Concluding that Fontana has dodged its affordable housing obligations since 1987, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has blocked the Fontana Redevelopment Agency from issuing $40 million in tax allocation bonds because the agency has exceeded its debt limit. The court also declined to "validate" a settlement between Fontana and the state Department of Housing and Community Development concerning a $67 million shortfall in affordable housing funds, and the court makes clear that Fontana has been avoiding is affordable housing obligations since 1987.

San Bernardino County has agreed to deal with greenhouse gas reduction in its general plan as part of a settlement agreement in a high-profile lawsuit filed by the state attorney general's office.

In passing the state budget on Tuesday, the Legislature agreed to begin resolving issues associated with the California Environmental Quality Act and global warming.

Almost 30% of Californians name air pollution as the state's biggest environmental problem — far more than any other — and another 10% say the biggest environmental problem is global warming, which is related to air pollution. Furthermore, a significant plurality say the state government should do something about it, which suggests that there might be political tolerance for air pollution regulation

So I've finally had it with Joel Kotkin.

Joel Kotkin is, of course, the Los Angeles pundit who loves to be hated by planners. Last week in the Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section. Kotkin flung around a lot of very selective facts and kinda-truths in order to make the argument that Los Angeles is rushing thoughtlessly and without public debate into "Manhattanization". This article is the latest piece of evidence suggesting that Kotkin's arguments are getting old and tired.

The Salton Sea sits likes a time bomb in the desert, serving up a brew of bad smells, turgid waters and the potential to increase air pollution in an area where thousands of homes are planned. But under a proposal making its way through the Legislature, some of the sea's lurking hazards may be stopped. Instead, the Salton Sea may be shrunk to a third of its current 240,000 acres and revived as a recreational lake for sport fish and migrating birds. All it will take is billions of dollars and at least 75 years of maintenance.

Even Orange County is going urban.

The latest evidence is Lennar's "Central Park West" project – almost 1,400 condominiums, plus a little retail and office space, on a 43-acre site just off the Jamboree offramp of the 405 Freeway in Irvine. I visited the construction site on Monday (8/13) as part of an event sponsored by the Orange County chapter of the Building Industry Association.

The California Environmental Quality Act has been blamed for holding up affordable housing, economic development, urban revitalization and public works projects. This year, however, marks the first time that CEQA has ever held up the state budget.

So not everybody thinks downtown Long Beach is a better place than downtown L.A. But at least everybody agrees Fresno has the worst big-city downtown in California.

We stirred things up recently when we ranked California's big-city downtowns. People in Long Beach loved us, while advocates of the new urban scene in L.A. were not happy. "How could anyone be so ignorant as to rank downtown Long Beach, which is like a northern extension of suburban Orange County, ahead of the downtown in the country's second largest city?"

Mathematicians often take delight in Cat's Cradle, the age-old game of making string figures on one's fingers. In the most familiar form of this game, one person starts out with a simple rectangle of yarn or string, and then makes a simple figure by looping different parts of the yarn around his or her fingers. This figure is then passed to the fingers of a second player, who introduces another layer of complexity into the figure before passing the increasingly complex string figure to a third player. And so on, until the figure becomes so complex that it becomes impossible to go further, at least with a two-foot length of yarn.

OK, I'm totally obsessed with www.walkscore.com.

This is one of those Google map manipulations – created by three Seattle residents – that allows you to plug in any address and get a walkability score of that location somewhere between 0 and 100. (It also shows you a map of all the businesses and services in close proximity to your address.)

One city's municipal services agreement with an Indian tribe has survived a legal challenge while another city's agreement has been struck down by an appellate court.

Two recent court decisions have helped clear the way for the largest water transfer ever contemplated in the United States: 300,000 acre-feet of water from the Imperial Irrigation District to San Diego, Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley.