Last week bond rating agency Moody's took California's redevelopment bonds down a notch , and today fellow rating agency Fitch is expressing similiar concerns.  Citing concerns over the "short timeframe" that last month's Supreme Court decision dictated for the dissolution of the state's roughly 400 active redevelopment agencies, Fitch has placed all bonds secured by tax increment financing on Rating Watch Negative. Fitch is also concerned by the lack of progress in shoring up what redevelopment's supporters consider flaws and shortcomings in AB X1 26, the legislation that mandates and guides the process for agencies' dissolution. February 1 is the date on which agencies are supposed to be turned over to successor agencies.  According to a statement  <.pdf> released by Fitch, "While the intent to uphold existing obligations is clearly stated in the legislation, the mechanics of implementation are not." To determine whether or not outstanding bonds will be repaid, Fitch intends to review the process of handing off RDA assets and obligations to successor agencies and will review each agency's and oversight committee's ability to mange those assets and obligations.  Fitch's review will include the following: Once available, Fitch will review the guidelines and discuss with the appropriate county auditor-controllers their plans to adhere to guidelines that are being drafted by the California Association of Counties (CSAC). Fitch will assess whether each county auditor-controller, successor agency, and board is planning to track tax increment revenue generated by project area and for housing and non-housing purposes, pursuant to the pledges to bondholders, and whether each of these entities is prepared to apply procedures in a way that assures the flow of tax increment revenue pledged to secure each series of bonds. Fitch will evaluate whether the guidelines or subsequent legislation, if any, address the concern that the payment schedule is funded on a six month basis, rather than annually, which could result in funds being transferred to overlapping taxing entities prior to funding a full year of debt service. Fitch will confirm that Fitch-rated bonds are included on the schedule of payments permitted to be paid by the agency.  Fitch will evaluate the ability of a 'designated local authority' to staff and oversee a successor agency should no existing local entity elect to become the successor agency. While Fitch believes these uncertainties will be resolved for all or most affected entities, if any of these plans or procedures are inadequate to ensure timely payment of debt service, Fitch will take appropriate rating action on those individual credits.

If you listen carefully, you might be able to hear the sounds of hammers in some parts of California. After nearly five long years of recession and stagnation, recent reports indicate that new residential construction may be picking up.  A recent survey from the National Association of Homebuilders indicates that confidence among home builders has risen to its highest level in four years. Rising from nearly zero may not sound like much--the survey's overall rating of 25 still indicates that conditions are "poor"--but it's still an improvement. Construction in Los Angeles seems to bear out this trend, with $1.51 billion worth of projects--dominated by high-density rental apartments--underway in the second half of 2011; that's a 6% increase over the previous year. Meanwhile, home sales in the Bay Area rose 4.4% in December as compared with December 2010; prices, however, have continued to decline. In  Orange County , a developer has evoked headier times with the purchase of a 16-acre tract entitled for up to 143 home at an estimated $2 million per acre. And even in Sacramento , where construction of single-family homes hit a near standstill, the Sacramento Bee reports that a "modest building boom" of six projects is bringing over 250 units to high-density areas of the state's capital.  Clearly, this trend doesn't yet mean that a million tract homes will bloom. But it does mean that developers may be emboldened to restart dormant projects and even seek out new ones. In many cities, there are far fewer planners now than there were when the bubble first burst, but they now might have more work to do than they've had in a long time.

Judging by the likes of Apple, Google, and Chez Panisse – to say nothing of the relative stability of housing prices -- the San Francisco Bay Area might not seem like the most likely recipient of an economic planning grant. But the federal Department of Housing and Community Development thinks otherwise. Following a hotly competitive application process, HUD awarded the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, in partnership with the Association of Bay Area Governments, one of 22 Sustainable Communities Grants in late November. MTC's award of $4,991,336 is, by less than $10,000, the second-largest such grant that HUD awarded nationwide; the 22 grants totaled nearly $96 million. MTC will focus on a "prosperity plan" for the region. According to a statement supplied by HUD's San Francisco office, MTC received the grant because its "plan incorporates a broad region made of numerous communities with a real need to connect housing to jobs, provide transportation options for families, and generate the economic growth they need to win the future." HUD also cited the plan's ability to create middle-income jobs. The Sustainable Communities grants are the brainchild of the Obama Administration -- designed to help communities and regions improve their economic competitiveness while also connecting housing with jobs, schools and transportation. On that count, say Bay Area planners, the region needs all the help it can get. "The Bay Area has the same number of jobs in 2010 as it did in 1990 and we are the second-most expensive region in the country," said Doug Johnson, senior transportation planner with MTC. "We're seeing potentially astronomical costs for our low-income residents." Those costs have risen, say some, because the benefits of the boom in Silicon Valley and in certain urban centers, such as the City of San Francisco, have not necessarily extended to the region as a whole. And there is no formal mechanism to ensure that all parts of the region share equally in its success. "We lack any sort of comprehensive regional economic development strategy," said Jeremy Madsen, Executive Director of the Greenbelt Alliance, one of several nonprofit organizations that is partnering with MTC and ABAG on the grant. "That has kind of taken care of itself, which is both a blessing and a curse.  We have not thought comprehensively about where jobs should be going."  MTC and ABAG's approach to its Sustainable Communities Grant is to interpret "sustainability" in the broadest sense to include not only the widely ecological benefits of, for instance, compact, transit-oriented development, but also the benefits of promoting economic development in concert with land use and transportation planning. The grant recipients say that this sort of planning is crucial in a region that is expected to grow by two million people by 2040. MTC and ABAG will use the funding, to be spent over three years, to develop and implement a Regional Prosperity Plan in conjunction with local partners. The two major, interconnected areas of work are what the agencies describe as "a community-rooted process" to develop and implement a regional Economic Opportunity Strategy to expand economic opportunities for low- and moderate-income residents; and the implementation of a Housing the Workforce strategy that would create and preserve housing affordable to low-income workers. "This plan is about implementing a long-term vision for a region to be more environmentally, economically, and socially stable and prosperous," said Johnson. These programs encompass pilot projects spread among 30 participating Bay Area jurisdictions and nonprofit partners. The pilot projects include workforce training or job placement program for low- and moderate-income workers in a particular industry of opportunity; the development of small business clusters in new industries; and creation of a database that would match up low-income residents with affordable transportation and housing options. To curb housing costs, Bay Area Planners will be using the grant money to implement housing that is not only affordable for low-income residents but is also in close proximity to job centers – thus reducing housing costs without imposing onerous transportation costs on those residents who can least afford them and without perpetuating what many planners consider inefficient growth patterns. "It's…intending to make a better economy by moving away from the old model of ‘live where you want and drive an hour to work,'" said Kevin Riley, director of Planning & Inspection for the City of Santa Clara. One of the great frustrations about land use planning—especially long-range regional planning exercises, such as the Sustainable Communities Strategies that are under consideration in the state's major metro areas—is that planners must abide by population projections and activity patterns over which they have no control. Indeed, the use of land is, in many ways, predicated on the economic conditions that compel people to live and work in certain places. "This particular economic development strategy is really looking at how do we associate jobs and transit better," said Jeremy Madsen, executive director of environmental group Greenbelt Alliance. "How do we get beyond the old-style auto-oriented business park and into something that is a little more sustainable and meeting the new paradigms around planning." Allen Fernandez Smith, executive director of housing advocacy group Urban Habitat, said that the grant participants will try to answer a number of questions in the course of implementing the pilot projects: "Where do we need to build new housing stock? How can we have an early warning system where there are cities that are losing their affordable housing and turning over to market-rate, thus displacing people? What are anti-displacement strategies that cities and counties can take on?" said Smith. Smith emphasized that the answers to each of these questions must be grounded in concern for social equity, "insuring that there is inclusion and access for all people throughout the region, especially those that are most marginalized or that have been left historically behind by policies that have been crafted to keep people out." For many, the displacement of low-income residents is one of the unfortunate components of a regional economy that is skewed towards high-income jobs and towards younger residents who are willing to pay a premium for urban living.  The notion of a region-wide effort to coordinate housing and transportation may sound familiar, since it is nearly identical to the mission of the Sustainable Communities Strategies mandated by Senate Bill 375. But whereas that law compels the state's metro regions to coordinate land use and transportation planning for the sake of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the HUD grant does so for the purpose of economic vitality and social equity. ‘"Housing the Workforce' is about making sure we are setting up affordable housing so that this workforce that we're trying to cultivate…throughout the Bay have places to live that were close to work and close to transit," said Smith.  Planners hope that the work funded by the HUD grant will offer models for the realization of the Bay Area's SCS. Johnson noted that the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, which determines how many units of housing the SCS must take into account, is primarily a "technical exercise." The RHNA does not, however, tell jurisdictions where housing should be developed and how housing should relate to transportation networks. That is, say planners, where the HUD Sustainable Communities grant will complement the SB 375-mandated SCS. "We've always had the RHNA allocation, but it's not really been a comprehensive regional strategy for how we achieve our housing goals and housing needs," said Madsen. "With the Regional Transportation Plan process and SCS process we have a lot to deal with the general land use and transportation component of good regional planning, and this grant brings in more of the specific housing and economic development piece." While the notion of marrying land use planning with economic development may sound like a powerful notion, some are concerned that this approach may be too ambitious. "The challenge is simply that you have a lot of pieces moving at the same time," said Riley, of Santa Clara. "It's a good thing but it takes a lot of time." Nevertheless, Riley said that the grant, plus the SCS planning process, represents a step in the right direction for a region that was, not long ago, considered fragmented. "It means we are all becoming more regionally adept," said Riley. I would say up until the last decade it has been very parochial, that cities care only about what happens inside their borders." Contacts: Doug Johnson, Senior Transportation Planner, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, 510.817.5846 Jeremy Madsen, Executive Director, Greenbelt Alliance, 415.543.6771 Kevin Riley, Director of Planning & Inspection, City of Santa Clara, 408.615.2450 Allen Fernandez Smith, Executive Director, Urban Habitat, 510.839.9510

Credit rating agency Moody's Investors Service downgraded by one notch all California tax allocation bonds rated Baa2 and above. Moody's is monitoring all other redevelopment bonds and may issue a downgrade in the future.  Moody's cites near-term cash flow risks surrounding the disollution of redevelopment, per Assembly Bill X1 26 and the subsequent Supreme Court decision upholding it, as the reason for the downgrade. AB X1 26 calls for successor agencies to assume RDAs' outstanding debt and to disburse funds that they receive from the state to RDAs' creditors. However, the stipulations of AB X1 26 have been criticized as being out of touch with typical bond repayment schedules. In issuing the downgrade, Moody's noted that "the implementation and potential for varying interpretations of the new legislation incrementally raises the risk that some debt service payments will not be made on a timely basis."  Though the downgrade is slight and may not have direct impacts on redevelopment projects or successor agencies, supporters of redevelopment say that the downgrade underscores their concerns over AB X1 26. The downgrade should, they say, give the governor and Legislature pause.  "It's sort of a shot across the bow," said Jim Kennedy, interim executive director of the California Redevelopment Association. The CRA has been lobbying for legislation that would extend the deadline for dissollution to April 15. "It's more important in terms of not the fairly modest downgrade...(but) in saying that there's a tremendous amount of ambiguoutiy and uncertainty in the law that needs to be corrected," said Kennedy. "If that doesn't happen, we may be seeing more than just a one notch downgrade."  Representatives of the governor's office did not respond to request for comment.  Click here for Moody's full rating update (.pdf).

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Los Angeles) has introduced legislation that could give California's redevelopment agencies if not a reprieve then at least a stay of execution. Senate Bill 659 would push the dissolution date from Feb. 1 to April 15 in order to allow cities and agencies time to put their affairs in order -- and, presumably, to allow the Legislature to deliberate on a replacement for redevelopment before the agencies are dismantled and their employees laid off. Despite fervent support from the California Redevelopment Association and many cities and advocacy groups, the success of SB 659 is far from assured.  A recent report broadcast by the CRA indicates that SB 659 will not move forward unless it addresses a host of logistical problems that have been identified in AB 1x 26, the budget bill that authorized the dissolution of redevelopment. The CRA contends that AB 1x 26 and the dissolution process that is prescribes will lead to litigation, bond defaults, and other complications stemming from the liquidation of redevelopment agencies' assets.  CRA and its members have identified the following areas of concern:  -Many redevelopment agencies have outstanding contracts for design work on infrastructure projects, but the projects themselves have not yet been funded. Therefore, successor agencies would have to pay the design firms for designs that will, presumably, never be implemented.  -AB 1x 26 fails to respect the schedule by which property tax revenues are collected, in December and April. The Supreme Court's decision, however, calls for successor agencies to be funded May 16, meaning that, according to CRA's analysis, there may be no funds with which to honor outstanding debts. This discrepancy could lead to defaults and insurance policy claims on many payments that are due prior to May 16.  -Many bond payments are not paid off in equal, regular payments throughout the year. Section 34183(a)(2)  of AB 1x 26, however, calls for equal semiannual payments. This could result in a mismatch between the funds in successor agencies' coffers and the monies that are owed to serve RDAs' debt.  -AB 1x 26 calls for former tax increments to be pooled in Redevelopment Property Tax Trust Funds, with one trust fund for each county. CRA contends that this pooling does not respect the distinct project areas, including affordable housing, that rely on different types of financing and typically draw from funding pools that are kept separate from each other.  -The disposal of assets that are funded by tax-exempt bonds could run afoul of federal tax law.  -Agencies that received loans from their parent jurisdictions, in lieu of issuing more costly bonds, owe money to those jurisdictions that may not be covered under AB 1x 26's definition of "enforceable obligations."   -Many redevelopment agencies are members of joint powers authorities and may be party to bonds that have been issued by JPAs. AB 1x 26 does not specify how successor agencies are supposed to approach these bond obligations.  -Many agencies include employment contracts that require 120-day advance notice of termination. Successor agencies may not have funds to pay employees for this period.  CRA has identified other problems with AB 1x 26. Among the concerns are administrative costs, legal status of successor agencies, ability of RDAs to transfer properties, and the status of redevelopment plans and land us controls.

While cities around the state have been, reluctantly, agreeing to serve as undertakers for their respective redevelopment agencies, the Los Angeles City Council indicated this week that the city will not do so.  The 9-3 vote against serving as the "successor agency" that would liquidate the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency's assets and oversee its existing contracts means that some other governmental entity will have to take over. The City Council vote took place after City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana released a report estimating that serving as successor agency could have cost the city up to $109 million. Some council members disputed this figure, saying that it was likely to be a high estimate.  CRA/LA, the largest redevelopment agency in the state, is distinctive among the state's redevelopment agencies for being an entirely separate entity from the city itself. It has its own, separate board of commissioners and, importantly, has its own labor agreements with its employees. CRA/LA employees are paid, on average, $109,000 annually�more than city employees are on average�and their contacts call for a 120-day notice of termination. This requirement conflicts with the Feb. 1 dissolution deadline imposed by Assembly Bill 1x 26. Therefore, a successor agency would have to pay CRA/LA employees even after the entity has been disbanded and its funds disbursed elsewhere.  The County of Los Angeles could step in, but it seems highly unlikely that county supervisors will want to assume those costs or the burden of overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of obligations.  Gerry Hertzberg, policy and political director for Sup. Gloria Molina, said that no vote is planned and that if there was one, the supervisors would likely not be inclined to accept the burden.   "They don't have to take a formal vote, and I can't imagine that they would," said Hertzberg. "I don't know of anybody that's proposed it."   Hertzberg said that the relationship between the county and municipal redevelopment agencies was, as elsewhere throughout the state, a complex one. On the one hand, redevelopment agencies are accused of diverting property tax revenue that could go into county coffers. On the other hand, Hertzberg noted that CRA/LA was involved with major projects under Molina's purview, such as the Grand Avenue Project, a collection of high rises in downtown Los Angeles.  The county's demurral is would not necessarily a statement about redevelopment itself. "The county just has other priorities," said Hertzberg.  This means that responsibility for CRA/LA now falls to the state. However, the entity or department in state government that would take over has yet to be named. Critics of the dismantling of redevelopment say that it is taking place too quickly.  "What Los Angeles did is simply and indicator of the mass chaos and the problem that's associated with the dissolution date of Feb 1," said Jim Kennedy, interim executive director of the California Redevelopment Association. "Without really any ability to orderly plan for the implementation of a dissolution action and, frankly, an opportunity clean up some of the ambiguities and misstates that are in AB 1x 26."  If hundreds of cities statewide similarly passed off their former redevelopment agencies on to the state, the administrative burden could be enormous. However, signs indicate that few, if any, other cities have followed Los Angeles' lead.  "The circumstances associated with CRA/LA appear to be fairly unique," said Kennedy. Kennedy said he was aware of "only a handful of cities" that are opting not to serve as successor agencies.  Today is the deadline for cities to decide whether to serve as successor agencies or not. AB 659, sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla, would extend the deadline for dissolution until April. That bill is pending in Sacramento.

Two bills have already hit the Legislature that would affect the wind-down of redevelopment:  SB 654 (Steinberg) Clarifies that any Low and Moderate Income Housing Fund balances will be transferred to the successor housing agency for use under current redevelopment law. (AB 26x contained conflicting sections on this point.) This bill is strongly supported by affordable housing advocates, who fear the disappearance of redevelopment funds -- totaling an estimated $2 billion annually -- that were previously set aside for affordable housing.  Status: This bill pass through the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee yesterday.  SB 659 (Padilla) Would extend the deadline for redevelopment agencies' dissolution from the current February 1 deadline to April 15. The language for this bill has not been released yet; it is expected to be heard in the Assembly Local Government Committee in the next few weeks.

It's taken me a few days to absorb the California Supreme Court decision in California Redevelopment Association v. Matosantos , which effectively killed redevelopment in California. Although I was a longtime critic of isolated cases of abuse, it believe it was a huge mistake to relegate the entire institution to the glue factory of failed policies. Wiser heads at CP&DR maintain that a creative compromise is possible that would allow redevelopment to survive in some altered form. But if redevelopment is dead, then, what can cities do to build up their downtown areas and attract business? My proposal: Planning and design. Cities should use their next general plan updates—the process by which most California cities think about their futures—as the chief way of determining the way the city should look and function.  Here are my suggestions, naïve or not: 1) \t Adopt a vision statement, e.g. "We want a walkable downtown area full of large and small merchants that places a priority on historic ‘fabric' and regional character." 2) \t The vision statement should identify the most important parcels suitable for infill development. Residential mixed-use (including low income and senior housing) and transit orientation are big plusses.   3) \t This is potentially controversial:  Cities should stick with their general plans, and not give them away to WalMart, Costco or a developer who's touting a sports stadium or convention center hotel. Difficult? Probably, but if cities are not willing to stick to their own plans, they can't control their future. 4) \t Even more controversial:  Cities must be willing to buy land and/or property at market rate (as opposed to through eminent domain). The purpose, of course, is to convey the parcels at below-market rates to developers who agree to build what the city needs, i.e. a specialty grocery, plus a chain drug store, 20 "in-line" merchants, at least half of which would be local mom-and-pop retailers, plus some housing within walking distance of a transit station. If cities don't have the cash, they still have some bonding authority. The developer can agree to pay the debt service on those bonds for three years or so, prior to the completion of the new development , so the city ends up revenue neutral on the deal.  (The cash value of the discount price on the land would be equal to money spent on debt service.) The real test here, of course, is whether local governments can "sell" new development to their constituents.  And that's a different bucket of eels entirely.

In releasing his proposed 2012-13 budget last Thursday, Gov. Jerry Brown also proposed a major reorganization of state government that would separate transportation and housing at the same time Brown's policy thrust is intended to link the two closer together. In particular, Brown has proposed a major restructuring of the Business, Transportation, and Housing (BTH) Agency that would have here parts: All housing functions, as well as business regulation functions, would be merged with the current State and Consumer Services Agency to create a new Business and Consumer Services Agency. Within this new agency, the Californai Housing Finance Agency would be merged into the Department of Housing & Community Development. Economic development functions within BTH, such as the California Infrastructure Bank, would be moved to the Governor's Office of Economic Development. These changes would leave only transportation functions within BTH, which would be renamed the Transportation Agency. These functions include Caltrans, the California Transportation Commission, and the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The separation of transportation and housing comes at a time when the Brown administration – as well as regional and local officials around the state – are trying to bring housing and transportation into closer alignment. In particular, SB 375 brought Regional Transportation Plans into close alignment with the Regional Housing Needs Assessment process, which is overseen by HCD. "With the reorganization, it separates the disciplines of transportation, housing, and economic development," said Mike McKeever, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. "Those are disciplines that are important to be more and more integrated." For McKeever and the other metropolitan planning organizations -- which are charged with implementing SB 375 -- the reshuffle means they have more places than ever to go to in the state government. They have to interact with Transportation on transportation funding issues; with the California Air Resoures Bboard (part of the California Environmental Protetion Agency) on greenhouse gas emissions targets; and now with the revamped HCD, under Consumer and Business Services, on RHNA even though SB 375 calls for MPOs to address all three of these in concert. But Anna Caballero, the former Salinas mayor and assemblymember who is Brown's State and Consumer Services secretary, said she is optimistic about the restructuring's impact on SB 375 planning and the role of the state's Strategic Growth Council. "I don't see it being a problem," said Caballero. "I really think the SGC is the place where you link the two." Presumably Caballero will be the secretary of the combined agency containing the housing functions. She was actually mentioned as a possible HCD director before be selected as consumer secretary. McKeever did not disagree with Caballero. "What I think this means is that it's going to be even more important than before that the SGC be an important, meaningful, component of the state government," said McKeever. "And I hope that the governor would make it clear to the council that it's a high priority of his that they use their statutory authority to integrate the various silos of state government." Gary Gallegos, McKeever's counterpart at the San Diego Association of Governments, welcomes the reorganization wholeheartedly. In fact, he has long spoken out in favor of a seperate transportation agency. Working with Sacramento, "is always complicated," said Gallegos. "I'm not sure that it will be any more or less complicated."  Gallegos noted that, for instance, MPOs have to work closely with the Air Resources Board on SB 375 issues and that BTH is not necessarily very integrated because a BTH secretary may tend to favor one function over the others. Therefore, he said that the reorganization, and especially the consolidation of transportation functions, will do more good than harm. Moreover, he noted that SANDAG considers SCS planning to be a "bottom-up" process involving member cities, so working with the state is a lesser concern.  However, the reshuffle may still create a problem at the SGC. The SGC has six members – including four Cabinet secretaries and the head of the Governor's Office of Planning & Research – and is charged with coordinating all state actions to support the goal of sustainable development. However, while the BTH secretary is on the council, Caballero is not. A statutory change would be required to add her. Although he has been in office for a year, Brown has never appointed a BTH secretary – the only Cabinet position he has not filled. Caltrans had not had a director since last spring, and veteran civil servant Cathy Creswell has been acting as the interim HCD director. The directorship of the Governor's Office of Economic Development is also vacant.

Amid all the debating and litigating around redevelopment's demise, it's sometimes easy to forget what, exactly, Californians are fighting over. But this week's premature release of Gov. Jerry Brown's 2102 budget offers a handy reminder: it's money.  Even after the Supreme Court ruling, the Brown Administration is assuming that the state will reap $1.7 billion in 2011-12 from the end of redevelopment -- and $1.8 billion in 2012-13, said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the Department of Finance. Had the Supreme Court decided the other way, striking down both AB 1x 26 and AB 1x 27, then the governor would have been in a roughly $11 billion pickle rather than merely a $9.2 billion one.   The Department of Finance estimates that the total tax increment that will be liberated by the demise of redevelopment amounts to roughly $5 billion, but roughly $2 billion of that will immediately go back to successor agencies so that they can fulfill RDAs' debt obligations.  The governor's budget estimates that of the $1.7 billion that will be recovered from RDA's this year, $1.05 billion will go to K-14 schools, thus offsetting the state's Prop. 98 General Fund obligation. That leaves nearly $600 million for "pass-through" payments to counties ($340 million), cities ($220 million), and special districts ($170 million).  What's surprising about these numbers is that they are nearly the same as those that the governor presented in his 2011-12 budget.  Many supporters of redevelopment have claimed that the actual amount of money that will become available is far lower than $1.7 billion, and in the past year agencies have been scrambling to enter into new contracts and to shield assets. The Department of Finance is, however, confident in the numbers that it is using.  "We update our numbers based on the data we get from the Controller's office," said Finance spokesperson H.D. Palmer. "Those are our best estimates based upon the actual data we have and the modeling we have for property tax revenue."  If those numbers turn out to be off-base, the governor will revise the budget accordingly.  "As with anything, if there are any changes to those projections based on data we get after we've locked in the budget we use those accordingly when we get to the May revision," said Palmer.   Palmer said, however, that the department is not worried about all those deals that took place in 2011. The Department of Finance is prepared to undo any such deals that it considers illegitimate. A provision in AB 1x 26 enables the department to review all transactions that took place after Jan. 1, 2011.   "If there are any that don't represent a true contractual obligations, that would be unwound and the proceeds would be divided up among the jurisdictions," said Palmer.  Now the governor just has to come up with the rest of the $9.2 billion.

This morning the California Supreme Court issued a ruling upholding a law that disbands the state's nearly 400 redevelopment agencies. The ruling upholds the constitutionality of AB 1X 26, the budget bill that eliminates redevelopment agencies while striking down AB 1X 27, the bill that would have allowed redevelopment agencies to continue operating as long as their host jurisdictions paid remittance fees to the state. The bills were designed to reap an estimated $1.6 billion in funds that lawmakers said were necessary to help offset the state's budget deficit.   The ruling, which was unanimous except for Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye's dissent regarding the AB 1X 27 decision, fulfills what many in the redevelopment community considered their "worst nightmare." Laywers who represented the California Redevelopment Association had tried to argue that the two bills were "inseverable," but the court rejected this argument.  Gov. Jerry Brown hailed the ruling's effect on the state budget but did not comment on redevelopemnt itself.  In a statement, Brown said, "Today's ruling by the California Supreme Court validates a key component of the state budget and guarantees more than a billion dollars of ongoing funding for schools and public safety." The California Redevelopment Association and other supporters of redevelopment are expected to lobby for legislation that would reinstate redevelopment.  Updates to follow on cp-dr.com.

There must have been something in the water affecting women in the early 1960s, and it wasn't just DDT.  This year, planners have celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of a great book, but it is not just one book or one author who deserves celebration. While eggshells collapsed, killing new life in the nest, three women � speaking for the countless other women (and men) who had grown weary of the false promises of the 1950s � issued crucial, intertwined dissents through equal parts activism and prose. That the planner is the most obscure among the three is unfortunate, but, ultimately, her impact may be no less profound than the other members of her sorority.  Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, and Jane Jacobs tore at the social fabric of America at the very moment when the country's own global dominance was more assured than ever. They each published their pathbreaking works, in such rapid succession that the sequence hardly matters: Jacobs published Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, having begun writing it in 1958; Silent Spring followed in September 1962; and The Feminine Mystique completed the cycle--from city to forest to bedroom--five months later.  Though Jacobs' ink was dry by the time The Feminine Mystique went to press, it's entirely likely that each was loosing her fury upon her Smith-Corona at exactly the same time, bound by common ribbons of outrage and lucidity.  I am not old enough to know whether anybody at the time marveled at this coincidence. But through the distance of 50 years, it seems that they arose at a remarkable moment. So close were their publication dates, and so original was each book, that surely none can be considered an influence on the others: they were, all together, products of both their time and extraordinary contemplation. E.O. Wilson wrote that Carson "delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness;" that Friedan did the same is indisputable. Whether many people beyond lower Manhattan knew of Jacobs is less clear.  A casual reading of The Feminine Mystique, Silent Spring, and Death and Life suggests that each relied on what can only be described as an abiding faith in perceptiveness, observation, and simple common sense -- the type of common sense that social science often attempts to discredit. Each too spun literature out of dreary subjects: murderous chemicals, urban blight, ennui. All three relied focused not of the esoteric, learned, and complicated but instead of the achingly familiar: baked goods, birdsongs, stoops. They mix analysis with storytelling. Jacobs describes ideal streetcorners just as Carson invokes a pastoral ideal before burying it in invisible toxins. Friedan reveals the shocking complexity of the kitchen table upon which she herself served those fatal meals. They reaffirmed the beauty -- unquantifiable, nearly indescribable, but eminently palpable -- that had been forgotten in the aesthetic cataclysm of the 1950s, and then they painstakingly explained what had happened and what could be done. They exposed the ego of the builder, the thoughtlessness of the industrialist, and the despair of the so-called housewife -- things that turn into nonsense if you try to enter them into a spreadsheet. That's why each of their nonfiction tomes qualifies as literature: not because they aren't based on fact (which they are) but rather because they, like any other great work of art, attempt to drive at truth.  Though they chose different images, they all wrote about the same thing. Carson's concern for nature echoes Jacobs' concern for the built environment. The lifestyle that Friedan describes is the almost-inevitable result of the urban form that Jacobs laments. Both Jacobs and Carson (not to mention Friedan herself) are shining examples of the types of women that Friedan believed all women could and should be. They are to Friedan what the poet Whitman was to essayist Emerson: the embodiment, in a country that so much enjoys speaking of its greatness, of unspeakably great hopes.  How these particular truths all erupted in the span of two years is as delicious a question as history ever will provoke. As a historical coincidence, the ascendency of Friedan, Carson, and Jacobs ranks up there -- in all seriousness -- with the question of how Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target all came into being in the same year, thus exacerbating to this very day the problems that all three women railed against. (That year happened to be 1962.)  The great postwar sigh of relief that blew over the country in the late 1940s brought with it the toxins that would become the problems of the 1960s. The Baby Boom, Levittown, and even the chemical industry all seemed benign in their inception. Prior to 1919, women's most immediate goal had a name--suffrage--and therefore was easier to combat. But not until the end of the 1950s did women's problems, and so many others that arose in the years following World War II, reach critical mass.  What burst forth in the early 1960s was building up throughout the 1950s. It's no wonder that the regimented "Organization Man" ethos of 1950s business culture found foils in independent, iconoclastic, literary women perhaps oppressed yet unbound by the hierarchy. Moreover, the task of exposing the defects of 1950s America may have fallen to women if only because many men were invested in the status quo, what with their black suits, skinny ties, and slide rules. They were not inclined to incite revolution -- they were, in many ways, the ones against whom the revolution was incited.    While corporations hummed along, Friedan, Jacobs, and Carson were simply the first to look around them, realize how deeply the problems had sunk in, and then air their realizations publically. They were quite unlike, for instance, Martin Luther King, whose own protests of the early 1960s trace their lineage literally to the Old Testament; the injustices that he fought against and died for were manifest equally to all who suffered them and all who did not.  Betty Friedan launched feminism. Rachel Carson launched environmentalism. They tower over their fields like few other leaders -- male or female -- do. But, if you ask plenty of people involved with urban planning, Jacobs' name belongs atop the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, and the Space Needle all stacked atop each other. In fact, within planning circles, she is more powerful than ever, as her ideas have made that generational trek from radicalism to budding orthodoxy.  In 2009 the urban planning web portal Planetizen.com (whose parent company hosts CP&DR's website) conducted a poll, albeit an unscientific one, of history's 100 "greatest urban thinkers." Jacobs won with 6,000 votes out of 14,000 cast. Contemporary architect and planner Andres Duany came in runner-up and yet received only one-fifth as many votes. And, even so, a piece of each of his votes belongs to Jacobs, since Duany's New Urbanist movement is derived directly and unapologetically from Jacobs' ideas. Today, nearly every urban plan that makes headlines can trace its lineage back to Jacobs' promotion of pedestrianism, mixed land uses, community cohesion, and local economies.  Yet Jacobs herself has no -ism.  Jacobs' relative obscurity owes itself to several reasons, not the least of which is the obscurity of her field. Nearly four billion humans live in cities entirely unaware of the forces that create those cities. Being the most local of political pursuits, planning is, for the most part, a leaderless profession. It relies on the principle that what is good for San Juan Capistrano is not necessarily good for San Juan Bautista.  There is also the problem of words. Protest though she might, even her impassioned literature cannot in and of itself effect change when the built environment is at stake. A reader can read the Feminine Mystique, or even just the first chapter, and join Friedan's movement instantly. Likewise, environmentalism lends itself to individual, and sometimes instant, behavioral changes. In Carson's case, it required the abandonment of DDT: a politically challenging but logistically simple gesture that culminated in its outright ban in the United States in 1972, only ten years after Carson brought its evils to light.  But what do you do when the enemy is set -- literally -- in stone?  Like many other revolutionaries, Jacobs wrote sometimes in militaristic terms. With an eye as much towards the cannon ball as the wrecking ball, Jacobs abandons diplomacy by the fifth word of Death and Life: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." Although Jacobs' real-life conflict with New York's dictatorial "master builder" Robert Moses was a mighty contest and a great story, Jacobs' real enemy was not a person, and anger would have gotten her so far. She hews to the the inspirational in the very next sentence: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines." Jacobs spoke for a genuinely marginalized group: people who wanted to live in dense, diverse, stimulating vibrant cities. But because the urban instinct is not an immutable characteristic of either individuals or groups, these people do not define a protected class, and they have no human antagonist or oppressor. Instead, they have a system, so dispersed and purposeful that it seems almost to have no agency or leadership of its own, even as "whole communities are torn apart and sown to the winds with a reaping of cynicism, resentment, and despair that must be seen and heard to be believed." What Jacobs fought against, in the 1950s and even today, was progress itself: progress as defined by an elite few.  Few concepts yield so many definitions as Modernism does, but for the purpose of Jacobs' activism it entailed the use of engineering, technology, and large-scale industry to alter and expand cities to accommodate the automobile; aesthetically it favors formal efficiency, "honest" use of industrial materials, and lack of ornamentation. Ideologically, Modernism is bound up in the curious fixation with "progress" that prevailed in the middle of the 20th century. At the time, progress achieved an untenably narrow definition that loosely correlated with the notion that the human condition could always be improved upon, typically through science, technology, and rationality. Jacobs' objection to Modernism was no esoteric academic exercise, of the sort that plays out at conferences, swaddled in obtuse theory and excess syllables. She despised Modernism with perfect clarity--the sort of clarity to which Modernist design often lays claim.  "Human progress," as Dr. King points out in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "never rolls in on wheels of inevitability." Indeed, if you ask Jacobs, it does not roll in on wheels at all. Just as Carson heard the silence, Jacobs needed little more than the halo of a streetlamp in order to view the failure that was so prevalent in New York City and just about everywhere else. She saw that "all the art and science of city planning is helpless to stem decay--and the spiritlessness that precedes decay--in ever more massive swatches of cities." Jacobs was, perhaps, the first leader in history ever to lead a movement against progress without being branded an anarchist or nihilist. She ascribed, however, to a heretical notion: the old was better than the new.  By the time Moses proposed the evisceration of lower Manhattan, "progress" had long overshot its mark (or missed its exit, if you will).  The rest of the story is history doubling back on itself. Starting in 1968 with the Jacobs-led defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, countless similar instances of would-be urbanicide were also halted. Since then, some highways have been disassembled and many ghastly public housing projects have been demolished. Formalized in the late 1990s, a wholesale movement to promote historically inspired neighborhoods has arisen in the form of New Urbanism and other ideologies, almost all of which openly proclaim their allegiance to Jacobs, who moved to Toronto in 1969 and, until her death in 2006, engaged in virtually no more rabble-rousing as she instead wrote several more excellent books.  For the purpose of today's progressive urbanism, Life and Death did all the leading, and it did so anachronistically, drawing planners and architects back in time to a moment when cities were built at a human scale and with human pleasures in mind. Jacobs led first and foremost by reminding readers that rationality -- and its co-conspirator, paternalism -- cannot constantly arrive at better and better answers. A world insane enough to, say, deny black people their basic human rights surely cannot be neatly tamed by freeways, subdivisions, and glass towers.  Though Jacobs' her civic activism was based on the ideas that she articulated in Death and Life, the book was not a template for how to get what she wanted. Rather, it rather a vision of what she wanted. So, while Jacobs' two personas -- author and activist -- lend credibility to each other, they easily could have existed in each other's absence. New York is probably glad that they did not.  Though Jacobs probably is not a household name even today, she touched the lives of millions of people whose cities have been planned with her ideas in mind, and those numbers are growing. By now her eminence within the field is more than complete, but her veneration followed a slow process--possibly for the better, given the limits of veneration. To this day her goals are realized through countless dispersed, time-consuming, excruciating battles that take place over and over again and are fought by intimates, not by larger-than-life demagogues that sometimes pass for leaders.  Indeed, the revolution that Jacobs incited is condemned to take place at a nearly glacial pace. Building things takes long enough. How long it takes to not build things sounds like a calculation that only a Zen master could perform. Try putting that in your general plan update.  Then again, it's still easier to un-build a city than to resurrect an extinct species.  Though the American population is rooted in cities, the vast bulk of American literature that speaks of landscape does so of the natural landscape. Cities hardly existed when the early American novelists and short-story writers -- Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper -- were writing. The primacy of nature in American culture and consciousness was cemented by Thoreau and Emerson. Since their time, everyone from Mark Twain to John Steinbeck to Cormac McCarthy has reveled in the non-urban landscape, thus leading America through road trips, Frontier idylls, suburban disaffection rather than inquiries into back alleys and bursting subway cars.  But for everyone who lives in cities and believes in what they offer -- including a way for Americans to achieve Carson's goal of leaving nature alone and a venue in which to achieve Friedan's goal of self-actualization -- Jane Jacobs, even 50 years later, remains the leader who, more so than any other American, gave voice to their desires and a nest for their dreams.