Construction is underway on San Jose's Communications Hill, a 500-acre infill project that supporters are promoting as a large-scale, walkable, urban neighborhood. Early indications are that there is a great demand for the new houses, townhouses and apartments, but the easy access to transit and retail areas that might make the neighborhood truly walkable are lacking thus far.

A decade after the passage of the "revenue neutrality" law, the incorporation of new cities appears to be back as a major planning issue in California. Now, however, there is a somewhat different twist.

The state Supreme Court will hear a case involving a county's ability to regulate a water district's construction of a water treatment plant.

In Brief is CP&DR's monthly digest of land use news stories in the making, or follow ups to stories that we have run in the past.

To get some idea of how much San Francisco Bay has changed during the past two centuries, unfold a map and trace the estuary's amoeboid outline as it squeezes through Carquinez Strait into the Delta's confusion of sloughs and marshes. There, 33 miles inland from the Golden Gate but still bathed in tidewater, lie a pair of features named Grizzly Bay and Grizzly Island.

Generating economic activity at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino has proven to be difficult since the base closed in 1994. But Norton is now the scene of a proposal to replicate a successful airport in Texas that was built during the 1980s solely for industrial users.

Two rulings by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the setting of permissible pollution levels in surface waters offer a mixed review of the issue.

A garbage company can challenge the environmental review of a competitor's proposed trash processing facility because the garbage company was enforcing a public duty of a local government, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled.

The City of Malibu can regulate the use of land owned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to review a Clean Water Act case from California's Central Valley. The case involves the federal government's ability to regulate agricultural activity in wetlands.

Two generations of Americans are likely to influence local planning, development, and economic activity in many ways during the coming 10 to 20 years: the retiring Baby Boom and the soon-to-be-working Echo Boom.

One dim memory I have from sixth grade biology is that of the oxpecker, a small bird that sits on the back of the rhinoceros. Normally a dominating and irascible beast, the rhino tolerates the oxpecker because the bird does something the rhino cannot do for herself: relieve her of all the troublesome insects that worry her neck, back and hindquarters. As most sixth graders know, this relationship is an example of symbiosis, or the cooperation of two organisms to their mutual benefit.

California is on the verge of an unprecedented surge in school construction. State voters' willingness to lower the threshold of approval for local school bonds from two-thirds to 55% has drastically increased the number of bonds issued by districts. If state voters approve the two largest bonds in California history — $12.5 billion in November and $13 billion in March 2004 — school construction would take off.

Flat-rate "franchise fees" that the City of Roseville charges customers of its municipal water, sewer and refuse collections systems are in violation of Proposition 218, the Third District Court of Appeal has ruled.