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Many of California’s great Native American casinos rise out of the landscape like mesas in the desert. Think of Morongo along Interstate 10 outside of Palm Springs or Cache Creek towering over the olive groves of the Capay Valley. While the California gambling industry, at an estimated $17 billion per year, eclipses that of Las Vegas, the fantasy of easy winnings and the reality of urban life seldom intersect.

Last fall, the California Supreme Court reversed the First District Court of Appeal in an environmental case from the College of San Mateo, saying that courts shouldn’t second-guess lead agencies on what is a “new” versus a “modified” project under the California Environental Quality Act.

The new draft Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) Program Guidelines is being revised by the Strategic Growth Council with a few significant changes. They include organization and streamlining of guidelines, moving select scoring criteria to thresholds, revised application process and scoring criteria, including Indian tribes as eligible applicants, costs associated with parking are ineligible for AHSC funds, housing element compliance, environmental clearance requirements for transportation components, and joint and several liability. The drafts incorporate feedback obtained through public comments and workshops held in late 2016. SCG is considering two options for geographic allocation of grants. The drafts address concerns and recommendations from statewide AHSC stakeholders, as well as from an internal review of process and outcomes from the past two AHSC funding cycles. The Council is still discussion the question of regional funding distribution goals. Natural Resources Agency Seeks Public Comment on Climate Adaptation Plan The California Natural Resources Agency released a  draft of the  Safeguarding California Plan: 2017 Update  and seeks public comment on the state’s strategy for adapting to a changing climate. The update builds on the first California Climate Adaptation Strategy in 2009. This 2017 update provides recommendations and next steps to advance adaptation in 10 sectors that include water, agriculture, public health and biodiversity. As California continues to experience rising average temperatures, shrinking mountain snowpack, warmer storms, and higher sea levels, the State must consider climate change in its planning, investment, and public outreach. The Natural Resources Agency leads California’s climate change adaptation effort under several statutes and executive orders intended to foster change throughout state and local government. The draft represents a comprehensive effort by experts across 27 state agencies to describe ongoing efforts and needed actions to ensure public safety and environmental protection as average temperatures warm, precipitation patterns change and sea levels rise. The document provides a succinct “to do” list for state departments that will help the public measure progress. Some examples: Develop a map of climate change refugia (places where local conditions persist over time) for certain wildlife species, address environmental justice issues around supporting community solar projects for low-income customers, and advance programs for “living shorelines” that may include wetland plants, aquatic vegetation, oyster reefs or sand fill. The Natural Resources Agency seeks public comment on the draft plan through May and will hold four public meetings this month to gather input from interested citizens, scientists, government officials, and other stakeholders. TheSafeguarding California Plan: 2017 Update document will be revised based on public comments, with a final version scheduled for release in July.  San Francisco Faces Two Affordable Housing Proposals The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is  considering two competing affordable housing philosophies: one would focus on keeping middle-class families in the city while the other would build more affordable housing. The group Council of Community Housing Organizations is requesting the supervisors change the way affordable housing is priced so that it would be based on the market rate of the surrounding neighborhood rather than a citywide median income. The two sides will meet before the board’s Land Use Committee with the resulting legislation going to the board. Supervisor Katy Tang is promoting an ordinance that would allow developers to build two extra floors in exchange for more affordable housing. The Board of Supervisors last week reached a compromise on how much affordable housing to require in new market-rate developments: 18 percent of rental units be affordable for all projects approved between now and January, this will increase to 19 percent next year, and 20 percent in 2019. If the developer instead choses to build the affordable units at another location, the ratios increase from 30 to 32 percent. S.D. State University Pulls Out of Soccer Stadium at Qualcomm Site San Diego State University ended discussions with FS Investors for a proposed joint 30,000-seat soccer near Qualcomm Stadium, which is being abandoned by the Chargers. The University said the proposal did not meet the athletic and academic needs of the campus. The proposal is part of a ballot initiative that will head to the City Council next month for a possible special election Nov. 7. Originally the university would have contributed $100 million and received the facility as a donation after five years. Without SDSU, FS Investors will revert back to a smaller 22,000 seat soccer-only stadium without the ability to double in size if SDSU later changes its mind. L.A. Metro to Consider Two Alternatives for 710 Freeway Gap Los Angeles Metro released a study last week recommending the development of a tunnel to close the infamous gap in the 710 Freeway between Alhambra and Pasadena. A 4.9-mile tunnel is expected to cost at least $5.4 billion and would be the longest tunnel in California for car traffic. The study recommends two double-decker tunnels, one for each direction of traffic. Metro Board of Directors Ad-Hoc Congestion, Highway and Roads Committee passed, 3-2, a motion which recommends adopting the Traffic Systems Management/Traffic Demand Management alternative which would instead upgrade local streets rather than build a tunnel. Both proposals head to the May 25 Metro board meeting for consideration. The motion requires votes by 7 of the 13 members to pass. S.D. State University Pulls Out of Soccer Stadium at Qualcomm Site San Diego State University ended discussions with FS Investors for a proposed joint 30,000-seat soccer near Qualcomm Stadium, which is being abandoned by the Chargers. The University said the proposal did not meet the athletic and academic needs of the campus. The proposal is part of a ballot initiative that will head to the City Council next month for a possible special election Nov. 7. Originally the university would have contributed $100 million and received the facility as a donation after five years. Without SDSU, FS Investors will revert back to a smaller 22,000 seat soccer-only stadium without the ability to double in size if SDSU later changes its mind. Quick Hits & Updates San Francisco is the only city in the nation where every resident lives within a 10-minute walk of a park or open space according to an analysis by the Trust for Public Land. A 10-minute walk is approximately a half-mile for the average person. The group’s annual ParkScore analysis includes the number of individual parks, overall spending and facilities upkeep. Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation restoring funding to the state’s most recently incorporated cities. Eastvale, Wildomar, Menifee, and Jurupa Valley were hit hardest when VLF funds were cut in 2011. SB 130 allows these cities to receive allocations of property tax as VLF adjustment amounts that all other cities receive. An earthquake fault has been discovered under Seaport Village in San Diego according to preliminary results from a geotechnical study. This could force a complete redesign of the redevelopment plan for the 37-year old retail center. The plan was to build a series of hotels, offices, an aquarium, maritime academy, shops and restaurants but an active fault would require major reworking of the development plan. The National Trust for Historic Preservation celebrated the 30th anniversary of its annual “Most Endangered Places” list with a retrospective of success stories. In California, Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco and Cathedral of St. Vibiana in Los Angeles have made the list for having been successful preserved. California regulators moved towards closing the last coastal sand mine in the United States, which has used a legal loophole to operate near Monterey Bay for decades. The 8-acre Lapis Sand Plant has for the last 27 years sucked up sand and seawater even after all other sand dredges were banned from the coast. The Coastal Commission has claimed Cemex is threatening both the surrounding dunes and hastening the southern Monterey Bay erosion. California State Lands Commission told the company they must immediately submit to state regulation. The San Jose City Council rejected , 10-1, a policy that would have weakened tenant protections for mobile home park closures. The city is home to nearly 11,000 mobile homes in 59 parks, the largest number of any city in the state. The closure policy had a loophole that would allow a property owner to close a park without paying high relocation benefits or face as much scrutiny but sit on the land to redevelop it later. According to a new report from the California Association of Realtors, only 29 percent of LA County households can afford to buy the county’s median-priced home of $485,800. The study also found that a minimum annual income of $99,830 was needed to make monthly payments of $2,500 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at a 4.36 percent interest rate. In comparison, 52 percent of San Bernardino County households can afford the region’s $256,900 median-priced home but only 21 percent of Orange County households can afford the $750,000 median priced home. In a sign of the housing crisis in the Bay Area, Stanford University paid $130.5 million for upscale apartment and retail complex in Los Altos to house faculty and staff. The complex includes 167 apartments and 12,000 square feet of retail space. According to the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office, the property’s value was calculated at $85.1 million a year ago.  The Office of Exposition Park Management  released an RFP seeking master planning services for the 160-acre expanse as new large-scale projects are being developed around the park, in South Los Angeles. This will generate the park’s first master plan since 1993.  UC-Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies (IGS) released  (pdf) a report “Displacement in San Mateo County, California: Consequences for Housing, Neighborhoods, Quality of Life, and Health.” The study found a spike in evictions in San Mateo County, disproportionately affecting people of color. The researchers did 100 in-depth phone surveys with primarily low-income tenants who received services from Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto.

The Strategic Growth Council Sustainable Communities Planning Grants & Incentives Best Practices Pilot Program awarded  (PDF) $250,000 in Proposition 84 monies to six projects statewide. Of the 13 applicants, five were from the Bay Area, four from the Los Angeles area, two from Central Valley, and one each from Sacramento and Central Coast. The City of Arvin that incorporated a Water Element into its general plan. The County of LA won $41,000 for its Green Zones Program: Environmental Justice Ground Truthing in East Los Angeles & Florence-Firestone which aims to utilize sustainable land use tools and implementation measures to reduce and mitigate toxic pollutants from emission sources. City of San Jose won for its Bike Plan Outreach Strategy and County of Merced for its Integration of GHG Inventory. The fifth winner was County of Contra Costa for a Renewable Resource Potential Study that would identify potential for distribution-scale renewable resources such as solar, wind, biomass, and biogas. The final winner was the County of San Luis Obispo for its Oceano Eco-District Project that works with Habitat for Humanity for SLO County to provide an underserved community a clear path for projects that achieve resilience and GHG reductions. Santa Clara VTA to Overhaul Bus Network Santa Clara County’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) unanimously approved , on a 12-0 vote, major changes to its bus and light rail routes because of a $21.4 million operating shortfall. The VTA will increase fares by 50 cents over the next two years and the DASH line through downtown San Jose will be replaced by the Rapid 500 bus. The new bus schedules will coincide with the inauguration of BART service coming to the County with Milpitas and Berryessa stops. The redesign focuses on high-volume routes. In the current configuration, VTA considers 70 percent of routes to be “volume” routes, with the remainder as “coverage” routes that make the system accessible but do not attract many riders. That ratio will shift to 83 / 17 in the new configuration. While Uber and Lyft are luring people away from public transportation, stable gas prices and rising car purchases in Santa Clara County have also lead to the decline in ridership. Report Details Low-Income Housing Shortage in Bay Area A report from nonprofit California Housing Partnership Corp. and Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California found that in the Bay Area it is becoming harder for lower-income residents to find affordable housing. Rents and incomes in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Sonoma counties shows that each county is at least 10,000 rental units short of what it would take for everyone to find affordable housing. Residents who earn less than 50 percent AMI spend more than half of their monthly paychecks on rent. The report found that state and federal funding for affordable housing in the four counties analyzed have dropped 65 percent since 2008. California’s spending on affordable housing has gone down $1.5 billion since 2012. Authors Clarify Controversial Study of Transit Oriented Development A study noted in last month's CP&DR news briefs  has roused concern among planners in the Bay Area for reportedly conflating new transit oriented development with transit oriented neighborhoods. The original version of the study seemed to indicate that new TOD tended to hasten rates of gentrification in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The study actually found the opposite. It turns out that there was significant displacement and gentrification in transit oriented neighborhoods, even where there was very little new development. According to an updated abstract, the study found “that transit proximity has a significant impact on the stability of the surrounding neighborhood, leading to increases in housing costs that change the composition of the area, including the loss of low-income households. We found that gentrification and displacement in rail station areas would only be likely to cause an increase in auto usage and regional vehicle miles traveled (VMT) when accompanied by a significant loss of population near transit.” Activists had used the original interpretation of the study to protest SB 375, which promotes new development near transit. The San Francisco Planning Department led the charge to encourage researchers to clarify their findings and terminology.  Group Pledges $100 Million for Homeless in S.F. Nonprofit group Tipping Point Community has pledged $100 million to cut the chronically homeless population in San Francisco in half over the next half-decade. The money will create permanent housing, improve aid for people with mental illness and other causes of homelessness, and help the city attract more state and federal funding. In the latest one-night homeless count, the city found 1,745 of the 6,686 people were chronically homeless (2015). The money was raised privately and will be given to city agencies, including the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. The 12-year-old organization raises millions of dollars annually to fight poverty, but this was the first large challenge. Cox and Kotkin Release Brief on Millennials’ Prospects in California Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy released a research brief “Fading Promise: Millennial Prospects in the Golden State.” Co-authored by scholars Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin, the brief discusses how California millennial are facing “unprecedented economic challenges and, according to many predictions, diminished prospects.” This is primarily because housing prices in California have risen to 230 percent of the national average, while salaries remain lower than key competitive states. This has lead to significant out-migration, primarily by younger families in their late 30s and early 40s. The report covers a variety of statistics including homeownership rates, numbers of millennials living with parents, population change, and how to bring more millennials into the housing market and thereby restoring middle-class prosperity in California. El Monte Envisions Transit Oriented Downtown The City of El Monte is moving forward with plans to revitalize downtown through its proposed “Downtown Main Street Transit-Oriented Development Specific Plan” funded by a grant from Metro. The plan includes a 115-acre area that would generate 2,200 residential units and 500,000 square feet of commercial by 2035. Eight guiding principles have steered the process including mixed-use, pedestrian and TOD village, central shopping district, enticing place for investment, variety of housing opportunities, expanded and improved public transportation system, blend of old and new, balanced system of multimodal streets, and entryways at key intersections. Landfill Discovers Mapping Mistake, Runs Afoul of Coastal Zone Tajiguas Landfill in Santa Barbara County has been trying to expand for 15 years, but last-second discovery of a miscalculation about the location of a key boundary line means the project is “dead in the water” according to Ed Easton of the Gaviota Coast Conservancy. Planners initially discovered the mistake two months ago as they were preparing paperwork to seek financing for the $110 million construction project. They discovered the state’s Coastal Zone Boundary line was 173 yards further inland than planners had believed. This means all permits are null and void. Environmental groups have been trying to get Tajiguas decommissioned since the late 90s. Quick Hits & Updates Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) has filed paperwork seeking a 2018 ballot measure to overturn SB1, the 10-year, $54.2 billion transportation funding bill that would raise the state’s gas tax by 12 cents a gallon, increase taxes on diesel fuel and impose new annual fees on vehicles. The Attorney General’s office needs to give the measure a title and summary, then organizers must collect 365,880 voter signatures to qualify. The California Supreme Court will hear two cases that challenge the North Coast Railroad Authority’s stance that federal laws preempt it from having to conduct an environmental review on its project to restore a railway stretching from Arcata to Napa County. Friends of the Eel River and Californians for Alternatives for Toxics filed the cases in Marin County Superior Court nearly six years ago and are saying the June 2011 environmental review of the 142 mile section of the whole 316 miles is incomplete. The Safeguarding California Plan: 2017 Update-California’s Climate Adaptation Strategy covers water, food, transport of goods, and daily lives around climate and weather. The report is looking for feedback and comments on the working draft. Workshops will be held at UC Merced May 16, Metro Center in San Francisco May 22, Coachella Public Works Department May 30, SCAG in downtown Los Angeles June 3, and two workshops in Auburn and San Diego in June that have not been finalized. The Santa Monica City Council has approved the Lincoln Neighborhood Corridor Plan that will add a bus lane to the street from I-10 to Ozone Avenue. The $2.9 million plan will improve traffic flow and pedestrian safety. Developers of the controversial Lilac Hills Ranch submitted paperwork to San Diego County planning department in the hopes of keeping the project alive. The 1,700 home and retail shops in the hills of Valley Center went to voters in November and was rejected by 63 percent of the county. The County got a new stormwater management permit, which makes the project viable, and developers have included requested infrastructure improvements, such as a new fire station, in their new plan.  A San Francisco Superior Court Judge has ordered a landlord to pay the city nearly $2.4 million in penalties for violating state housing law. The judge found that Anne Kihagi and her associates had “purposefully destroyed their tenants’ quiet enjoyment and any sense of sanctuary through their long, continued and unrelenting campaign of harassment, reductions in services, and unlawful and fraudulent evictions.” Kihagi and family members have invested $24 million in San Francisco real estate with a collection of 50 units. An appeals court  found that building a parking lot in place of a 54-year-old garden on the campus of the College of San Mateo frequented by students, teachers and others would have a significant environmental impact and therefore either a full EIR or a description of steps the district would take to reduce environmental effects to “insignificance”. The court ordered the college to consider these environmental impacts.  San Bernardino International Airport has inaugurated commercial operations with an international commercial passenger flight with Volaris to and from Guadalajara. At SBD, the primary business is private business jet travel, with five maintenance, repair and overhaul businesses for general aviation. However airport officials say the number of aircraft annually taking off and landing have reached 48,000 in 2016, double the number in 2013. A developer is  suing the City of Palo Alto for assessing unlawful and excessive fines in Santa Clara County Superior Court. John Tze and Edgewood LLC, the owner-developers, received at least 72 citations totaling more than $700,000 for failing to land a grocery store at the Edgewood Plaza shopping center after the Fresh Market vacated. City officials say Edgewood broke a 2012 agreement that allowed it to build homes on the condition that a grocery store would be provided. The owner argues they are complying by reserving the building for a grocery store and no other use. The City of San Jose Deputy Director of Housing Tim Jones  resigned in early May, two weeks after being hired. Jones was previously accused of mismanagement and financial abuse when he ran the Richmond Housing Authority. A new analysis of the proposed Bay-Delta water tunnels, now known as WaterFix, indicates that the project might make life worse for fish even though the two primary goals of the project are restoring imperiled native fish and improving water deliveries to farms and cities. The USFWS and National Marine Fisheries Service released draft studies detailing how the tunnel might affect fish protected by the Endangered Species Act. Gov. Jerry Brown sent a letter to President Trump asking him to transfer oversight of environmental reviews to the state rail authority instead of the Federal Railroad Administration. This “delegation of federal authority” would give the state final approval and potentially speed up the process. Los Angeles City Council voted to approve a new law that eases the process in legalizing “bootlegged” apartments- existing units that were created without the city’s approval. In the new law, the units are only allowed if they guarantee affordable housing and meet all fire, life, and safety codes. Mayor Eric Garcetti will co-chair the LA Sustainability Leadership Council with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block to help advance the goals laid out in Sustainable City pLAn. The Leadership Council will provide vision, leadership, guidance, and support for the pLAn, the SLA GC, and other important sustainability initiatives.

I can think of at least a few buildings in the world that exquisite enough that they warrant a little elbow room. The Taj Mahal comes to mind. The Farnsworth House. Certain monasteries and castles. Most quotidian pieces of architecture, though, gain their value not from splendid isolation but rather from their relationships -- with surrounding buildings and streetscapes. Setbacks, which are perhaps the most ubiquitous way that planning imposes on architecture, are to these relationship what adultery is to romantic relationships. For those residents of, say, Paris, Vienna, and New York City who are unfamiliar with setbacks: they are spaces that “set” buildings “back” a certain distance from the property line and, usually, the sidewalk. A distant but useless cousin of the front yard, they appear in, I reckon, the majority properties developed nationwide since 1950 and nearly all properties developed in California. For all their popularity, setbacks have little basis in engineering or architecture. They are simply regulatory whims. Setback requirements come in all shapes and sizes. Some are minimal (a foot or two) while others are dramatic (ten feet, fifteen feet). Some make way for pleasant things like outdoor dining spaces; others turn into unwelcoming bollards. In each case, setbacks are mandated voids, either to be ignored or landscaped, unusually in decidedly half-assed ways. Ferns for everyone! (I refer mainly to setbacks that separate buildings from sidewalks, not to those that separate buildings from each other. I have slightly more sympathy for the latter type.) Received wisdom holds that setbacks make urban spaces feel less crowded. They supposedly ensure that buildings do not overshadow streets and sidewalks. They create the illusion of less density and protect buildings’ personal space. They create room for “green space,” “light,” and “park-like settings,” which sound great in real estate listings. They assume that buildings are impositions on their cityscapes, to be contained so as not to offend delicate sensibilities. A street in Paris (l.) and a street in Los Angeles (r.). This rationale is mostly nonsense, of course. Like so many other concoctions that come courtesy of regulators rather than designers, setbacks are a scourge on our cities. At best, setbacks persist because of habit. But, like elevator music and parsley, they are not actually as pleasant as we pretend they are. They confer psychological satisfaction even if they have nothing to do with aesthetics or economics. To the proponents of setbacks, a few patches of grass might as well be Luxembourg Gardens. But think about the classic street in any of the cities I cited above. If you enjoy Paris or New York, you already know why you shouldn’t like setbacks. Density in a city is good. And not just population density. The actual appearance of density (which may or may not have anything to do with population density, depending on the type of structure in question) is good, too. With scant exceptions, the most pleasant streets and neighborhoods – from the Île de Saint Louis to Greenwich Village to Old Town Tucson to the row house neighborhoods of Philadelphia – are those not where buildings recede from their streets but indeed where they are closest together, working in harmony with streets to create a public realm. A sense of enclosure is one of the hallmarks of great streets, whereby space is created and defined by the intersection of vertical and horizontal planes. Pedestrians also benefit from the shade created by snug buildings and vertical facades (and awnings, if they’re lucky). The no-man’s-lands created by setbacks detract from streets and buildings alike, only scarcely less aggressively than do walls and cyclone fences. From a developer’s perspective, setbacks waste space and, therefore, money. Who would want to give precious square footage to ferns, ficuses, and snails rather than to people? Even worse, setbacks create lousy buildings. When a pedestrian’s feet and eyes might travel mere inches from a façade, that façade ought to be at least somewhat attractive or inviting. Setbacks invite architects to pay that much less attention to detail. I enjoy dragging my fingers on a Parisian façade because, well, Parisian facades are attractive. To fans of setbacks, a building nestled right up against a sidewalk is scary. A ten-foot “landscaped” setback? Just fine. Never mind those shrubs look like mighty attractive hiding places to aspiring muggers. There’s a reason it’s “eyes on the street,” not “eyes on the setback.” What about privacy? I’m sorry, but if your living room faces the street, you’re going to need curtains no matter how far back you are. Setbacks don’t create privacy. They create the illusion of privacy. In short, there is no economic, aesthetic, or security reason for setbacks to exist. Cities have gotten along fine for centuries without them. So, what gives? Let’s think about who might lobby for setbacks, either in an individual project or in a zoning code. They’re certainly not the tenants of buildings. Unbuilt buildings have no tenants. The people most likely to demand that a development be worse are those who don’t like development in the first place and who object to density on principle. Setbacks are the currency of anti-development activism. Homeowners who like their cities and their property values just fine don’t care how far away a building is from a street. They’re likely only to see those buildings at 35 miles per hour anyway, and probably from a lane or two away (plus a few feet if there’s a devil strip ). But they know how to push planners around. For them, setbacks are just a bargaining chip – a palpable way to stick it to developers. Setbacks persist because they are quantifiable and negotiable. Once opponents have whittled down the number of units or the amount of floor space in a project, they can bring on the setbacks. The developer wants a setback of zero feet. Neighbors want a setback of ten feet. When it gets settled at five feet, the neighbors chalk up a win. Why is that a win? Because they don’t care in the first place. They gain nothing, except for a five-foot pain-in-the-ass for the developer and a lousy place to take a stroll. This isn’t advocacy, and it’s certainly not planning. This is urban trolling. I bemoan setbacks not to redesign every condo building from Riverside to Santa Monica. Setback regulations and their proponents have already done their damage to the buildings that exist and the streets that they face. Fortunately, with a few deletions from zoning codes, and more tenacity from the planners who care about density, walkabilty, aesthetics, and fairness, cities can play with a full deck once again. And when the next Shah Jahan comes along with a great idea for a mausoleum, then we can talk. Photo Credits: Paris: Zoetnet via Flickr ; L.A.: CP&DR Staff.

According to a new State Population Report from the Department of Finance, California grew by 0.85 percent or 335,000 people in 2016. While most counties and cities saw growth, the largest numerical  increases occurred in Los Angeles, with more than 42,000 residents, San Diego added over 15,000 people, San Jose almost 10,000 more residents, and San Francisco over 9,000. The City of Sacramento had the largest percentage gain in population with 1.4 percent or 6,900 people. The fastest growing counties in the state are all in Sacramento area: Amador, Placer, and Yolo counties. The fastest growing county was Amador County with 1.9 percent due to prison expansion. Generally, smaller, suburban localities are growing more quickly than their large urban counterparts, with large cities growing around 1 percent and the most booming small cities around 5 percent. Even so, multi-family units represented 57 percent of unit growth last year. The report also found the state’s housing supply increased by 88,562 units, meaning one new home for every 3.78 residents. Developers are adding homes at a higher pace than recent years, but still far below what experts believe would be enough to keep up with California’s growing population.  Study: Development in Los Angeles Comes at Expense of Trees Researchers at USC have found that trees and other greenery in single-family neighborhoods in Los Angeles are declining significantly with the increase in housing construction. In some cases the trees are disappearing because of mansionization , where smaller homes are replaced with disproportionately large properties. Using aerial imagery the study found the amount of trees and greenery fell between 14 and 55 percent in the period from 2000 to 2009 in LA County. For instance, for each home expansion about one-third of the existing green cover is lost. Trees produce many benefits such as carbon sequestration, shade, decrease chance of erosion and landslides, and other public health benefits such as filtering dust particles. In Baldwin Park, green cover dropped from 70 percent in 2000 to 31 percent in 2009. Compton lost 41 percent, Downey, San Pedro, Sylmar and Pomona experienced 20 percent losses. The City of Los Angeles has a tree-planting program now, and last year more than 18,000 trees were planted. SPUR Chastises Tech Companies for Location Choices San Francisco Planning & Urban Research released a report “Rethinking the Corporate Campus” that accuses the innovative Silicon Valley companies of being backward in their choice of office locations and typologies. According to the report, many are located in suburban one-story campuses with sprawling parking lots, far from public streets. These choices come at high environmental and social costs as commutes get longer and housing prices more expensive. The report tackles two questions: How do we encourage employers to choose efficient, sustainable, high-performance locations? How do we create new locations that are more efficient, sustainable, and high-performing? While there are a few examples of companies moving next to mass transit: Twitter, LinkedIn, Samsung, Salesforce, the majority have stuck to their suburban sprawling offices. Judge Thwarts Sierra Club Wish for Development Moratorium in San Diego County San Diego Superior Court Judge Timothy Taylor denied  the Sierra Club’s attempt to block new large-scale developments on previously undeveloped, unincorporated land before the county adopts a revised plan for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Taylor however did say the court was very concerned that county officials have not been acting more quickly and that the environmental group can renew its request if the county has not made significant progress within two months. County officials earlier this year said the climate plan would be released this summer. The climate action plan was first found inadequate in 2012 and was directed to be redrafted to set clearer standards on what emissions levels are acceptable. San Francisco Inclusionary Housing Policy Advances The San Francisco Planning Commission approved an ordinance that would require market rate developers to make 18 percent of rental units affordable to low- and moderate-income households. The commission was decided between two versions: the more aggressive of which would have required that 24 percent of rental units be affordable. While both sides wanted to maximize the number of affordable units, the disagreement was on how many affordable untis could be squeezed out before a project became economically infeasible. This housing ordinance would only represent about 10 percent of the affordable units the city produces, 75 percent are funded with federal tax credits and are only available to households that earn less than 55 percent AMI, or $63,400 for a family of four. The County Board of Supervisors must approve the housing law. Two California Projects Vie for ULI Housing Award The Urban Land Institute (ULI)  Terwilliger Center for Housing  has announced the finalists for this year’s  Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award , which honors exemplary developments that ensure housing affordability for people with a range of incomes. Two of the seven nominees are in California: The 2017 Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award finalists are: 1) Perris Station Senior Apartment Homes (Perris, Riverside County) replaced a blighted property, fulfilling the city's goal of adding high-quality, sustainable housing that is affordable to low-income seniors, and providing space for retail/office uses. The development is a model for offering amenity-rich living for active seniors as well as resource-efficient and “green” design features. 2) The apartment complex Veo (Carson, Los Angels County) serves as a mixed-income, mixed-use walkable community of for-sale townhomes sized specifically for families. Street-level retail has rejuvenated the area by enhancing the streetscape with outdoor dining and other improvements. The winner will be announced during the Terwilliger Center’s Housing Opportunity Conference, set for September 10-11 in New Orleans. Quick Hits & Updates Environmental groups have filed a federal lawsuit against President Trump’s executive order to open protected coastal waters to offshore drilling. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Alaska, claims Trump has no legal authority to undo protections adopted by President Obama in 2015 and 2016. California officials condemned the executive order and vowed to fight any new oil development off the state’s shores. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) announced winners of its annual Charter Awards for excellence in architectural, landscape, urban, and regional design. CNU recognized 16 projects across the US, Mexico, Spain and South Africa. The two California projects were Plaza La Reina in Los Angeles as a “timeless and artful building” and St. Joseph’s Redevelopment in Oakland as “harmony of old and new is gift to city." The San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Commission voted unanimously to provide $13.3 million in funding to extend the forthcoming SMART rail line from downtown San Rafael to Larkspur Landing by 2.1 miles. The city will also receive a new transit center to better accommodate buses and trains, but funding has not been identified and it could take at least five years. Planning firm Nelson/Nygaard along with business leaders, nonprofits and advocates  released a report titled “The Silicon Valley Bike Vision Report.” The document includes designs and maps that analyze existing bikeway conditions in Silicon Valley, mode share metrics, a collision analysis, an inventory of existing bikeways, and origin0destination pairs for significant locations. Sober Network Properties, which owns seven sober living facilities in San Clemente, has filed a lawsuit against the city’s zoning of such facilities. The lawsuit alleges residents of one home were verbally abused and harassed by groups of people opposed to sober living homes. San Clemente finalized ordinances in 2016, with an 18-month lifespan, allowing sober living homes to certain areas of the city. Los Angeles Metro has begun soliciting bids from companies interested in conducting a feasibility study of potential modes of transit and possible routes for the traffic-clogged Sepulveda Pass. The combination of Measure R transportation sales tax in 2008 and Measure M tax, give nearly $8 billion for this project. Metro’s current schedule call for a transit system to be built through Sepulveda Pass by 2033. A new UCLA environmental report gave Los Angeles County a “C” in energy use and persistent air pollution. The 2017 Sustainable LA Environmental Report Card for Energy and Air Quality gave the grade based on a failure to reduce fuel use, increasing commute times, and some of the worst smog in the nation. However, the county had reduced its GHG emissions by 20 percent in 2013 from 1990 levels, and are on track to meeting its 45 percent reduction goal by 2025. Developer FivePoint Communities has sent the Irvine City Council a proposal for switching land for the Orange County veterans cemetery. Instead of putting the cemetery in the Great Park, it would be swapped for land near the 5 and 405 freeways. The change would not cost any money for the city or its taxpayers, and there are no substantial zoning, traffic or environmental issues affecting the freeway cemetery land. However, some City Council members are accusing the developer of trying to improperly get additional homes built in the Great Park. Santa Barbara County Supervisor Joan Hartmann is urging Congressman Doug LaMalfa to stop the legislation that would immediately annex the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indian’s 1,400-acre Camp 4 in Santa Ynez Valley. The fight began in 2010 when the tribe purchases the land and announced it planned to build housing. Neighbors of the site worried they would overdevelop the property. Airbnb and HomeAway settled a lawsuit with San Francisco agreeing to help ensure all local hosts are registered. The websites will now only include legal listings and the city “has tools for quick, effective enforcement,” according to City Attorney Dennis Herrera. In 2015, a San Francisco law required all vacation-rental hosts to register with the city but only about 2,100 out of 8,000 hosts had done so. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard L. Fruin Jr. concluded that the City Council’s approval of a Hollywood Target shopping center violated planning rules. The project has been defeated in courts twice in three years. Target first filed an application to build in 2008, and the partially built, three-story structure has been empty since 2014. Redfin's “ migration report ” ranks the San Francisco metropolitan area, including San Jose and Oakland, as the first market where house hunters are most likely to leave. The analysis showed 1 in 5 home seekers living in the Bay Area is looking outside the region. Last month, the Bay Area Council found 40 percent of Bay Area residents want to leave in the next few years. The number jumps to 46 percent among millennials.

It was a warm day with very little breeze. Visible to the south, east, and west, motionless smoke columns served as precise geographic markers of the buildings that had been torched so far. The cops were nowhere. As white gentrifiers in West Adams, we were at the mercy of any neighbor who might want to settle a score, such as the guys who lived in the gang house down the block. My street of early-1900s Craftsman houses was as eerily tranquil as an Edward Hopper painting. The party was elsewhere: three short blocks to the east, buildings were ablaze on all four corners of the intersection of Western and Washington boulevards. A mile to the north, in Koreatown and the Wilshire District, storeowners perched on rooftops with rifles to ward off arsonists and looters. (As it turned out, the gang viewed us part of their turf to protect, as the gang leader told me a few days later in a friendly conversation. In spite of myself, I felt grateful.) Before they ended, the Los Angeles riots extended from South Central all the way to the Hollywood Hills to the north. How did the unrest become so widespread? L.A. is an automobile city, and the unrest was literally a riot on wheels. Much of South Los Angeles is organized around endless north-south streets, like Western, Vermont, and La Brea, that span the 20-mile distance between downtown and the beach cities. Who started the fires? It’s unclear whether they were lit by locals inspired by news reports, or perhaps a small number of people, sitting in the back seats of cars and tossing incendiaries out the rear window, block by block, as their drivers headed north to Hollywood. In the first hours, I was determined not to leave my house. Some of my reporter friends were actually cruising the streets in search of interviews and photo ops, despite a police curfew. When a cloud of acrid smoke settled on our house, it was time to go. The family of four, a large white dog, and a Selmer saxophone piled into the car to join the exodus to Sherman Oaks, behind the protective barrier of the Santa Monica Mountains. In the end, the five-day riot left 50 people dead. It destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 buildings, at an estimated cost of a $1 billion. About a year later, some new commercial buildings, in candy colors and fashionable zig-zag angles, came to my neighborhood to replace the nondescript strip malls burned. In my opinion, they were not an improvement, even though the bar was pretty low. *** In the days immediately after the riots, some people felt that Los Angeles needed fresh leadership and ideas. Their impulse was to privatize the project of community redevelopment. This belief may been particularly strong in Los Angeles, where government is perceived to be weak and business to be resolute and wise. To head this ad hoc committee of civic repair, organizers chose Peter Ueberroth, a Republican resident of Orange County. Ueberroth, who had organized the successful 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was “a guy who knows how to get things done.” No sooner had Rebuild LA formed than it ran into a problem: How would this city-building be done, exactly? What projects should they undertake? Based on what policy? No one ever figured it out. Despite good intentions and some nice gestures, Rebuild LA quickly turned into one more poverty agency in search of projects, “partners” and funding, and companies that had pledged either money or initiatives seemed to shrivel up. More action, arguably, came from the city’s official civic-improvement arm, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (LA/CRA.). The agency gained great power in the Bradley years. It built some projects and attracted developers with free land and expedited financing, among other benefits. CRA created new project areas, including one centered on the riot-damaged corner of Vermont and Manchester. The agency supported commercial ventures like Magic Johnson’s 12-screen multiplex at the Crenshaw Mall, the agency’s attempt to give South Central a real mall a few years priors to the riots. Another attempt at a shopping center, this time a grandiose effort called Vermont Gardens, which promised a cultural performance space in its center, started construction in 1995 but stalled out a year later. The agency helped build a number of low-income housing complexes, although projects that are instantly identifiable as affordable housing tend to stigmatize their neighborhoods. Momentum to repair the city faded when the sense of crisis diminished. When the Northridge earthquake hit two years later, followed by the immensely entertaining O.J. Simpson murder trial, Angelenos found something else to focus on. While there were some individual success stories from the CRA and Rebuild LA, it’s hard to assess what lasting good was done. A recent released report  from UCLA, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the unrest, reports that economic conditions in South Central, if anything, have worsened slightly. *** The emergence of downtown as a popular residential neighborhood, along with the redevelopment of Hollywood, were perhaps the two most remarkable planning events in the past quarter century – and it was quite a quarter-century. Other great planning events include the completion of the Century (105) Freeway, creating a link between southern suburbs and aerospace jobs in the LAX area, which was no longer needed because those jobs had largely disappeared. Several new transit lines reached completion to Pasadena, East L.A., the San Gabriel Valley and Santa Monica, but these expensive projects were not enough to offset freeway congestion. More importantly, football returned, in the form of the Rams. And the Chargers. Boba drinks, designer cupcakes, Korean-Mexican fusion tacos, all left their marks. South Central L.A. was renamed South L.A. The web arrived, swallowed the music, travel, and newspaper industries, among others, while failing to end civilization on New Years 2000. Forest fires grew more frequent and more intense. Multiple droughts occurred. The Chinese became the biggest foreign investors in L.A. real estate. Jerry Brown killed the redevelopment agencies. Housing prices grew to absurd levels, and city officials acknowledged that the city was in a perpetual housing crisis. L.A. had three boring mayors who seemed to accomplish nothing; the current mayor is a bright young man with some good ideas about walkable streets and other urban amenities that world-class cities should enjoy. Again, the question is where is the constituency for planning? Los Angeles still doesn’t know what it is. Civic awareness is non-existent in this unfriendliest of cities. *** On a personal note, I remarried, sold my West Adams house at a $50,000 loss after I heard gunfire one afternoon while the children were playing outside. I remarried and bought a house in the Valley. I read about violence in South Central in the L.A. Times with a mixture of revulsion, guilt and relief. Young people were still dying needlessly from gun violence, but now they were far away; there was nothing to do but shake your head and turn the page. As for South Central, the experiences of both Rebuild LA and the CRA suggest that the social and economic problems are too deep to respond to real estate solutions by themselves. Physical planning can provide improvements in mobility and housing. The fundamental problem remains economic. In my view, the federal government should revive the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, and create millions of jobs. In other words, the government should invest directly in individual people by giving them paychecks -- as opposed to tax credits or other financial incentives to developers and contractors. The much-discussed need to repair perhaps $1 trillion in freeways, roads, dams and bridges would seem like a good fit here. In addition to a new WPA, government should form joint ventures with tech companies, and create manufacturing or just-in-time delivery warehouses in inner city locations. Perhaps the government could subsidize the physical plant, the cost of training and other non-business-related costs. I believe Freud when he says that people need “love and work.” High unemployment is a cause of substance abuse, fatherless households, spousal abuse and incarceration; an unemployed person is a frustrated person and sometimes a dangerous one, too. Glitzy shopping centers and expensive upgrades of cultural monuments like Watts Tower are nice, but they don’t really touch the fundamental issue, which is economic. Neighborhoods improve when people are working. People can buy homes, or refinance and repair existing ones. Unemployment is a persistent problem in South Central, because African-American unemployment is higher than white unemployment, especially for teenagers and young adults. High-paying jobs, followed by improve education and better health care, are the right medicines for South Central. Compared with those five days, the breeze has been relatively gentle in Los Angeles over the past 25 years. We need to do more to keep it that way.

The American Planning Association announced its 12 National Planning Achievement Awards for 2017 in advance of its national conference in New York City. Four of the 12 winners are based in California winners. UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs got the award for Best Practice-Silver for “Placemaking for an Aging Population: Guidelines for Senior-Friendly Parks. ” The guidelines describes 10 purposes that senior-friendly open spaces should address: control, choice, safety and security, accessibility, social support, physical activity, privacy, contact with nature, comfort, and aesthetic and sensory delight. Monterey Bay won a Best Practice-Silver as well for its “Historic Fort Ord Regional Urban Design Guidelines” that outline reuse plans for the 28,000-acre historic military installation. The City of Ontario won an award for a Grassroots Initiative-Gold for its “Huerta del Valle Community Garden” which provides fresh organic produce to the community. The garden opened in 2013 and features 68 family plots and 2.5 acres of agricultural land that produces 6,000 pounds of food annually. In 2015, Huerta del Valle Community Garden became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The final California winner was Marin County and its “Game of Floods” which won an award for Public Outreach-Gold. The Game of Floods combines games with community planning exercises to communicate about sea-level rise vulnerabilities and adaption. Review of National Monuments Includes Eight in California Eight national monuments’ designations in California are among the 30 being reviewed by the Trump administration for possible de-listing. Under a new executive order almost a billion acres nationwide are being reevaluated for their status if they were designated by presidents after 1996 and are at least 100,000 acres. The California National Monuments covered by Trump’s order include Cascade-Siskiyou at the Oregon border, Berryessa Snow Mountain, Carrizo Plain, Giant Sequoia, San Gabriel Mountains, Sand to Snow, Mojave Trails, and Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains. Trump says this will end the “egregious abuse of federal power, and give that power back to the states and the people.” While most of California’s national monuments will pass the tests, the two most recently designated desert national monuments could be in jeopardy. Last February, Obama protected 1.8 million acres at the request of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Republicans opened an investigation in March 2016 claiming a “lack of transparency and consultation with local stakeholders.” However, no president has rescinded a national monument designation, and there is no provision in the Antiquities Act for reversal which would likely lead to lawsuits. San Diego Reveals Plans for Vast Network of Urban Sensors San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced the city would be working with General Electric to upgrade streetlights to reduce energy costs by 60 percent and create a connected digital network that can optimize parking and traffic, enhance public safety and track air quality through deployment of 3,200 smart sensors. It would, city officials contend, create the largest city-sponsored “Internet of things” network in the world. These smart nodes will use real-time anonymous sensor data to direct drivers to open parking spaces, help first responders during emergencies, track carbon emissions and identify intersections that can be improved for pedestrians and bicyclists. The anonymous information will be used for San Diego’s “Vision Zero” strategy to eliminate traffic fatalities and injuries, and it will be available to developers who want to create civic-minded apps and software. The new lights will be installed this summer and the project will be completed by fall 2018. Ruling Tentatively Preserves Bond Funding for High Speed Rail Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei tentatively denied High Speed Rail opponents' attempt to block the state from spending about $1.25 billion from a $10 billion bond voters approved in 2008. Cadei allowed the project to move forward but delayed a final ruling on a legal challenge asserting the state is not keeping its promise to its voters. Cadei said that the injunction was at the wrong time and blocking the money could hurt Californians as taking away the state’s access to the bond dollars would require forfeit of billions of dollars in federal grants. The lawsuit challenges AB1889, which changed previous law to allow money from high-speed rail bonds to be spent on electrification of Caltrain. Those opposed said only voters can make that change, not Gov. Brown, and contended that the ruling gives the legislature “carte blanche” to redirect voter-approved bond funds.  White Paper Describes Opposition to Housing, Possible Responses UCLA professor in urban planning Paavo Monkkonen, released a white paper addressing obstacles to the production of housing in California titled, “Understanding and Challenging Opposition to Housing Construction in California’s Urban Areas.” The paper provides  ways that residents and groups express opposition to new housing their own neighborhoods and makes a set of policy recommendations for the state government to address the challenge. Monkkonen argues limiting new construction make all housing less affordable, exacerbates spatial inequalities, and harms the state’s economic productivity and environment. The paper covers motivations for opposing densification and tactics used to block housing projects. Monkkonen concludes that the state should enforce and enhance existing laws, push local planning agencies to be more representative and equal, provide information for public discussions, and develop ways to make planning decisions at the metropolitan not neighborhood scale. CARB Seeks to Warn Developers of Pollution Risks The California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued a guide to help cities and developers identify risks of and reduce exposure to pollution from busy urban roads. Strategies to Reduce Air Pollution Exposure near High-Volume Roadways provides planners and builders of infill developments with science-based strategies to protect public health and reduce impacts of nearby traffic. CARB Chair Mary Nichols said, “Infill developments are crucial to California’s ability to meet our air quality and climate goals…The health benefits of denser urban neighborhoods can be reduced if they are built close to congested highways.” The strategies include reducing traffic emissions, reducing concentrations of air pollution from vehicles, or removing pollution from the air. Draft Los Angeles City Budget Released Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti unveiled his proposed 2017-2018 budget , with significant funding for expenditures related to transportation and land use. The $9.2 billion budget allocates more than $176 million towards housing and services for the homeless and $35 million to fix roads. More than $89 million of the $176 million is HHH funding and the transportation funds will come from Measure M and SB1. The proposed budget also includes $3.5 million for Community Plan Updates, $17 million for Vision Zero, $3.6 million for Great Streets, $14 million DASH Expansion, $31 million for sidewalk repair, $7.1 million for tree-trimming, and joint use arreements for park space. Quick Hits & Updates The Sacramento Area Council of Governments entered into a contract with Social Bicycles for a regional bike share system that will include Sacramento, West Sacramento, Davis, and UC Davis. The preview system will include 50-100 bikes in May 2017 in Sacramento (downtown and Midtown) and West Sacramento. The program will grow to 800 Smart Bicycles plus 100 Electric Bikes during expansion targeted for the fall. The City of Los Angeles  released a new interactive Vision Zero map that shows the location of recent traffic fatalities, identifying them by age, gender, and whether they were traveling by foot, bike or car. The map focuses on the High Injury Network (HIN): six percent of streets where 65 percent of deaths and injuries take place. The map includes data from 2003 to 2016. (See prior CP&DR coverage .) The CEO of the High-Speed Rail Authority, Jeff Morales, announced he will be stepping down this summer after five years. The board of directors are in the process of selecting a replacement. Los Angeles Metro’s Planning and Programming Committee approved final project definitions for a future Eastside Gold Line extension. The project must get approval from the full board, and then can move into environmental clearance studies. The Eastside Gold Line extensions are funded by Measure M with two phases: $534 million to break ground in 2029 and open in 2035 and $2.89 billion for break ground in 2053 and open in 2057. The committee also approved four West Santa Ana Branch light rail alignments to be used for environmental studies. Measure M funds two phases of light rail on the West Santa Ana Branch, which will ultimately run from Union Station to Artesia. Metro plans to scope their EIR this spring, prepare a full EIR, and the agency expects to approve in late 2019. Santa Clara Valley Water District is considering building a new $800 million dam and reservoir in the hills of eastern Santa Clara County near Pacheco Pass. In February the board voted to pay consultants up to $900,000 to study the idea. If the findings return favorable, the district will apply for funding under Proposition 1.  The California Housing Consortium has launched BringCAHome.org , a website with information for Californians on infographics and statistics on the housing affordability crisis, “take action” section that connects Californians with legislators, and a toolksit of county-by-county factsheets on housing affordability and the type of workers who are being priced out. A report released by the High Desert Corridor Joint Powers Authority on the proposed Desert Xpress high speed rail line finds that 27 percent of the more than 23 million passengers that travel between Southern California and Las Vegas would do so by high-speed rail if given the option. The project could also save money for travelers, help the environment, increase safety, and generate $1 billion in revenue. The report notes the promise of infrastructure funding from the Trump Administration and the move of the Raiders from the Bay Area to Las Vegas which can hopefully boost the project to attract new investors. (See prior CP&DR coverage .) The Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program (SALC) is accepting applications for Agricultural Conservation Easement grants and Agricultural Land Strategy and Outcome grants. SALC is the first program in the country to invest in farmland conservation for its climate benefits. Launched by the Strategic Growth Council in 2015, SALC Program dedicated $4.6 million to agricultural conservation easements and planning grants in its first year. Last year, it awarded $37.4 million to preserve 20 properties protecting 19,000 acres. The Anaheim City Council voted to ban commercial marijuana operations, including cultivation, manufacturing and distribution for recreational or medical uses. State officials are expected to issue licenses next year, but city officials say the ordinance give the city control of the issue, rather than deferring to unknown state laws. Anaheim has also limited growing marijuana plants to in their homes and backyards, rather than front-yards. (See related CP&DR coverage .) The City of Los Angeles adopted a new ordinance that would strengthen enforcement of the Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Under the Ellis Act, landlords who tear down rent-controlled units must either replace them one-for-one with affordable units or ensure that 20 percent of new unit are affordable. The new law would also help prevent displacement of tenants by increasing regulation of both vacant and occupied rental units, requiring owners to re-start the Ellis process if withdrawn units are re-rented, tightening rules when units are demolished without necessary approvals, and requiring property owners to file annual reports. The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, in partnership with researchers at UC Berkeley, is installing  and monitoring air quality sensors in densely packed neighborhoods near the city’s port to give people who live and work there live readings of pollutants that can injure their health. The project has installed the first 25 of 100 sensors in residents’ yards, schools, senior centers, and businesses.

CP&DR Vol. 32 No. No. 4 April 2017

In 1883 novelist Helen Hunt Jackson visited what is now the City of Hemet in 1883 to do research for what became her novel Ramona. The title character is orphaned in Southern California following the Mexican-American War and finds adventure and romance on the frontier. Her story drew thousands of easterners weary of toil and strife and inspired countless readers to pursue the Southern California dream. Had Jackson landed in present-day Hemet, though, she might chosen a different setting for her heroine. The ranchos, orange groves, and soaring peaks that greeted Jackson gave way long ago to the tract housing, freeways, and big-box stores that characterize much of the Inland Empire. Hemet’s downtown — one of the oldest in the region, having been founded in the 1880s and incorporated in 1910 — slid into disrepair as the city's population grew to its current 83,000. A new Downtown Specific Plan, adopted on a 5-0 city council vote in early April, aims to bring a little urbanism to Southern California’s original frontier town. The plan applies to a 360-acre area covering 58 blocks including the civic center, historic core, and a future Metrolink commuter rail station. It is bisected east-west by the city’s main street, Florida Avenue and includes a handful of historic resources, such as the 1921 Hemet Theater.

Reversing a Superior Court judge’s ruling, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled that the City of San Diego properly moved forward with construction of a lifeguard station – even though the construction occurred almost 10 years after the city issued a development permit that was supposed to expire after three years.

Southern California is facing a major die-off  of trees throughout parks, campuses and yards in both urban and rural areas, according to data from the U.S. Forest Service. For instance San Diego County’s Tijuana River Valley Regional Park has seen over 100,000 willows destroyed by the polyphagous shot hole borer beetle. Greg McPherson, a researcher with the US Forest Service, estimates the beetle could kill as many as 27 million trees, or 38 percent, in LA, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties. These would be only losses from the beetle, but many of the trees in the area cannot tolerate stresses of drought, water restrictions, higher salinity levels in recycled water, wind and new pests that arrive almost daily because of global trade and tourism, local transportation systems, nurseries and the movement of infected firewood. The hardest-hit native species of urban trees are California sycamores, typically found along streams and used as shade and street trees. Bay Area Cities Strengthen Rent Control San Jose City Council approved a suite of measures, on a 6-5 vote, to strengthen renter protections, including a requirement that landlords must cite a reason for refusing to renew a lease. San Jose has had more than 2,400 evictions without cause since 2010. This was among several moves in recent weeks by Bay Area cities to strength rent control. City housing officials will also study tying rent increases in the city’s 43,000 rent-controlled units to inflation rather than the current 5 percent increase allowed annually. The council also approved Ellis Act protections that would require landlords of rent-controlled units to provide 120 days to a year of notice before they demolish, remodel or convert their buildings and provide displaced renters money to relocate. In Pacifica, the City Council voted , 3-2, to approve a temporary rent-and eviction-control ordinance. In early May, the Council will decide whether to put a rent and eviction control on the Nov. 7 ballot. In Santa Rosa, residents will vote on a broad rent-and eviction-control measure in the June 6 election. Union City City Council approved an eviction-control ordinance that would limit evictions to just causes allowed by law. (See prior CP&DR coverage .) Nationwide Housing Crisis Costs Economy Up to $1.6 Billion  Analysis from economists Chang-Tai Hsieh of University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley finds that the lack of affordable housing in "superstar cities" like New York, San Francisco, and San Jose have cost the US economy about $1.6 trillion a year in lost wages and productivity. The report is titled, “ Why Cities Matter: Local Growth and Aggregate Growth .” The nation’s 380 metro areas generated $14.6 trillion in GDP in 2012, there is little research about factors that limit the growth of cities and metros. Hsieh and Moretti developed a statistical model that analyzed the contribution of each US city and metro to national economic growth. They analyzed 220 metros from 1964 to 2009 and looked at effects of housing on wages and productivity. The authors found that nearly 75 percent of the nation’s economic growth came from small group of Southern metros and 19 other larger metros. The superstar metros created wealth in finance and high-tech industries, but the gains were eaten up by the wages used to pay for higher housing costs. The authors also investigated whether workers are not flowing to the superstar metros because they have become too crowded, noisy and unpleasant, or whether it’s policies like zoning, building codes and NIMBYism. Improving transit is a large part of the solution, according to Hsieh and Moretti. (See prior CP&DR interview with Enrico Moretti.) Santa Monica Releases Conservative Downtown Plan The City of Santa Monica  released the final draft of its Downtown Community Plan. The 300-page document lays out the future of development downtown through 2030, includes what some consider to be aggressively slow-growth rhetoric. The document has five major elements: density, building heights, housing, affordability and transportation. The plan projects less than 20 percent of downtown’s property area will change because it is largely built-out. The maximum height for buildings will be 84 feet (although some areas maximum will be 32 feet) and three exceptions exist already. The plan breaks up downtown into seven districts, with the tallest buildings planned for the area near the city’s light rail stop. City officials say the plan paves the way for the construction of 2,500 housing units over the next two decades. The plan regulates the number of studios and one-bedroom apartments and requires a certain percentage of new units be available for low and middle-income families. For transportation, the priorities are pedestrians, bicycles and public transit. The document still must go through public review at the Planning Commission and City Council, before officially becoming policy. (See prior CP&DR coverage .) Lumber Companies May Challenge Spotted Owl Habitat Designation The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously that a group of lumber companies, calling themselves the American Forest Resource Council, have legal standing to challenge the northern spotted owl’s designated “critical habitat.” Federal officials in 2012 designated more than 9.5 million acres in California, Oregon and Washington as essential to the owl’s survival. Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote that there is substantial probability that the critical habitat designation would cause a decrease in the supply of timber and the members would suffer economic harm as a result of the decrease in supply. The case moves back down to district court, and the trial judge may order the Fish and Wildlife Service to redraw the critical habitat maps. Permits for Housing Construction Decline in Los Angeles Permits for housing construction in LA area have declined from 34,034 for 2015 to 32,008 last year or a six percent drop. The units that have been constructed have been primarily condominiums and apartments. This slowdown can most likely be attributed to pullback in bank lending, new land use regulations, and difficulty for developers to find available land. This is the first decline in six years, since permitted units hit a recession-era low of 7,281 in 2009. Most of the new construction is concentrated in downtown LA, where developers can build taller buildings and higher densities. These declines in housing construction may be a cyclical pause or a trend in the making. However, lower numbers of available units negatively impact the cost and availability of homes for buyers. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington in Texas had 55,618 units permitted last year, and Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land had 44,643. Even New York and Atlanta’s metropolitan areas surpassed LA with 10,458 and 4,113 more units respectively.  Lancaster Does Away with Parking Requirements in Commercial Zones The high desert city of Lancaster approved  an ordinance that would delete parking requirements in commercial zones. The staff report contends that eliminating these requirements is one step towards reversing low-density, sprawling development patterns, and resulting fiscal liabilities. For development, parking spaces carry a high cost in terms of the land needed to build them but also the costs in maintenance. Planning Director Brian Ludicke said businesses can treat parking as a "business decision" rather than a regulatory requirement. A benefit is that city planning staff can save time spent on calculating, determining, and verifying compliance. To prevent extreme abuse, developers must determine the number of parking spaces sufficient for their project and provide justification to the Direct of Development Services and/or Planning Commission. Quick Hits & Updates According to analysis  by Redfin, San Jose is the nation’s most competitive market for residential real estate with 69.6 percent of homes sold over the listing price. Second and third place were San Francisco and Oakland, respectively. Low supply has driven competition, which keeps pushing home prices up. Los Angeles County will  lose nearly 14,000 affordable rentals over the next five years according to analysis by the California Housing Partnership Corp. The group says these units, spread across 232 building,s are at “high” or “very high” risk of being converted to market rate units.  A report  from the USC Price School of Public Policy, “The Affordable Housing Crisis in Los Angeles: An Employer Perspective,” contends that nearly 60 percent of leading employers have cited the region’s high cost of living as impacting employee retention. Seventy-five percent cite housing costs specifically. Nearly 64 percent report including cost of living when negotiating hiring packages for high-level employees. Rohnert Park Mayor Jake Mackenzie was unanimously elected as the chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Mackenzie has served for the past two years as MTC’s vice chair and has represented Sonoma County on the Commission since 2008. A controversial project  proposed by Cadiz, Inc. to pump Mojave Desert groundwater to sell to urban Southern California has been given new life by the Trump administration. The existing documents said Cadiz could not use an existing federal railroad right-of-way for a new water pipeline, which meant the project would have to go through federal environmental review. Cadiz asked the BLM to reverse what it called a flawed decision. The new memo from the BLM, states that future right-of-way decisions will be made by the agency’s Washington office. Anaheim’s $185 million ARTIC transit hub, will have to pay  its operating deficit from the city’s general fund for the foreseeable future. For the past three fiscal years, the station has fallen far short of ridership projections and operated in the red, with a $2.5 million deficit for 2016-17. This year, because of television shows and commercials filmed there, is projected to generate $1.4 million in revenue. Los Angeles real estate investor Leeor Maciborski faces  fines of $17,000 after writing checks through more than a dozen companies to help elect City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell. Under city rules, each donor can only give $700 per election at the time, the company exceeded restrictions by $3,000. The Elk Grove City Council approved , 4-0, $8 million worth of incentives to lure a Costco superstore. Construction will begin in June on a 17-acre site in the suburbs. The project includes 150,000-square foot store and up to 30 gas pumps. The Center for Biological Diversity has filed  a lawsuit against the city of San Bernardino Municipal Water Department and the City of San Bernardino challenging a plan to dramatically reduce water flows in the Santa Ana River. The project would cut water by 50 percent, hurting endangered wildlife and recreational opportunities for people. The National Parks Services has added  the Pan American Bank structure in East Los Angeles to the National Register of Historic Places. This structure is the headquarters of the oldest Latina-owned bank in California and was co-founded in 1964 by Romana Acosta Banuelos, who was also the first Latina Treasurer of the US. Sacramento leaders have met with automakers and technology company representatives to become a national testing  ground for driverless cars.The city is callings its efforts the Autonomous Transportation Open Standards Lab, or ATOS.