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The City of Upland should be able to move forward with renovation of a major park now that an appellate court has upheld the city’s mitigated negative declaration on the project. The appellate court specifically chose not to use the Save Our Capitol! CEQA case to rule against the city.

In a case that could have significant consequences up and down the state, an appellate court has ruled that buildings built after the passage of the 1976 Coastal Act are not entitled to seawalls or other “hard armature” protection from erosion. In reversing a trial court judge’s ruling, the First Distrct Court of Appeal concluded that while the Coastal Commission could issue a permit for a seawall to protect an apartment building built on a bluff in Half Moon Bay in 1972, it could not do so for a neighboring condo complex and coastal trail built in 1984. The ruling puts many projects built after 1976 at risk. The Coastal Act permits seawalls and othe har armature “to serve coastal-dependent uses or to protect existing structures . . . in danger from erosion.” (Public Resources Code § 30235.) The court concluded the word “existing” means existing on the date the Coastal Act went into effect, which was January 1, 1977. Rejecting the reasoning of San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Marie Weiner, the appellate court concluded that allowing the seawall would open the door to a bait-and-switch approach for new projects, through which developers would obtain Coastal Commission approval for a new project and then the Coastal Commission would subsequently be required to allow a seawall. The court said this was not the Legislature’s intent in 1976, adding: “Such an interpretation gives no independent meaning to the term ‘existing,’ rendering it surplusage.” The case involved several developments along a coastal bluff in Half Moon Bay. A four-unit apartment complex was built immediately on the bluff in 1972. Twelve years later, the four-building Casa Mira condominium complex was built slightly further back from the bluff, along with a sewer line and a trail owned and operated by the state Department of Parks & Recreation.

In a departure from the actions other major cities in California, the Los Angeles City Council voted on December 10 to approve a citywide upzoning designed to meet L.A.’s housing targets – but didn’t touch single-family zoning.

A controversial hotel project adjacent to a tribal casino on coastal bluff in far northern California may or may not move forward after an appellate court found that the Coastal Commission’s review under the did not contain sufficient evidence that fire protection was adequate. Just as important, the appellate court ruled in favor of the Coastal Commission on all other environmental issues, including most significantly the hotel’s visual impact. The hotel is proposed by the Cher-Ae Heights Indian Community of Trinidad Rancheria, which owns a nearby casino in the coastal town of Trinidad in Humboldt County. The project was considered a federal project because of a loan and lease requiring approval of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, meaning the project had to be consistent with the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. The BIA declared the project consistent, but this determination then went before the Coastal Commission because the California Coastal Act is the federally approved coastal plan for California under the CZMA. The tribe originally proposed a 64-foot hotel. The Coastal Commission staff originally recommended that the commission object to the BIA’s consistency determination because of the visual impact, citing Coastal Act §30251, which requires protection of “scenic and visual qualities”. After originally agreeing with the staff, the Coastal Commission then voted to conclude that the project could be consistent with the Coastal Act if the height were reduced to 40 feet.

Driven in part by the ongoing controversy over the Southeast Development Area, the City of Fresno and Fresno County have agreed to a wide-ranging agreement to share property taxes in the SEDA and other areas located in the city’s sphere of influence.

A conditional use permit in Santa Barbara County has been overturned by an appellate court … because transporting marijuana is illegal under federal law even though the sale and use of marijuana is legal under state law.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed creating a separate Cabinet-level agency for housing.

So here we are again: Fighting horrific wildfires around Los Angeles, which have destroyed Pacific Palisades and much of Altadena. It’s the worst urban wildfire in California history, the latest in a recent series of terrible fires. And it once again raises the question of whether we could have – or perhaps still could – plan our communities differently to minimize the risk.

Ventura’s permanent closure of Main Street in the downtown area does not violate the state Streets & Highways Code, a Superior Court judge has ruled. More specifically, the court ruled that allowing emergency vehicles and delivery trucks to use Main Street while closing it to through traffic does not mean the closure is “partial” under state law. Ventura’s historic downtown includes many restaurants and other businesses along Main Street, which is not heavily used for through traffic. In 2021, the city issued the first of a series of temporary closures of Main Street primarily to allow restaurants to expand outdoor eating into the public right-of-way, as occurred in many cities during COVID. After several more temporary closures, the City Council voted to close a portion of Main Street permanently in 2024. Though the closure was popular with most businesses and patrons, a group of downtown property owners sued to block the permanent closure, saying the city’s action constituted a partial closing under the Streets & Highways Code. The property owners also said the city violated the Pedestrian Mall Act of 1960, which creates a specific process for closing streets to create a pedestrian mall, and – in an argument similar from the so-called Marilyn ruling in Palm Springs – argued that the serial temporary closures were a violation of the Streets & Highways Code. (The “Marilyn ruling” had to do with serial temporary closures to accommodate a statue of Marilyn Monroe on a street outside the Palm Springs art museum. CP&DR ’s previous coverage of that case can be found here .) Main Street Ventura during the temporary closure Among other things, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Matthew Guasco found that Ventura did not abuse its discretion under the streets and highways code. “The Administrative Record contains abundant evidence,” Guasco wrote, “that (a) a majority of residents including Main Street business owners, favored keeping the Main Street closure permanent; (b) re-routing vehicular traffic around the closure site did not have significant negative traffic impacts; and (c) the section of Main Street was closed for three years without negatively affecting vehicular access to Downtown Ventura. Additionally, the Administrative Record contains abundant evidence that the closure improved the revenue of businesses on Main Street by encouraging pedestrian access. Although the same data revealed dissatisfaction on the part of some business owners with the Main Street closure, the overwhelming majority of downtown business owners and residents supported the closure becoming permanent.” The property owners also argued that permitting emergency, maintenance, and delivery vehicles, as well as cross-traffic on certain streets, constituted travel under the Streets & Highways Code. “Not so,” wrote Guasco. “The affected sections of Main Street are closed to all through traffic. The exceptions implemented by the City do not permit through traffic. Instead, they are strictly limited to vehicular access for emergency vehicles, such as ambulances fire trucks and police. These are essential to protect lives and property; they are not local travel.” The property owners also argued that the city violated the Pedestrian Mall Act, also contained in the Streets & Highways Code, by not following the process required by that law to create a pedestrian mall. But Guasco said the Pedestrian Mall Act is an alternative method for closing streets and the city did not have to follow it. Finally, Guasco did acknowledge that the city violated the Streets & Highways Code by implementing serial temporary closures for three years, similar to the Marilyn situation, but that this violation was mooted by the permanent closure. The Case: Open Main Street v. City of San Buenaventura , Ventura County Superior Court No. 2024CUWM021824 The Lawyers: For Open Main Street: Darin Marx, Lowthrop Richards, Dmarx@lrmmt.com For City of San Buenaventura: Peter Howell, Rutan & Tucker, PHowell@rutan.com

Landowners are increasingly trying to find easy ways to split big lots into smaller pieces in order to build more housing. But one property owner in Oakland won’t be able to do that. That’s because the California Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling and said that even though a parcel was created in the 19 th Century, it’s not a legal parcel under the Subdivision Map Act. It’s the first major “antiquated subdivision” ruling in almost 20 years. The case involves the property owner’s attempt to establish that an 8,800-square-foot single-family lot in the San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland – which currently has a single-family home first built in 1895 – is actually several lots because the original parcel map was filed prior to the Subdivision Map Act’s passage and the lots existed prior to later Map Act amendments. The property in question is located on East 21 st  St. in Oakland, east of Lake Merritt. The existing home has a large yard, so most likely the property owner is seeking to essentially split the lot to allow additional development.

An appellate court has ruled against a Vista cannabis dispensary’s attempt to knock a competitor out of a coveted position for a permit, saying the second dispensary met all requirements to obtain the permit. The case is unpublished, meaning it cannot be used as precedent.

This piece is brought to you free of charge courtesy of the paying subscribers to California Planning & Development Report. To become a paying subscriber with access to all of our content, just click  here . The passing of the legendary “parking guru” Donald Shoup has saddened everyone in the world of urban planning – especially former students like me. Don was an amazing guy. As an individual he was unfailingly kind and generous to everybody, although he did have an acerbic sense of humor. As an academic he was rigorous. And of course he changed the way the entire world looks at parking. It is remarkable, in retrospect, that a quirky guy who had never been a prominent academic became in his later years the object of a cult-like following. He called himself “Shoup Dogg” and his devoted followers called themselves “Shoupistas”. Even when it was unfashionable to do so, I was always proud to count myself among the Shoupistas. I knew Don for more than 40 years – half of his life and two-thirds of mine, ever since I showed up in his required public economics class at UCLA planning school back in the ‘80s. Our paths crossed innumerable times, most notably around 2010, when as Mayor of Ventura, California, I was involved in the implementation of a controversial Shoupian parking strategy for the downtown area. Don was proud of the fact that his old student helped bring about change in the real world based on his ideas and the Ventura story gained a lot of currency in urban planning circles, partly because of Don’s great celebrity as a result of his seminal 2005 book The High Cost Of Free Parking – and also the fact that he talked about Ventura endlessly in his speeches and interviews. Our personal relationship was a warm one, and Don often told funny stories about me – some of which were even true. (You can read more about how Ventura implemented Shoupian parking principles in my old mayoral blog here . I go into much more detail about my experience in Ventura and the whole history of relationship with him in the upcoming Routledge book, The Shoup Doctrine. ) But as I have reflected over the past few days about Don’s career and my interaction with him, it dawned on me that, in the end, he wasn’t really about parking. Don was an economist, and his mission was to help people understand the underlying economics of public goods and services. Parking was simply the vehicle, one might say, that he chose to do so. Whenever anybody asked him how he got so focused on parking, Don always had a funny answer. If you are a public policy academic, the ones who study national issues – the presidency in particular – are at the top of the heap. Far behind were those who study state issues. At the bottom of the barrel, where Don jokingly used to argue he could be found, were those studying local government. (In some cases, local government doesn’t even count toward scholarly achievement in academia.) And among those studying local government, there were two issues nobody ever wanted to touch: parking and sewage. Don didn’t want to study sewage. So he studied parking. In later years Don always made fun of my paper on this topic, claiming that it was “just one long sentence,” and when he asked me why, I said, “That’s how I thought economists wrote.” This was not true, but he did grade it very thoughtfully, which I always appreciated. (FWIW, you can find my paper here ; let me know if you need access.) The larger point, though, is that Don was fascinated by the economics of all public services, not just parking. What really led him to parking (other than the fact that it wasn’t sewage) was the fact that it was a classic case of the government giving away something for free or at a below-market price to individuals who benefitted from the giveaway. Every public parking space has both a cost to the government and a value to individual users. In some cases, the demand for this particular public resource exceeds the supply. As an economist, Don understood that if demand exceeds supply, the supply must be allocated one way or another. For the government, the simplest way to allocate resources is on a first-come, first-served basis. This is how most public commodities are allocated, ranging from housing vouchers (think of the waiting list) to campgrounds (though they often come with a small price tag) to parking spaces. But Don believed first-come, first-served was not the only way, nor even in many cases the best way, to allocate public resources. There were at least two other ways. The first was to restrict the amount of time that people can use the commodity, which is (supposedly, if enforcement is good) what happens with many parking regimes. And the second is to charge money. In point of fact, all three are sometimes used in combination. You may have to sign up months in advance for a desirable campground but depending on the location you may pay a fairly hefty fee and you may be able to stay only a certain number of days. I doubt rigorous research goes into the impact of this combination, but it is illuminating to look at it this way. Now, charging money for a public commodity is a controversial idea. In some cases – housing vouchers, for instance – it’s not a realistic alternative, since the whole purpose of housing vouchers is to give people money to pay for housing. And it’s always very difficult to get people to pay for something they are accustomed to getting for free. But over time, Don came to persuade millions of people that charging for parking owned by the government makes sense. He did this in two ways. First, he used the supply and demand argument, which is hard to argue with. (Curiously, ideological right-wingers sometimes did argue with it, which I never understood.) But second, as an economist, he understood that when a payment is involved, there’s both a loser and a winner. In the case of parking, the loser is the motorist who pays (though Don would argue the motorist is a winner because they have access to spaces that would otherwise be occupied by freeloaders). The winner is whoever gets to spend the money. And Don shrewdly understood that this was a very important question. If the government throws the money into the general fund, never to be seen again, there’s no political benefit to anybody. But if you give that money back to the neighborhood where the paid parking is occurring, you can provide a tangible benefit to that neighborhood – and begin to overcome political opposition to paid parking. A couple of weeks ago in San Diego, where I live, the city doubled on-street parking fees. Fehr & Peers did do a rigorous parking study for the city which proposed dynamic pricing and extended hours for paid parking (eliminating free parking on Sunday’s for example, and the city is likely to implement those moves in the future. But the doubling of fees occurred simply because the city is trying to plug a big budget eficit. This is exactly the wrong way to go about things not only economically but politically, because the worst thing you can do is price a public commodity higher just because it’s a cash cow. Don Shoup singlehandedly punched a big hole in that idea. And while politicians will inevitably fall victim to the temptation every now and then, we Shoupistas will always be around to call them out. If you'd like to learn more about Donald Shoup's ideas and their impact on parking policy, check out my one-hour, on-demand course on parking , eligible for AICP CM credit. (Be sure to click on "Course Info" for a full description. This course has been updated to honor Shoup's passing and expand on his ideas.