Articles

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.

State laws approved seven years ago requiring water assurances for large development projects appear to be of minimal aid in determining whether the state and regions have enough water for the future. That's the conclusion of a California Research Bureau (CRB) report released with zero fanfare in August.

The validity of a 1915 subdivision map has been rejected by the First District Court of Appeal in a decision that calls into question any subdivision recorded before 1929.

The court determined the 1915 map for a 25-lot subdivision in southern Sonoma County is not valid today because the county had very little discretion under the Subdivision Map Act in place at the time. The decision provides a significant victory to local governments concerned about an untold number of antiquated subdivision maps that do not conform to modern-day land use planning principles.

The California Supreme Court has accepted a second case involving the California Environmental Quality Act's statute of limitations.