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Los Angeles' housing crisis has been building for long enough that just about anyone who rents an apartment here could have told you about it years ago. But it wasn't until last summer that UCLA released a report confirming what many of us already know: as a function of average rents (high) and average incomes (low, especially compared to those in San Francisco and New York) Los Angeles is the least-affordable rental market in the country. Circulating around the blogosphere now is a single graph that illustrates why: This graph comes from a dissertation by UCLA Ph.D. student Greg Morrow, posted on the blog of Prof. Richard Green, of USC. Green showed it to me on Friday at the Urban Land Institute's Urban Marketplace conference. I'd like to say that we had a lively discussion (which we did, on other topics) so much as we shared a moment of mutual speechless bewilderment. The graph mostly speaks for itself: Los Angeles' population is, after 100 or so years of development, just about equal with the city's maximum allowable population. As Henry Grabar puts it in Salon , Los Angeles has "reached capacity." What this means for housing costs is obvious: the difference between those two lines is affordability. It's also opportunity for developers. Constrained supply and ever increasing demand equals  insane housing prices . In a typical industry, supply would never become this constrained. Firms would produce more, or consumers would seek substitutes. Equilibrium would be restored. But this is real estate, and those rules don't apply. Usually "constrained" is used as a passive verb, as if it's something that just happens. But the "hand" here is very much visible. When we think of "capacity," Los Angeles didn't lose 60 percent of its landmass en route from 10 million to 4 million, and it didn't lose 60 percent of its water, power, food, or sewage capacity either (though the first one remains to be seen). Those 6 million men, women, and children were zoned, voted, and legislated off the island. That downward slope tells a fascinating tale for anyone who's not currently struggling to make rent. The greatest irony is that Los Angeles' peak population of 10 million was allowed a time when its population was a fraction of what it was today. Either the city's public officials were thinking big prior to 1960, or they figured that even a number like 4 million was unthinkable, so what difference did a few more million make? What happened, though, was a revolt by homeowners. The 1960s were heady times for the conversion of single-family homes into multifamily dingbat apartments, leading residents to fret about the loss of "neighborhood character." This usually equates with a fear of poor people and/or minorities. They were, at the same time, horrible times for public transit, as the trolly system clanged its last bell. The freeways ran smoothly for a while, but then they filled up, leading to more fears about growth. Los Angeles has always been, a "reluctant metropolis," to borrow CP&DR publisher Bill Fulton's phrase, and the dream of the single-family home has held sway. Worries about the "Manhattanization" have persisted for years, never mind that even at 10 million people, Los Angeles would be about as dense as New York City as a whole, but still nowhere near as dense as Manhattan. So, homeowners pushed through anti-growth legislation, advocated by residents who wanted to keep Los Angeles all to themselves. As Grabar catalogs in his Salon piece, small measures to keep Manhattan out of California included silly, unjustifiable requirements like setbacks, which do nothing but waste land, and parking requirements, which also waste land and jack up developers' costs. On the more monumental scale, these sentiments culminated in 1986's Prop U. Prop U , which is where that top graph bottoms out, was the mother of all slow-growth measures, down-zoning much of of the city's commercial areas. (According to its framers, Prop U itself was crafted not to directly impact housing supply.) It passed by a 2:1 ratio. What you can bet is that the actual sentiments among Los Angeles residents were probably flipped. Except, owners of single-family homes control 80 percent of L.A.'s residential land while representing a far smaller proportion of the population, so do they dominate elections. A 2013 poll by the Pat Brown institute found that "older voters and homeowners are disproportionately represented in mayoral voting." Half-measures and creeping protectionism that had satisfied anti-growth activists during the 1960s and 1970s were no longer enough once they saw the city hitting 3.5 million. (Not coincidentally, the city's public transit system was in a world of hurt at the time, thus favoring lower densities and people who could afford cars and places to park them.) The implications of movements like Prop U were largely invisible for a while � you can't see what you can't build � until they started showing up in astronomical rents. Today, many of Los Angeles' planners are trying to wring as much density out of the city as they possibly can. Developers are too. But, contrary to the stereotype of the marauding capitalist, they know as well as anyone that they build only at the pleasure of city policy and the public officials who can grant variances to it. Los Angeles' planners are also working on ReCode:LA, a comprehensive, and much-needed, overhaul of the city's zoning code. You can bet that they're going to go for more density, especially around the city's new transit nodes. If the effort fails, though, that red line on the graph might one day overtake the black line. People are going to keep coming to L.A. whether the slow-growthers of 1986 like it or not. And we'll really have a crisis on our hands. Reporter's note: This post has been updated to clarify the relationship between Prop U and residential zoning. Prop. U did not directly affect residential zones.

Until the mid-2000s, the South Park neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles had exactly one high-rise tower: the looming, vaguely Stalinist Transamerica Building (now the AT&T Center). It most famously supplied the rooftop where Guns 'n Roses shot the video for "Don't Cry." The area—which occupies the southern portion of downtown Los Angeles, between the Financial District and Interstate 10—otherwise consisted of dilapidated retail, low-rent residential buildings and acres of surface parking lots.  The area was avoided by businesses, developers, and rock stars alike.  Today, the AT&T Center is but the tallest tree in a rapidly growing forest. No fewer than 20 high-rise and medium-rise projects are under construction or in development in the roughly 40 square-block area. At least that many projects are in earlier stages of development.  It is, say planners, the next phase in the resurgence of downtown Los Angeles.  "The last boom was the adaptive reuse boom," said Tanner Blackman, planning deputy to Councilmember Jose Huizar, referring to the renovation of former commercial buildings in downtown's Historic Core that was facilitated by 1999's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance. "The ground-up construction boom on parking lots...it's wonderful to see the spaces in between the communities that have been growing downtown fill in." South Park's projects represent over 3,000 units of mostly rental housing that is expected to be available by 2017. The tallest will be 45 stories. Though they are being developed by a hodgepodge of developers, the loose vision for the area is that of a miniature Vancouver, or a high-end version of Portland's Pearl District.  It is the closest thing to a development bonanza that Los Angeles may ever see.  High-rise developments have faced all manner of opposition elsewhere in the city. In Hollywood, for instance, wary neighborhoods have backed California Environmental Quality Act lawsuits that have stopped developments in their tracks. There, a dispute over the location of an earthquake fault has impeded development around Capitol Records building. Elsewhere the city, community opposition often leads to development agreements and shrunken projects. Not so for South Park. What's extraordinary about South Park is that the neighborhood is, in large part, a blank slate. The vast majority of new development is taking place on the sites of parking lots. Developers can build high and wide without demolishing anything and without raising neighbors' ire. Traffic concerns are alleviated by a Blue Line light rail station. "I can't see any other place in L.A. where you have such a nexus between market opportunity and land availability," said Paul Beesemyer, Southern California Program Director for the California Housing Partnership Corporation, which promotes affordable housing. "It's also important to...remember that it's not just happenstance."  Beesemyer noted that the now-defunct Community Redevelopment Agency established the vision for South Park in collaboration with sports giant AEG, which owns nearby Staples Center.  Vacant land is one reason why South Park has attracted a veritable United Nations of developers. They, or their parent companies, are based in Canada, China, Phoenix, Houston; they are joined by a half-dozen or so local firms. Out-of-town developers are focusing on South Park in part because it gives offers them the chance to put their names on brand-new marquee properties, in a marquee city.  "For developers who want to put their signature stamp, South Park is the place to do it because you can develop from the ground-up," said Jessica Lall, executive director of the South Park Business Improvement District. (By contrast, many renovated buildings in downtown's Historic Core are named for companies that no longer exist.) For all the excitement surrounding South Park, it is still not exactly a Paradise City for developers.  As enticing as South Park's vacant lots may be, the area also suffers from Los Angeles' notoriously convoluted zoning laws, many of which include building restrictions that were imposed in the slow-growth era of the 1970s and 1980s.  Some of the area permits only 3:1 floor-to-area ratios, meaning that many towers can occupy only a fraction of their parcels. Others will engage in the controversial practice of purchasing "air rights" from nearby parcels that are developed at less than 3:1. Even with these tricks, many properties are encumbered by "Q Conditions," which are limitations that the city places on individual parcels. This means, for instance, that some would-be high rises will instead come to life as seven-story wood-frame structures.  "There are a lot of old rules and old regulations that, in a lot of developers' minds, conflict with the vision for South Park," said Lall.  Meanwhile, building restrictions tend to keep heights down. City building code allows for wood-frame buildings up to seven stories. Taller buildings must use different, more expensive techniques to conform to earthquake codes.  "You end up getting a lot of seven-story buildings, unless you're going to go to all the way to 24 stories," said Blackman. "If you're going to go beyond that, you're going to go to the moon." The upside is that development in downtown Los Angeles is governed by floor-to-area ratio, not by units-per-acre. Developers may cram as many units as they see fit within a building's envelope regardless of how tall it is. Some of those seven-story buildings could have nearly as many units as buildings three times taller.  Last year Huizar introduced a motion that would have imposed a moratorium on development in South Park so that the city could revamp its codes and promote more intensive development. That ordinance did not pass, but Blackman said that the effort served its purpose by signaling the council office's endorsement of more and taller buildings. "Almost immediately after that, I think partly because of that message and partly because of economics, that we began to see more tower proposals," said Blackman.   No matter how high the towers soar,  Blackman said South Park's developers must create a street environment that is functional, appealing, and inclusive. "There's a pull between wanting Los Angele to have the fantastic, world-class skyline that it deserves, but the urban planner in me hearkens back to Jane Jacobs and that human-scale," said Blackman. "It all comes down to the details of urban design." South Park's blank slate means that few, if any, existing residents will be displaced. South Park developers speak of gentrification openly and enthusiastically.  "There's a real tight group of investors, developers who want to see the neighborhood gentrify in a way that is going to create a safe, walkable area," said Paul Keller, CEO of Mack Urban, which has projects in South Park.  South Park wants to be the antithesis to downtown's Bunker Hill, a 1980s redevelopment area that has virtually no street life. The South Park BID has extensive plans for sidewalk improvements, public murals, planting of street trees, a "Green Alleys" program, and activation of other public spaces.  If development in South Park sounds maddening, many in the city agree. The Department of City Planning's  Recode:LA initiative  is currently overhauling the city's zoning code in part to promote high-quality development in places like South Park. But it won't be complete until 2017.  South Park's developers see the market opportunity now – and want to get shovels in the ground before the next economic downturn – so they are dealing with the current system.  "You're basically going 100 miles per hour down the freeway on a bus and you're trying to fix the tires," said Lall. "The question is how fast can the city go to take advantage of the opportunities that are here today?" A version of this article was originally published at Next City , with financial support from the Surdna Foundation.

Currently on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change  is an arresting exhibition depicting consequences of, and solutions to, rising sea levels. It includes photographs by artists and journalists of disasters, like Hurricane Katrina and the Japanese tsunami, and responses, like floating schools in Bangladesh, sculpted sea walls in the Netherlands, and the restoration of the Malibu Lagoon, just a few miles away. Sink or Swim celebrates, and issues a charge to engineers, designers, and public officials to acknowledge rising seas and start embracing ways to build resiliency. Sink or Swim was curated by Frances Anderton, known locally for hosting KCRW public radio's DnA: Design & Architecture show. She spoke with CP&DR 's Josh Stephens. We've seen documentaries and read news stories. What's special about portraying climate change and sea level rise in photographs? A lot of climate change is a data story. It's a sad story and that tends to be quite hard to convey in a way that is emotionally stirring. What photography can do is get to the human heart of a story. To what extent can we say that it was because of climate change rather than a freak disaster? I don't think we can say this was because of climate change, and I don't think the show is doing that either.  The projects are situated in the context of vulnerable coastlines, which are associated with problems of rising seas and catastrophic storms, which are, in turn, associated with climate change. But the show is not directly attributing all the situations to climate change. One of the things that was truly fascinating that emerged in researching the show was the kind of…an issue that was kind of equally compelling, which is our propensity to live in vulnerable situations. An astonishing percentage of the world's population now lives on coastlines. We build right up to the water in estuaries, deltas. Five-hundred years ago we saw water as both a precious resource and something to fear. We now build right up against coastlines. So we have built ourselves into vulnerable situations. I believe that's a corollary to the story of climate change. Some images come from highly developed countries with incredibly sophisticated resilience response, and then you have places like Benin that are as poor as they come. What messages are we getting from those contrasts? The show is about architecture and thereby it's about ingenuity. Ingenuity can take the grassroots vernacular form, and it can take the highly resourced, highly developed form of sophisticated infrastructure. I definitely felt it's important to show a kind of range of thinking because the issue of climate change and rising seas is global. If one was to think about, say, Bangladesh one would one would think more astutely about Bangladesh's situation if it was shown that there was some analogy to our own situation, and vice-versa. The global connectivity in this issue that was certainly something we wanted to get across in the exhibition. Some of the photographers are artists, and others are journalists. What's the relationship between journalism and art in these photos? You want people to linger on photos. You want photos to be so compelling that people are drawn to look at them and then think about the stories. I think it's a crossover. There's an incredibly good journalistic photo goes to some higher level of engagement.  I think there's a whole conversation about what constitutes art. In choosing the photographs for this exhibition, which I did in concord with Pat Lanza, I don't think we were asking ourselves, "is this journalism, is this art, what is it?" I think we were looking at images and asking, will this grab the viewer? If people think it's art, that's great. If they purely think its good visual reportage, that's good too. I think one of the big questions is, when does the photograph become too beautiful? We don't ever want to sanitize or render the human story here so visually compelling and lovely that it gets separated from the issue. We're trying to arrive at a place of a really compelling image that, at the same time, dramatizes the issue that we're trying to explain. Many people, especially in coastal California are concerned about these issues. Many people are defiantly not concerned about these issues. How do you feel like this exhibit will be received by both parties? We didn't make this part of a partisan political fight. We didn't even go there. In that sense, we endeavored to make this an exhibit that would appeal to everybody. What I've heard anecdotally is that people expected to find something depressing. One of the reasons people will turn away from the issue is that it feels so big, and "what on earth can I do about it? It's too big to even think about."   What I did hear is that people went to the show and found it inspiring. They felt that what the show largely depicted—and this was our goal—was ingenious thinking and the human capacity to adapt. Hopefully (the show) rises above the issue of climate changes and says, look at what the human community is capable of doing. What has to change about our approach to resiliency?  What really did strike me over and over again, talking to many people in completely different locations is that going forward, is that we cannot build in a post-war Modernist way in that we segregate ourselves from the perils of nature. We channelize our rivers, we wall off our seas. The meaning of resilience is that we have to find a way to build in concert with nature that provides protection while accommodating our rivers, our coasts. The Los Angeles River plan where they want to soften the edges. There's this sensibility that suggests that moving forward we have to incorporate soft and hard defenses. That could be absorbent wetlands coupled with well conceived strengthening structures. That to me was the overriding philosphy I came away with. What roles must architects, engineers, and planners play? It has to be more multidisciplinary. There's been a segregation of these professions for many decades. The Rebuild by Design Projects, which are speculative, what they suggest is a multidisciplinary approach that brings in architects and engineers and landscape designers and members of the community and political representatives and so on and so on. The view is that there has to be a collective and comprehensive approach that takes into account the forces of nature and our capacity to defend against them and create this combination of soft and hard defenses. Reporter's Post-Script Sink or Swim is on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography, in the Los Angeles office district of Century City. The classic edge city, Century City could not function without personal automobiles. Its office towers are accompanied by thousands of parking spaces, and a subway stop is many years away. It is exactly the kind of place that has contributed to greenhouse gas emissions. The day I visited it was 85 degrees. It was January 28. Sink or Swim Annenberg Space for Photography 2000 Avenue of the Stars Los Angeles, CA 90067 Through May 3, 2015. Admission is free. Sink or Swim  will be moving to the Long Beach Aquarium in June. Photo Credit: Arambagh, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2009. After a night of heavy rain, Dhaka experienced widespread flooding around the city. © Jonas Bendiksen. This interview has been edited and condensed. Portions of this interview appear in Josh Stephens' review of Sink or Swim at Nextcity.org.

Perhaps fittingly, one of the state's oldest, stateliest cities will be the first to institute one of the most sophisticated advances in planning tools since the slide rule. Not long ago, the City of Pasadena implemented metrics that measure projects' impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act in terms of vehicle miles traveled rather than level of service.  Pasadena is not only the first city in the state to adopt VMT metrics but may also be the first in the nation.  Pasadena's switch both responds to and precedes the adoption of Senate Bill 743. Passed in 2013 as an amendment to the California Environmental Quality Act, SB 743  will require cities to evaluate traffic impacts according to vehicle miles traveled, not to traditional level-of-service thresholds. Those thresholds take a narrow view of mobility, measuring only the flow of vehicular traffic. This switch means that impacts need not be mitigated only by improving vehicular flow but also by almost any other program or mode – including public transit, cycling, pedestrian improvements, and many other methods.  SB 743 complements 2008's Senate Bill 375, which encourages dense development and alternative transportation in the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Many planners considered CEQA ironically hostile to SB 375's goals in part because of its reliance on VMT. Projects that increased congestion at poorly rated intersections were considered to have significant negative impacts.  The Office of Planning and Research recently released draft guidelines for VMT metrics, with a final draft expected later this year. Pasadena, however, is well ahead of most of its peers.  In 2004, Pasadena adopted a development plan that favors further density in the city's already built-up urban core. In 2008, the city began the process of updating the land use and mobility elements of its general plan. Building on the 2004 development plan, the general plan update all but necessitated the adoption of VMT metrics (allowed, but not necessarily encouraged, under CEQA at the time), so city planners drafted theirs from scratch, years before SB 743 was drafted.  The Pasadena City Council voted to adopt the metrics in November, and they were implemented at the beginning of this year. The metrics will soon be integrated into the entire general plan and its environmental impact report.  "They realized that…if we were going to transform our streets, we needed to measure whether a project is good or bad, figure out how to put the appropriate design into the project," said Pasadena Planning Director Vince Bertoni. "We had to measure traffic differently." The LOS approach, born of 1950s-era management approaches, set up the paradoxical situation in which high-density development was often pushed away from city centers – where multiple transportation options are available – and out to urban fringes, where intersections are less congested even if they end up generating more and longer car trips.  "Over-reliance on level of service as the only indicator of success in our transportation systems is one of the biggest obstacles to infill development," said Jeffery Tumlin, principal and director of strategy at Nelson-Nygaard.  In many ways, Pasadena is the perfect city to usher in California's next chapter in smart growth. It is a metropolis in miniature, with a dense, mixed-use downtown, distinct thoroughfares, and stately suburban-style neighborhoods on its edges. The Old Pasadena commercial district instituted innovative parking reforms decades ago, and the city has embraced the Gold Line light rail.  "We're…essentially down to nothing but infill development," said Fred Dock, Pasadena's director of transportation.  VMT therefore complements the direction in which Pasadena was already headed, even with the inconveniences of LOS metrics.  "We don't widen the roads. We're managing congestion, we're managing traffic volumes, we're managing how signals operate," said Dock. "We're not able to add capacity in the sense that we would be able to mitigate a level-of-service impact."  Dock said that the inclusion of an impact fee will be crucial for the success of mitigation under the VMT metrics. Pasadena has used impact fees for amenities like parks for a decade. Dock said that impact fees can now be used for mitigation measures such as bike infrastructure and pedestrian plans and a host of other projects that can offset would-be VMT increases but would have been nearly meaningless under LOS metrics.  While embrace of VMT is a paradigm shift in the planning field, Pasadena may be an ideal proving ground, because the new metrics do not promise to have a significant impact on the city. They are expected to appear slowly, on a project-by-project basis.  "But what you're going to see is…changes over time in terms of how people behave and move around," Bertoni added. He said that buildings might get taller and a few surface parking lots might disappear.  No matter what guidelines OPR sends to the Natural Resources Agency in the coming months, Pasadena is almost bound to have an easier time adopting VMT metrics than many other California cities will.  "The learning curve in Pasadena isn't going to be nearly as sharp as other places," said Bertoni. "In other places, you're going to have people who come to the table very leery of this and very cautious." Bertoni cited instances when community members, with no apparently connection to professional planning, arrived at meetings proactively asking the city to move off LOS and go to VMT. "And they know what it means!" he said.  Nonetheless, cities around the state are expected to take notice of Pasadena's efforts. Bertoni said that he expects and welcomes inquires. "When you're at the cutting edge like we are, that's also part of your responsibility," said Bertoni.  Other early adopters, including Oakland and San Francisco, are not expected to release their draft metrics for months.  "There's a few cities that have been pioneering and gotten out in front of SB 743, which is helpful to us," said Chris Ganson, senior planner at the Governors Office of Planning and Research. "They're developing these methods that can be examples for other cities."  OPR is currently taking comments and working on the next draft of guidelines. Ganson said that the current  draft has elicited "every flavor of response."  However long it takes Calfornia's other cities to become as comfortable with their VMT metrics as Pasadena is with its, Bertoni maintains that acceptance of VMT is inevitable – not just in California, where it is mandated, but in places outside California too. "This is where we are going not only as a city, as a region, as a country," said Bertoni.  Contacts & Resources:  Vince Bertoni, Planning Director, City of Pasadena, (626) 744-7311  Fred Dock, Transportation Director, City of Pasadena, (626) 744-7311  Chris Ganson, Senior Planner, Office of Planning & Research, (916) 322-2318 Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy, Nelson/Nygaard, (415) 284-1544 Find OPR's SB 743 Guidelines Discussion Draft here .

With their startling colors, jarring juxtaposition of architectural styles and emphasis on simple geometry, Michael Graves' colored-pencil drawings fixed his reputation as the highbrow jokester who built a bridge between academic architecture and pop culture. Bristling with energy and invention, those early drawings, from the 1970s and 1980s, were expertly tossed salads of different historical styles—bulgy pillars from Revolutionary France, round-headed castles from German Romanticism, the rigid axis of the 19th Century Beaux arts—all rendered in acid colors and pushed to comic extremes. The drawings were intentional, calculated slaps in the face: The message, that Modernism was wrong headed and played out, was the war cry of the period.  Graves passed away last week at age 80.  Most disconcerting about Graves's drawings was an underlying sense of archness and preppy superiority, as if the architect himself did not take his own enterprise so seriously. That was anathema to earnest young architectural students bent on saving the world through redesign. Like Erik Satie and Salvador Dali, two other figures who often hid their anxieties behind humor, the element of snark in Graves seems like protective cover. He needed irony as a shield in case someone accused him of unseriousness.  His much-quoted saying, "The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth," was a cunning trap set for puritans and numbskulls.  Graves made a big public impact with his buildings, including the Humana Tower in Louisville, the Portland Building in Portland, and the Team Disney building in Burbank. (In California, other buildings by Graves included the public library in San Juan Capistrano, the Kavli Building for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, the Clos Pegase winery in Napa Valley, and the Aventine complex, including the Hyatt Hotel, in La Jolla.) I disliked those buildings when they were new. They looked like cartoons or over-sized toys, cloying in their cuteness. Graves also built a number of fine projects; my favorite is the library in San Juan Capistrano (1983), organized around a pair of parallel hallways: one path leads through a Mission-inspired façade and arrives at a hacienda style interior courtyard; another pathway, less grand in scale, leads directly into reading rooms.   Graves was also uneven. At times, it seemed he had exhausted the vein of images he had mined from the architecture of late 18th century France, particularly Ledoux, and from German Romanticism. For the Metropolis project (1990), a group of three high-rise office buildings in downtown Los Angeles, Graves proposed a trio of towers covered in meaningless decorative doo-dads. Otherwise conventional, these office buildings looked like big Christmas cookies, encrusted with cake icing, sprinkles and dried fruit.  I was dismayed that he had given little consideration to the context of downtown LA. Fortunately, they were never built.  More satisfying was the big Hyatt Hotel (1990) in La Jolla. There, Graves used the cartoon technique to better advantage, using simplified, over-scaled details to maximize the visibility of the façade from the nearby freeway.  The Hyatt, in fact, is a more polite variant of the notorious Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disneyworld, Florida (1985).  The Disneyworld hotel boasts some features in common with the Hyatt; they include a curving roofline and the use of a stand-alone, castle-like building as an entrance pavilion. (The building type is a borrowing from the German Rundbogenstil.) Unique to the Disneyworld resort, Graves added 47-foot statues of swans and dolphins that were calculated the raise the hackles of humorless, puritanical Modernists. The statues seemed like Graves had gone too far and broken a taboo. The taboo was not that of "taste;" the entire project is a cannonball aimed at conventional good taste. Rather, the real offense here was the unapologetic use of representational imagery in architecture with a capitol "A." In puritanical Modernism, there is no place for the human figure, Le Corbusier's famous Modulor man notwithstanding, let alone animals and plants.  Like Robert Venturi and Robert A.M. Stern before him, Graves was working in an architecture of images rather than abstractions. The giant swan and dolphin may have been outrageous in scale but otherwise fit into the context comfortably.   The giant pyramid form on one of the elevations of the Disneyworld capitalizes on the power of simple geometry. Pyramids, of course, mean ancient Egypt, the mysteries of the Masons, Cleopatra movies starring Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor, the one-eyed pyramid on the dollar bill, and so on. Rather than allude to a symbol through abstraction, Graves imports the symbol itself. Whether we like the Disneyworld project or not – I admire its audacity  – we should recognize that much of its power comes from simple devices (i.e. "Platonic" geometry and figurative imagery) that were commonplace to architecture prior to 1940. One possible conclusion: Representational images are often, if not always, more evocative than abstract forms. Even the current popularity of so-called Mid-Century Modern architecture is based on the fact that these buildings, which were "abstract" when newly built and hence indecipherable to mass culture, have now been transformed by time into something familiar, that is identifiable images and symbols of American culture from another era. If I think Graves is uneven and only occasionally successful as an architect, he also showed a way that some (if not all) qualities of historic architecture could be transferred successfully to Modern architecture. Here's a few: The profile or overall contour of a building is more important than its shape, because the profile, unlike the bulges of a sculptural mass, can be clearly seen from a distance. Round contours are often more suggestive of mass than mass itself.     Simple geometry is the basis for architectural rhetoric. His famous tea kettle combines a triangle and a circle, while the over-cute bird figure on the spout lends an image, however coy or campy, to the whistling sound of boiling water.  Color is admissible in architecture. Given the monochromatic tendency of most new buildings, it may even be advisable. Architecture needs to find a way to include figurative imagery without embarrassment. A combination of abstraction and figuration is possible in a single work of architecture.    Popular culture dislikes pure abstraction. The incommunicative quality of many modern buildings makes it necessary to include figurative signage or logos to humanize otherwise uninviting structures.   So rest in peace, Michael Graves. Your legacy, however mixed, awaits re-appraisal. If you sometimes seemed sarcastic, you also raised genuine questions about the theory and practice of current architecture. In addition, you made some suggestions as to how to work around the dead ends of both a flamboyant avant garde that is hostile to its surroundings and the banal, cost-driven mainstream.  So maybe you were not entirely unserious, after all.

This week brought yet another critique from the right of the California Environmental Quality Act. Unlike most, this one isn't confined to concerns over land use, unnecessary regulation, and high housing cost. Rather, CEQA's ills have grown so vast that, apparently, it now deserves blame for California's low educational attainment, lousy job growth, extreme wealth inequality, and significant domestic out-migration.  Jennifer Hernandez and David Friedman are attorneys with the firm of Holland & Knight, which has been an astute observer of, and enthusiastic participant in, the evolution of CEQA caselaw. (See for example the firm's analysis of CEQA lawsuits over infill projects .) They are the authors of "California's Social Priorities," a new report published by Chapman University's Center for Demographics and Policy, whose director is that well-known free-market critic of regulation, Joel Kotkin. The report (and it is a report, not a study) offers some compelling—dare I say original—claims about California's decline and its misplaced "social priorities."  The body of the report — a full 11 pages, with plenty of pretty graphics – accurately chronicles California's recent problems. Job growth has dropped from 5.6 million from 1970 to 1990 to 2.6 million from 1991 to 2013. The number of Californians without a high school diploma has risen since 1970 (never mind international immigration). Income inequality ranks 45th nationally, down from 25th in 1970. Everyone is moving to Texas. Woe is us. And yet, somehow, among all the laws, regulations, micro-, macro-, and global economic trends that impact on and emanate from our state, the overriding cause of California's malaise is — wait for it — CEQA.  Hernandez and Friedman don't even mention CEQA in the body of the report. But it makes a grand entrance in the first paragraph of the report's conclusion. After carefully documenting the state's ills, the authors boldly say that "there is little doubt that California's high costs and weak economic performance is related to the state's regulatory requirements." They literally just say it. They don't explain it. They don't prove it with anything resembling facts, scholarship, or original research. The report's 20 footnotes include, as far as I can tell, not a single mainstream scholarly study leading them to this idea. For the rest of the conclusion, the only "regulatory requirement" they talk about is CEQA. And the only "evidence" they present between runaway jobs and the evils of CEQA is Tesla's recent decision to locate its new "gigafactory" in Reno, Nevada. While it is undeniable that "CEQA lawsuit risks and other regulatory burdens have emerged as well-publicized major roadblocks to completing even the most popular entertainment or sports projects, long overdue infrastructure improvements, and manufacturing plants," no one at Tesla says that CEQA was the only deal-killer – or even a deal-killer. Meanwhile, the authors don't cite the sweetheart deal that Tesla got from the State of Nevada .  Nevada coughed up the money partly because it was competing with several states other states that were also throwing economic development incentives at Tesla. Would CEQA reform have magically counteracted the $1.56 billion incentives package that Nevada offered?  If Californians end up moving to Reno in order to work for Tesla, they'll join legions of Californians who have already abandoned the state because of the tyranny of CEQA between 1990 and 2010. Indeed, the report implies that 3.8 million autonomous, freedom-loving Americans would have stayed in California were it not for the invisible scourge of CEQA – a fact which is bad for climate change and the environment, they argue, because when people move to other states their carbon footprint doubles.  Californians emit 11.4 metric tons of greenhouse gases per capita per year, or about half what the average American does. So, when people abandon a relatively efficient state, they do the biosphere that much more harm (assuming, of course, that they instantly change their lifestyles upon breaching California's borders). Never mind that, CEQA – along with California's other regulatory requirements, such as the state's tough air pollution laws – is one of the reasons why Californians live more efficiently in the first place.  What's most amazing is that — despite their seeming passion for reform — the authors offer no practical suggestions for how to actually reform California's laws. They offer no plan for funding education or taking on teachers unions (if that's your thing, which is probably is if you're a right-leaning scholar). They offer no prescriptions for tax reform or other business incentives. They don't begin to ask how to solve for inequality. They dare not mention Proposition 13. For that matter, they don't even make any suggestions on how to reform CEQA. Indeed, even Kotkin himself doesn't seem to quite buy the argument that CEQA is the cause of all evil. In his OC Register column plugging the report , he goes on at great length about California's economic and social ills – but even he doesn't mention CEQA. With that said, things are getting better even if CEQA is still a mess. Recent data indicate that the state added a half-million jobs in 2014. That's 30% more than Texas added. This growth really shouldn't surprise anyone, since California's employment patterns have had both downs and ups over the decades. Remember the 5.6 million jobs added from 1970 to 1990? Those were all added under CEQA – which, after all, was passed in 1970. And signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan. Why does all this alleged scholarship seem so tortured? To a great extent, the Kotkin crew's complaint reflects the changing nature of CEQA. No longer can conservatives rail proudly against CEQA for impeding development. That's because many liberals — particularly planners who support infill and the public officials who support SB 375 and SB 743 — are levying many of the same criticisms of CEQA (if for different reasons). Conservatives now have to hate on CEQA in much more vague ways. Nowadays, if an endangered butterfly flaps its wings in Lassen County, a scholar in Irvine has to work harder to find something to bloviate about.

The case began in 2009 when a storm drain in La Jolla failed, causing significant erosion along nearby steep slopes. At the time of the failure, the city had been in the engage in CEQA review of potential improvements to the storm drain. After the failure, the city undertook emergency repairs (the installation of a new storm pipe) under CEQA Guidelines 15269 , the statutory exemption for emergency projects.  Relying on previously prepared biological stuies, the emergency permit required the city's Public Works Department to use hand tools rather than mechanized equipment in order to minimize the disruption to sensitive resources. The emergency permit also required Public Works obtain a permanent permit from the city's Development Services Department within 150 days or else the temporary repairs would have to be repaired.    When Development Services issued the permanent permit in 2010, the city concluded that the additional work being undertaken – implementation of a revegetation plan – was exempt from CEQA under Guidelines 15061(b)(3) because the revegetation plan would improve the environment and did not hold the potential for significant impact. The Notice of Exemption defined the project as including the work done under the emergency permit that was covered by the previous exemption. The community group CREED-21 – the name stands for "Citizens for Responsible Equitable Environmental Development" – appealed the CEQA determination to the San Diego City Council, which denied it. Subsequently the city's hearing officer approved the permanent permit. CREED-21 appealed that decision to the San Diego Planning Commission, which upheld it.  CREED-21 then sued and won in the trial court. San Diego Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Prager bought CREED-21's argument that the baseline to be considered in the CEQA analysis should have been existing conditions prior to the emergency repairs, and he even enjoined the city from moving forward on the revegetation plan.  In his ruling, Prager wrote: : " f the City's logic is accepted, it would undermine the purpose of CEQA, as an applicant who is granted an emergency permit would be able to avoid more stringent scrutiny of its project during the regular permitting process due to the fact that it was previously able to obtain this type of permit." A three-judge panel of the Fourt District Court of Appeal overturned Prager on almost all points, however. In his opinion for the court, Justice Alex McDonald wrote: "Although the court correctly noted environmental review for the storm drain repair work and related revegetation plan began in 2007 when City filed its initial application, we conclude the court misapplied the CEQA statutes and regulations regarding exemptions. … [T[he storm drain repair work completed in 2010 pursuant to the emergency exemption was, in effect, an intervening and superseding event that changed the physical environment without any requirement for CEQA review of that work for a significant effect on the environment." McDonald added: "Because CEQA ‘applies only to ‘discretionary projects proposed to be carried out or approved by public agencies" ‘ ( San Lorenzo, supra , 139 Cal.App.4th at p. 1376) and the revegetation plan was the only ‘project' under CEQA proposed to be carried out at the site after completion of the 2010 emergency work, CEQA applies only to the revegetation plan and not to the work done as part of the 2010 emergency storm drain repair. Therefore, in conducting a preliminary review of the revegetation project under CEQA, City was charged with making a comparison between the existing physical conditions after the 2010 emergency work was completed without the revegetation project and the conditions expected to be produced by the revegetation project." The court also overturned Prager's ruling on CREED-21's standing, saying that the group did not have standing to challenge the city's determination that the emergency repair work was exempt from CEQA. CREED-21 had argued that it had standing even though it did not challenge the emergency permit's CEQA determination in a timely fashion because that exemption had, in essence, been rolled into the project description for the permanent permit. But McDonald rejected that argument: "To the extent City thereafter found its completed storm drain repair work was exempt from CEQA, it was merely confirming its prior emergency exemption determination." The appellate court did affirm the trial court's ruling that a $100 appeal fee was unauthorized, in part because it did not provide the trial court with the relevant ordinance in a timely fashion. The Case: CREED-21 v. City of San Diego , No. D064186, decided January 29, published February 18 The Lawyers: For CREED-21: Cory Briggs, 619-497-0021 For City of San Diego: Deputy City Attorneys Andrea M. Contreras (now with Sunroad Enterprises, acontreras@sunroadenterprises.com ) and Jana Mickova, jwill@sandiego.gov.

A report issued by the Legislative Analyst's Office shows that California's high housing costs are stifling the state's economy and making it difficult to create affordable housing. The report says that the state "probably would have to build as many as 100,000 additional units annually...to seriously mitigate its problems with housing affordability." But housing construction has fallen behind population and job growth, with builders only getting authorization to start 37,000 single-family homes and 49,000 multifamily units statewide last year. The inadequate increase in housing supply leads to rising costs and makes it more difficult for companies to hire and retain qualified employees, the study said. A main issue involves state funding for affordable housing, which has fallen about $1.5 billion per year since 2012 because of depletion of state bond funds and the dismantling of local redevelopment agencies. Couple that with an increase in available jobs in the state, and rent on housing units across the state has skyrocketed. Caltrans Details Options for Extending, Expanding 710 Freeway Los Angeles County Transportation officials are considering multi-billion dollar plans to close the notorious 710 freeway gap and increase capacity along the entire freeway. The freeway, a vital trade arterial connecting the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, abruptly ends in South Pasadena without connecting to the 210 Freeway, four miles to the north of the 710 terminus. This gap has been blamed for causing traffic throughout the Los Angeles freeway grid, especially because of traffic from trucks traveling between the port and the warehouses of the Inland Empire. A draft environmental impact report by Caltrans estimates that a tunnel under South Pasadena — which is preferred by residents, who vehemently oppose the taking of homes for a surface right of way — would cost between $3.1 and $5.6 billion. It would take five years to build. The EIR presents two plans for separating cars and trucks along the 18-mile stretch of freeway. The first plan is an $8-billion freight corridor that includes for elevated truck-only lanes to parallel the 710 along the Los Angeles River. The alternative is a far cheaper option estimated at around $3-4 billion, would add one travel lane in each direction and create a truck bypass around the 405 interchange. "There is no way we can accommodate the traffic without adding capacity. This region handles more than 40% of all port traffic in the United States,"  Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, told the Los Angeles Times .  Garcetti Sets Deadline for Earthquake Retrofitting In his ongoing campaign to ready Los Angeles for a major earthquake, Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced an ambitious deadline for requiring mandatory retrofitting to buildings in Los Angeles for earthquake safety. He wants a law passed by the end of this year, in contrast to San Francisco, which took more than a decade to pass its own retrofitting laws. The plan will require wooden buildings to be retrofitted within five years and concrete buildings within 30 years. To help get the retrofits moving if the law is passed, the City Council could propose low-interest loans or tax breaks to owners, or it could expand a program that would pay back private loans through a temporary, voluntary increase in property taxes. Orange County Tollway Rejected by Water Board A $200 million tollway project in Orange County suffered a defeat at the hands of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, which rejected a permit for an extension that it claims is actually a part of a larger expansion plan that environmentalists have condemned. The plan, called the Tesoro Extension, would have allowed the Transportation Corridor Agencies to add 5.5 miles to the Foothill tollway from Rancho Santa Margarita to east of San Juan Capistrano. Environmentalists and other tollway opponents believe that the Tesoro proposal is the first step in a plan to resurrect the Foothill project, a controversial plan proposed several years ago that would have built Foothill extensions through the popular San Onofre State Beach Park in San Diego county. TCA officials argue that the Tesoro Extension is a stand-alone project.  Los Angeles Supes to Vote on General Plan Update The  agenda  for the March 24 meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors indicates that the supervisors may vote to adopt the long-planned County General Plan Update. The General Plan Framework was first presented to the board in February 2014 and has been discussed and revised since then. The last general plan was adopted in 1980. The draft update includes the following provisions: Land Use Element, Mobility Element, Air Quality Element, Conservation and Natural Resources Element, Parks and Recreation Element, Noise Element, Safety Element, Public Services and Facilities Element, Economic Development Element, implementation programs and figures and maps Rezoning of 4,386 parcels for consistency between the Land Use Policy Map and Zoning Map Amendments to the Industrial Zones in County Code, Title 22 to implement the industrial preservation policies of the General Plan Update; also includes the removal of the M-4 Zone and Arts and Crafts Zone for consistency purposes Amendments to the Mixed Use Zone and removal of the Transit Oriented Districts Ordinance in Title 22 to implement the Transit Oriented District strategy and the Land Use Legend of the General Plan and amendments to address applications that are submitted before the General Plan Update becomes effective Creation of new zones, and corresponding modifications for consistency in Title 22 to implement the Land Use Legend of the General Plan Update which are: Industrial Preservation Combining Zone (IP), High Density Multiple Residence Zone (R-5) and Major Commercial Zone (C-MJ) SLO Passes Anti-Odor Ordinance, Aimed at Pot A new ordinance in San Luis Obispo will regulate  offensive odors that waft across property lines. Following a vote of 3-2 by the City Council, staff next month will be able to issue fines of $100, $200, and $500 respectively for increasing numbers of violations within 12 months of a first offense. The new ordinance can be used against any type of odor deemed "offensive to individuals of normal sensitivity," but it originally came about because of complaints about the smell of marijuana being cultivated outdoors. The two council dissenters called the ordinance too vague and subjective, saying that complaints could come about through activities like barbecuing, nothing illegal in a residential neighborhood. San Bernardino Continues to Struggle Financially Reuters reports that, since declaring bankruptcy in 2012, the City of San Bernardino has defaulted on $10 million in pension payments and has not negotiated with its bondholders since September. The city declared last year that it intends to pay public pension fund Calpers in full to the tune of $300 billion. However, it has paid nothing to its bondholders for almost three years. In bankruptcies in cities like Stockton and Detroit, bondholders had to take big cuts to their debt while pensioners emerged relatively unscathed, showing that in bankruptcy cases retirees typically get better treatment than the bondholders do. However, a bankruptcy attorney said that the city's treatment of bondholders may come back to haunt it. "Down the road, the city may find that the capital market it unavailable to it or that it will be penalized at a very high rate when it seeks to borrow," said Michael Sweet of Fox Rothschild in San Francisco. Bill Seeks to Help Cities Collect TOT's from Short-Term Rentals The Sacramento Bee reports that State Senator Mike McGuire plans to introduce a bill that make it easier to collect transient occupancy taxes from homeowners who rent out rooms on online house-sharing services like Airbnb. The bill would force online home-sharing companies to make regular reports to cities about which homes in their area are renting rooms, the costs of the rentals, and the lengths of stay. While McGuire says that hosts on sites like Airbnb are supposed to pay transient occupancy taxes, many do not, creating "a severe under-registration of hosts and underpayment" of taxes, according to a fact sheet about the bill. Additionally, some tenants may unknowingly be subletting their apartments to people through the online services, thus transferring the liability to an unwitting landlord. The cities of San francisco, Auburn, and San Jose have already passed their own ordinances in the past year to regulate Airbnb. Counties Sue Federal Government for Access to National Forest A coalition of two counties and several individuals sued the federal government for blocking motorized travel to Plumas National Forest without an environmental review. Represented by the libertarian  Pacific Legal Foundation , the coalition says that the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act by suddenly banning motorized vehicle use by issuing an Environmental Impact Statement that excluded thousands of trails that had always been open to the public. The coalition says that the closures should have gone through further environmental review under NEPA. S. Calif. Cities Fight for Redevelopment Funds The cities of Long Beach and Tustin are taking different approaches in trying to get money back from their now-defunct redevelopment agencies. Long Beach got the approval of the state to sell its properties belonging to its former Redevelopment Agency, thus kicking into gear sales of 27 pieces of land likely to be sold to adjacent property owners or for fair market value. Tustin , on the other hand, has sued California's Department of Finance in an attempt to get back $42 million that it says it lost when the state dissolved its redevelopment agency. The state claims that Tustin isn't entitled to the money as it didn't formally loan it to its RDA and instead covered expenses and signed agreements to pay them back. However, Tustin points to other cases that have rejected the state's position, including a decision in favor of Watsonville which the state is currently appealing. AEG Pulls Plug on Downtown L.A. Farmers Field  Farmers Field football stadium, proposed on the site of the Los Angeles Convention Center by sports and entertainment giant AEG, is officially defunct. The company will not seek an extension to its development deal with the city, and it is no longer in talks with the NFL. Proposed in 2010, Farmers Field had been the frontrunner among all L.A.-area stadium proposals. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti reportedly still supports the proposal, but AEG has indicated that it is turning its attention to other projects.  Banning Ranch Landowner, Coastal Commission Reach Agreement   Ending a long-running conflict between the main landowner of the Banning Ranch, a parcel of land near Newport Beach, and the California Coastal Commission reached a settlement wherein the ranch will end vegetation removal and oil-well operations condemned by the agency. The ranch had been removing native plants from its property without permission from the Coastal Commission, according to a report by the commission. It also drilled 17 oil wells without Coastal permission, which the commission disputed because of the 1976 Coastal Act that made permits a required step for coastal drilling. The ranch had contended that the South Coast Conservation Commission had allowed oil companies to drill a certain number of wells without a permit in 1973, thus exempting them from the 1976 act. The settlement ended the debate, though the ranch's owner did not admit fault.

A couple of weeks ago, CP&DR reported on two land use measures on local ballots in California related to oil drilling – one in Hermosa Beach that would have allowed it, which failed, and one in La Habra Heights that would have restricted it, which also failed. We dutifully recorded it  as a split decision, but I think the biggest news isn't how these ballot measures turned out. The biggest news is that oil drilling is back on the ballot in California at all. The Santa Barbara oil spill was the event that birthed the modern environmental movement. But it's been 30 years since we've seen much ballot activity related to oil.  Now that the fracking boom has hit California, local anti-oil activists are increasingly pushing to get fracking bans passed – and place broader oil-related measures on local ballots. And it's clear that the oil industry is willing to spend enormous sums of money to try to influence these local elections. The oil industry spent $400,000 on the La Habra Heights measure in an election that drew 1,800 voters. Last fall, the oil industry spent $7 million to successfully defeat a fracking ban in Santa Barbara County. (Bans in San Benito and Mendocino Counties passed .) In Hermosa Beach, pro-oil groups spent 10 times as much as anti-oil groups, even though the anti-oil side won.  It's sometimes easy to forget that much of California's early wealth was based on oil. The state was the No. 1 oil-producing state in the nation, off and on, between 1900 and 1930. The state pumped 30% of the nation's oil in the 1920, setting up a speculation boom documented entertainingly in The Great Los Angeles Oil Swindle , written by San Francisco State historian Julies Tygiel. Los Angeles in particular was dotted with oil wells throughout the entire first half of the 20th Century. California oil fortunes have served as the basis for any number of books and movies; the Doheny oil fortune was fictionalized, for example, in both Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep (Chandler worked in the oil industry during the "oil swindle" days depicted by Tygiel) and Paul Thomas Anderson's movie There Will Be Blood .  Offshore oil production in the Santa Barbara Channel didn't begin until the 1950s, and only 15 years later the Santa Barbara oil spill triggered the modern environmental movement. No single event was more instrumental in the stimulating passage of CEQA.   And it wasn't long before CEQA began to affect oil production in California. One of the earliest and most important CEQA cases – cited in an appellate ruling I read today – was N o Oil Inc v. City of Los Angeles , 13 Cal.3d 68 , decided in 1974. In a California Supreme Court ruling written by legendary Justice Matthew Tobriner, the No Oil case established two important principles under CEQA: First, that a lead agency must make a determination under CEQA about a project's environmental impact before the agency can approve the project. No Oil 's ruling in this regard was invoked as recently as February, when the Third District Court of Appeal ruled that the City of Sacramento did not violate this rule in approving a new downtown basketball arena.  And second, it lowered the bar for when an environmental impact report should be prepared – specifically, it established that an EIR should be prepared when there is "some substantial evidence that the project may have a significant effect". The court rejected the trial court's conclusion that an EIR should be prepared only when "there is a reasonable possibility that the project will have a momentous or important effect of a permanent or long enduring nature". No Oil also helped launch the careers of a number of important environmental lawyers in California who worked on the case, including Mary Nichols (currently the chair of the Air Resources Board), Carlyle Hall, and Jan Chatten (now Jan Chatten-Brown). On the other side of the case, representing Occidential Petroleum, the team included Bela Lugosi Jr.  California oil protection peaked in 1983 and declined steadily until last year, when it was up for the first time in 30 years. Subsequently public support for oil drilling in the state waned and environmental laws made it more expensive. Drilling continued apace in Kern County and, while tough regulation made it more expensive to build new oil facilities, the oil companies nevertheless found it worthwhile to expand and update the rigs and support facilities in the Santa Barbara Channel. This increased interest in Channel drilling – and the increased shipment of oil into California from other locations -- led to the next set of land-use ballot measures dealing with oil. In the 1980s, several coastal jurisdictions passed initiatives that banned the construction of onshore oil facilities, including San Francisco and Morro Bay. These measures were widely reported as part of the boom in ballot-box zoning at the time – I'd provide a link to CP&DR 's coverage back then but none of it is online – and the courts blocked attempts by local jurisdictions to ban drilling in the neighboring waters. But the oil ballot measures died after about 1986 – until last year. The price of oil has dropped from $100 to $40 since last summer, so it's not clear whether California's latest oil boom will continue much longer. But given the fact that – because of fracking and other reasons – the United States is again the world's leading energy producer, it's likely that oil companies will continue to ramp up drilling in California. And given the fact that the state's policies are strongly anti-fossil fuel – witness both the push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the use of alternative energy -- it's likely that localities around the state will continue to resist.

The Strategic Growth Council has  given the green light  to 54 potential projects to prepare full applications for funding under the newly created Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program. The 54 projects are seeking $301 million in funding -- about 2 1/2 times as much as the $120 million program has to dole out. Final applications must be completed by April 20 and SGC plans to select the winners by July. Only the 54 applicants on the finalists' list will be given access to the online application. Of the 54 applications going forward, 44 (worth $235 million) have affordable housing setasides and 37 (worth $229 million) are located in disadvantaged Census tracts -- the definition of which was the subject of considerable debate last year. The finalists represent a diverse array of communities in 22 counties. Geographically, the biggest winner in the finalists' round was the Bay Area, which got the green light to apply for about 40% of the statewide pie (21 of 54 projects and $138 million out of $301 million). By contrast, the SCAG (Southern California Association of Governments) region, with more than twice the population as the Bay Area, got the green light to apply for about 20% of the pie (12 projects and $52 million). On the face of it, the county-level winner was Los Angeles County, with 10 projects worth $38 million moving forward. (Outlying SCAG counties did poorly in comparison.) But maybe the biggest county-level winner was Alameda County. With 15% of L.A. County's population, Alameda got the green light for eight projects worth $42 million. The biggest winner among developers was Meta Housing  of Los Angeles, which got the green light to move forward with eight projects worth $22 million -- four in L.A., three in the Bay Area, and one in Yolo County. No other developer got the green light for more than two projects. BRIDGE Housing, SANDAG, and Chelsea each got the green light on two applications, with a total value of between $13 million and $15 million in each case. There is a $15 million limit on awards to individual developers. SGC  received 147 concept proposals by last month's deadline. Those proposals requested a total of $760 million in funding. Fifty-four of those projects have been selected to submit full proposals.  They are collectively requesting $301 million, meaning that rough 40 percent of projects stand to be funded once grants are awarded.  Many of these projects are competing for subsets of funds set aside for disadvantaged communities and for affordable housing. The AHSC application process was discussed at a series of workshops in February. See CP&DR coverage .

The Third District Court of Appeal has ruled that two "re-entry agreements" between Sonoma County and its former redevelopment agency are valid under the redevelopment wind-down law. The case marks the second time this year that the Third District has upheld re-entry agreements, suggesting that local governments are beginning to get the upper hand against the state Department of Finance in post-redevelopment litigation. The case involves the county's desire to retain $14 million in tax-increment funds for two projects: street and sidewalk upgrades on Highway 12 north of Sonoma, and a mixed-use project on the site of an abandoned shopping center in the Roseland neighborhood of Santa Rosa.  As with the other recent case from Emeryville , the case turned in part on whether AB 1484, a 2012 law which eliminated re-entry agreements, should somehow be used to invalidate reentry agreements made before the law took effect. In addition, DOF made a series of narrow legal arguments that the Third District did not buy. Acting as successor agency, Sonoma County received permission in March 2012 from its oversight board to move forward with the two projects via "re-entry" agreements. The county then included the two projects in the successor agency's Recognized Obligation Payment Schedule, or ROPS, for the periods of March-June 2012, July-December 2012, and January-June 2013. After DOF disallowed the two projects for the third time, Sonoma County sued. In disallowing the two projects from the January-June 2013 ROPS, DOF argued that, although oversights could approve a reentry agreement, a particular interpretation of the AB 1x 26 – referred to by the appellate court as the "Great Dissolution" law – did not permit reentry agreements between a successor agency and its equivalent former redevelopment agency.  On appeal, DOF argued that the express prohibition on reentry agreements contained in AB 1484 (which took effect in June 2012) suggested that such agreements were contrary to the legislative intent of AB 1x 26 (which took effect in February 2012) and therefore the agreements should be invalidated.  Writing for the Third District panel, Justice M. Kathleen Butz wrote: "This type of ‘legislative spirit' interpretation is not well taken." She added: "The 2011 version of (Health & Safety Code) sections 34178, subdivision (a) and 34180, subdivision (h) …  unambiguously authorized a successor agency to request approval of a reentry agreement, and an oversight board to grant the request. Under the well-established interpretive principle just cited, this express grant of authority cannot simply be negated through resort to the spirit of the Great Dissolution law."  The Third District also rejected a series of narrower issues, including: -- DOF's argument that the oversight board could not approve Sonoma County actions that were not authorized for oversight boards. -- The fact that Health & Safety Code Section 34171 as amended by AB 1x 26 did not include reentry agreements in the definition of enforceable obligations or that Sections 34178 and 34180 did not include language saying that they be used "notwithstanding" the language in 34171. One deals with oversight boards; the others with successor agencies. -- As in the Emeryville case, DOF's argument that AB 1484 should be applied retroactively. In concurring and dissenting opinion, Justice Louis Mauro made a technical distinction about the nature of the obligations upheld in both cases. He wrote: "To the extent the majority opinion in this case and the opinion in City of Emeryville suggest that reentered agreements must be continuing obligations rather than new obligations, I disagree. The reentered agreements in this case are new obligations because the original agreements between the redevelopment agency and the County of Sonoma were invalidated by law." The Case:  County of Sonoma v. Cohen , No. C075120 The Lawyers: For State of California (Michael Cohen, DOF Director), defendant-appellant: Deputy Attorneys General Mark Beckington  (Mark.Beckington@doj.ca.gov) and George Waters (Waters@doj.ca.gov) For County of Sonoma, plaintiff-respondent:  Juliet E. Cox, Goldfarb & Lipman (cox@goldfarblipman.com) and Steven S. Shupe, Deputy County Counsel (sshupe@sonoma-county.org)

The California Supreme Court has accepted Cleveland National Forest Association v. SANDAG , the controversial case that raises the question of whether a governor's executive order must be taken into consideration in CEQA analysis. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court let stand an appellate court ruling striking down San Diego County's climate action plan, meaning the county will now have to set strict greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for itself as it had promised to do in its General Plan. In taking the SANDAG case, the Supreme Court limited its review to that one narrow -- but extremely important and controversial -- issue: Whether the environmental impact report for SANDAG's regional transportation plan must include an analysis of consistency with Executive Order S-3-05, which calls for an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In a split ruling in November  here=">here"> , the Fourth District Court of Appeal concluded that t he executive order must be taken into consideration in the EIR.  SANDAG has argued that it complied with state law because the RTP (which also serves as the sustainable communities strategy under SB 375) met the 2020 GHG emissions reduction target contained in AB 32, the state's climate change law, even though the RTP showed an increase in emissions after that. The environmentalist plaintiffs in the case argued that Schwarzenegger's executive order constitutes the state's climate change policy and therefore must be taken into consideration in the EIR. By a 2-1 vote, the Fourth District agreed with the environmentalists.  The Fourth District also covered a number of other issues , but the Supreme Court did not include them in its review. In a commentary, CP&DR  Publisher Bill Fulton has argued that the Fourth District's ruling gives the governor too much power by permitting him to create state policy unilaterally through executive orders.