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The principles of smart growth should also be used as the principles of adapting land use patterns to climate change.

That's what Ron Sims, executive of King County, Washington, said in so many words while speaking April 12 at forum on climate change and cities.

The passage of AB 32 – California's climate change law – has focused the attention of Left Coast policy wonks like a laser beam on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And as we have reported over and over again on this website, land use patterns are at the center of this debate. But adapting to a warmer world may actually be a bigger land use policy question.

The earth's climate is changing more rapidly than we had thought possible only a few years ago, and we had better both prepare for that change and do what we can to stem it.

Professional and trade conventions actually are new urbanist events. People arrive from out of town, often sans car, and spend several days walking around the convention site and the host city while taking care of business and enjoying themselves.

So when we at CP&DR started talking about the best convention cities in California, we ended up talking about some of California's best urban areas. It turns out that a good convention city has all the same attributes as a good urban place.

The housing foreclosure crisis has slammed the Central Valley as hard as any region in the country. Stockton, Sacramento, Modesto, Merced and Bakersfield are typically listed the top 10 to 15 markets with the most foreclosures per capita. In some cities, 5% to 7% of homeowners are delinquent on their mortgage payments. And whole neighborhoods, such as portions of Natomas in Sacramento, sometimes seem to have been completely emptied.

People who design roads don't ride bicycles. That is evident to any cyclist.

Location, location, location. Those are the three most important factors in real estate, and — as evidenced late last month — in land use decision-making.

On a 10-5 vote, the Los Angeles City Council on March 19 directed the Planning Department to stop processing the application for Las Lomas, a project that proposed 5,500-housing units, 2 million square feet of office space, 225,000 square feet of retail space, a hotel and a school on 555 acres at the junction of Interstate 5 and the Antelope Valley Freeway.

Do ya think that the California redevelopment crowd might be a little nervous?

It sure seems that way, and here's why:

• Under a state law passed in 1993, some of the oldest redevelopment project areas will have to start going out of business next year.

• The state has a $16 billion budget deficit and the state's finance wonks are eyeing redevelopment's tax increment money – the property tax revenues generated inside redevelopment project areas.

It looks like the 2009 Los Angeles mayoral race has begun. And it looks a lot like the 1989 race. In the role of an incumbent determined to bring L.A. to the next level as a "world city" – the Tom Bradley role -- is Antonio Villaraigosa. And in the role of a crusading neighborhood activist seeking to protect the city from overdevelopment – the Zev Yaroslavsky role – is, well, Zev Yaroslavsky.

Although it made no grand announcement, the California Chamber of Commerce's Board of Directors has voted to oppose Proposition 98, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association's eminent domain initiative on the June ballot.

Add Tucson to the list of cities in the Intermountain West that fear California-style growth � and is thinking about California-style solutions to forestall California-style problems.

A hot potato — or should I say a hot sugar beet — is headed back to the Delta Protection Commission, which is scheduled on March 27 to reconsider a proposal for the first housing development within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta's "primary zone" in 15 years.

The hearing comes at a time when concern about Central Valley flood safety and the overall health of the Delta is at an all-time high, a setting that must have project proponents feeling like a smelt swimming too close to a State Water Project pump.

Will transportation and land-use planning get its share of dough from federal climate change programs? Not if the coal industry has its way.

That was the message from a Capitol Hill staffer at a plenary session of the American Public Transit Association's annual legislative conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday. To combat the coal industry, smart growth and public transit lobbyists will have to prove they have an important national asset that can help meet the climate change challenge.