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Construction activity may have declined dramatically, but the number of ballot measures seeking to slow or guide growth remains high. Voters across California will face close to 50 growth-related local ballot measures in November.

It's not unusual for the number of slow-growth measures to increase at the end of a real estate boom. Construction often continues and the real estate market dies, and slow-growth measures are often a reaction to construction rather than the market. In other words, slow-growth ballot measures are a lagging economic indicator of the real estate market. This November's total is down from the 78 measures on the November 2006 ballot, partly because California had two primaries this year.

Barack Obama and John McCain are both selling themselves to the American people as reformers. And neither was raised in a conventional American city or suburb. So you'd think that they would have unconventional ideas about how to deal with growth, planning, and development issues.

The state budget signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in late September shifts $350 million from redevelopment agencies to schools, and it provides no funding at all for transit projects contained in the State Transportation Improvement Program. Still, the sentiment among many local government officials was that the budget could have been far worse.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals continued to flesh out its property rights jurisprudence with a decision from Spokane, Washington — this time by siding with property owners seeking to protect their own rights by enforcing historic preservation regulations.

Members of the public may sue to defend the public trust resource of wildlife, but the suit must be filed against public agencies responsible for protecting the wildlife, according to the First District Court of Appeal.

The Environmental Protection Agency has until December 1, 2009, to promulgate standards for runoff from construction sites. The deadline is contained in a 2006 federal district court ruling that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld.

A property owner challenging the constitutionality of an inclusionary housing ordinance may not employ the nexus and rough proportionality tests from the Nollan and Dolan cases, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled.

Faced with the potential demise of a highly anticipated 430-acre commercial and residential project, the City of Marina has added more than $80 million worth of subsidies and incentives to a deal with developers. In the recently approved deal, the city also reduced the developer's workforce housing obligations and agreed to cover half of water connection fees.

We've all seen in recent weeks the cruelty of hurricanes uprooting houses as easily as trees, tossing cars into fields and reducing farms to rubbish heaps. Tropical storms go where they want, and anything less than monolithic masonry is a goner. Even with the damage they bring, however, hurricanes are kinder than freeways.

Only two exceptions are available to alter the impact of freeways: In the case of elevated roadways, we can take them down, as San Francisco did with the Embarcadero Freeway along the waterfront. And in the case of corridors located in trenches, we can build above them.

In a major reversal, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that wireless telecommunications providers can no longer challenge local zoning regulations on the basis that the zoning has the potential to prohibit telecommunications services. Instead, providers will have to show that local regulation does in fact prohibit telecommunications services.

In a decision bolstering farmland preservation, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled that Humboldt County can enforce updated land use regulations against a landowner whose original Williamson Act contract predates the regulations.

The state and federal governments are throwing a lot of "new money" at the housing market in hopes of stabilizing prices and bailing out subprime mortgage borrowers. For California alone, the total looks to be several hundred million dollars – at least – in the next year alone. But is that anywhere near enough to make a dent in the problem?

Stem-cell therapy and urban design have little in common, or so I thought, until I saw Dan Solomon's design for New Railroad Square in Santa Rosa. In the San Francisco architect's plan for the former rail yards in downtown Santa Rosa, the typical block from the older sections of Santa Rosa takes the role of the healthy cell. The imported block, with its small dimensions, helps weave the New Railroad Square project into the fabric of the historic downtown.

Despite high gasoline prices, concern over greenhouse gas emissions, a dismal housing market and a renowned "smart growth" regional planning blueprint, a whole new phase of exurbs is being planned north of Sacramento.