Vol. 19 No. 05 May 2004

A state appellate court has refused to block the City of San Francisco’s plan to lease former state highway property to a nonprofit agency for development of an affordable housing project.

A First District Court of Appeals, Division Four, panel voted 2-1 to uphold a lower court’s ruling against project opponents, who contended the city plan violated state law that limited the use of the property.

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Mitigation measures taken after the issuance of a mitigated negative declaration do not satisfy the California Environmental Quality Act, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled.

In a case involving a water district’s proposal to cover a small reservoir in the unincorporated Santa Barbara County community of Summerland, the court also ruled that the district should have considered the project’s potentially substantial impact to aesthetics.

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Many years ago, overwhelmed by the sheer size of the numbers involved in modern society, humor columnist Russell Baker suggested that we should replace all numbers greater than 10,000 with the word "lotsa." As in, McDonald’s has sold lotsa hamburgers. Social Security entitlements involve lotsa money. A war requires lotsa missiles. These days, a house in California costs lotsa money. Inevitably, the planning system gets blamed for the mess.

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Proposals to create two new state conservancies — one covering as much as a quarter of the state and one focused on a single Southern California river — are alive in the state Legislature. A proposed Sierra Nevada Conservancy appears to have gained some bipartisan momentum, while a proposed Santa Ana River Conservancy struggles to gain ground. Neither proposal is a sure thing during this budget-constrained legislative session.

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Red flags went up in the environmental community during May 2002 when the Bush administration announced it was forming a task force to "modernize and improve" the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Two years later, release of the task force’s final report suggests that many of the fears voiced by defenders of this landmark federal statute have yet to materialize.

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In a remarkable political turnabout, two land use organizations that vigorously fought one another during the 2000 election in Sonoma County have issued a joint report calling for more intensive city-centered growth to protect agriculture and natural resources.

San Francisco-based Greenbelt Alliance and the Sonoma County Farm Bureau jointly released "Preventing Sprawl: Farmers and Environmentalists Working Together."

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Owners of the San Remo Hotel in San Francisco have lost the latest round in their 11-year litigation over the city’s ordinance restricting the conversion of residential hotels to tourist use.

In the latest decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rule on the hotel owners’ takings claims because the state Supreme Court had already decided the claims.

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An environmental impact report for a water pipeline project near Jackson has been rejected because the water agency in charge did not explain the reason why it concluded that a potential impact was not significant.

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The bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric Company has resulted in a stunning windfall for the state. As part of a bankruptcy settlement approved in April, PG&E agreed to offer conservation easements or title to 140,000 acres of land, most of which lies around the utility company’s hydroelectric system.

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Architects often talk about the need to design with an awareness of context, but few architects have taken the issue as literally as Richard Matteson. The Los Angeles-based architect has designed a building that, from certain angles, not only fits in with the surrounding landscape—in this case, a lush forest in a Los Angeles canyon—but from certain angles is well-nigh invisible.

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