A 7-year-old City of Los Angeles ordinance prohibiting new off-site signs has been upheld by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected the argument that the ban combined with a city contract permitting advertising at city-owned bus stops violated the First Amendment.

Remember way back to the days when climate change and greenhouse gas emissions didn't dominate every discussion of land use and economic development in California? You know, way back in … 2005.  Well, Dan Logue sure does.

Not since Lyndon Johnson more than 40 years ago has any president come into office with anything like the sky-high expectations about reforming urban policy that Barack Obama brings. But the various federal policies related to growth and development have many constituencies – urban, suburban, and rural – and it is not yet clear that Obama can meld them in a meaningful way.

Senate Bill 375 dominated this year's UCLA Land Use Law and Planning Conference. While there were few comments about the merits of the new law, there was extensive discussion regarding the law's impact and implementation.

If there was a common theme, it was this: SB 375 has the potential to change dramatically both California's land use planning system and growth patterns, and the law is very much a work in progress.

Although it was largely unsaid, the implication is that the era of the large-scale, low-density, single-family housing tracts has passed.

When Barack Obama took the oath of office Tuesday, he tried to strike a delicate balance between the soaring rhetoric he is famous for and an almost dour message about how much work and sacrifice will be required to put America back on its feet. Nowhere will that balance be more difficult to strike – or more important – than in the vast combination of federal policies that help to drive growth and development patterns around the country.

Senate Bill 375 needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed this year. So says Rick Bishop, executive director of the Western Riverside Council of Governments.

Bishop is not an advocate of sprawl-and-pavement über alles, which is the way many SB 375 opponents have been painted. In fact, Bishop has no gripe with the intent of SB 375, which is to reign in low-density, segregated use sprawl and to encourage public transportation spending that best serves higher-density, mixed-use areas (that's my description, not his).

Planning and Conservation League & PCL Foundation
Annual Environmental Legislative Symposium
Steps to a Sustainable California    
Saturday, February 7, 2009 – 9:00A – 4:15P  
Downtown Sacramento

If you attend only one conference all year, it should be the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference, scheduled for January 23 in downtown Los Angeles.

I use an admittedly imprecise technique to monitor the health of the Sacramento River's salmon. Several times during November and December, I walk onto the Diestelhorst Bridge in Redding and peer down at the river.

Back in the 1990s, I often spotted half a dozen or more salmon within a couple minutes. This year, I saw very few salmon. Same story last year. On my two most recent trips to the Diestelhorst Bridge, I saw not a single swimming salmon or post-spawning carcass.

The Governor's Office of Planning & Research (OPR) has released a draft of the new CEQA Guidelines for assessing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming impacts of and on projects as mandated by SB 97 (Public Resources Code § 21083.05).

The notion of using redevelopment to help solve the state's budget deficit continues to percolate in Sacramento. Meanwhile, analyses of the governor's proposed 18-month budget that was released on New Year's Eve are trickling out.

The development of affordable housing is inherently difficult. Projects typically require multiple funding sources, face neighborhood opposition, and are closely watched by both skeptics and state housing officials.

Yet California's need for additional affordable housing is undeniable, despite the crash in real estate prices. So CP&DR shares this look at three different projects to offer lessons for anyone involved in providing housing affordable to people of modest means: a crime-ridden, market-rate condominium complex that the Rialto Redevelopment Agency rehabilitated as affordable apartments; a new, eye-catching project in an industrial part of San Jose that serves 218 households making less than half of median income; and a project in Contra Costa County that overcame what  appeared to be imminent failure.

There is a new gold rush in California. Rather than extracting minerals from the ground, the new prospectors are hoping to exploit California's abundant sunshine and wind.

From the southern Cascade Mountains of far northern California to the desert along the Mexico border, utilities, start-up companies and entrepreneurs are proposing scores of large-scale solar thermal, photovoltaic and wind projects to generate electricity.