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Was Tuesday's election the turning point in the San Francisco density battles?

A proposed development in Newport Beach that has become a crucible for the California Coastal Commission was overwhelmingly rejected, 9-1, by the commission on Wednesday. With the controversial dismissal of former Executive Director Charles Lester in February, many environmentalists had accused the commission of taking a turn in favor of development and in opposition to serious coastal protection but the commission went in the other direction on Banning Ranch.

Since Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement a few weeks ago, he has been hailed - and reviled - as the Court's "great liberal voice" of the past couple of decades. But especially in land use, Stevens' legacy rests with not only his ardent support of government regulatory power, but also his skill in mustering five votes, on a pretty conservative court, in favor of aggressive use of land use regulation. President Obama's choice to replace Stevens will undoubtedly be "liberal" - but it remains to be seen whether this replacement will be as skilled at building majorities in land use cases.

This article is brought to you courtesy of the paying subscribers to  California Planning & Development Report . You can subscribe to  CP&DR  by clicking  here . You can sign up for  CP&DR ’s free weekly newsletter  here . Los Angeles Extends Adaptive Reuse Policy Citywide Los Angeles will expand its adaptive reuse policy, allowing office and commercial buildings to be converted into housing citywide, per a unanimous vote of the City Council. Previously, these conversions were largely limited to specific areas such as Downtown, Chinatown, Hollywood, and Koreatown under the older Adaptive Reuse Incentive Areas Specific Plan. These updates are intended not only to expand the scope from the previously limited area but to also make it easier to convert older and underutilized buildings left empty after the pandemic. City officials say this update marks the first step in the Citywide Housing Incentive Program, a program created in order to increase housing production and meet state-mandated housing goals. YIMBY Law Threatens Suit over Suspension of SB 9 in Los Angeles Fire Recovery Areas San Francisco-based YIMBY Law is threatening to sue Gov. Gavin Newsom over an executive order he signed in July that essentially bans duplex construction and lot splits in areas affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. The order runs in opposition to Senate Bill 9, which was passed in 2021 and made it legal to build multiple units on land zoned only for single-family homes. Newsom’s order was aimed at giving cities like Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Pasadena the power to suspend SB 9 in high fire-risk zones after the destructive wildfires earlier this year, citing concerns about evacuation safety and community risk. YIMBY Law threatened legal action unless Newsom revises the order to property owners’ ability to build duplexes after one year according to executive director Sonja Trauss. The group argues that SB 9 may provide flexibility to families who may be otherwise priced out of their community during rebuilding, while community members such as Sue Kohl, president of the Pacific Palisades Community Council, argues that these propositions are being pushed by developers over community members, and may exacerbate issues of crowding and congestion that created chaos and forced members of the Palisades community to flee their cars and escape on foot. San Francisco Upzoning to Face Legal Battle Neighborhoods United SF plans to file a lawsuit against San Francsico Mayor Daniel Lurie's Family Zoning Plan which he officially signed on December 12. The lawsuit could delay the implementation of the plan until after the next Board of Supervisors election in 2026, which might change the majority of the board with approval power over the plan. The lawsuit argues that the city cannot use an environmental impact report created for the 2022 Housing Element to get California Environmental Quality Act approval for the Family Zoning Plan, because the new plan is very different from the 2022 Housing Element. According to the lawsuit, the FZP will allow 54,000 new housing units, including in many areas not included in redevelopment in the 2022 Element. The suit also criticized the city for ignoring the 71,000 already approved units waiting to be built, saying the 54,000 added in the new plan far outstrips the 10,200 units needed to meet the city's RHNA goal of 82,000. Proponents of the lawsuit criticized the city's Family Zoning Plan for allowing rent-controlled units to be replaced with non-rent-controlled ones, and for not including requirements or funding for affordable housing in new construction. Del Mar Faces Builder's Remedy Conundrum The state has sent a warning letter to Del Mar saying the small coastal city must process a builder’s remedy application for a 259-unit bluffside housing project. But city officials say the project changed by more than the allowed 20% between the “preliminary application” permitted by the builder’s remedy law and the final application filed with the city. The developer, local philanthropist Carol Lazier argues that the city is obligated to approve the project because the housing element was not approved when she filed the application. But the city has stalled the application at first by saying Lazier’s application is incomplete because it does not request changes to the city’s planning and zoning policies. Lazier sued, then halted her lawsuit, then sued again before Attorney General Rob Bonta sent the warning letter. Shortage of Affordable Units Scuttles Major Mall Redevelopment in Santa Barbara Santa Barbara City Council declined to approve the redevelopment plan for the Paseo Nuevo mall after last-minute changes including the removal of part a parcel land from the proposed deal that could reduce the number of affordable units in the project from 80 to 24. Before the changes, the proposed project was set to include 233 market-rate and 80 affordable units, 125,000 square feet of retail space, and open areas and public amenities. City Council members stressed that while housing supply is a top issue, there are concerns around getting the best plan possible and not moving too quickly. The city of Santa Barbara owns the land under the mall, but the deal includes the city giving away the land, valued at between $32 and $39 million, to the project developers. The City Council and the general public have raised concerns about such an unprecedented giveaway, and the Council is considering requiring new guarantees in the next iteration of the plan, such as establishing a minimum number of required affordable housing units. CP&DR Coverage: Santa Barbara Developer Sues in Federal Court over New State Law A Santa Barbara developer with a pending builder’s remedy project has sued the state in federal court, claiming a new law violates the developer’s constitutional rights. The root of the lawsuit is a proposal by The Mission LLC to build an eight-story housing project behind the iconic Santa Barbara Mission. Under AB 130, passed last summer, infill housing projects of up to 20 acres are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, but under SB 158, passed later in the session and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the infill exemption cannot be applied to the Santa Barbara project. The main argument in the new lawsuit is that SB 158 singles out the project’s developer in a way that violates both the federal and state constitutions, most notably the equal protection clause and the so-called “prohibition on special legislation” in the state constitution, which prohibits passing laws that target specific individuals or corporations. The developer’s lawsuit also names the City of Santa Barbara as a defendant, claiming that the city’s overlay zone does not conform with state Housing Element law. The overlay claim builds on a recent appellate court ruling from Redondo Beach. Quick Hits & Updates The Trump administration will reduce protections for threatened fish in the San Joaquin River Delta in order to divert more water into Central Valley farmlands. California officials including Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed opposition to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s plan, which plans to divert more water into the federally operated Central Valley Project aqueducts. Though some valley farmers who view the state’s water policies as prohibitive to business support the plan, state officials warn that the increased water demand would put significant strain on native species in an already limited water supply. Attorney General Rob Bonta's office warned the City of  Del Mar that its position on a proposed housing development legally untenable in a recent letter. The developer filed a builder's remedy application, but the city has maintained that the Coastal Commission's input was required for the application to be complete. The development in question is Seaside Ridge, a proposed 259-apartment complex with 85 affordable units, 42 of which are low-income, that would occupy the bluffs above Dog Beach. The Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation reclaimed nearly 900 acres across the western edge of Yosemite National Park. The property was transferred from the Pacific Forest Trust, a nonprofit that purchased the property two decades ago when the area was threatened with the proposed development of vacation homes. The transfer takes place at a time of increased state-funded land exchanges and repatriation to native tribes by organizations including The California Natural Resources Agency, which provided $2.4 million in support of acquisition and maintenance costs. The Coastal Commission and PG&E reached a deal that will keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant online at least until 2030, in exchange for helping conserve 9,200 acres of land across three parcels. The plant was slated for decommission this year due to seismic safety concerns, but it accounts for 9% of the state's electricity, and state officials argued it was essential to keep it operating for the time being. The conservation efforts were pitched as compensation for continuing to perate the plant, which uses around 2.5 million gallons of ocean water per day for once-through cooling, killing an estimated 2 billion marine organisms per year. A report from Retirement Living analyzing U.S. Census data found that more people are leaving California than any other state. In 2024, California recorded an inflow of roughly 407,000 people, while 661,000 left, for a net loss of 254,000 residents. The report cited cost of living and the impact of wildfires as the largest likely causes for people moving away. California recorded the highest net loss of people in every age bracket, from the silent generation to Gen Z. The EPA confirmed that it will redefine the scope of the Clean Water Act t o confine the act's jurisdiction to "relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water, such as streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, along with wetlands that are directly connected to such bodies of water". The proposal is part of a large package of environmental regulation rollbacks being introduced by the EPA in the wake of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that limited the EPA's authority to regulate pollution into wetlands. Developer AEG has filed plans to add a 49-story tower at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles, featuring 364 residences, 334 hotel rooms, and multiple bars and restaurants, though construction won’t start soon due to current economic and labor conditions. The project is part of AEG’s broader investment in downtown, including co-developing the $2.6-billion Convention Center expansion. Hard Rock Casino Tejon , the new $600 million casino and entertainment resort, opened in November in Kern County. The casino, a joint bet by Hard Rock International and the Tejon Indian Tribe, promises 1,100 regional jobs, with future plans for a 400-room hotel and a concert venue. The owners of a Long Beach gas station wanted to add a car wash . But the property is adjacent to a school and in close proximity to several other gas stations, and Long Beach Unified claimed that the air quality analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act was inadequate. Now, in an unpublished opinion, an appellate court has agreed. On appeal, Justice Stephen Goorvich, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, concluded that the report from the Chambers Group “constitutes substantial evidence that the project would “compound or increase” the environmental impacts of the nearby automobile-related businesses.

I confess I have not read the book A Choice over Our Heads , but the resonant title of Lawrence Butler’s book chimed in my brain the other day, when I first hearing about Sequoia Village. The project is an attempt to combine affordable housing and the philosophy of co-housing, a semi-communal way of living in which people agree to contribute labor, such as cooking one day for a week in exchange for communal meals the rest of the time. This concept left me thinking about the dilemma of choice — or lack of it — in the standard model of low- and moderate-income housing. Now, I think the nonprofit builders who create housing for low- and moderate-income households walk only a little lower than the angels, given the extreme difficulty of financing and winning political support to supply one of society’s most critical needs. At the same time, I also think there is something unintentionally paternalistic, even authoritarian, about affordable housing as an institution. That is to say, working-class folks do not get many choices about where they can live. Homebuilders, understandably eager to stretch their scarce construction dollars, tend to build affordable residences in the form of “stacked flats,” which are two rows of identical apartments, separated by a hallway, with access to light and air from one wall only. In addition, you may not know your neighbors. Worse, you may have reason to fear them. But if you are on the list for an affordable unit, the builder says: “This is where you are going to live—and you should be grateful.” Given this mindset, co-housing may seem like an odd choice for affordable housing. In a co-housing arrangement, residents agree (as distinct from being obliged) to prepare communal meals on certain days and clean up on others. Co-housing participants may also commit themselves to other tasks, such as doing landscape work on common areas. But it’s all voluntary, as each unit is fully self-contained. The advantages of co-housing might seem obvious, at least to anyone who has been single, or a single parent, or part of a married couple that works full-time while raising children. Spending one evening a week cooking for a crowd is a great trade-off for communal meals the rest of the time (as long as you are not a salesperson who lives on the road, or an associate lawyer who works until midnight). It’s also practical to know your neighbors well enough to borrow a cup of sugar without embarrassment. The promised rewards of co-housing, however, go beyond the practical to the personal and ethical. Promoters of co-housing like to call these places “communities of choice” and people who live in this communitarian way of life typically seek it out. In other words, the communitarian way of life is an end in itself. Residents of co-housing place a high value on the idea (or ideal) of community, perhaps in memory of times when people tended to live in the same place for long periods of time and neighbors looked out for one another. Living in a tight-knit community may be a cure for isolation, even if not everyone has the commitment or the social skills to keep the communitarian ball bouncing. Located near the apple orchards of Sonoma County, Sebastopol is one city with the right set of factors to foster co-housing. One factor is a tolerant and open-minded populace. Another, arguably, may be affluence. “Sebastopol is a highly progressive place and seems to have a lot of people who are interested in issues such as healthy living, politics, and alternative housing,” said the city’s planning director, Kenyon Webster. The city is one of the few in the state to require, as opposed merely to allow, green building standards, including requirements for both capturing and partially purifying stormwater on-site. Given this forward-looking culture, it is not surprising that local government would have both the resources and the openness to lend a hand to non-standard housing types. A few years ago, Sebastopol contributed a portion of its housing monies toward the first co-housing development, Two Acre Wood, which contained market-rate units. The success of that project emboldened the city to take a further step, and in August the Sebastopol City Council approved the city’s first affordable co-housing project, the 45-unit Petaluma Avenue. The developer is Affordable Housing Associates of Berkeley. The council followed shortly with approval of the 20-unit Sequoia Village, to be developed by Burbank Housing Development Corporation of Santa Rosa. All units in both projects are rentals. Financing, the bugbear of many creative projects, turned out to be no problem. John Morgan, Burbank’s senior project manager for Sequoia Village, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the lack of opposition from lenders. “Once we explained the concept to them, they were fine with it,” Morgan said. “Their real concern was whether the single-family houses look attached.” The lenders were concerned about the very dense arrangement of single-family homes in the project, in which houses are separated from one another by only two inches, which must set some kind of record. The site planner and architect is Michael Black, who has been active nationally in promoting co-housing. The city contributed $1.6 million to the $7 million project. The city’s loan, which equals about $80,000 per house, will be paid back at 3% interest over a 59-year amortization. Morgan is hoping the units will be outfitted with photovoltaic cells for solar power if bond funding becomes available. Morgan is frank about the possible stumbling blocks of affordable co-housing. People who participate in co-housing have often already formed “intentional communities” before the housing is built. It is far less typical to invite or persuade new people who may not know one another to take part in the communitarian way of life. And there is no guarantee that the new projects will fully succeed on a communitarian basis, even though the projects have large communal kitchens and tenant associations to pay for property management and maintenance. I think the effort is worth the risk, though. In the worst case, this expensive Sonoma County city will have 65 new units of affordable housing, hardly a negative “outcome.” The more intriguing idea, however, is that affluent Sebastopol had enough respect for its residents to give them a choice in where and how to live. It is a risk worth repeating in other parts of California. Granted, co-housing may not appeal to everyone in our intensely private society, but I suspect its appeal is broader than just a few dozen households in Sebastopol.

Looking back at the environmental issues that grabbed headlines 20 years ago, it’s tempting to conclude that nothing at all has changed. Here’s a sampling of the environmental topics covered in the first few issues of CP&DR : threats to Lake Tahoe’s fabled clarity from development and pollution; dissatisfaction over the Coastal Commission’s regulation of land use in seaside communities; suggestions that developers should be required to mitigate the air-quality impact of their car-dependent malls and housing tracts; alarm over plans to bury flood-prone land in the Central Valley under suburban sprawl. Despite the superficial similarity of the controversies then and now, the past two decades have actually seen a significant shift in the debate over the fate of California’s environment. One of the most significant changes has been geographic in origin. During the 1980s, population pressures were focused on the state’s urban coastal counties. But the focus of California’s growth has shifted in the past 10 years, migrating into the high desert of Southern California, the Central Valley — particularly those pockets within commuting distance of the San Francisco Bay Area — and the Sierra Nevada foothills. Between 1986 and 2006, California’s population grew by 39%, as the state added 10.4 million residents. County growth rates were near or below the statewide level in the traditionally populous urban coastal counties. In the Central Valley, however, rates were higher than the state as a whole, ranging from 48% over 20 years in Tulare County to 92% in Madera. In the foothills, it was higher still: Placer County grew by a whopping 124%, Amador by 70%, El Dorado by 75%, Calaveras by 89%. But it was the Inland Empire that saw the most dramatic population influx: San Bernardino County has added about 900,000 residents since the first issue of this newsletter was published, growing by 82%. And Riverside County has more than doubled its population, adding about 1.1 million people. With these geographic shifts in population have come increasing conflicts over inland air quality, as the Central Valley’s smog, soot and dust have pushed it ahead of perennial pollution powerhouse Los Angeles for the dubious title of most unhealthy air in California. That’s led to crackdowns on nontraditional regulatory targets, such as farm and construction equipment — a dramatic shift from the focus on Los Angeles auto traffic that was the subject of a story in one of the first issues of CP&DR (see “Clean Air Act Legislation May Affect Development,” August 1987). It has also pushed the Central Valley into novel regulatory terrain, as the region attempts to reshape its urban fabric to reduce smog-causing emissions from automobiles. New conflicts related to endangered species and habitat loss have accompanied the rapid expansion of urban development in the state’s interior. Desert-dwelling species such as tortoises and lizards have joined the roster of high-profile critters in peril, as have vernal pool plant species on once-remote rangeland and even creatures once thought to be relatively safe from potential extinction because they were so widespread, such as the red-legged frog. Accompanying the growing list of imperiled California species has been a fundamental shift in the way such creatures are protected. Species-by-species recovery plans have been supplanted by comprehensive agreements that attempt to balance development and other habitat-wrecking activities with landscape-level conservation of entire ecosystems and multiple species. The foundation of this balancing act is the habitat conservation plan (HCP), an idea born in California and subsequently exported nationwide, through which landowners promise to preserve and manage sufficient habitat to protect sensitive species in exchange for regulators’ permission to destroy other habitat. The first such plan was negotiated during the early 1980s to protect a Bay Area butterfly, and it established the template for most of the HCPs that followed. Despite persistent criticism, the HCP process has become enormously popular. It was formally written into federal law in 1982 as an amendment to the Endangered Species Act. When CP&DR began publishing, only two HCPs had been negotiated in California. Now, there are more than 100 species plans in effect in California — more than a fifth of all the HCPs nationwide. California not only has more of these agreements than any other state, it also has the largest one ever negotiated, an ambitious plan encompassing a tenth of the state and covering more than 100 sensitive species in the Mojave Desert (see CP&DR Environment Watch , May 2005). Like the growing importance of HCPs, which reflect a significant retooling of a landmark Nixon-era law, another far-reaching shift in environmental regulation over the past 20 years in California has involved revision of a statute dating from the 1970s. The regulations are known as total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs. They are a way of addressing water pollution from “nonpoint sources” — the diffuse runoff from agricultural fields and urban storm drains that, unlike emissions from factories and sewage treatment plants, lacks an identifiable discharge point where pollution controls can be installed and monitored with relative ease. Although authorized under section 303 of the Clean Water Act of 1972, TMDLs and nonpoint pollution were largely ignored by state and federal regulatory agencies until relatively recently. The EPA did not even adopt implementing regulations for them until 1985, refining those standards further in 1992. And it has only been within the past decade that enforcement has begun, largely a consequence of a barrage of lawsuits by environmental organizations seeking to force the EPA and the states to adopt TMDLs for impaired streams and lakes (see CP&DR Environment Watch , February 2005). The consequence will be to spread the pain of Clean Water Act compliance from factories and coastal sewer plants — the primary targets during the 1970s and 1980s — to everyone else. That’s something Californians probably should get used to. As the past 20 years have demonstrated, the state’s enormous population growth has meant intensifying pressures on ecosystems and natural resources, even those once considered safe because they were either too abundant or too remote to be troubled by human activity. Those pressures in turn have translated into a heavier and more broadly shared regulatory burden, as laws drafted a generation ago have been updated to reflect new concerns about the state’s air, water and wildlife. As there is no evidence to suggest California’s population will stop growing or spreading anytime soon, the 40th anniversary edition of CP&DR will probably carry a story very much like this one.

Back in the early 1990s, regionalism was the hot planning topic. Championed by then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, regionalism sought to organize a range of planning functions traditionally managed at the state and local levels into newly defined “regions” that would better reflect actual human activity and social function. In its fully actualized form, regionalism would have handed many regulatory and planning powers from local government to new regional governments that in many cases crossed county lines. However, regionalism was felled by a combination of political turf protection and legitimate questions about defining the regions. Within a few years of the initial fanfare and conference chatter, the idea plummeted like a lead balloon. This episode is a telling one about the endless quest for purpose that defines the planning profession in California. Despite its name, planning is a profession that spends a good amount of time looking in the rear view mirror to confirm its bearings. The abrupt collapse of the regionalism movement is indicative of how the profession can deftly relegate out-of-favor ideologies to the dustbin with nary a staff report. This trait has likely evolved as a defense mechanism. From urban renewal to high-rise blocks of public housing, one planning theory after another has been pilloried by the drift to market-based culture and away from government-led central planning. Largely speaking, planning’s professional culture of self-doubt is a fate wrought by circumstance, for planning is shaped by client success — and planning’s client is the culture at large. Trying to order the physical and social world in a market economy is akin to having a tiger by the tale. So it has been interesting to watch planners warm to the biggest development trend of the last 10 years: new urbanism. In fact, the planning establishment so embraces the concept that it can be considered a core concept of urban planning — an amalgam of the previously named neo-traditional town planning with a dash of transit-oriented development (TOD) thrown in for balance. Not atypically, both branches of new urbanism were originally devised by architects rather than planners: neo-trad by Andres Duany, and TODs by Peter Calthorpe. After witnessing these architects dismantle Euclidean zoning and promote these seductive concepts during the early 1990s, planners essentially had to buy in. But given past scrapes with trends that went south, it would behoove planners to promote new urbanism with a critical eye and to understand the movement’s philosophical underpinnings. Planners should recognize that neo-traditionalism plays to society’s pursuit of comfort derived from the past, and is ultimately a backlash against post-war modernism. Illustrative models almost uniformly hearken to urban morphology of a century ago, even physically mimicking architectural styles and describing social interactions from a romanticized civic life of yore. The TOD school has grown into the urban variant of the small-town neo-trad model. More system-based in methodology, the TOD model is open to modernist architecture but adopts the form-based, mixed-use pattern of neo-traditionalism, albeit at much higher densities. Planners have been joined by trend-watching land developers to sell the movement, and this partnership has largely met with success. This too is important to understand. Today, planners work fervently with developers to get new urbanist projects in the ground, commonly abandoning their traditional role of skeptical regulator looking out for the public good. In fact, many planners are beginning to view regulations as bad, perhaps not remembering that the regulations were originally written to protect the public welfare. The placement of faith in the market system and the adoption of the architect’s sensibility that good design solves all problems should raise eyebrows. But, at least for now, it appears that planners have hitched their carts to the popular horses. In many parts of California, new urbanism seems to be working. One must attribute some of the success to the rise of an urban and suburban elite whose tastes correspond with new urbanist design themes. This success, in other words, is owed in part to the emergence of urban space as a lifestyle choice. The urban economy of the late 1990s shifted to a focus on the creative, digital and wireless sectors. The gen-Xers who fueled this sector were motivated by lifestyle. The suburbs and all they represented were — and remain — definitively passé. By contrast, urban was — and is — “in.” Thus, abandoned early-20th Century warehouses and factories were transformed into lofts and mixed-use platforms of the new urbanites. And because old buildings remain rooted in their original urban morphology, their vernacular is well suited to pedestrian life, public transportation and human scale. Center cities and older towns have benefited from the latest urban lifestyle choices. The comeback of rail transit, revitalization of downtowns and resurgence of pedestrian districts all over the state have been uniformly accepted as positive cultural developments. Planners, at least for the moment, have hit pay dirt. Equally as dramatic as planners’ acceptance of new urbanism has been their neglect of the valuable, customary planning subjects of housing and environmental quality. The exit of government as the leading provider of housing for the lower economic classes has been dramatic during the last 10 years – and its effects are deep. The production of affordable housing has shifted largely to nonprofit groups, whose good works are able to provide for only a fraction of the need. Homelessness and overcrowding have become permanent and accepted fixtures of our communities. As acknowledged in numerous public opinion polls, California’s interest in environmental issues has been supplanted by concerns about terrorism and — in planning parlance — public safety. Planners have followed this trend too, essentially relegating debate over environmental planning to CEQA documents. This focus on public safety explains in part why concepts like alternative energy, gray-water reuse and cisterns for rainwater collection are barely on the agenda. How long will planners be content with remaining primarily occupied with implementing new urbanist strategies to the exclusion of other topics? If present housing market trends continue, we may have an answer soon. For planners, success with the latest development trend has required a new partnership with developers. Planners simplify regulations, and developers finance new urbanist projects. But new urbanist successes have depended on an unusually strong housing market. If profits dwindle, as many vanguard homebuilders are already reporting, planners may run out of projects to champion, requiring a shift back to other pressing matters. It looks today like new urbanism has plenty of steam left. In the meantime, though, it would be worthwhile to integrate diversified housing and environmental sustainability into projects. There could be great benefits to incorporating some of urban planning’s more traditional concerns into this retro new world. Stephen Svete, AICP, is president of Rincon Consultants, Inc., a Ventura-based consulting firm.

Thesis: Cities are dynamic places, where different forces constantly push against each other. Among those many forces are the desires of local residents to maintain a “sense of place,” or in some cases create that sense de novo in locations where it does not already exist. At the polar opposite from that tendency are the sophisticated methods that national retailers use not only to capture local sales, but to control the landscape, as well. Will the branding of national companies control the image of our fast-growing cities, or will that role fall to the forces of nostalgia and manufactured charm? Case History: The midtown area of Milpitas, a city of 65,000 people in Santa Clara County is our chosen example, although many other cities have similar stories to tell. I chose Milpitas because it provides a dramatic, direct contrast between the branded environment and the kind of development often described, in a cringe-making way, as the urban village. Exhibit No. 1: The Great Mall. Representing the branded environment in our exercise is the Great Mall of the Bay Area, an enormous outlet center that occupies a former auto assembly plant in this city on the eastern edge of Silicon Valley. The Great Mall is a large, anonymous-looking building with all the usual backlit signs. Nearly all these signs are familiar to any person who has lived in America for more than six months: These are the brands of merchants so ubiquitous in American life they could be called the Fifty Famous Names. In the Great Mall, those famous names include McDonalds, Starbucks, Calvin Klein, Cinnabon, Dave and Buster’s, Abercrombie & Fitch, Brooks Brothers, Mrs. Fields Cookies, Gap Outlet, Hot Dog on a Stick, Zales the Diamond Store. These brands give meaning and identity to this big, dumb building. The problem with the branded environment is that brands have meaning that extend far beyond the local. A McDonalds sign does not refer simply to a single fast-food restaurant, but to the entire universe of McDonalds and its firmly rooted place, like it or not, in American culture. For that reason, those Fifty Famous Names tend to overwhelm most commercial streets, drowning out the local merchants, even if the latter might offer food or goods or services that are more tied to the traditions and history of a particular place than a company with a billion-dollar line of credit with Morgan Stanley. At risk is the unique sense of place that each city potentially offers. This unique sense of place — whether it is based on the architecture, the landscape or the local industries — in many cases is the reason why people have chosen to live in a particular community. Exhibit No. 2: The urban village, here represented by the Parc Place and Park Metro housing developments. In 2002, the Milpitas City Council approved the midtown specific plan, which called for filling in the midtown area with 4,800 new housing units and more than 1 million square feet of new office and retail space. The design of the housing shows the influence of the new urbanism and its affinity for the quaint, vaguely historicist detailing favored by that doctrine. Among the notable goals of the plans are 48 acres of new parks and open spaces, together with a network of wide, walkable sidewalks, and easy pedestrian access to surface rail and a possible future BART station. The coherent neighborhoods are a clear contrast to the former state of midtown Milpitas, described in these pages in November 2003 as having “extensive strip commercial development with abundant surface parking, numerous mom-and-pop retail and service businesses, some vacant parcels, and a mishmash of housing.” Inspiring the change, of course, is the popularity of such traditional-looking places as the Kentlands in Maryland and Seaside in Florida, both designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zybek. Criticized by some architects and planners for their strident pronouncements, Duany and Plater-Zybek re-introduced the notion of a hierarchy of open spaces, while emphasizing the importance of being able to walk to services, especially shopping and transit stops, within a quarter mile or so of home. Better still, the doctrinaire duo found a way of controlling the rampant branding, by subjecting all signs to strict ordinances. If the new urbanists could not extinguish the proliferation of brands, at least they could tame them. One emphasis of the new urbanism is a gentle, nostalgic architecture, which in part recalls the past and in part reinvents it with a golden halo. True, style is a secondary issue when the goals are preserving open space, bringing housing and transit into close proximity and creating comfortable ways for people to do their daily tasks on foot. In my view, one strong impulse of the new urbanism is to create a sense of place—a sense both of domestic comfort, familiarity and uniqueness, as opposed to the everywhere-in-general-and-nowhere-in-particular character of the branded environment, which is always familiar but rarely comforting. For Americans, who are generally conservative in their housing tastes, something that looks venerable and old might look like home. Conclusion: Even if the steeply pitched rhetoric of Duany et al. sets some architects’ teeth on edge, the new urbanist movement has been a net benefit to urban America. A set of humane values has come to challenge the unexamined practices of sprawl, neglect of open space and lack of genuine social centers and public space. At the same time, we must also acknowledge that the soft, derivative new urbanism that has trickled down through the marketplace is also a product—generic, placeless, often as blind to local culture and customs and traditions as McDonalds and Tommy Hilfiger. Home builders customarily speak of housing as “product,” and in Milpitas as elsewhere, the urban village is a product. It is a much better product than strip development, unregulated sprawl or the branded environment. But it is still not authentic urbanism. That is, the urban village is still not a reflection of our unique moment in history and culture. Perhaps the kind of neighborhood that acknowledges both global change and local culture, in which the buildings are designed less for style than for the convenience and health of their occupants, and where public spaces might encourage social interaction among people who would otherwise disappear inside their cell phones does not yet exist. If the urban village is a positive step forward, it falls short of being a unique, local place. The genuine urban neighborhood of our time remains to be discovered.

Of all the Election Day upsets in congressional races across the country, none was more surprising than the defeat of veteran Central Valley lawmaker Richard Pombo, who has represented California’s 11th District in the House of Representatives since 1992. The seven-term congressman, chair of the House Committee on Resources, was unseated by a candidate with virtually no political experience and little name recognition outside his immediate family. Despite representing a district where Republicans hold an edge over Democrats in voter registration, Pombo garnered only 47% of the vote on November 7, versus 53% for opponent Jerry McNerney, an engineer whose resume identifies him as a wind-energy consultant and novelist. “Pombo’s defeat sends a clear message to those who share his ideology that when it comes to the elections, the environment is now a giant-killer,” Sierra Club Director Carl Pope told the San Francisco Chronicle . Pombo’s loss, although celebrated with almost giddy enthusiasm by his critics, will no doubt lead to a marked change in congressional debate over national environmental and energy policy. But his successor as leader of the Resources Committee, which has tremendous influence over matters near and dear to the hearts of Californians, such as water, energy and public lands, won’t have to spend a lot of time trying to unravel Pombo’s legacy. That’s because there is not much of a legislative legacy to unravel. Despite tireless and occasionally hyperbolic efforts to revise some of the nation’s most far-reaching environmental statutes — mainly the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — Pombo has almost nothing concrete to show for his 14 years in Congress. Environmental advocates have long regarded him as Public Enemy No. 1, and can justifiably claim the lion’s share of credit or blame for his defeat last month. But their antipathy toward the former rancher had more to do with ideology than with his record of legislative achievement. And there was more to Pombo’s defeat than his hostility toward environmental regulations. Some political analysts have noted that Pombo’s district, once reliably Republican and conservative, has been changing as exurban refugees from liberal bastions in the Bay Area seek more affordable housing on the edge of the Central Valley. Hopeful Democrats have been predicting for several years that liberal commuters might finally spell defeat for a congressman wedded to the policy priorities of farmers, real estate investors and oil-patch workers. But of the forces that finally conspired to send Pombo packing, changing demography likely played the smallest role. The 11th District was created after the 1990 Census, when California gained seven House seats. The district originally included the southern and eastern parts of Sacramento County and nearly all of San Joaquin County, and Democrats led Republicans in voter registration 48% to 41%. The district was still Democratic, on paper at least, when Pombo first won election in 1992, and it remained that way through 2000, although the margin had narrowed by then to 45% Democratic and 43% Republican. Redistricting in 2002, however, shifted Sacramento County out of Pombo’s district and added inland portions of Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties. And the balance of power flipped. Republicans led Democrats in voter registration that November 47% to 38%. That margin has since narrowed, and in fact it fell this year from 6.5% during the runup to the June primary to 5.6% for the November general election. Still, Pombo won re-election repeatedly, and by large majorities, even when he represented a Democrat-dominated district. Scandal probably played a more important role this year than demography. Pombo’s critics hammered relentlessly on his ties to convicted influence peddler Jack Abramoff, from whom Pombo accepted campaign contributions, as well as his reliance on campaign money from oil and gas companies that stood to benefit from the changes he promoted in federal energy policy. They also raised questions about money he directed from campaign funds to his wife and brother. Ultimately, however, it was Pombo’s environmental record that finally did him in. Probably not directly — his attitudes toward environmental policy have been consistent since he first went to Washington, and voters resoundingly re-elected him anyway — but because it finally drew the attention and money of big-name advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife. Pombo’s signature issue has been revising the ESA to make it friendlier to business and property owners, a responsibility GOP leadership handed to him shortly after the party took control of Congress in 1994. His first 11 efforts were stymied either by a certain White House veto or opposition by moderate Republican colleagues. However, the stars finally seemed to align for him last year, thanks to strong support from the Bush administration and a larger Republican majority in Congress. In October 2005, the House approved Pombo’s 12th ESA rewrite on a vote of 229 to 193, sending it to a still-uncertain fate in the Senate (see CP&DR Environment Watch , November 2005). Pombo also drew heat, but not much support, for proposals to sell off portions of the national park system to finance transportation projects, expand oil and gas drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, allow mining companies to claim ownership of public lands, and revamp NEPA. Environmental groups have been battling Pombo’s legislative proposals for more than a decade, but the groundswell of anti-incumbent sentiment this year offered a chance to eliminate him altogether from the policy debate. Although Pombo raised and spent twice as much as his opponent — $3.8 million vs. $1.6 million as of the close of the October 18 reporting period — that margin was narrowed by environmental groups, which spent more than $1 million on McNerney’s behalf and mobilized volunteers to knock on thousands of doors in the district. Pombo’s defeat opens the door for Resources chairmanship to Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat. Environmentalists may welcome any Democrat as an improvement over Pombo. But Rahall represents a coal-mining state, and he has pressed for federal investment in coal liquefaction and gasification technologies, which have the potential to boost greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate destructive mining practices. Federal Election Commission records show he’s received substantial campaign contributions from coal mining companies, coal-hauling railroads and the coal-burning electricity industry. Nevertheless, the League of Conservation Voters gave Rahall a 92 rating for his votes in the 109th Congress. Pombo scored a 3.

It’s a little hard to make out the houses in aerial photographs of the 1997 flood in south Yuba County. Only after a minute or two do we realize that we are not looking at floating detritus, but at the rooftops of homes nearly submerged in the brown water. At least one person died in that flood, which destroyed 180 homes and businesses while damaging another 480 structures. The ground, according to a local news account at the time, was “littered with the carcasses of hundreds of drowned farm animals.” The price tag on the damage was $200 million, according to the state Office of Emergency Services. No stranger to high water, south Yuba County had been inundated previously in 1986 and 1955 during floods that took more lives and damaged far more property than the 1997 version. In the same flood zone, a group of 22 developers, including KB Home and Lennar, is currently proposing to accelerate home building. Surprisingly, the efforts to build in a flood-prone area are being supported by a public agency – the Three Rivers Levee Improvement Authority. The rationale is that a home building fee is expected to fund at least $135 million of a levee strengthening project in south Yuba County estimated to cost $230 million-plus. The project may also qualify for some of Proposition 1E’s $4.1 billion in flood control bonds, although that is not certain. While some strong arguments can be made for the strategy of using home building as a means of paying for critically needed levee repair, some danger remains that new homes in the area could be damaged or destroyed if a flood occurs before the levees are fixed. And that danger raises serious moral issues with the scheme: Is it worthwhile to put a comparative few homes (and lives) at risk in the interest of providing flood control at a faster pace than would otherwise occur? The setting of this precariously balanced moral dilemma is the Plumas Lake specific plan area, a 5,200-acre portion of unincorporated Yuba County just south of Olivehurst and the junction of State Routes 70 and 65. Although the specific plan has existed since 1993, home building has only recently heated up with the suburbanization of greater Sacramento. The housing product is affordably priced starter homes. With pleasant views of rivers and farmland, the houses hold particular appeal to both retirees and middle-income public employees who work in the capital city 40 miles south. During the early years of the decade, the state Reclamation Board – the body responsible for overseeing California’s levees – and the home builders were butting heads. In 2003, the home builders agreed to pay upfront $28 million, the original estimated cost of levee repairs, in advance of the work, in return for permission to build. At that time, the home builders planned on reimbursing themselves with an assessment district. By early 2005, however, cost estimates of levee work had swollen to $110 million. About half that money could be supplied from a Proposition 13 grant. The state Reclamation Board looked to the home builders for the rest. On this occasion, the home builders agreed to charge levee fees of $29,345 per house. Although that sum may seem high, it is close to fees paid by many home builders in more urban locales. The money would go to the Three Rivers Levee Improvement Authority, a joint powers authority composed of Yuba County and Reclamation District 784. Perhaps as a way of hedging its bets, the Reclamation Board limited home building to 800 units a year in 2005 and 700 units the following year. (The specific plan allows 11,740 dwelling units in all; about 2,600 have been built.) Earlier this year, yet another increase in costs torpedoed the 2005 plan. The flood control costs reached an estimated $230 million. The builders had the unpalatable choice of increasing levee fees threefold, which would have made the homes too expensive for the “starter” market, or the public agency would have to wait an additional six or seven years to complete the levee work – an invitation to disaster. Representatives of the levee authority argued vigorously for the Reclamation Board to lift the building caps as a means to generate levee-repair funds quickly. Although individual board members expressed misgivings, the board agreed to remove the cap in April of this year. In approving the plan to accelerate housing development, the Reclamation Board was aware it was gambling. But it was a calculated risk, according to Scott Shapiro, a Sacramento-based lawyer who is special counsel for the levee authority. As part of the agreement, the home builders assented to a number of “mitigations,” including a more vigorous effort to inform existing and potential homeowners about flood risks, and providing every new home owner with flood insurance. The authority also agreed to assist in creating new evacuation plans reflecting studies of those areas most likely to flood first in the event of a breach. In addition, the levee authority stepped up its efforts to improve some of the most vulnerable stretches of Yuba River levee system, which are scheduled to be upgraded this winter. “There is no question that there is a window of danger,” Shapiro said. “In the balance, do we put a small, additional group of people at risk in exchange for getting everybody out of risk faster?” “On a risk-analysis table,” Shapiro continued, “you actually pose risk to fewer people, for a shorter period of time.” I don’t know what a professional ethicist would say, but I actually find Shapiro’s argument compelling, even though there is something troublesome in my willingness to endanger the few (even if those dangers are low) in the interest of the many. As one of the Reclamation Board members mordantly observed earlier this year, flood insurance does not cover loss of life. “Between the intention and the act,” wrote a famous poet, “lies the shadow.” In a similar way, between the acts of building a house and finishing a levee, a flood may lie.

Finally heeding a message of alarm that experts have been sounding for a decade, California voters in November authorized an unprecedented investment in the fragile network of levees that protects homes, farms and critical infrastructure in the Central Valley from catastrophic flooding. Between Proposition 1E, which authorized $4.1 billion for levee improvement, and Proposition 84, a water bond that included $800 million for flood-control projects, the levee system stands to get a $5 billion upgrade. The investment comes not a moment too soon. Flood experts have long warned that California faces a potential disaster in the Central Valley, where 1,600 miles of levees protect about 400,000 people living in and around Sacramento, while another 1,100 miles of levees protect farmland, homes and critical infrastructure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Those experts have had trouble getting anyone to listen. But when the levees protecting New Orleans failed catastrophically in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, flooding 85% of the city and killing more than 1,000 people, the devastation finally focused public attention on the substandard condition of California’s flood system. The result: 64% of voters approved the levee improvement bond. But apparently not everyone received the same message. Four days before the November election, an environmental group filed an appeal with the Delta Protection Commission to halt a large development planned in the Delta flood zone. Yolo County approved the project, proposed by Clarksburg Investment Partners LLC and 44 Willow Point LLC, on October 24, allowing construction of 162 homes on the old Delta Sugar mill property in Clarksburg, a small town on the bank of the Sacramento River. The plan also designates 25 acres for commercial use and 30 acres for industry. “To put that many families directly in the floodplain is just indefensible,” said Kate Pool, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which filed the appeal. “Have we learned nothing about planning in lowlands since the disaster of Katrina?” The Delta Protection Commission scheduled a January 25 hearing on the appeal, and told Yolo County to halt the project in the interim. Like New Orleans, much of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is below sea level and sinking. And like New Orleans, the bowl on the inland edge of San Francisco Bay is rimmed by a network of protective levees buffeted by storms and tides. There’s no big city in the Delta, but the levees there protect something critical to much of the state’s urban population: two huge pumping plants, one operated by the state and the other by the federal government. Located at the south end of the Delta, those pumping plants send water south in aqueducts to irrigate nearly 4 million acres of cropland in the San Joaquin Valley and to meet the residential and industrial needs of two-thirds of California’s population. While the vulnerability of the Delta pumps has statewide significance, cities in the Central Valley outside the Delta are vulnerable to local flooding and rely on an aging system of protective devices that experts warn is inadequate. Judged by the level of protection provided by levees and dams, Sacramento faces the highest risk of flooding of any major American city, according to the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. The Clarksburg development would be squarely in the valley’s danger zone, protected by flood-control levees. At issue in the NRDC appeal, which was filed on behalf of the group by Earthjustice attorneys, is whether the project site lies within the “primary zone of the Delta,” as defined by the Delta Protection Act. That legislation was adopted in 1992, designating primary and secondary zones in the Delta, establishing the Delta Protection Commission and requiring development of a land use and resource management plan for the primary zone (see CP&DR , June 2004). That zone encompasses about 500,000 acres in the heart of the Delta. Because the primary zone is vulnerable to flooding and includes productive farmland and wildlife habitat, urban development is prohibited unless the proponents can demonstrate that their projects will not result in loss of wetlands or riparian habitat, won’t degrade water quality, won’t interfere with migratory birds or public access, won’t harm agricultural operations, and “will not expose the public to increased flood hazards.” The Delta secondary zone, consisting of about 238,000 acres, encompasses the remainder of the legally defined Delta region and has less stringent controls. All local agencies whose jurisdictions overlap the Delta were required to amend their planning documents so they are consistent with the Delta Protection Act. Those include the counties of Yolo, Contra Costa, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Solano, as well as at least nine cities. Clarksburg is one of several unincorporated communities in the Delta, and the sugar mill development falls under Yolo County jurisdiction. The Delta commission arbitrates disputes over whether the actions of local agencies conflict with the Delta plan. The mill was constructed in 1934 to process sugar beets and ceased operation in 1993. The current owners have transformed part of the brick mill complex into winemaking and tasting facilities, plus offices, shops and other commercial ventures. Lawyers for Yolo County and the developer have argued that, although the site is technically within the Delta primary zone as shown on official state maps, the Delta Protection Act exempted previously developed areas from its restrictions on urban expansion. In its appeal, the NRDC says the exemption was intended to apply only to property within city limits, and that the urban footprint of unincorporated Clarksburg does not count. The larger issue at stake, according to the NRDC, is that the project would result in additional residents moving into a floodplain protected only by a century-old earthen levee that even the county acknowledges is likely to fail. Along with the 105-acre development, the project would include construction of a wastewater-treatment facility that also would be at risk of flooding. The sugar mill project is only the second appeal the Delta Protection Commission has ever been asked to consider, which is somewhat remarkable given the pace of floodplain development in the Sacramento region over the past decade. Much of the growth, however, has taken place outside the Delta proper. “While development in the primary zone has been moderate and consistent with the provisions of the management plan, activities in the secondary zone, have continued to increase at a significant rate,” the commission noted in its 2005 annual report. “Thus, the potential for development activities in the secondary zone to impact the primary zone continues to be of increasing concern.” Documents related to the sugar mill project and the appeal, including filings by NRDC, Yolo County and the developers, are at www.delta.ca.gov/Default.asp .

The only way to squeeze a generation’s worth of growth into existing urban areas plus 2% more land is with a heavy reliance on infill development. With the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) beginning to finesse its density-driven, “2% Strategy” growth vision from policy into action, Solimar Research Group is producing information of use to those planning and executing infill development. In few of the giant metropolitan planning organization’s 13 subregions is this plan for infill-based development as relevant as in the South Bay, a 16-city cluster that is home to Los Angeles International Airport and inner-ring suburbs. Here, where the urban environment approaches full build-out and the population is expected to increase 170,000 by 2025, the South Bay Council of Governments has initiated an intensive examination of two development patterns that SCAG has deemed ripe with infill potential. Since early 2005, Solimar Research Group has guided this study of the functionality of existing “mixed-use centers” and “mixed-use corridors” in the South Bay. Still ongoing, we have already uncovered patterns in the travel behavior of the residents of these districts. Although our study is ongoing, there are signatures of “performance” that offer vital clues about future, high-density infill development throughout Los Angeles. We’ve discovered that those who live or work near these centers will travel to them more frequently than elsewhere, in effect absorbing trips to other destinations. Such residents are also more likely to walk than drive; in fact, at least 20% more will walk to the center than residents of a traditional suburban neighborhood accessing their local services. Overall, residents of mixed-use centers are likely to make fewer total trips, especially auto trips, than their suburban counterparts. By project’s end, we will have evaluated project areas in six communities in order to develop a set of broad, strategic guidelines for creating functional mixed-use districts. After completing a Phase I study of centers in Inglewood, Redondo Beach and Torrance, and a Phase II study of Hawthorne and El Segundo locations, we are currently engaged in a Phase III study of corridors in Gardena and Redondo Beach. Our methodology and results for the Phase II Hawthorne Boulevard project area exemplify the potential of this study. Like other “mixed-use corridors,” the City of Hawthorne’s one-mile Hawthorne Boulevard corridor is dense with commercial uses, is surrounded by relatively high-density housing and carries significant through traffic over a length greater than the typical “mixed-use center.” The corridor is socioeconomically typical of Los Angeles County as a whole. Our analysis of this commercial corridor was designed to reveal linkages between the functionality of mixed-use districts and the travel behavior of the people who use the districts. In addition to an extensive, online travel survey, including detailed “travel diaries” for corridor residents and employees—as well as a series of sidewalk visitor surveys—we undertook an exhaustive examination of a 395-acre “inner” and 750-acre “outer” buffer zone surrounding the corridor. This statistical and GIS-based functionality analysis covered the physical, social, commercial and transit-oriented characteristics of the corridor. We analyzed, among other things, demographic and socioeconomic figures, land use and year-built data, business functionality profiles, bus ridership and pedestrian activity, and parking and traffic patterns. Just a glance at the results reveals lessons for future mixed-use districting. Like nearly all study areas, Hawthorne Boulevard acts very much like a neighborhood shopping center. We found that Hawthorne Boulevard generates $400 million in sales in its “inner” buffer zone and has a total of 1,041 retail/service-oriented businesses. However, survey responses revealed that residents are less likely to walk to, or along, the corridor as compared to users of mixed-use centers. Yet it is also clear that the corridor plays an important role in the daily economy. Our survey results reveal that residents commute out of the area (largely by bus or Metrolink train) in the morning. Yet on their return in the afternoon, they consistently patronize the businesses along the corridor. This is an early indication that these arterial, “mixed-use corridors,” ubiquitous to all of metropolitan Los Angeles, can be transformed into successful mixed-use districts. The results of the ongoing, third phase of this project will allow us to further isolate those characteristics of existing mixed-use districts that affect the travel behavior of residents, employees and visitors. In concert with detailed case-study reports, this analysis will further facilitate the fruit of our efforts: Creating a broadly applicable set of strategic guidelines for developing functional, “high performance” mixed-use districts in the South Bay and beyond. Greg Goodfellow is a research associate and project manager for Solimar Research Group, parent company of CP&DR .