Blogs

The California Air Resources Board has released very cursory greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets for the state's 18 metropolitan planning organizations.

Although draft greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions targets under SB 375 are due June 30, detailed targets will not be proposed until August. The targets, scheduled for final adoption in September, are intended to guide sustainable communities strategies that the MPOs must adopt during coming years. 

Pitting affordable housing advocates against local government officials, planners, and builders, a housing element bill has seemingly risen from the dead to become one of the hottest land use bills in Sacramento.

Assembly Bill 602 would provide an unlimited time period during which someone could sue over a jurisdiction's housing element, which is intended to demonstrate how a city or county will provide its fair share of housing at various cost levels. According to the affordable housing advocates supporting the legislation, a 2008 Court of Appeal decision placed a 90-day statute of limitations on legal challenges to housing elements. The bill would permit lawsuits at any point during the housing element planning period.

Some people are, lamentably, forced to live in substandard housing. They languish in stark Modernist buildings that are often segregated from the proverbial hustle and bustle of the city. They enjoy no amenities and they have a hard time making a living, even with public assistance, so they ask for more public assistance to give them the environment they need to prosper. 

2010 Summer and Fall UCLA Extension Public Policy Courses

The UCLA Extension Public Policy Program has now released its listing of courses for Fall Quarter. We encourage you to visit www.uclaextension.edu/publicpolicy for more information about the courses listed.

Online enrollment is available by visiting www.uclaextension.edu and referencing the Reg#.

Join Us!

Summer 10

• Recent Innovations in Parking Management (V7784)
Thursday, June 22
Figueroa Courtyard, Los Angeles, CA

Peter Valk, President, Transportation Management Services
Don Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA

The Legislature doesn't get credit for doing many things right these days, but lawmakers appear to be making at least one bipartisan strike for fiscal sanity.

Few definitive trends emerged in the handful of local land use ballot measures that were decided across the state yesterday. Voters in Costa Mesa, Mission Viejo, Pleasanton, Sutter Creek, and Brentwood maintained status quo with votes that either limited development or rejected new land use provisions. Meanwhile, Redlands voted to allow new big-box stores, Eastvale voted to exist as a city, and Santa Clara voted to allow and partially fund a football stadium that, when full, will add the population of a small city to the heart of Silicon Valley. 

Read on for complete results, with links to CP&DR's preview coverage:

HOLLYWOOD, June 4 -- What's that spell?!? If you're a policy wonk, public official, or real estate developer and you were within earshot of Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, then you'd darn well better know.

 HOLLYWOOD -- Speaking at the Urban Land Institute's Transit Oriented Development Summit, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) announced that the Federal Transit Administration had admitted the entire 9.3-mile stretch of Los Angeles Metro's proposed "Subway to the Sea" for preliminary engineering studies. Boxer said that the admission of the entirely bodes well for Metro's innovative "30-10" financing plan, which promises to remake the face of transit in Los Angeles within a decade.

By Morris Newman

TIPPER and AL GORE have retired for the evening. They lie supine under the covers and are wearing pajamas, each with their respective monograms on the chest pockets. 

Al: "Honey, something's been on my mind...."

Tipper: "If it's dirty, please write it down. You know I don't like to hear smutty language."

Al. (chuckling): "No, hon, nothing like that. Those fires are banked for the night. I'm just wondering if we blew enough insulation into this house."

Tipper (lecturing tone): "Albert, we have 300 cubic yards of insulation in this house. Plus we live in Tennessee, not Wasilla. It's never below 50 degrees."

AL: "I know, I know. It's just that this house is so… freakin' gi-normous. Sometimes I don't see you for days."

Tipper: "It's true. But, then again, it's not even the biggest on the block!" (coyly): "Did you miss me?"

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California, one size does not even come close to fitting all.

That's all I could conclude after the SB 375 Regional Targets Advisory Committee (RTAC) and metropolitan planning organization (MPO) representatives touched on an amazing array of policy and technical issues during an all-day meeting on Tuesday.

All right, I could also conclude that what has been a highly technical process may be on the verge of becoming very political.

(Please note that the word "draconian" does not occur once in the following post concerning the ongoing budget debacle. Readers susceptible to cliché-induced seizures (CIS) can read this article without ill effect.)

By his own characterization, the governor's latest proposal attempts to close the $19 billion shortfall in the coming year's budget almost entirely through cuts. For CP&DR readers, it's probably unnecessary to explain that many of these cuts affect – or have effectively eliminated – services for low-income people, not limited to affordable housing, health care and early childhood education. Hell, we can't even afford our prisons—an irony well deserved by the Lock-'em-Up State. 

The Regional Targets Advisory Committee returns to work next week for what promises to be a very technical meeting regarding greenhouse gas reduction forecasts.

The meeting and discussion are the next step in trying to answer this question: How is California going to grow in a way that reduces the amount that people drive?  

As you probably recall, the committee (known as the RTAC or "Are-Tack") was charged with making recommendations to the Air Resources Board for regional greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions from passenger vehicles, based on transportation systems and land use planning. The committee report issued last September was one of the first steps in implementing SB 375, the 2008 legislation that ties land use planning and transportation so as to reduce GHG emissions.

 President Obama has now nominated two women to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court – and the addition of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan -- nominated Monday and almost sure to be confirmed -- will definitely give the court a new tilt. But the tilt isn't about gender. It's about geography. In Sotomayor and Kagan, Obama has selected two women who have lived their whole lives in big cities – they're both from New York, though from very different backgrounds (Sotomayor's from the Bronx).

The ongoing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico may be the best thing ever to happen to the renewable energy industry.

I hope that doesn't sound crass. Really, I'm not celebrating in any way a disaster that has already killed 11 oil platform workers and is threatening the livelihoods of countless people in the fishing and tourism industries.

But history teaches us that the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 was one of the galvanizing incidents of the environmental movement. That spill also was caused by the blowout of an offshore oil well. Three million gallons of crude oil spilled into Santa Barbara channel, coating miles of coastline and thousands of birds. You can almost draw a direct line from that event to the California Environmental Quality Act to the California Coastal Act. In fact, many of our cornerstone state and federal environmental laws stem from the early- and mid-1970s, when the environmental movement was ascendant.