In a followup to last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling, an appellate court in Sacramento has ruled that El Dorado County’s traffic impact fee system is constitutional and meets the so-called Nollan/Dolan standard. The case is almost certain to be appealed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the El Dorado County property owner who brought the suit.

Will Averaging Be Good Enough For Exactions?

A Los Angeles judge has ruled that the Beverly Hills housing element is “deficient” in a variety of ways, including the city’s calculations of potential housing development based on its current density standards. The city has announced plans to appeal the ruling, but if ity loses on appeal that could open the door for several builder’s remedy projects that have been proposed by a single developer.

Both the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County have followed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lead and suspended SB 9 in areas affected by wildfires. Meanwhile, YIMBY Law is considering filing a lawsuit challenging the suspension.

A water deal between Fairfield and Solano County – which will facilitate development outside Fairfield’s urban limit line – has been upheld by an appellate court in a published decision, meaning it can be used as precedent in other cases. Opponents framed the whole issue as a possible prelude to a similar deal for California Forever, though this seems unlikely, at least at this point.

SB 9 isn’t unconstitutional – at least as it is applied to general law cities, an appellate court has ruled.

How Will SB 79 Affect Local Planning in California?

Tier 1

Huntington Beach’s status as a charter city doesn’t get it out from under state housing law, including the provision that the city must adopt a compliant housing element within 120 days of a court order to do so.

As part of a settlement agreement with the state, the City of Norwalk has repealed a moratorium on homeless shelters and similar facilities. The city must also establish a housing trust fund and file regularly reports with the Department of Housing and Community Development. The state promised to recertify Norwalk’s housing element, which was revoked after the city adopted the moratorium.

Eden Housing has been trying to build an affordable housing project in Downtown Livermore since 2018. Two local groups with the same backer have gone to court with different lawsuits to stop the project – or at least move it.

In November of 1986, I showed up at the California Chapter, American Planning Association, conference ; maybe the second one I had ever attended ; with the pilot issue of four-page newsletter that no one had ever heard of or seen before called California Planning & Development Report. I thought it filled a need but I wasn't at all sure it would last. At the time I was a fledging land use journalist ; an occupation that most people thought was a hilariously unlikely proposition ; freelancing for a wide variety of publications, including APA's own Planning magazine, as well as California Business (now out of business) and California Lawyer. Industry newsletters ; printed and mailed ; were all the rage in those days, and I figured that if I compiled all the interesting stuff that crossed my desk each month, at least my friends would pay to read a newsletter. Which is pretty much what happened first. Our first regular issue in December of 1986 was launched with 15 subscribers. Although I had only lived in California for five years, I was fortunate enough to have several advantages in undertaking this work. I had worked my way through UCLA planning school by working at the L.A. Daily Journal, a newspaper for lawyers ; and I still use the skills I learned there in writing up court cases for CP&DR. I also attended a huge number of continuing education programs dealing with land use then offered by UCLA Extension, which proved to be my true education in the California land use system. I also had two incredible pieces of luck. Vicki Torf, my wife at the time, happened to be a graphic designer. In those pre-desktop publishing, pre-internet days there is no way I could have launched CP&DR without her. And I happened to live in West Hollywood, which had just incorporated amid national publicity. At a time when most of my planning school classmates were interning somewhere, I wound up as chair of the West Hollywood Planning Commission. That gave me even more of a real-time education in how land-use decision-making actually worked. Preparing CP&DR before the internet was a tough job. To gather material, I subscribed to so many newspapers that we had to get a much larger rural mailbox at our home in Ventura. I spent endless hours reading and clipping articles from around the state, often enlisting others to help, including Steve Svete, later one of the founders of Rincon Consultants. (As a toddler, my daughter often imitated this work, sitting on the floor of our living room and furiously throwing random papers around into different piles.) Shortly after I started CP&DR, I got a call from Warren Jones, who had founded Solano Press Books. He told me he had always wanted to write guide to planning in California but realized he would never get around to it and asked me if I wanted to do it. I turned him down flat. But after a couple of years of writing CP&DR ; and lecturing in planning at Cal Poly Pomona ; I realized I had the material and I told him yes. Since then, CP&DR and Guide to California Planning, now in its seventh edition, have really been one project, not two, with CP&DR providing the week-by-week update and GTCP the comprehensive overview. But CP&DR has never been a one-person effort. Along the way, I’ve worked with some great journalist. In the '90s and early '00s, Morris Newman ; trained as an urban designer but a real estate journalist at heart ; wrote an endless number of wry columns and hard-hitting analyses of public real estate deals. From 1999 to 2009, Paul Shigley ; an extraordinary journalist ; served as editor of CP&DR, bringing insight, diligence, and great reporting to the publication; he also co-wrote three editions of GTCP. For many years, Larry Sokoloff ; a Bay Area journalist that I originally worked with at the Daily Journal ; covered a wide range of land use stories from around the state. And since 2010, Josh Stephens has brought both solid reporting and a clever eye to California land use issues. I'm grateful to all of them for their commitment. Of course, the role of CP&DR has changed since the pre-internet era. At the beginning, when my rural mailbox was stuffed with newspapers, CP&DR simply brought news to planners, developers, and land use lawyers that they couldn't otherwise access. Today, our role has changed. Everything is out there on the internet ; even videos of Planning Commission and City Council meetings. There are plenty of free sources of information that we compete with, including the many fine summaries of legal rulings published by prominent law firms. And of course AI allows people to do their own research. But CP&DR still plays an important and, I hope, essential role. We still scour the internet to find land use news that nobody else brings to a statewide audience. And we try to bring perspective, context, and analysis that California land use practitioners can’t find anywhere else. Today we have hundreds of paying subscribers and thousands of folks who read our weekly e-newsletter. I'm grateful to every one of you for sticking with us and seeing value in what we do. We're charging full steam ahead and we hope to keep at this for a long time to come.