The Salton Sea sits likes a time bomb in the desert, serving up a brew of bad smells, turgid waters and the potential to increase air pollution in an area where thousands of homes are planned. But under a proposal making its way through the Legislature, some of the sea's lurking hazards may be stopped. Instead, the Salton Sea may be shrunk to a third of its current 240,000 acres and revived as a recreational lake for sport fish and migrating birds. All it will take is billions of dollars and at least 75 years of maintenance.

Even Orange County is going urban.

The latest evidence is Lennar's "Central Park West" project – almost 1,400 condominiums, plus a little retail and office space, on a 43-acre site just off the Jamboree offramp of the 405 Freeway in Irvine. I visited the construction site on Monday (8/13) as part of an event sponsored by the Orange County chapter of the Building Industry Association.

The California Environmental Quality Act has been blamed for holding up affordable housing, economic development, urban revitalization and public works projects. This year, however, marks the first time that CEQA has ever held up the state budget.

So not everybody thinks downtown Long Beach is a better place than downtown L.A. But at least everybody agrees Fresno has the worst big-city downtown in California.

We stirred things up recently when we ranked California's big-city downtowns. People in Long Beach loved us, while advocates of the new urban scene in L.A. were not happy. "How could anyone be so ignorant as to rank downtown Long Beach, which is like a northern extension of suburban Orange County, ahead of the downtown in the country's second largest city?"

Mathematicians often take delight in Cat's Cradle, the age-old game of making string figures on one's fingers. In the most familiar form of this game, one person starts out with a simple rectangle of yarn or string, and then makes a simple figure by looping different parts of the yarn around his or her fingers. This figure is then passed to the fingers of a second player, who introduces another layer of complexity into the figure before passing the increasingly complex string figure to a third player. And so on, until the figure becomes so complex that it becomes impossible to go further, at least with a two-foot length of yarn.

OK, I'm totally obsessed with www.walkscore.com.

This is one of those Google map manipulations – created by three Seattle residents – that allows you to plug in any address and get a walkability score of that location somewhere between 0 and 100. (It also shows you a map of all the businesses and services in close proximity to your address.)

One city's municipal services agreement with an Indian tribe has survived a legal challenge while another city's agreement has been struck down by an appellate court.

Two recent court decisions have helped clear the way for the largest water transfer ever contemplated in the United States: 300,000 acre-feet of water from the Imperial Irrigation District to San Diego, Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley.

The saga of plan check and building inspection fees in Orange County continues, as an appellate court has ruled that the county must reduce fees by $4.5 million and pay nearly $1.4 million in attorney fees and court costs.

The owner of two parcels that the City of Berkeley wants to merge may not avoid the merger with a paper transfer of title to his wife, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled. However, the court stopped short of canceling the grant deed, ruling only that the city may be entitled to an injunction prohibiting further transfer of the property title.

Two cities known for providing a large chunk of the Coachella Valley's affordable housing may soon see some more upscale and very different development.

I recently spent the better part of three days in the eastern Nevada town of Ely. For those of you not current on your Nevada geography, Ely is the largest town on a 400-mile stretch of Highway 50 through Nevada and Utah known as the "Loneliest Highway in America."

In other words, Ely is a small town smack in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town is more than 70 miles away.

The ABAG executive board approves the draft regional housing need allocation, meanwhile, San Francisco questions whether to conduct an EIR for its previous housing element update. San Diego's Mayor vetoes an ordinance that would ban big-box stores that sell groceries, while a disputed Wal-Mart supercenter in the City of American Canyon will open this fall. Placer County supervisors have approved a 14,000-unit housing development but litigation is likely, a judge throws out Rancho Cordova's approved town center plan, and the City of Bakersfield responds to a "moratorium on future development within metropolitan Bakersfield."