Blogs

The Urban Land Institute has a reputation of being an organization in which enlightened developers get together with the occasional savvy planner and designer. So with a real estate downturn in full swing, it's not surprising that the main topic at ULI's Fall Meeting in San Francisco last week was ... planning, not development.

Maybe California's public process for making land use decisions really is "old and sick," as new urbanism champion Andrés Duany said during a recent presentation in Sacramento.

Duany's criticism of the system and his praise of a jury-style process used in Perth, Australia, seems to have struck a chord. The piece I wrote about Duany's presentation drew quite a bit of readership on Planetizen, and I've been receiving emails ever since.

For the second time this year, we've been reminded that the California Environmental Quality Act is not a set of tablets brought down from Mount Whitney. It's just a state law, and it can be changed whenever the Legislature and the governor can agree on changing it – especially during bad economic times.

The latest reminder is AB 81X3, signed by the governor the other day, which exempts the proposed football stadium in Industry from CEQA – and even from several pending CEQA lawsuits.  This law comes only a few months after the state budget deal, which truncated or eliminated CEQA review on several highway projects that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to get moving.

Ah, the growth wars. What would we land use journalists do if there were ever a truce?

My ire often rises when the national media or some big-time organization ignores California. Don't they know how important we on the whacky West Coast are?
 
When the American Planning Association released a list of the 10 best streets in the country and not a single California street was on it, my outrage cranked up. At first. Then I got to thinking: What is the best street in California? Should it be among the APA's top 10?
 

A couple of weeks ago, while I was listening to yet another SB 375 panel at the California state planning conference, a text message popped up congratulating me for being named the 99th top urban thinker in a recent Planetizen poll.

There are consequences to every public policy choice we make. An editorial in today's Monterey County Herald makes the argument that one consequence of not providing enough decent, affordable housing for low-wage laborers is crime and violent death.

The planners may have all gone home from Squaw Valley, but the planning talk has continued apace in San Jose, where the League of California Cities annual conference started on Wednesday. Most of the talk, not surprisingly, is about money – specifically, how Sacramento keeps taking it – but there's also plenty of policy talk, especially about affordable housing.