Innovations

When an untimely freeze destroyed the Tulare County citrus crop two years ago, costing many people their farm labor jobs, the City of Lindsay responded with a program modeled on the Works Project Administration. The city built a number of projects, the most novel of which was the conversion of an empty fruit-packing plant into a 172,000-square-foot sports and fitness complex. » read more | add to cart

Just as a well-aimed bowling ball can be expected to knock down all ten pins and boost a bowler to a top score, many planners believe that a well-written zoning ordinance can steer the housing market toward socially beneficial ends. There is a difference between a bowling lane, however, and a downtown area. » read more | add to cart

Parking is the demon of urban design. Like a gargoyle on a tower thumbing its nose at passers-by below, California’s inflexible parking requirements seem to mock developers, housing advocates and city officials alike.

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Parking is the demon of urban design. Like a gargoyle on a tower thumbing its nose at passers-by below, California’s inflexible parking requirements seem to mock developers, housing advocates and city officials alike.

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It’s a little hard to make out the houses in aerial photographs of the 1997 flood in south Yuba County. Only after a minute or two do we realize that we are not looking at floating detritus, but at the rooftops of homes nearly submerged in the brown water.

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“Thank God for hospitals,” I said to myself a few weeks ago while speeding to the local emergency room, doubled over in the back of an ambulance. Only after the painkillers had deadened a hitherto-undetected kidney stone could I begin to think about hospitals from an urban-design standpoint.

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Making a public park out of a Superfund site is a rarity. If Maywood, a city in the old industrial belt of South Los Angeles County, ultimately succeeds in creating a 7.3-acre park along the Los Angeles River, the result would be inspirational.

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Developer Jeff Dritley acknowledges he did not set out to run a municipal airport when he first started talking to the City of Hawthorne two years ago.
Dritley, who is managing director of Kearny Real Estate Company, is a developer with industrial and office projects on his resume, not necessarily the bona fides for running a general aviation airport for profit. Yet Dritley had a very good reason for agreeing to assume management responsibilities for the airport late last year.

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I recently had an unsettling experience in a parking lot in Lompoc. I was standing in the middle of an enormous asphalt parking lot, surrounded by large buildings emblazoned with the logos of national retail chains, and, for a split second, I didn't know where I was.

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Here is a list of one-liners about suburbia, inspired by comedian Jeff Foxworthy, originator of the popular “you-know-you're-a-redneck-when” jokes.

You know you're in suburbia when: The only ethnic restaurants you can find are Italian and Chinese. The churches are all bunched together in a “religious-use” district. The synagogues have no Hebrew lettering on them, only English transliterations that make sense in no language whatsoever...

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