California voters approved $20 billion worth of bonds for school construction and rehabilitation in March. In addition to the $12.3 billion for schools contained in Proposition 55, voters in 52 school districts approved $7.9 billion worth of local school bonds. Since 1998, state voters have approved three school bonds worth a combined $34 billion for everything from kindergarten classrooms to university research facilities.

The philosopher Heraclitus once remarked that a wise man and a fool may look at the same tree and see different things. The observation also pertains to a reasonable person and a developer. A reasonable person, for example, would look at the Union-Pacific rail yard in downtown Sacramento and see 240 acres of dirt laced with a century of poisonous industrial byproducts. A developer looks at the same thing and sees a pedestrian-oriented urban district.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) released three reports of interest to planners in March. The reports address housing supply, the link between water and planning, and planned developments. The housing supply study surprised many people because it reported a statewide shortage as of 2000 of only 138,000 units, when interest groups and other analysts have pegged the shortage at 500,000 to 1 million units.

There's no denying it anymore: California has entered the infill age. Suburban development still continues apace, especially in the Central Valley and the Inland Empire. But most of the state is engaged in the process of adding more residents to existing neighborhoods and existing urban areas - and trying to find good ways to add more houses and shops to those neighborhoods as well. What all this means is that design and context are important.

A framework intended to guide all local general plans in San Diego County could be adopted as soon as June by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). Advocates of the framework say it has the potential to be one of the most effective regional plans ever devised in California.

The City of Morgan Hill's decision not to rezone the site of a closed hospital to allow for development of a private, Christian college has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit ruled that the city did not run afoul of the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), as San Jose Christian College had alleged.

A homebuilder's lawsuit over the City of Encinitas's fee scheme, which allowed the city building official to implement automatic fee changes, has been allowed to proceed. The Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled that even though the fees took effect years before the homebuilder paid them, the normal statute of limitations did not apply because the city made no provision for public review. >>read more

In a ruling directly at odds with a landmark 1995 decision, the Sixth District Court of Appeal has ruled that local government may not regulate the location of timber harvests.

A community college board's decision to close and demolish a shooting range, clean up lead contamination at the site and transfer shooting range operations to a new location amounts to a "project" that requires review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the Fifth District Court of Appeal has ruled.

Neighbors of a Marin County rock quarry, which has been the source of complaints and government investigations for years, have failed in their bid to pursue a class action lawsuit against the quarry for allegedly illegal activities.

Three sweeping growth measures in three very different parts of the state - two measures seeking to tightly control development and one growth-friendly plan - all lost during the March 2 primary election. Voters in San Diego and San Benito counties overwhelmingly rejected growth-control general plan amendments. In El Dorado County, voters said no to approving an entire general plan via initiative. Elsewhere, Contra Costa County voters rejected a big-box law. San Marcos voters said no to Wal-Mart.

Like scores of California suburbs, Pomona suffered the death of its downtown during the 1960s and 1970s. And, as elsewhere, the death was little noticed at the time because there was a great deal of newfangled housing, retail and office development elsewhere in town. But, led by two brothers who grew up in town, downtown now thrives around the Pomona Arts Colony.

In his definitive book, City Center to Regional Mall, urban historian Richard Longstreth points out that in 1960, Southern California had 14 regional malls, located mostly in the southern L.A. County and northern Orange County suburbs that were emerging at the time. Although similar at the time, those malls have evolved greatly.

Anyone familiar with the operation of state and federal water projects in California recognizes that the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is the heart of the state's elaborate plumbing system. A recent federal court decision also places the Delta squarely at the heart of an intensifying debate over one of the nation's bedrock environmental laws, potentially throwing into question the protections afforded a host of threatened and endangered species throughout the water-short West.