After several years of struggling along with a minimal website, Solimar Research Group – sister organization to California Planning & Development Report -- has just launched a handsome new site (http://www.solimar.org) that is far more comprehensive and attractive than the old one.

The new site has a lot of features, including more detailed information about the products and services Solimar offers and even a little bit of description about the historic building where our office is located. But to me, the most important part of the new website is the "Virtual Library" – a collection of 45 studies and reports produced by Solimar and its research partners over the past eight years.

It's the first time that virtually all Solimar reports have been available online. These studies range over some pretty wide territory – from a nationwide examination of who's sprawling to the economic development strategy for a tiny California city. Much of the material, obviously, covers California in general and Southern California in particular, but Solimar has spent a lot of time looking at trends in Arizona and elsewhere in the intermountain West; and in selected other metro areas around the country, including Orlando, Seattle, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Taken together, I like to think that this body of work represents a pretty good guide to the changing zeitgeist of the land use policy world over the last decade – from concern about sprawl and urban growth boundaries of the late ‘90s to the infill orientation of the 21st Century.

The turning point came in 2001, when we at Solimar produced Who Sprawls Most? and played a major role in producing Sprawl Hits The Wall. Who Sprawls Most? was written by Rolf Pendall of Cornell, Alicia Harrison, Mai Nguyen, and me, and was released by the Brookings Institution. Our report documented a counterintuitive trend – that the rest of the country was consuming land more rapidly and less efficiently than the West was. Sprawl Hits The Wall, which was released jointly by Brookings and the University of Southern California, documented the fact that metropolitan Los Angeles was running out of places to sprawl onto.

Before these two reports came out, nobody believed that California and the West were running out of developable urban land. After they came out, Solimar's work – both research and consulting – has almost always been based on this assumption.

In conjunction with a variety of partners in Los Angeles, Solimar developed the "California Infill Estimation Tool," a GIS-based method of determining infill housing potential in a built-up area. This led, in turn, to a pathbreaking analysis of infill opportunities along the Exposition Line in Los Angeles, which is now under construction.

Solimar also worked on a variety of studies and reports about the future of land-poor areas in Phoenix – most notably "Which Way Scottsdale," which documented the dwindling land supply in the city and was at least partly responsible for Scottsdale ditching a Wal-Mart on an old mall site and putting a university research center there instead.

Of course, Solimar has continued to look at growth patterns in greenfield locations, including the San Joaquin Valley  and our home turf of Ventura County, California. But even these studies have focused on the question of a limited land supply and the kinds of choices that local governments will have to make in order to maintain farmland and open space while still accommodating additional development.

The chronological progression of the 45 reports also yields a steady movement away from broadbrush trend analysis toward a more specific approach focused on providing assistance and detailed recommendations on how to improve land-use policy systems so they are more effective.

This movement toward diagnosis and recommendation really began with Solimar's unprecedented and comprehensive analysis of the transferable development rights programs in the Lake Tahoe area, which was released in 2003. Since that time, Solimar has worked on more client projects for local and regional agencies, yielding such varied work products as a guidebook for mixed-use development in the South Bay of Los Angeles and an assessment of a proposed TDR program in metropolitan Bozeman, Montana.

It's hard to say where Solimar's work will go in the future. To a surprising degree, the 45 reports reminds me that we at Solimar have always been somewhat opportunistic, grabbing what comes our way, whether it's pointy-headed research or down-and-dirty consulting. But I can promise you one thing: Wherever the land use zeitgeist is going, that's where you'll find us.

- Bill Fulton