Blogs

If you are at all involved with urban planning in Los Angeles you were probably either in the audience or on the panel at last night's "The Future of the Los Angeles City Planning Department (and the City of Los Angeles)" event, sponsored by AIA, APA-L.A., ULI, and Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design. I suppose a third option is that you were stuck in traffic and couldn't make it.   

So you're sipping your coffee and reading the news on your web-enabled phone as you glide along the Expo Line, idly shutting it off as you descend into the downtown connector en route to Union Station. Your bullet train to Sacramento leaves at 9 a.m., but you're not feeling too pressed for time, because as it turns out, that train isn't departing for several years.

If you can't quite see yourself in that picture yet, a coalition of urban planners and architects has an exhibit for you.  Through the month of August, railLA is hosting LA Beyond Cars, "a multimedia experience showcasing concepts, ideas, and musings from around the world on the future of Los Angeles."

Today marks the launch of the "Los Angeles Cleantech Corridor & Green District Competition," an event sponsored by the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and The Architect's Newspaper. This call-for-entries seeks submissions focusing on clean technology infrastructure improvements in the Cleantech Corridor, an industrial area just east of Downtown Los Angeles that straddles the Los Angeles River. This cluster-based strategy – spearheaded by Mayor Villaraigosa and the Community Redevelopment Agency – has experienced an impressive wave of attention over the summer, propelling it to the national stage and broadening support for LA's case as the home of clean technologies.

Whether or not Prop 19 passes, the Oakland City Council is already considering legalizing marijuana for fiscal reasons. 

More than a decade ago, when I was writing my book The Reluctant Metropolis, I became so fascinated by the political changes in the so-called Hub Cities of southeast Los Angeles County that I wrote a chapter about them. Over time I came to love these towns – Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Bell, Cudahy, Maywood – because they had a proud working-class history and an all-American optimism that had been renewed when their population  shifted from mostly white to mostly Latino. There was both a modesty and a pride in these towns that seemed to me to represent all that was wonderful about the American spirit.

At a press conference at City Hall this morning Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa introduced Michael LoGrande, his nominee to success Gail Goldberg as the city's planning director. At some moments the rhetoric of the mayor and fellow speakers -- including LoGrande, City Council Member Ed Reyes, and Planning Commissioner Bill Roschen, and affordable housing activist Jackie DuPont Walker -- sounded as if they were building the world's next great city.

Other times, their emphasis on customer service made the city sound more like a Nordstrom store than the writhing metropolis that it is. 

The day after Spain won the World Cup in Johannesburg, I met Monday with architects David Turnbull and Jane Harrison, a husband-and-wife team who put together a demonstration project at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro called "Pitch: Africa."

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is reportedly set to announce his selection of Michael LoGrande as the city's next planning director. A 13-year veteran of the department, LoGrande currently serves as its chief zoning administrator. He replaces Gail Goldberg, who had served as planning director for four years before announcing her retirement three weeks ago. 

LoGrande's path to the directorship contrasts with that of Goldberg, who arrived in 2005 to a department far different from the one she is leaving.

Some thoughts on the LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne's rather brutal drubbing of the recently completed Robert F. Kennedy Education Center (three schools encompassing K-12) on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel near downtown Los Angeles.

California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George is probably most widely known for his 2008 majority opinion striking down the state's prohibition on same-sex marriages, and for his 2009 opinion begrudgingly upholding voters' ability to ban same-sex marriage and effectively reverse the court's earlier ruling. But in land use planning and development circles, George's legacy is one of centrism and consensus. Time and again, George has corralled all of his colleagues into unanimous decisions on sticky land use regulatory issues.

In light of George's announcement last week that he will not seek re-election this November, a quick review of the George court's land use decisions is in order.

(Editor's Note, in regard to the following blog post: The California Planning & Development Report disclaims any belief, credence or even any wish-it-were-true feelings in regard to spiritualims, ghosts, spooks, spectres, poltergeists and similar phenomena—even if one of our correspondents of longest standing, Morris Newman, seems to be crediting his most recent work products to the honored dead. If he's just in a temporary funk, we can try to overlook it. If this line of supernatural thinking continues however, an exchange of memos may be in order, if you know what we mean.)

The Associated Press reports that a Russian billionaire is coming to the rescue of a state park in Sonoma County affected by budget cuts. Viktor Vekselberg, head of Russian-based Renova Group, signed an agreement last Tuesday with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to provide "substantial financial support" to keep Fort Ross open.

Before we pay our last respects to the latest statewide water bond, could we at least let the voters put the nail in its coffin?

Gov. Schwarzenegger recently announced he would work with the Legislature to pull Proposition 18 – the $11.1 billion water bond – from the November ballot and instead place the measure on a 2012 ballot. State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said he would cooperate.

A bill that would permit a lawsuit challenging a housing element to be filed at almost any time advanced through a state Senate committee earlier this week and is headed to the Senate floor.

Assembly Bill 602 passed the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee on a party-line vote of 6-3 vote, with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed.