Blogs

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.

A lot of the talk here at the California APA Conference in Squaw Valley is about climate change – and, more specifically, about how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. But there's more and more talk – important but poorly attended – about the other side of the coin, which is dealing with sea level rise and other consequences of climate change.

It's always been a mystery to me why traffic modeling – and traffic mitigation – is such a big part of analysis done under the California Environmental Quality Act. After all, traffic in and of itself is not an environmental impact, any more than building a building is an environmental impact. Traffic may cause certain environmental impacts – air pollution, for example, depending on the fuels used – but there's nothing inherently damaging environmentally about traffic.

The executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency told the lunch crowd at the APA California conference today that her agency provides a model for regional planning. She was right – but not in the way she intended.

A bill that would exempt a planned football stadium and an adjacent 3 million-square-foot entertainment and retail complex in the City of Industry from the California Environmental Quality Act, and state planning and zoning law is speeding through the Legislature at a rapid pace.