Is a proposed high-density project in Redwood City an example of smart growth, or a gridlock-inducing suburban nightmare? That is the question voters will answer in November, when they vote on whether to allow 17 high-rise towers to be built along the city’s San Francisco Bay waterfront. The upward thrust of the Marina Shores Village — the towers would range between 15 and 21 stories high, with 2.8 million square feet of residential space, along with offices and retail — is unprecedented in the suburban Bay Area. In the region, only San Francisco has more high-rise buildings. But without San Francisco’s transit infrastructure, the $1 billion project has opponents who predict it will lead to traffic gridlock on Highway 101, which is already jammed with commute traffic. “Smart growth” often means high density development built around mass transit, but in this case the mass transit — in the form of the Caltrain commuter train — is across the freeway and its crowded intersections from the development site. Marina Shores Village sits next to the Bayshore Freeway and along Redwood Creek, which turns into San Francisco Bay. The project would be carved out of two boat marinas.. Developer Glenborough-Pauls LLC plans to run six daily shuttle buses from the village to the Redwood City Caltrain station. But Redwood City environmentalist Ralph Nobles thinks the shuttles are not enough to reduce the congestion. “What this means is you’ll have someone to talk to while you’re stuck in traffic,” Nobles said. Paul Powers, president of Pauls Corporation, which is a partner with the Denver-based Glenborough REIT in building Marina Shores Village, said the project will provide housing to local workers who want to live close to their jobs. He estimated the approximately 3,900 residents of Marina Shores will live within three miles of 30,000 to 50,000 jobs. The largest employer in the city is Oracle, which has between 6,000 and 7,000 workers at its headquarters near the Marina Shores Village project site. Powers also expects local residents to move to the new development as they downsize from houses. “We will take cars off of 101,” Powers said. A group called People for Housing Not High-Rises was able to gather more than 3,600 signatures to force a referendum on the project one month after the Redwood City council approved the project and raised the allowable height limits from 75 feet to 240 feet. The project is unusually large for suburban San Mateo County, which has little easily developable land remaining. A total of 1,930 condominiums and townhomes are proposed to be built in phases over a 20-year period at Marina Shores Village. Powers said the project has “tremendous support from people who want to do away with urban sprawl.” Among those endorsing the project is the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group (SVMG), an influential business group that, among other things, lobbies for housing development in the area. “Traffic is always an issue in any kind of infill proposal,” said Shiloh Ballard, SVMG’s director of housing and community development. “If you don’t put the homes here, folks are going to commute from somewhere else.” Water, however, could be a problem. Currently, Redwood City uses more water than it is allocated by the Hetch Hetchy project, and there is no guarantee of water for Marina Shores Village. With each phase of the project, a consultant funded by the developer but working for the city would study the water situation and determine if supplies are adequate for construction to go forward, according to Tom Passinisi, the city’s acting planning director. The city has no new water sources, although the developer could purchase someone else’s water supply, Passinisi said. Developer Powers noted that the city plans to begin recycling wastewater to make up for the shortfall. City planner Mike Church said earlier plans for the project called for more towers at a lower height. But Powers said lowering the towers further would not leave enough land for all the improvements planned for the area. The development is expected to receive approval from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which has jurisdiction over development on the bay and 100 feet around it, according to Will Travis, the commission’s executive director. “Generally, high rise development along the waterfront is not something we’re opposed to if it has adequate public access,” he said. Marina Shores is proposed to have 6.8 acres of new parks, as well as marinas and access to open space. The project also would have public walkways on all areas along the water, and the developers plan to build trails and a pedestrian/bicyclist undercrossing beneath Highway 101. Altogether, the developers have promised 97 units of affordable housing for very low-income families making between $33,000 and $42,000, and 193 units for those making $80,000 to $102,000 a year, a moderate income in San Mateo County. The rest of the units would be sold at market prices. Two-bedroom condominiums in the nearby Redwood Shores neighborhood of Redwood City sell for approximately $450,000. But the developers may not place the 97 units of very low-income housing on the site, noted Nobles, who is a former city planning commissioner. A city report acknowledges that the very low-income units may be built offsite. More than 20 unmitigated impacts were identified in the project’s environmental impact report, mostly related to traffic. Loss of views from Redwood City and from the neighboring cities of San Carlos and Belmont is also identified as an unmitigated environmental impact. Nobles said additional unmitigated impacts of the project include effects on a nearby wildlife refuge and conflicts with planes at the nearby San Carlos Airport, which lies one mile away. But Powers said the Federal Aviation Administration has approved the project. Nobles, 84, was a leader in a 1982 referendum in Redwood City to prevent development of Bair Island, an open space area adjacent to Marina Village. That land was bought by the federal government and is now protected open space. The 1982 ballot measure won by less than 50 votes out of approximately 20,000. “This election will not be that close,” Nobles predicted. Powers refused to speculate about the project’s future should it be rejected. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said. Contacts: Paul Powers, Pauls Corporation, (650) 369-8651. Mike Church, Redwood City Planning and Redevelopment Agency, (650) 780-7237. Will Travis, Bay Conservation and Development Commission, (415) 352-3653. People for Housing Not High-Rises: www.housingnothighrises.org

Fighting over water is a popular sport in the West, where generations of lawyers have refined the practice until it approaches an art. Often, the quantities at stake are prodigious, the output of entire watersheds. In other instances, however, the volume is so minuscule as to leave outsiders puzzled by all the fuss. A dispute of the latter sort is threatening to break out in Ventura County, where an unusually broad coalition of interests has united behind one of the largest dam-removal projects in American history. As federal, state and local agencies press forward with environmental review and demolition planning, a handful of opposing voices have strained to make themselves heard. Having failed so far to secure the guarantees they desire, they have begun offering thinly veiled threats of legal action to stop the project or at least delay it — a move that could prove fatal to critical funding. The dispute is an illustration that, in California, there is no such thing as a trivial amount of water, and that even the most marginal dams have their defenders. Matilija Dam, completed in 1948 in a rugged canyon 16 miles north of Ventura, was envisioned as a means of providing flood control to a handful of small downstream communities and recharging groundwater supplies used by farmers in the sparsely populated Ojai Valley. With so few potential beneficiaries, the dam had such a dismal cost-benefit ratio that no state or federal agency could be persuaded to build it. Undaunted, the dam’s backers persuaded local voters to pass a bond measure to provide funding, and the county flood control district tackled the task. Problems were apparent nearly from the start. Cracks began appearing on the downstream face of the dam almost immediately after completion, and they worsened over time. A 1959 survey revealed that the dam’s crest was tilting upstream, probably because a chemical reaction between alkali in the cement and silica in the aggregate used in the concrete was causing it to expand and deteriorate. Concerned about the dam’s safety, the county twice had the dam’s crest notched to lower it and reduce stress on the foundation. The dam originally was 198 feet tall; subsequent modifications lowered it 30 feet. Bad concrete was not Matilija Dam’s only flaw. The mountains surrounding it are rising rapidly and eroding nearly as rapidly, producing huge amounts of debris. Matilija’s 7,000-acre-foot reservoir first filled with water in 1952. But it also had begun filling with sediment — about 79 acre-feet a year, according to a 1954 report by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR). By 1969, the reservoir’s storage capacity had been cut in half. According to the BOR, the dam now traps 6 million cubic yards of sediment, the equivalent of 14 Rose Bowl stadiums full of sand, silt, gravel and cobbles. The reservoir has a storage capacity of about 500 acre-feet and provides no flood control, although it does provide a trickle of water to supplement the supply of the Ojai area’s main water provider, the Casitas Municipal Water District (CMWD). The dam contributes to beach erosion by trapping sand that would otherwise reach the coast, and blocks access to critical spawning grounds for endangered southern steelhead in the Ventura River watershed. Efforts to demolish the dam and restore the ecosystem have been under way since 1998, when local advocates secured federal support for a feasibility study. Strategies for taking out the dam and dealing with the sediment behind it are detailed in a technical analysis released in June and are examined further in a draft EIR/EIS released in July, opening a pubic-comment period that closed August 30. Almost simultaneously, local lawmakers announced that $79 million in federal funding for the $110 million project had survived committee scrutiny in Congress and made it into this year’s federal Water Resources Development Act. The Army Corps of Engineers is the lead agency under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Ventura County Watershed Protection Agency (former the county flood control district) is the lead agency under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). A final record of decision on the project is expected by the end of the year. Dealing with the trapped sediment is the most costly aspect of the project. There is too much to haul away, and allowing it to be eroded naturally by storm flows after the dam is gone would cause the lower river to be buried beneath debris, smothering habitat and increasing the flood risk. Under the preferred alternative, the fine silt would be dredged out, transported downstream in a slurry line and piled up outside the main river channel. The remaining coarse sediments would be stabilized temporarily in the old reservoir site in such a way that extremely high flows would erode them gradually and carry them downstream. Legislative support reflects the extremely broad coalition of interests united in support of the removal project, including virtually every federal, state and local agency with an interest in the dam or in steelhead, as well as a lengthy roster of environmental groups. At a July 28 public hearing on the draft EIR/EIS, however, representatives of CMWD and some small rural water agencies complained that the document fails to address the effect of the dam removal on their water supply. And at least one of those representatives argued that this failure left the document open to challenge under CEQA and NEPA — a hint of litigation to come. He may have a point: The EIR/EIS acknowledges a potential temporary reduction in supply as a consequence of the project., but vaguely waves off the impact by noting that replacement water could be purchased from the State Water Project or “obtained from other sources” — the kind of “paper water” assurances California judges increasingly seem disinclined to tolerate. In a state where individual farms consume thousands of acre-feet a year, the amount of water at stake seems trivial. The Casitas district has a lease with the dam’s owner, the Ventura County Watershed Protection District, to store water behind the dam. That water is dribbled through the dam’s outlet works into the river channel after winter’s peak flows have subsided, allowing it to be diverted downstream by CMWD. According to the BOR, Matilija Dam adds an average of 590 acre-feet a year to the local water supply. Casitas provides conflicting estimates. In a July 20 letter to the editor of the local newspaper, the agency’s board president asserted that Matilija reservoir provides “about 600 acre-feet of water.” A July 21 press release from the district asserts that removal of the dam could cause the district’s customers to lose 2,400 acre-feet. In a more recent press release, the district claims Matilija yields 790 acre-feet of water a year, a figure repeated in a recent interview with Casitas General Manager John Johnson. Regardless of which figure is correct, Mother nature has ideas of her own. Continuing sediment deposition, the EIR/EIS warns, will reduce Matilija Reservoir’s capacity to 150 acre-feet by 2010 and less than 50 acre-feet by 2020. Even before sedimentation eliminates the reservoir, the water district will lose access to it. The district’s lease with the dam’s owner expires on Jan. 1, 2009 — about the same time the dam would start to come down, if the project moves forward. And it is unlikely the county will be interested in renewing that lease, as it is spearheading the removal process. Contacts: John Johnson, Casitas Municipal Water District, (805) 649-2251. Jeff Pratt, Ventura County Watershed Protection District, (805) 654-2001. Draft dam removal EIR/EIS: www.matilijadam.org/public-report.htm

Two recent appellate court rulings appear to have clarified aspects of the California Environmental Quality Act and may have even broken new legal ground. One case involved the project description in an environmental impact report and in public notices. The court held that the identity of the proposed project’s end user did not have to be disclosed. The other case contained a lengthy discussion about how to address a proposed project’s impact on a community’s jobs-housing ratio. In that case, the court offered deference the city’s handling of the issue and provided guidance to other jurisdictions that address jobs-housing ratios in environmental studies. The first case was from the Town of Apple Valley, in San Bernardino County’s high desert. In October 2001, Pluto Development submitted an application for a 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center on 300 acres at the corner of Dale Evans Parkway and Johnson Road. Eight months later, the City Council certified an EIR for the project, adopted a statement of overriding considerations because seven environmental impacts could not be fully mitigated, and approved the project. In July 2002, a group called Maintain Our Desert Environment (MODE) sued the city for failing to comply with CEQA. San Bernardino Superior Court Judge John Wade halted construction of the project briefly, but ultimately he ruled for the city. MODE appealed, but a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division Two, upheld the lower court. Two key issues in the case were tied together: Whether the project opponents had exhausted their administrative remedies, and the adequacy of the project description. The environmental documents did not identify who would use the distribution center. In fact, Pluto Development is simply an arm of Wal-Mart. MODE and the state attorney general argued that public notices and the EIR’s project description were incomplete and misleading because they did not identify Wal-Mart as the user of the proposed facility. “Not a lot of people knew what was going on until after the fact,” explained Raymond Johnson, MODE’s attorney. He contended that the city hid Wal-Mart’s identity to minimize public comment. And, because fewer issues had been raised during the administrative process, MODE had fewer issues to pursue in court because the group could not litigate over issues that were not part of the administrative review. But the court ruled that the project description passed muster under CEQA. The statute requires public notices to contain a “brief description of the proposed project.” “The key word here is ‘brief,’” Presiding Justice Manuel Ramirez wrote for the court. “ n choosing to use that word, the Legislature suggested that the project description contained in the public notice need not be as extensive as the description in the EIR itself, but need only be a brief, compact summary without elaboration or detail.” The attorney general argued that the project description in the EIR itself was inaccurate because it identified Pluto, and not Wal-Mart, as the project proponent. “That argument fails to note the difference between a project proponent/developer and a project user/tenant,” Ramirez wrote. “If CEQA was to be interpreted as the attorney general suggests, no such projects could ever proceed until all potential users/tenants were identified and subsequently investigated by the lead agency. In addition to being completely impractical, this interpretation finds no support in the sphere of law and regulation encompassed by CEQA.” Ramirez cited , (2000) 83 Cal.App.4th 1004 (see , October 2000), in which the court ruled that the identification of Borders bookstore as the tenant of a proposed project was not enough to trigger additional environmental review. “So long as the project is approved, CEQA has no concern about who uses it,” Ramirez wrote. The attorney general and MODE argued that withholding Wal-Mart’s name resulted in less than the “full disclosure” required by CEQA. But the court held that the full disclosure requirement applies only to environmental impacts. “Therefore, in order to demonstrate that CEQA requires disclosure of the identification of the end user of a project, it is incumbent upon MODE and the attorney general to demonstrate that the identity implicates potential physical environmental impacts,” the court ruled. But MODE attorney Johnson said the court’s argument is circular: To demonstrate that a specific user will have an environmental impact, the public must know who the user is. If the public does not know, it cannot make a case. Johnson contended that Wal-Mart’s policies for delivery are different from other companies’ and results in large numbers of trucks parking around distribution centers. Johnson also complained because the court upheld the EIR’s traffic analysis, which was based on traffic at an unnamed “similar facility” and not on the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ figures that are typically used. “Effectively what the court is saying … is that even though you know who the proponent is, you don’t have to disclose that proponent,” Johnson complained. “And you don’t have to use industry standards for evaluating impacts. You can use another facility owned by the same proponent … with no way of being able to check it.” But Neal Singer, the city’s attorney, said the project opponents were trying to build too much into the project description requirement. “The administrative record was bad for them,” Singer said. So opponents argued that the project description should excuse them from the normal requirements for getting everything in the administrative record, he said. “There are all kinds of reasons for submitting projects,” Singer added. “If you had to know the end user every time, it would be pretty cumbersome,” MODE has asked the state Supreme Court to review the case. The second case came from the City of Irvine and involved the city’s general plan amendment and zoning change for the 7,743-acre “northern sphere,” near the former El Toro Marine Corps base. The city approved the northern sphere plan and an EIR in June 2002. The environmental group Defend the Bay sued, alleging, among other things, that the project would exacerbate employment-rich Irvine’s jobs-housing imbalance. A trial court ruled for the city. Defend the Bay appealed but the Fourth District, Division Three, upheld the lower court. The city’s plan called for development that would eventually create 17,667 jobs and 12,350 housing units, for a ratio of about 1.44 to 1. Defend the Bay argued that there was insufficient evidence for the EIR’s conclusion that the project would not worsen Irvine’s housing shortage. The EIR said that the project would actually improve the city’s jobs-housing balance because other projects have jobs-housing ratios of up to 8.2 to 1. Plus, the EIR stated, there is “considerable future housing growth” planned in South Orange County and the area is “expected to remain housing rich through 2025” with overall jobs-housing ratios in different areas of 1.05 to 1 and 1.28 to 1. “The evidence supports the no-adverse-impact conclusion for the current project,” Justice William Bedsworth wrote for the Fourth District. “Needed housing will be added, the city-wide imbalance of more jobs than housing will be ameliorated, and the shortfall in housing within the city will be made up by plentiful housing in adjacent communities. Whether we would agree that more jobs than housing is an adverse impact is not the question, and it is not our function to second-guess the city’s decision. Rather, our role is to determine if the conclusion reached by the city has support in the record. It does.” Defend the Bay argued that the project was inconsistent with the city’s general plan, which calls for “balanced residential and nonresidential development throughout the city.” The group also contended the EIR’s alternatives analysis and statement of overriding consideration were inadequate because they did not recognize the project’s housing imbalance. The court rejected these contentions. “Defend the Bay sees an inconsistency here because the project creates more jobs than housing and adds to the city’s housing shortage,” Bedsworth wrote. “Thus, it says, there is no balance between jobs and housing. This is semantic manipulation. We are not dealing with the assaying of minerals here. Balance does not require equivalence, but rather a weighing of pros and cons to achieve an acceptable mix. The general plan requires the city to ‘strive to improve’ the jobs-housing relationship. This project clearly does so. That Defend the Bay would strike a different balance than the city does not mean the project is inconsistent with the policies at issue.” Jeffrey Melching, the city’s lawyer, said the decision is useful because it says that blind adherence to a certain jobs-housing ratio is unnecessary. The court also said it was acceptable for the city to consider regional housing conditions. “I think it’s the first case in California that has a discussion in great detail of the jobs-housing ratio,” Melching said. “It really set out a guideline for how you’re going to look at jobs-housing balance questions.” Interestingly, Defend the Bay and the Irvine Company (the real party in interest) asked the court to dismiss the case after oral arguments were conducted because they had reached a settlement. The court declined to dismiss the matter, though. “Whether a public entity can approve a development project that creates more jobs than housing is a matter of public interest and likely to recur,” Bedsworth wrote in a footnote. The city was not a party to the settlement, Melching said. The fact that the city rezoned 227 acres in the northern sphere from a medical and science designation to residential “had nothing to do with the settlement. In fact, it predated the settlement,” he said. First Case: , No. E033904, 04 C.D.O.S. 6060, 2004 DJDAR 8195. Filed June 10, 2004. Ordered partially published July 2, 2004. The Lawyers: For MODE: Raymond M. Johnson, Johnson & Sedlack, (909) 506-9925. For Apple Valley: M. Neal Singer, Singer & Coffin, (949) 863-1224. For Pluto Development: Jennifer Guenther, Gresham, Savage, Nolan & Tilden, (909) 684-2171. Second Case: , No. G032062, 04 C.D.O.S. 5877, 2004 DJDAR 7965. Filed June 29, 2004. The Lawyers: For Defend the Bay: Kevin K. Johnson, Johnson & Hanson, (619) 696-6211. For the city: Jeffrey Melching, Rutan & Tucker, (714) 641-5100. For the Irvine Company: Christopher Garrett, Latham & Watkins, (619) 236-1234.

The court of appeal has cleared the way for the Modesto Redevelopment Agency to sue manufacturers and suppliers of dry cleaning solvents and equipment. While the First District Court of Appeal did not rule on the Redevelopment Agency’s claims, the unanimous appellate panel did overturn a lower court decision to dismiss the lawsuit against the manufacturers and suppliers. By potentially making more parties liable for the cleanup of contamination, the decision could bolster redevelopment agencies’ efforts to clean up tainted land and water. At issue is liability for contamination from two dry cleaning solvents, perchloroethylene (PERC) and trichloroethylene. The city argued that dry cleaners dumped the solvents into the city’s sewer system and let the solvents leak into the environment. The city sued a collection of manufacturers, distributors and dry cleaners. Under the Polanco Act (Health & Safety Code § 33459), a redevelopment agency may remediate contaminated properties within a project area and may recover the costs from the responsible parties. The definition of a “responsible party” is contained in the Porter Cologne Water Quality Control Act (Water Code § 13000 et seq.). San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer granted summary judgment for the manufacturers and distributors, but he also asked for guidance from the appellate court. Writing for the First District, Justice Maria Rivera first dealt with the common law definition of nuisance, concluding, “ iability for nuisance does not hinge on whether the defendant owns, possesses or controls the property, nor on whether he is in a position to abate the nuisance; the critical question is whether the defendant created or assisted in the creation of the nuisance.” The court then moved to the question of whether the city’s claims under the Polanco Act fell within the realm of nuisance or of product liability law. The court turned to , (1990) 221 Cal.App.3d 1601, a case that also involved manufacturers, distributors and end users of hazardous materials. “We agree with the first stated conclusion in — that those who create or assist in creating a system that causes hazardous wastes to be disposed of improperly, or who instruct users to dispose of wastes improperly, can be held liable under the law of nuisance,” Rivera wrote. “Here, for example, the city claims that, with knowledge of the hazards involved, some of the defendants instructed the dry cleaners to set up their equipment to discharge solvent-containing wastewater into the drains and sewers, and that others gave dry cleaners instructions to dispose of spilled PERC on or in the ground. We conclude that these kinds of affirmative actions or instructions could support a finding that those defendants assisted in creating a nuisance.” But the court distinguished those parties that provided instruction to dry cleaners from manufacturers that made products but offered no guidance to end users. “ e conclude that those who took affirmative steps directed toward the improper discharge of solvent wastes — for instance, by manufacturing a system designed to dispose of wastes improperly or by instructing users of its products to dispose of wastes improperly — may be liable under that statute , but those who merely placed solvents into the stream of commerce without warning of the dangers of improper disposal are not liable under that section of the Porter-Cologne Act,” the court ruled. The First District returned the case to the trial court with instructions to “apply the standards articulated in this decision” to the facts in Modesto. The Case: , No. A104367, 04 C.D.O.S. 4692, 2004 DJDAR 6452. Filed May 28, 2004. Modified June 28, 2004 at 2004 DJDAR 7928. The Lawyers: For Modesto: Duane C. Miller, Miller, Axline & Sawyer, (916) 924-8600. For Dow Chemical (real party in interest): Gennaro Filice, Filice, Brown, Essa & McLeod, (510) 444-3131.

Habitat conservation plans have become popular tools for balancing development with protection of imperiled plant and animal species. Since Congress authorized them in 1982, nearly 500 habitat conservation plans (HCPs) have been adopted nationwide. The plans were not always so popular. Only 20 HCPs won approval during the program’s first 12 years. Their use accelerated in 1995, when the Clinton administration began promoting them in the hope of blunting congressional efforts to rewrite the Endangered Species Act (ESA). And they really took off in 1998 with adoption of the controversial “no surprises” policy, which made HCPs more attractive to landowners by promising them relief from future regulatory meddling. The no surprises policy was immediately attacked by environmental organizations, which recently won a court ruling overturning it. Although not quite the decisive victory the plaintiffs sought, the ruling nevertheless resulted in the suspension of the federal government’s HCP program and has cast doubt on its long-term future. As originally adopted in 1973, the ESA made it a crime to “take” a species listed as threatened or endangered, “take” being defined as any activity that kills or harms listed species or destroys their habitat. In 1982, Congress amended the ESA to allow federal agencies to issue permits for the “incidental take” of listed species during the course of otherwise lawful activity. Any application for an incidental take permit must be accompanied by an HCP that spells out how the effect of the permitted activity on a listed species will be minimized, monitored and mitigated. Landowners initially were unenthusiastic, mainly because of a requirement that HCPs include a clause allowing their terms to be changed whenever federal agencies deemed it necessary. Why go to the trouble and expense of developing a habitat plan, landowners reasoned, if the government could rewrite the permit at any time? The “no surprises” policy, originally announced in August 1994, was adopted to cure that perceived shortcoming. The policy required that federal agencies approving HCPs provide “assurances” to landowners that once an incidental take permit was approved, the government would not later change the permit’s terms in a way that increases the landowner’s costs or further restricts the use of natural resources. Under “no surprises,” no additional conservation or mitigation measures could be imposed even if changed circumstances rendered the HCP inadequate to protect a listed species. Biologists and environmentalists decried the policy, charging that it opened a gigantic loophole in the ESA and ignored the uncertainty inherent in the science of conservation biology and ecosystem management. In 1996, several groups filed a lawsuit alleging that the policy had been adopted in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires public notice and an opportunity for public comment before such regulations are adopted. The federal government settled that suit by agreeing to delay final adoption until the government had solicited public comment. About 800 comments subsequently were received, 755 of them opposing the policy. Many comments came from conservation biologists who warned that without a mechanism to respond to such “surprises” as drought, disease, fire, storms and floods, the HCP program would guarantee the loss of species and habitats. But the federal agencies adopted the original policy virtually unchanged. In 1998, six environmental groups sued again, arguing that the government still had failed to comply with administrative law and that the policy violated the ESA. While that suit was pending, the federal government adopted yet another policy making it more difficult to revoke incidental take permits. The plaintiffs, including the Spirit of the Sage Council and the Humane Society of the United States, amended their suit to allege that the revocation policy also violated the ESA and the Administrative Procedures Act. Intervening as defendants in the litigation were the city and county of San Diego — where large-scale HCPs are a particularly popular conservation tool (see , February 2003) — Orange County, Irvine Ranch Water District and a coalition that includes the National Association of Home Builders, the Building Industry Legal Defense Foundation, the Kern Water Bank Authority, and the American Forest and Paper Association. In December 2003, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the federal government had, indeed, violated the Administrative Procedures Act by adopting both the “no surprises” and permit revocation policies without prior public notice and without providing a meaningful opportunity for public comment. He suspended both policies and ordered officials to start over. “The ruling is a huge victory for imperiled animals and plants, as well as the public’s basic right to have a say in how public resources are managed,” said Leeona Klipstein, executive director of Spirit of the Sage Council. The defendants were less enthusiastic. “The inability to give ‘no surprises’ assurances to landowners would not only be a breach of faith with those landowners, it would also be a serious impediment to our ability to conserve and enhance habitat for imperiled wildlife,” said Craig Manson, assistant secretary of the Interior. Duane Desiderio, vice president of the National Association of Home Builders, was more blunt. “Now, a permit isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” he told the Associated Press. The legal saga did not end there. Following the judge’s ruling, USFWS Director Steven Williams issued a memo directing his regional managers to continue approving HCPs containing the no surprises clause, as long as they also included legal language noting that the remaining stipulations in each HCP would remain in effect if the no surprises policy were subsequently invalidated. The plaintiffs went back to court, and on June 10, Judge Sullivan ordered the agencies to stop issuing HCPs containing the no surprises clause. He also gave the agencies until December 10 to complete the process of developing new permit rules. Williams then issued another memo directing his agency to stop approving incidental take permits altogether, but not before the USFWS on June 22 approved an HCP and incidental take permits covering 1 million acres and 146 species in rapidly growing western Riverside County. The Riverside County plan, perhaps the most ambitious HCP to date, does not contain the no surprises guarantee, although federal officials could add it later. Significantly, Judge Sullivan did not rule on the substantive claim in the lawsuit: that the no surprises policy violates the ESA. Absent such a ruling — and given the popularity of no surprises HCPs — it is likely the federal agencies will simply readopt the polices after the legally prescribed public comment process has been completed. If that happens, another round of litigation is likely. Contacts: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, habitat conservation planning: http://endangered.fws.gov/hcp/index.html Spirit of the Sage Council: www.sagecouncil.com

The average home price in California topped $400,000 in June. This news stimulated the now-familiar headlines about how even beat-up tract homes from the ’60s have become unaffordable for middle-class families. It’s getting to the point that a six-figure income does not guarantee homeownership. But what does this do for the more traditional “affordable” housing that we in California have supposedly been fighting about for the last several decades – housing not for the middle class but for low-wage workers and for the poor? Has this topic slipped off the radar screen altogether amid concerns about housing for teachers and paramedics? And when concern for poor people does emerge, will the astronomical price of housing make the cities and neighborhoods more amenable to lower-cost housing – or less? These thoughts surfaced recently when two affluent cities in South Orange County, struggled with the question of how to consider two different “affordable” housing projects. Back in January, the Steadfast Cos. gave up on an apartment proposal for a 23-acre hilltop site on Jeronimo Road in Mission Viejo after intense neighborhood opposition. The proposal called for 168 units, or about 7 units per gross acre – about the density of a typical single-family subdivision. Nevertheless, the project was designed to accommodate low- and moderate-income residents, and neighbors objected. According to the , everyone appearing before the Planning Commission opposed the project and claimed it “would bring overcrowded apartments, graffiti, gangs, drugs, and even drive-by shootings.” The perplexed developer, who had brought forth the low/mod project in response to direction from the city’s staff, went back to the drawing board. In June, the affordable housing dilemma surfaced in San Juan Capistrano when the City Council voted in closed session not to sell a 2.7-acre parcel of land to a nonprofit housing developer. Once again, neighborhood concern was the driver. As one council member said, “The neighbors were concerned about the density and the property values. I felt the complex was too expensive, too massive, and wasn’t right for the neighborhood.” In each of the two projects, some units would have been set aside for families categorized as “very low income,” which in the case of Orange County means a household income of about $37,000 per year, while others would have been set aside for “low income” families – those up to about $57,000. In each case, the city was driven by pressure to comply with the low- and moderate-income housing allocation target that resulted from the regional housing needs assessment process – the dreaded “housing element” requirement overseen by the state Department of Housing and Community Development. One of the ironies of the recent real estate boom is that it seems to have rendered the income categories somewhat obsolete. The housing element system requires jurisdictions to plan for the amount of housing required in three specialized income categories – very low income (up to 50% of median income), low income (50% to 80% of median income), and moderate income (80% to 120% of median income). The assumption is that people making more than 120% of median income can take care of themselves in the housing market. The recent debate over workforce housing has left the first two categories behind. Builders focusing on workforce housing usually say they are targeting households at 80-200% of median income – which today amounts to somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 in most parts of California. (See , July 2004.) At current interest rates, these incomes can leverage home prices of $200,000 to $400,000 – prices that were well within range just a year or two ago, but are quickly vanishing today. More significantly, the recent price run-up has increased the gap between market and subsidized housing, especially in affluent areas. Maybe a family’s “low-income” pay can leverage a $200,000 house (or rent of $1,000 to $1,500 a month). But such neighbors don’t look very attractive when the average home price in your tract is $800,000 and rising by $10,000 or more a month.. Ironically, the problem is not that everybody wants to build high-end housing instead of affordable housing. There are plenty of developers – both nonprofit and for-profit – who are trying to make “affordable” housing deals work. There are also lots of different pots of money around – low-income housing tax credits, redevelopment housing setaside, Proposition 46 funds – that can be tossed into the mix. (San Diego, for example, is considering increasing the bed tax and/or levying a car rental tax to provide funds.) And there are lots of cities and counties promoting low-income housing, either because they think it is the right thing to do or because they feel the heat from HCD. The problem, as the two South Orange County examples suggest, is the sites. A given site may look good – until the public meetings start. Cities often try to avert this problem by identifying sites that seem segregated from higher-end residential neighborhoods. In the Mission Viejo case, the 23-acre parcel was located on a hill 40 feet above street level. It was adjacent to commercial property and did not abut any residential parcel. Residents responded by circulating a flier reading “Stop the Nightmare Before It Starts,” which contained a rendering of a public housing project. So who’s being left out in the cold? Actually, it is not all low-wage or low-income people. Some folks who qualify for affordable housing are more acceptable than others – senior citizens especially. In fact, some reports suggest that because cities often use senior projects to meet their affordable requirement, there’s a glut of senior housing. In Santa Clara County, developers seeking to avoid political opposition have focused on senior housing and housing for moderate-income residents (80-120% of median income). The result? “It’s cutthroat,” says one San Jose developer, who has proposed a moratorium on low-income senior housing. This glut may not last long, and it might not become widespread. After all, everyone is predicting a boom in the elderly population in California. But it does suggest that some low-income groups benefit while others do not. And that may have peculiar consequences as well. The gap in affordable housing appears mostly to affect families with low-wage workers – farmworkers, retail clerks, and others seeking to make ends meet on one or two minimum-wage jobs. But for these groups, there is another way around the housing problem – if they’re willing to overcrowd their way into the American dream. Anecdotal evidence suggests that extended immigrant families are bootstrapping their way to ownership even in this housing market by doubling and tripling up – not only in the housing unit itself, but on the mortgage. By combining their salaries, three, four, or five low-wage earners can escalate beyond the moderate-income category and buy a nice house. It will be interesting to see how affluent neighbors react to that kind of upward mobility, because there is an inherent conflict. On the one hand, the neighbors are undoubtedly thrilled to see owner-occupied single-family homes nearby. On the other hand, they’re probably not too happy to see these very same houses overcrowded by low-wage workers. Many cities have overcrowding ordinances, so the neighbors might call the local code enforcement department. But that would mean kicking people out of houses that they own. If that starts happening, the battle over the Jeronimo Road hill will pale by comparison.

While the footsoldiers in the efforts to plan cities (and add housing) were grinding away in Pasadena at the American Planning Association conference , a different audience was discovering a challenge that planners have known about for years. Yesterday, McKinsey and Co. released  A Tool Kit to Close California’s Housing Gap , which offers its take on California’s housing crisis. It was a focal point of a session I attended at yesterday’s Milken Institute  California Summit , moderated by none other than Jonathan Wotzel, director of the McKinsey Global Institute. MicKinsey’s conclusion: California doesn't have enough housing. How’s that for a news flash? Perhaps the only thing new about the report was its audience.The people who pay attention to McKinsey (who are much the same people that attend Milken Institute events) are probably different from those who usually pay attention to government reports. And they wear more expensive suits. I approach that with explicit sarcasm because, of course, every planner (and developer) in California already knows this. So does nearly every renter and every homebuyer in the sub-$5 million market. The crisis has been studied and described by nearly every major university in the state and acknowledged by nearly every major think tank and nonprofit that deals in land use. The Legislative Analysts Office put out two major  reports  last year. What’s been missing, in many cases, is political will and, let’s face it, political leadership. While majors like Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti and Oakland’s Libby Schaff have forcefully called for more housing, leaders in many other cities are acting like they hope the whole thing will just go away. Fortunately, that kind of willful ignorance is getting increasingly difficult to pull off. The panelists at the summit offered anecdotes and analysis — much of it excellent -- that would sound like old hat to most planners. To folks who haven’t considered the housing crisis and especially the influence of anti-growth stakeholders, it must have been terrifying. Scott Laurie of the Olson Co. described the woes of a developer. He described a 58-unit by-right project in the City of Orange that, though it conformed to the zoning code, got cut in half because of the objections of a single neighbor. Then there’s a project on the San Gabriel-Rosemead border. The Rosemead City Council told him up-front that it would nix its portion of the project if a  single  constituent objected to it. Guess what happened there. Assemblymember and former Santa Monica City Councilmember Richard Bloom said that would-be housing developers are bailing out and selling sites to commercial developers because — for reasons that defy logic — neighbors don’t protest commercial but treat residential like it’s toxic waste. “There’s this idea that housing doesn’t pay,” said Bloom. "Commercial pays.” This, despite the fact that residential typically generates less traffic. Carol Galante, former Federal Housing Administration official and current professor at UC Berkeley, said “it’s hardest to build where the jobs are” and summed up the situation neatly: “the way we do land use in California is not normal.” McKinsey, of course, has some recommendations for normalizing the situation. Normal to the tune of 3.5 million units by 2025. That’s the number that the report thinks California can reach with a few nips and tucks to its land use policies. They want cities to identify housing “hot spots,” like places near transit and with vacant lots; make approvals quicker and less complex; promote affordable housing; and reduce the cost of constructing and operating multifamily housing complexes. Again, not exactly news. Among the “hot spots," McKinsey estimates that up to 3 million units can be built statewide around transit hubs. The recommendation that has drawn the most  attention  is that of building on vacant lots that are already zoned for development. McKinsey says there are scads of them in center cities. Well, of course there are. No one ever said California’s housing shortage was due to lack of land, vacant or otherwise. Planners have been encouraging cities to embrace density for ages. SCAG released its “ two percent strategy ”, advocating for the region’s future development to take place on two percent of its land, in 2004. McKinsey's recommendation is therefore odd, kind of like saying you should feed the homeless with the burritos in your freezer. Unfortunately, unless McKinsey is recommending the biggest eminent domain taking in history, the state can’t compel land owners to build so much as a doghouse. Prop. 13 ensures that land owners have nearly zero carrying costs, and California cities don’t have land value taxes. McKinsey’s most provocative recommendation would be to try to, finally, make the Regional Housing Need Allocation mean something. They recommend that the state offer a combination of incentives and penalties for cities that fail to meet their RHNA numbers. This might include withholding state property tax allocations for cities that flout their housing obligations and giving grants and bonuses to those that exceed them. Currently, “RHNA is a joke to a lot of cities. There's no enforcement,” said Galante. It’s hard to imagine how all this would happen given the current political climate and the temperament of stakeholders. As Galante noted, homeowners, not renters, are typically the ones who vote in local elections in California. That means that people like consulting firm partners and captains of finance are the ones with the real power. They’re the ones who vote, donate, and, often, protest against new development. They’re the ones who have heretofore pressured cities into the status quo. Now that the know there’s a problem, maybe they’ll try to do something about it.

On the day after Tom Hayden died in Santa Monica , I went on the California APA’s tour of station-area development along the Expo Line on Los Angeles’s Westside. It was a bit of a homecoming for me, because my life in Southern California began and ended within spitting distance of that line and despite all the years in Ventura so much of what went on in between was all tangled up with the Westside. The tour made me realize how much has changed on the Westside – even in the last few years, but certainly since I first met Tom Hayden 35 years ago. Two things struck me. The first – especially at our first stop at the Culver City station -- is the weird and ever-changing relationship between the Westside and the car. Yes the Westside is rich and hip, and yes ridership on the Expo Line is exploding. (Monday was the first day the line ran on six-minute headways.) Nevertheless, automotive carcasses are littered everywhere on the Westside, and folks there are obsessed beyond all reason with moving them and storing them. The second – especially at our last stop at Bergamot Station – is how thoroughly the Tom Hayden-era model of urban development, if you want to call it that, is now being rejected by the people of Santa Monica. Hayden, of course, was the godfather of the left-wing faction that took over Santa Monica on a rent control platform in 1981 and he represented the Westside in Sacramento for almost 20 years. For decades, the deal for developers in Santa Monica was simple: We’ll give you what you want if we can extract enough community benefits from you. (In fact, this was the topic of my master’s thesis in urban planning at UCLA , which formed the basis of Chapter 1 of The Reluctant Metropolis .) But the recent debacle at Bergamot – including the city council’s decision to un-approve the big Hines mixed-use project and the subsequent slow-growth measure on the ballot this fall – has made it clear that this deal won’t work any more on the Westside. If you add these two things together, it paints a pretty interesting picture of how the Westside has evolved, how much it struggles these days with being a victim of its own success – and how much the Westside slides back into 20 th Century thinking when the going gets tough. The minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour surface street gridlock on the Westside is awesome to behold, almost as if it were one of the seven wonders of the world. Which is, of course, why the Expo Line is so successful. And yet … Our first stop was at the Culver City station, near Helms Bakery. Culver City is doing a great job of station-area planning and the resulting district is going to be an excellent walkable neighborhood with strong connections to downtown Culver City. (For example, Lowe Enterprises’ plans for Ivy Station look really good .) But the most amusing part of our visit there was the automated parking garage at the old Helms Bakery, which owner Wally Marks and his family have lovingly transformed into modern office and retail space. The parking garage is, indeed, impressive. Once automatically parked using a lift, the cars are moved around the garage based on the established patterns of the drivers. If you don’t use your car during the day, it gets shuffled to the back; if you are in and out, it stays in the front. Your car will be gradually moved closer to the exit as the clock the time you typically leave work. And retrieving a car, even from an upper floor, takes a matter of seconds. But as I watched and listened – and Wally and his staff and consultants couldn’t stop talking about how great the garage was – I kept thinking that this must have been how IBM talked about how great the Selectric typewriter was right before the personal computer was invented. Yes, the Helms garage is all about efficiency – but it’s about storing and retrieving cars efficiently. Whereas the buzz in urban circles worldwide is about Uber, car-sharing and autonomous cars – that is, using cars more efficiently, so that you don’t need to store or retrieve them in the first place. In New York and San Francisco these days, you are how you ride or where you go. On the Westside, you are still what you drive. So 20 th Century. And that was part of the reason it was pretty refreshing to move on to the next stop – the Bundy station – and hear Dan Martin, a third-generation car dealer, bitch about parking requirements and talk about creating a walkable environment. When I first moved to L.A. in the early ‘80s, I lived walking distance from the Martin Cadillac dealership at Olympic and Bundy – not that you would have wanted to actually walk to Martin Cadillac in those days. (Take my word for it: Then, as now, I didn't own a car.) After almost 50 years on this 5-acre site, Martin Cadillac will soon give way to Martin Expo Town Center , a 10-story project with 500 residential units, 200,000 square feet of creative office space, and 100,000 square feet of retail, which will probably include a high-end grocery store. The visit was a good reminder that car dealers are often sitting on the best properties in transit-rich neighborhoods, and the best ones are smart enough to realize that as they become retail dinosaurs that real estate is their biggest asset. The Bundy stop is still pretty much an amenity desert, but between the Expo Line and big office buildings that pre-date it, the pedestrian traffic is already pretty good. At lunchtime today I saw maybe 30 people walking around at Olympic and Bundy, an intersection that features not only Martin Cadillac but a bunch of gas stations and convenience stores. One stop to the west is Bergamot Station, which features a combination of hip galleries and other arts businesses, high-end creative office businesses located in old industrial buildings, and traffic-spewing office towers from the 1980s. My life in L.A. may have begun down the street near Martin Cadillac, but it ended here 32 years later, when I was one of the principals in charge of the Bergamot Area Plan for the firm now known as Placeworks. And I do mean ended, because that plan – and some of the development projects that might have been built near the station – suffered the most ignominious fate of any planning effort in Southern California in recent memory. With it died the Tom Hayden-era idea of soaking the developers to get social goods, which has apparently been replaced by the pretty retro planning idea that doing nothing is usually better than doing something. The plan was supposed to build on Santa Monica’s vaunted 2010 LUCE (Land Use and Circulation Element). The LUCE, which supposedly had broad public support, was built on the concept of “tiers” – the idea that developers could get higher “tiers” of density in exchange for providing more community benefits. The LUCE was the ultimate manifestation of the Hayden-era development-for-goodies formula that was developed by the first progressive leaders in Santa Monica back in the ‘80s: Sure, we’ll give you the density for whatever the market is demanding (office, housing, retail) so long as you give us lots of social benefits in return. This was pretty radical stuff back in the '80s, when most people's idea of urban planning activism was to just shut down new development. And despite the fact that Hayden and his buddies had a reputation for being socialists, it requires a pretty deft understanding of capitalism to make this idea work. You have to know just how hard to squeeze the developers, so you still get the goodies and the developers don't go away. Over time, as capitalism has taken over the Westside, the argument for a bigger squeeze has only increased. Today in Santa Monica, the market is so strong that developers will pay almost literally any price for entitlements. Except that this isn’t what happened when Hines proposed a major mixed-use project on Olympic Boulevard right across the street from Bergamot Station. The project was arguably not the best designed project ever, though it dramatically improved pedestrian connectivity and publicly available open space in the area. Nor, apparently, did Hines do an especially good job selling it to the neighbors. The bottom line was that just before the 2014 local election, the city councilmembers up for re-election rescinded approval of the development agreement to save their own skin. And then, subsequently, they also backed off a lot of the good stuff contained in the LUCE . Save their own skin they did, at least for now, but at a cost. Hines sold the land and the existing Papermate factory is now being retrofitted – meaning there is still a 1,200-foot wall along Olympic Boulevard and no sidewalk. Yes, the latest biggest project on Olympic Boulevard went away. But so did all the goodies. And so, by the way, did a lot developers who could have been squeezed. Meanwhile, the defeat of the Hines project infected the entire Bergamot plan, and many of the other things that would have created better connectivity and a mixture of activities went out of the plan. The status quo, however imperfect, was judged to be better than anything new. In a certain way, you can’t blame Santa Monica’s residents for taking such an anti-growth attitude; after all, they’ve been hammered with job-related traffic for 30 years. But in rejecting dense 21 st  Century mixed-use growth, they are stuck with 20 th  Century problems, like no sidewalks, no connectivity, and even no restaurants. They also, by the way, have no affordable housing and none of the other things that the Hayden-era activists in Santa Monica wanted, because they are stuck with the 20th Century solution of simply retaining the status quo. So even as Hayden – perhaps the prototypical 20 th  Century lefty intellectual – slipped away in a hospital a short distance away, the section of Los Angeles that he loved remains mired in 20 th -Century thinking. Unfortunately, it’s not the 20 th  Century anymore. A personal postscript about Hayden: He always took an interest in my work and often quoted me, which on occasion could be pretty embarrassing. For example, one night I was walking down the street in Sacramento with a bunch of Central Valley Republicans when Tom, then a state legislator, hailed me as he was getting out of his car and yelled that he had quoted me in a hearing that day when he was railing against increasing cross-Delta water transfers. We talked briefly, and I pivoted back to discussing farmland with the Republicans as fast as I could. Still, I couldn’t help but like the guy. To me, he was generous to a fault. I well remember the time he hosted a small event at his house when The Reluctant Metropolis  came out. Afterward, I tried to give him a copy, but he pulled a twenty and a five out of his wallet and thrusting the cash into my hand. “I know what it’s like to have to buy books from a publisher and then give them away,” he said. Maybe the guy appreciated capitalism more than he let on -- and more than Santa Monica's current community activists.

With due appreciation to the organizers and sponsors of this week’s California APA conference, there’s been a lot of food to keep over 1,500 planners sustained and energized this week. At this morning’s session, there was also a lot of nibbling coming out of Sacramento. As every planner knows, the state’s ability to influence local land use is limited and usually indirect – for better or worse. State policy has traditionally been limited to nibbling around the edges, with the occasional law, and some polite suggestions. The financial incentives that could be most powerful are neutered because, well, they depend on finances. And yet, Gov. Jerry Brown and many other officials have statewide concerns and, in some cases, holistic visions for what the state’s cities should look like. The task of refining those goals and coming up with policies, strategies, and polite suggestions falls largely to the Strategic Growth Council. This morning SGC staffer Suzanne Hague discussed a comprehensive strategy called Sustainable, Equitable Communities. The SGC is drafting it now and hopes to adopt it sometime next year. It includes a range of tasty-sounding morsels designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (per AB 32) and provide a range of co-benefits. Depending how cities respond, these ideas may or may not ever make it out of the kitchen. Here are a few highlights, including some I hadn’t heard before: Regional transit-oriented development funds. The Bay Area has done it with the TOAH program . Other MPOs can follow. Rebates for carbon-friendly housing. If they do it for Teslas, why not for solar panels? Various tax-increment financing schemes, including one that encompasses multiple TOD areas so as to share wealth. Urban growth boundaries, reduced parking requirements, and tax abatements in distressed area. On the transportation tip, Hague mentioned a few well known ideas: subsidized transit passes; bike sharing and car sharing; congestion pricing (which she appealingly recast as “cordon pricing”). She touted the state’s current pilot project to test demand-based taxation that could replace the gas tax: the less you drive, the less you pay (whether you drive a Tesla or a Hummer). If you put Hague’s 30 or so bullet points together and make them happen, you’ll either get a regulatory monstrosity or, perhaps, an walkable, equitable, sustainable urban paradise. In the question-and-answer period, we learned a few reasons why neither scenario may come to pass, including the use of ballot measures to approve leapfrog development, regional transportation plans and taxation measures that have their own agendas, and the perennial shortage of funds to create regulations and do planning work. Hague herself volunteered one of the least talked-about but perhaps most profound impediments to infill living (as opposed to infill development). As it turns out, reduction of GHGs may depend on ABCs. No matter how many high-density, low-parking, mixed-use, yoga-adjacent, dog-friendly units California developers can crank out, none of these developments does a thing to improve public education in center cities. As long as parents, rightly or wrongly, fear for their children’s’ minds and safety, they will always be tempted to flee the suburbs eventually. California’s education tragedy, above all challenges, may be the reason why cities are so family-unfriendly (despite what grumps like Joel Kotkin may claim). So, while California’s planners are learning, and eating, their fill this week, we should remember that the success of their cities may in fact depend on what California’s children learn every day.

If you're in Pasadena right now, you're not alone. The American Planning Association, California Chapter, reported yesterday that 1,800 people are registered for the conference this week. That's a huge number -- in past years it's been more like 1,000 -- and it may suggest that planning and development in California is back after a long downturn that began with the Great Recession. Here are some other tidbits from Sunday ... ... As we tweeted yesterday morning, the most heavily attended session at 8 am. on Sunday was the medical marijuana ordinance session . You can expect even more marijuana land use drama if Prop. 64 passes and every local jurisdiction in the state will have to pass a land use ordinance dealing with marijuana. As we have reported in the past, medical marijuana cases appear to be driving land-use law  in California more than ever before.... ... SB 743 is on everybody's mind. Not only did Rob Dayton from Santa Barbara weigh in on how that affluent coastal city is serving as an "early adopter" of alternative methods of analyzing transportation, but the ever-diligent Chris Calfee from the Governor's Office of Planning and Research reported that a new version of the SB 743 VMT travel guidelines will be out early next year... ... One reason planning may be back in California is that development is back, and one indication of that may be the plethora of land-use ballot measures this fall. Josh Stephens and I weighed in on that yesterday morning at a panel discussing the 60 or so measures on the ballot this fal l.... ... AEP is working through the post- Newhall greenhouse gas emissions analysis problem. At a panel yesterday morning, several AEP leaders worked through their new "field guide"  to GHG emissions and Climate Action Plans. Bottom line: You've got to understand how to separate out the emissions assumptions for new development v. existing development in the area in order to meet the Supreme Court's test.... ....And at a panel on CalAdapt, Erik de Kok of Ascent Environmental gave a nice little primer on SB 1000 , the new environmental-justice-in-General-Plans law that goes into effect in 2018. One interesting sidelight: SB 1000 doesn't specifically speak to climate change, but you might want to take climate change impacts on vulnerable populations into account.

It’s election season, and throughout California we are seeing an unusually large number of ballot measures designed to restrain development. As usual, most of these measures are in coastal areas. Some are urban growth boundary measures, but a lot of them try to put a brake on the density and/or height of new residential development. Presumably that’s because longtime residents in these coastal areas fear that high-density residential development will invade their communities. But even as these skirmishes are still going on, it looks like the battle is over – at least in coastal California. Higher-density development has already won. And increasingly that’s creating a bifurcated state. New single-family homes are built pretty much only in the inland areas. With a couple of exceptions, the coastal areas are turning dense. Perhaps most strikingly, the move toward multifamily development has gotten much stronger since the Great Recession ended. According to the Demographics Research Unit at the Department of Finance, between 2010 and 2016 more than half of all housing units built in California were multi-family units, and the vast majority of those were contained in projects of five or more units. This reverses the trend from the 2000s – but reinforces a trend from the 1990s. (All numbers in this article are derived from DOF's most recent E-5 spreadsheet .) Now, there are a lot of caveats here. There hasn’t been that much housing built since 2010 – only about 300,000 units, or an increase of about 2.5%. (There was only about one housing unit built for every six people addd to the population.) There was a huge amount of single-family housing built during the real estate boom that ended with the crash in 2008 – much of which was available for rent or at cut-rate prices when the Great Recession ended. And lenders have been gun-shy about single-family subdivisions for years. But the trend is striking. And it’s even more striking when you break out the coastal and inland areas – or, more accurately, the land-poor urban areas (which are mostly near the coast and good transit) and the land-rich suburban areas (which are mostly, but not exclusively, inland and away from good transit). To see what I mean, take a look at the striking patterns contained in the chart below. In coastal Southern California – Ventura, Los Angeles, and Orange counties – 77% of new construction is multifamily and only 18% is single-family. (Even in Ventura – land-rich but highly regulated – the numbers were 62% multifamily and 27% single-family.) In the Bay Area, there’s a similar big divide. If you look at the rapidly urbanizing counties with good transit – San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda – you’ll see that 83% of new housing since 2010 is multifamily and only 12% is single-family. In the other counties – Contra Costa and Solano to the east and the three notoriously no-growth counties to the north, Marin, Sonoma, and Napa – you’ll see that only 28% of new housing is multifamily and 68% is single-family. We see the same thing in San Diego – though, as in the Bay Area, some of the single-family dominance is located in slow-growth coastal areas with land. In South County, 66% of new housing is multifamily and only 25% is single-family. In North County, 54% is single-family and 37% is multifamily. But that’s not the whole story. There’s also a story here about big cities in California. Contrary to recent history, they are growing faster than the state as a whole. They are adding housing faster than the state as a whole. And they are adding multifamily housing much faster than the state as a whole. The trend is really striking with the biggest cities. Take a look at the chart below, which compares the four largest cities with the state as a whole. Bear in mind that three of the four cities – Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego – are geographically very large, while San Francisco is not. Those big three cities are, however, running out of land. The raw numbers are striking. Of all the new housing built in these four cities, 92% was multifamily and only 7% was single family. But the numbers relative to the state as a whole is even more striking. Look at the chart below. Blue represents the situation in 2010; orange is the change from 2010 to 2016. In 2010, these four cities had about 19% of the population and 19% of the housing. But between 2010 and 2016, these four cities added 24% of the population and 27% of the housing. Most strikingly, they added about 52% of the multifamily housing. In other words, more multifamily housing was built in L.A. San Jose, San Diego, and San Francisco than in the entire rest of California put together . This trend plays out with other big cities, at least in coastal areas. Big inland cities are like their surrounding counties. Housing construction in Fresno, Bakersfield, Sacramento, Stockton, and Riverside – the five biggest inland cities – is all overwhelmingly single-family. So there it is: Bifurcated California. One very identifiable part of California is getting much denser really fast. One very identifiable part of California is not. It doesn’t break out. This doesn’t break down perfectly by coastal and inland areas – political culture about land use in places like the North Bay and North County San Diego matter a lot – but the overall trend is clear. In the long term, the question is not so much how the bifurcation occurs but what it means – not just politically but also in terms of policy, transportation, and lifestyle. For example, as the state’s push for a planning policy revolving around reduction in driving grows, the dense coastal areas will have a huge advantage in competing for money. And the big question is probably whether anti-density politics in the coastal areas will trump pro-density market trends. If the market wins, that means more housing built near job centers, lessening the transportation impact. If anti-density politics wins, that means more housing gets pushed inland. More people will be living in single-family homes, but they’ll be driving a long way to work. Whether they will be happy or not remains to be seen.

At first blush, the rest of California may not have much to learn from a high-priced, semi-isolated Spanish Revival paradise by the sea. But, roughly halfway through this week’s conference  of the American Planning Association California Chapter, held in Pasadena, Santa Barbara yielded what might be the conference's two most compelling pieces of data:  Among all the people who live in Santa Barbara’s downtown core and immediate surrounding neighborhoods, 10 percent commute outside the city for work.  Among all the people who work in downtown Santa Barbara, 39 percent commute into the city from somewhere else.  Hm.  These numbers come from Rob Dayton, principal transportation planner in the Santa Barbara Department of Public Works. They illustrate a truism that planners in big cities know well but that is counterintuitive to many suburban planers and — more importantly — to many of the opponents of growth in center cities. Dayton's numbers attest to the jobs-housing imbalance, in all its Mediterranean glory. (CP&DR doesn’t cover Santa Barbara very often — in part because, being built-out, it doesn’t have a lot of development.)  This data lead to an obvious conclusion: the more residents a downtown accommodates, the less driving there is in the aggregate. That’s doubly true if you believe in a world in which people do not equate self-worth with a steering wheel.  Santa Barbara is acting on this data sensibly: by encouraging development — commercial and residential — in its downtown core. Though Santa Barbara's street grid that is saturated, as Dayton said, a development’s traffic impact depends largely on its location. He expects that developments in the core will generate half the traffic of developments in outlying areas of the city.  This is exactly the kind of logic that eludes many of the opponents of development. In Santa Monica, for instance, voters will soon consider a ballot measure, Measure LV, that would all but freeze residential development. Proponents argue in part that development automatically incurs traffic and they fight like mad against it, ignoring the fact that the people with the most incentive to occupy new units are exactly those who are commuting into Santa Monica. Meanwhile, the westbound Interstate 10 looks like an evacuation route every morning.  Disregard for the jobs-housing imbalance is much the same in Los Angeles, where traffic gridlock is cited as the reason to oppose pretty much everything, especially in sites in West L.A. that would likely house — you guessed it — workers who commute to Santa Monica.  Dayton’s Santa Barbara data is of course no revelation for anyone who has paid any attention to center cities in the past decade. But his way of getting around the NIMBY freakout is. He’s using vehicle miles traveled (VMT) measurements rather than level of service (LOS). That change, which will be blessed statewide with the imminent implementation of SB 743, enables the city to essentially evaluate traffic impacts — and, crucially, CEQA analysis — from potential development in its entire downtown area in one fell-swoop. (The conference's host city, Pasadena, happens to have been the first city in California to implement VMT metrics; see CP&DR coverage .) Dayton said the impacts of any particular downtown development can be performed "on the back of a napkin." That’s because VMT enables the city to account for the non-impact of all those downtown workers who, with closer-in housing, will no longer be gumming up intersections after they spill off Highway 101.  Dayton stressed that Santa Barbara’s plan is new and not yet implemented. But if a place as near-perfect as Santa Barbara can accept that, sometimes, a little development can be a good thing, maybe there’s hope yet for the rest of coastal California.