Perhaps more quickly than anyone would have thought, the California Legislature is already considering a collection of bills designed to both smooth the process of dissolving redevelopment agencies and to introduce new tools that cities can use in redevelopment's absence.

As cities wrestle with the process of dissolving their redevelopment agencies, Assembly Bill 1585 (Perez) has been advancing through the state legislature. AB 1585 is designed to clean up many of the holes and ambiguities in AB X1 26, the budget bill that mandated the dissolution of redevelopment agencies and includes the provisions for liquidating their assets. 

SAN DIEGO -- Seeking to make up for lost redevelopment funds, the City of San Diego has decided to require downtown developers to pay processing fees for the first time in decades. But it remains to be seen who will process the permits and get the money – the city's planning department or the city's nonprofit downtown redevelopment entity, the Centre City Development Corp.

Google may have revolutionized our understanding of geography, but so far the world's leading internet company hasn't revolutionized the geography of commuting. So as Google contemplates its first major "campus," the City of Mountain View is looking to innovation – the coin of the realm in the Silicon Valley – to help Googlites get to work. Even if it means building a rail system that transports individual commuters around town in little capsules.

UCLA professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris was perhaps ahead of her time when she said in 1995 that "the ever-changing urban form and social ecology of neighborhoods calls for a flexible rather than rigid park design and for spatial layouts that can be easily changed in response to future needs…One can even think of mobile parks-spaces whose equipment and furniture can be transported to other parts of the city if the need arises."  

For many jurisdictions that are part of California's "Big Four" metropolitan planning organizations, Senate Bill 375 has ushered in new, unprecedented degrees of collaboration. But whereas SB 375 makes a regional planning revolution for many, for the jurisdictions of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, the SCS is business as usual. 

California Senate leader Darrell Steinberg has predicted that the Legislature will pass his post-redevelopment legislation – assuming the state revenues remain healthy.

In San Diego County, a dispute involving a long overdue application for a conditional use permit has resulted in the closure of a church that had been essentially squatting in a trailer park for over 25 years. 

Having already prepared one environmental impact report that was set aside by a court, the City of Carmel-by-the-Sea undertook a new EIR for the purposes of evaluating the impacts of the city disposing, by sale or lease, of a historic mansion. 

As the adage goes, they may not be making any more real estate these days. But, for some bargain-hunters, the death of redevelopment may be the next best thing. 

Though most cities maintained full-time redevelopment teams, not all the work was done in-house. That would be hard to do in a $5 billion annual industry, with countless moving parts in hundreds of agencies across the state. 

Even as the redevelopment wind-down process continues, the Legislature is beginning to play around with possible ways to bring it back in a more limited form. Many of the ideas involve tinkering with tax-increment financing in ways that will hold the state financially harmless. Others would allow cities to keep some or all of their former redevelopment agencies' cash and land assets, which are likely worth several billion dollars.

If you extrapolate from the current annual under-supply of affordable housing in California, California should have produced 5.5 million units of affordable housing during Cathy Creswell's career at the Department of Housing and Community Development. While the actual number is likely to be somewhat less, the point remains that HCD has faced and continues to face a monumental task. For the past year, that task has ultimately fallen on the shoulders of Creswell, as she has led the department as its interim executive director until stepping down in February.

Smart growthers tout transit-oriented development more often than any other strategy. Yet with the exception of a few few showpiece developments, TOD has yet to catch fire in practice. This year, the American Planning Association recognized one such development in the hopes that, finally, the trend will catch on.