Google may have revolutionized our understanding of geography, but so far the world's leading internet company hasn't revolutionized the geography of commuting. So as Google contemplates its first major "campus," the City of Mountain View is looking to innovation – the coin of the realm in the Silicon Valley – to help Googlites get to work. Even if it means building a rail system that transports individual commuters around town in little capsules.

For many jurisdictions that are part of California's "Big Four" metropolitan planning organizations, Senate Bill 375 has ushered in new, unprecedented degrees of collaboration. But whereas SB 375 makes a regional planning revolution for many, for the jurisdictions of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, the SCS is business as usual. 

California Senate leader Darrell Steinberg has predicted that the Legislature will pass his post-redevelopment legislation – assuming the state revenues remain healthy.

As the adage goes, they may not be making any more real estate these days. But, for some bargain-hunters, the death of redevelopment may be the next best thing. 

Though most cities maintained full-time redevelopment teams, not all the work was done in-house. That would be hard to do in a $5 billion annual industry, with countless moving parts in hundreds of agencies across the state. 

If you extrapolate from the current annual under-supply of affordable housing in California, California should have produced 5.5 million units of affordable housing during Cathy Creswell's career at the Department of Housing and Community Development. While the actual number is likely to be somewhat less, the point remains that HCD has faced and continues to face a monumental task. For the past year, that task has ultimately fallen on the shoulders of Creswell, as she has led the department as its interim executive director until stepping down in February.

As does every year, 2011 included a wide range of published appeals court cases, some setting major precedents and others tinkering with the arcana of land use law. Here are some highlights from CP&DR's Legal Digest compiled over the course of the year, organized by area of law.

This compilation draws on a presentation given by CP&DR contributor and Sacramento-based land use lawyer Bill Abbott, of Abbott & Kindermann, at the UCLA Land Use Law and Planning Conference earlier this month. 

LOS ANGELES -- For the wind-down of redevelopment to be anything short of a train wreck, successor agencies and oversight boards are going to need a keen understanding of real estate, public policy, economic development, and, of course, accounting. They're also going to need a lot of coffee and patience. But, according to Timothy McOsker, a member of the three-person board serving as successor agency for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, the successful completion of the wind-down process is going to require something more subtle. 

LOS ANGELES -- Yesterday's "California's UrbanScape" conference on redevelopment, presented by UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and UCLA Lewis Center, was kicked off by perhaps the member of the California Legislature most sympathetic to redevelopment--and therefore most remorseful about the current state of affairs. 

Amid confusion and frustration on the part of former redevelopment agencies, the Legislative Analyst's Office released a report today analyzing the wind-down as dictated by Assembly Bill X1 26 and making recommendations for some legislative patches to that law.