Playa Vista development in Los Angeles gets put on hold again, Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge tells city and UC to play nice, a San Luis Obispo landowner sues after winning approval to develop, State Auditor keeps busy with both good marks and ultimatums, and Glendale approves two residential towers downtown.

Only weeks after one round of relatively noncontroversial updates to the California Environmental Quality Act Guidelines officially took effect, the Governor's Office of Planning and Research has been charged with a far more ambitious task: amending the Guidelines to account for global warming.

Morris Newman's June Deals column, "Disney Spins Negative Fantasia About Housing," is off the mark, citing misinformation and wrongly taking Disney to task on Anaheim housing issues. As the former director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, and now as President and CEO of the Orange County Business Council (OCBC), I appreciate the opportunity to correct the record.

The smart growth crowd has weighed in on global warming, suggesting that more compact development patterns could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10%. Why? Because there's significant evidence that compact development patterns reduce vehicle miles traveled; and without the introduction of cleaner-burning fuels, the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles is to reduce driving.

But this is not likely to happen without more tough regulation that links emissions with land use.

It's undeniable: California is in the worst housing bust since the early 1990s. Sales have dropped by a third compared with last year. Prices are stable for now, but nobody knows what will happen once all those bank repos hit the market. And it's pretty clear that developers all over the state are sitting on their entitlements. Nobody's building anything unless they absolutely have to.

Seattle-based planner, architect and journalist Mark Hinshaw identifies a back-to-the-urban-core trend, in which people who have rejected suburban uniformity are choosing to live instead in dense, diverse urban environments. He explains his findings and theories in an interview with CP&DR.

A whole new set of stormwater regulations is about to wash over cities and counties, especially in Southern California. At first blush, these new regulations may seem most onerous on new development, which will probably have to meet very demanding onsite detention and water quality standards. But it might also mean retrofitting older urban neighborhoods – and using existing parks and other open spaces, including cemeteries, to help water quality in those neighborhoods.

The eminent domain legislation sponsored by the League of California Cities and the California Redevelopment Association (CRA) died on the floor of the Assembly this week when Republicans voted against the measure.

Although the sponsors of ACA 8 and its author, Assemblyman Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate), made a late change to add protections for houses of worship, Republicans refused to budge. Because the measure was a constitutional amendment, it needed a two-thirds vote in the Legislature (meaning some GOP members in both houses) before going on the ballot next year.

With lawsuits, referendums and an economic slowdown, it's been a rough few weeks for large-scale development projects. Some updates:

The 14,000-housing-unit Placer Vineyards project has been hit with at least three lawsuits. Sutter County, environmental groups and a citizens group filed the court actions over various impacts of the proposed 5,000-acre project in unincorporated Placer County, just across the line from Sacramento County. Litigation was anticipated, although Sutter County's lawsuit over traffic came as a bit of a surprise.

When people think of downtowns, they often think of huge cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. But anybody familiar with California knows that the big city downtowns are the exceptions. By and large, California is a state of mid-sized cities, and some of the most delightful urban places are the smaller downtowns. Often in older cities, these districts are manageable, pleasant and, very often these days, in the midst of a strong renaissance.

Prior to visiting a series of planned communities in and near Southern California's San Fernando Valley, I envisioned them as they were depicted in Greg Hise's book, Magnetic Los Angeles — suburban enclaves dotted with single-family homes, cars lining the wide curvilinear streets, children walking hurriedly to school. I almost expected my vision to blur slightly and force my surroundings to take on hues of white and black, matching the old photographs which told the story of the Valley's birth to a number of postwar self-contained suburban communities.

To succeed in the 21st Century, do cities really have to be cool, as Richard Florida argues? Or do they have to be uncool, as Joel Kotkin insists? Maybe they have to be both.

A few years ago, a little-known academic named Richard Florida turned the economic development world upside down by publishing a book called The Rise of the Creative Class. In a nutshell, Florida's argument was that to be successful today, cities have to be cool.