Search Results

This is a true story, not a fairy tale: the last time I spent a night in Anaheim was sometime in the 1990s for high school "grad night" at a certain local amusement park. P.M. Dawn was one of the musical acts. Jackets and ties were required for the gentlemen. And I discovered that there is no delirium quite like the delirium that comes with riding "It's a Small World" (sober) at 4 a.m. I vowed never to go back, and I've kept that vow. But, here I am for this week's conference of the California chapter of the American Planning Association. I'm back to speak about good books, learn about good cities, and commune with colleagues after a long hiatus. I apparently am not the typical Anaheim visitor. This morning I exited the 5 Freeway at 7:25 a.m. at Harbor Bl. Orange County, like much of American suburbia, was build around streets like Harbor: six lanes, plus some left-turn lanes; a median with a fence down the middle (to prevent jaywalking); perilously high speed limits; and limited pedestrian crossings. Usually, the shortage of pedestrian crossings doesn't matter. People rarely walk on streets like Harbor, both because they are unpleasant at foot level and because they don't run through walkable neighborhoods. But, in Anaheim, on Harbor Bl., the sidewalks are full. At the crack of dawn on a grey autumn Sunday, they're full like those of the Champs-Elysse, Broadway, or Michigan Avenue at high noon on a summer's day. They're full like those of the Las Vegas Strip at midnight. Where was everyone going? Church? The farmers market? Early-bird brunch? Not exactly.  The mouse-eared hats were a pretty strong tipoff. Whatever magic takes place inside Disney's kingdom, the means of ingress are decidedly terrestrial. You either walk from your hotel, or you drive from points beyond. Flying in on an elephant is not an option. On the one hand, the there's a shocking contrast between the lifelessness of Harbor Bl. and the intrigue of Tomorrow, Fantasy, Adventure (and, of course, California Adventure, which you apparently visit if you don't like the real California but also don't want to leave California). On the other hand, that contrast is likely a feature, not a bug. Disneyland came about precisely at the peak of and, I would argue, because of mid-20th century suburbanization. As the country was becoming deliberately dull and homogenous in the late 1950s, a place of excitement, escape, and, indeed, ersatz urbanism became more marketable. Disneyland promoted suburbanization in order to offer an antidote to suburbanization. The uglier Harbor Bl. is, and the less pleasant that walk is, the more exciting those other -lands become. Much of this has been theorized already, most usefully by Jean Baudrillard, who declared Disneyland to be a "simulacrum" -- a copy that overwhelms the original. What even Baudrillard -- or Walt Disney, for that matter -- could not have imagined was the extent to which the Disney empire would grow. This morning's opening session put the empire, and the Empire, on full display. Two Disney "imagineers" gave a brief history of Disney's theme parks (now numbering 12 worldwide), fawningly describing how the original park went from orange groves to opening day in just over a year, and reporting on the latest attractions they are dreaming up. They are a far from from animatronic that Abraham Lincoln that amazed crowds at the 1964 New York World's Fair. They are, to use imagineer parlance, fully immersive worlds, centered on the Star Wars universe and whatever other multi-platform franchise Disney wants to promote. The latest is a two-day stay at a Star Wars Extended Universe hotel, which seems like a cross between space camp and The Shining. At every turn, Disney stands for the ability to create "worlds" that are somehow both idealized and realistic, wholly accessible through suspension of disbelief and steep admission fees. However much effort Disney's folks put into designing Disneyland down to the last detail, today's "imagineers" are working harder that Walt ever could imagine. Fiction on screen merely requires viewers to believe that the scenes they are witnessing could have happened -- if not in front of their eyes in the moment, then perhaps a long time ago in... well, you know where. But fiction in three dimensions means that viewers aren't viewers. They are participants. The action takes place in real time and in the very place where the viewer stands. The viewer doesn't see only what the camera sees; he sees (and hears, smells, and feels) whatever he wants to see. For these reasons, imagineers work very hard. Fooling people in three dimensions is vastly--exponentially--more challenging than fooling them in two dimensions. They design physical spaces down to the finest detail -- the howl of a yeti; the whoomp of a light saber; the hem of a princess' train -- and they design storylines to command visitors' attention. Imperfections or plot holes cannot be wished away. The illusion must become real for the experience to matter. So, what does all of this have to do with Harbor Bl.? Imagineering is not cheap. Disney spends money to make money. So much so that the Disneyland complex alone takes in $3.8 billion annually. That's money that people, over 15 million per year, spend voluntarily. And why? Because, say what you will about artifice, consumerism, and wishing upon a star, Disneyland is nicer than the real world. People are willing to pay for nice, even for only a few hours. That's because, for much of recent history, in the vast majority of places, the imagination and talent has been privatized, funded, and promoted, and the public realm has, in too many cases, been neglected, starved, and vilified. The public realm doesn't get nearly the sort of attention and investment as even a few dozen acres of private realm. That's how we end up with streets like Harbor Bl. and "attractions" like Main Street USA. This morning's presentation was, I presume, supposed to inspire planners. And I hope it did. I hope in inspired them to imagine how to write plans and codes that are every bit as enchanting as the rides and worlds that hum to life every morning atop those former orange groves. I hope no one has to pay an admission fee to spend time in a place that excites them, and I hope no one has to cross eight lanes of traffic to do so. It's a small world after all. A small world with very big streets.

Not long ago, fans of mass transit in California had to be very patient. An entire decade could go by without the opening of a major transit line in California.

Roughly speaking, for every percentage point increase in prevailing interest rates for construction, the collective cost of producing the estimated 2.5 million housing units that California needs, at a conservative half-million dollars per unit, increases by $12.5 billion per year.

The most telling CP&DR headline of 2022 came very early in the year, on January 10: "Cities Move Quickly to Regulate SB 9 Housing Units."

After a record-setting budget and budget surplus last year, of $235 billion and $95 billion, respectively, economic gravity is setting in. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a 2023-24 budget that slashes over $22 billion of intended spending in order to accommodate what is expected to be lower tax revenues.

Only a handful of land use measures made it on to local ballots in June -- but it was a varied, colorful bunch.

While few economists would call California's revenue streams optimal -- especially with the constraints of Proposition 13 -- the state hit the jackpot in 2021 with, by some measures, a surplus of over $95 billion above projections. That surplus is bigger than the entire annual budgets of all but eight states. This year's total general fund budget amounts to $235 billion, up from $196 billion last year.

"Coals to Newcastle" isn't exactly the right metaphor, but it's close. The delivery in question is not a boatload of anthracite but rather its opposite: a recent $ 1.1 billion donation from John Doerr, a partner at the vaunted Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and his wife Ann, to Stanford University for the establishment of the Doerr School of Sustainability. It is envisioned as an interdisciplinary educational and research institution dedicated to fighting climate change.  The school will cover disciplines including energy, climate science, and sustainable development and environmental justice, and it will house up to 150 faculty members. I don’t doubt that an institution like Stanford will produce important work with those funds. And yet, the idea of fighting climate change by cloistering it in an ultra-exclusive institution, in a region that is already well versed in the ravages of climate chance, seems to miss the mark. To be sure, undoing, mitigating, or at least adapting to the effects of climate change requires study. But academic research takes time. And the climate effort needs many things that already exist, or, at least, that are coming into existence—especially in California. Dating back to the days of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the state adopted a raft of laws and regulations designed to promote dense development. They include AB 32 (greenhouse gas reduction), SB 375 , (dense development and coordination between land use and transportation), SB 743 (reducing vehicle miles traveled), and others—all of which take aim, in some way or another—at the carbon-intensive landscape that California built in the 20 th century and on the types of fuels we use. For planners, the most important elements of these laws are those that promote dense urban development that enables people to get around without individual cars and that align development with public transit and active transportation. In many cases, these regulations are designed to enable the California Environmental Quality Act—one of the country’s original pro-environment laws--to actually do what it's supposed to do. These policies are complicated insofar as they are bureaucratic. And they are controversial insofar as many Californians cling to the status quo, especially if it involves a single-unit home. But they are based on pretty simple principles. Regardless of what new model of electric Hummer comes along or how much your wifi-enabled thermostat knows about your bodily habits, the "technologies" and "policies" surrounding dense, car-phobic development are literally millennia old. In some cases, mitigating climate change doesn't require anything new -- it just requires less obstruction. Look at, for instance, CEQA's antagonism toward infill development or the affordable housing industry's disingenuous affection for parking minimums (which they like only because they allegedly make density bonuses relatively more attractive). Every planner knows about them, whether they went to Stanford or have just looked out the window.  That's one reason why, as delighted as I am for a proud California institution to get a windfall, the approach and the geography of this gift perplex me. Granted, Stanford is a global institution, and the school will have global impacts. But location still matters. California is already a leader on the climate front, in terms of policy, public sentiment, and technology. For all of California’s faults, obliviousness to climate change is not one of them. The hearts and minds that need changing are elsewhere. There's Texas, for instance – where the Doerrs went to college. Rather than plunk $1 billion down just a few miles Tesla’s main factory, why not do it in Houston – the home of ExxonMobil? Or maybe in Iowa, where ethanol corn still gets more respect than windmills. Or Florida, which promises to sink into the Atlantic any day now. Those would have been difficult choices (because, in part, many scholars and students might be uncomfortable living in some of those political climates). But they would have sent a far stronger message. Instead, the Doerrs chose to keep their money in their own backyard, comfortably within view of their fellow tech billionaires. And what backyards they are! Say what you will about New York billionaires, they live more sustainability than Woodside billionaires do. I don’t like to make ad hominem arguments. But, it’s possible that the Doerrs are focusing on academic and technological solutions to climate change because they—and so many others in Silicon Valley—are unschooled in the urbanist solutions. Despite having a darn good model of dense urbanism at the northern end of the San Francisco Peninsula, the cities of the South Bay exemplify what not to do. They rely on freeways and wide boulevards. They celebrate single-family homes and denigrate density. They price out almost all workers below executive level, forcing them to drive in or take infamous “Google Buses” and the like. For people who deal in futuristic nano-scale technology, the carbon footprint of the typical Silicon Valleyite is more like that of a brontosaurus. The advances that have come out of Silicon Valley in the past three decades eclipse anything in the previous history of human civilization. Unfortunately, many of them have arisen in the service of wealth creation rather than in the preservation of the human race, civil society, and the biosphere. Oh well. The Doerrs’ donation feels more like penance than a sincere attempt to marshal the financial and intellectual forces of his industry. $1 billion is a pittance for Silicon Valley. $1 billion is a tiny fraction of the funding that Kleiner Perkins has awarded and a rounding error compared to the value of the companies in which it has invested. Heck, it's only 10% of the Doerrs’ personal net worth. But, $1 billion is better than nothing, I suppose. I sincerely hope the Doerrs’ donation does some good. (In particular, I hope the institute brings on some psychologists to figure out how to talk sense into climate deniers.) John Doerr has been an effective angel investor in the world’s sexiest industry. In this instance, though, he and many other smart, wealthy, powerful people are going to have to figure out more humble ways to move heaven and earth. Until then, I guess we'll have to keep the coal shipments coming. Image courtesy of Ari He, via Flickr .

The amenity wars are heating up in Los Angeles. Swimming pools, quartz countertops, and in-unit washer-dryers are old news. I recently toured a soon-to-open residential development in which the refrigerators dispense not just regular ice cubes for sodas or cold brew but also tennis-ball sized spheres for the perfect old fashioned. To hear newly elected Mayor Karen Bass tell it, this is exactly the kind of development that housing-starved Los Angeles does not need. Bass, who took office in December, was recently interviewed by Liam Dillon and Ben Oreskes of the Los Angeles Times about her land-use agenda. Among her goals for the future and complaints about the status quo, she decried the proliferation of "luxury" developments. I'm not sure if she's seen those fridges yet, or the rates that the developer will be charging for the rentals, but I'm pretty sure that they'd fit the bill. "I do think the city needs everything," said Bass, meaning that the city needs a variety of housing types. She'd have been fine if she'd stopped there. But, she continued, "Well, let me let me qualify that. I’m not sure if the city needs more luxury housing. But luxury housing and market-rate housing are two different things." There’s no doubt that Los Angeles needs deed-restricted affordable housing. Bass says she's "not sure" about the rest, though. I'm sorry, but, given that housing is arguably the number-one issue in Los Angeles, I think the mayor should be sure about how much housing is needed and about who needs what sort of housing. In Los Angeles, any new market-rate housing is almost inevitably going to be "luxury" housing. Developers build "luxury" buildings because the city’s combination of high land prices, high construction costs, bureaucratic friction, and ravenous demand make properties that are "merely" market-rate untenable. Rents in Los Angeles are what they are, regardless of whether they include fancy cocktail ice. A two-bedroom dump anyplace that's not underneath a freeway goes for at least $3,500 per month. Even if developers are building "luxury" properties just for kicks, let's look at Bass's most provocative claim: that the development of luxury properties results in displacement and/or increased rents for incumbent residents. In response to Dillon's statement-question, "The construction of market-rate homes in disadvantaged areas does not cause gentrification or displacement, but instead prevents it," Bass responded with an oddly definitive diagnosis, backed up by anecdote: "That’s completely false. I’m sorry. The area that I lived in until a few weeks ago in South L.A. People who paid $150,000 for their homes. If you put a market-rate house next door, it’s going to be close to $1 million." This is pure nonsense. In the very same interview, Bass praises Los Angeles's rent controls, which govern the vast majority of its older, less expensive housing stock. In additional to limiting rent increases, rent control makes it almost impossible to evict a tenant including, and especially, for the purpose of jacking up the rent. Rick Caruso could build Buckingham Palace next door to your dingbat and it would--by law--have zero influence on the rent you pay. Caruso is, of course, the developer whom Bass defeated in November’s mayoral election. He’s famous for his high-end shopping centers like the Grove. One knock on him was that he would be too felicitous to his fellow developers, turning the city into one big construction site. Instead, we elected someone who doesn't seem to understand development at all. I happen to support the development of new housing (affordable and market-rate) in expensive areas, for many reasons. Even so, plenty of academic research contradicts Bass's claim about the impacts of new development in low-cost areas. I'm particularly convinced by USC Planning Professor Dowell Myers's idea of "vacancy chains ," in which people who trade up to nicer, more expensive homes make less nice, less expensive homes for other people. This is how real estate works in growing cities. The real "luxury" units are the city's hundreds of thousands of single-family homes. The tiniest, oldest, ugliest cottage in Los Angeles goes for nearly $1,000 per square foot. Working class Angelenos can’t dream of affording those rates, and very few early-career professionals or young couples can pay that kind of money either. The former often double up, and the latter tide themselves over with cocktails and the hope that someday they'll have enough cash for a down-payment (or for an entire purchase, since many deals these days are all-cash). Bass seems to wonder who these tenants are, admitting, "I have never understood who lives in all that luxury housing." The subtext is well taken: any big-city major should prioritize the needs of lower-income residents. But, ignoring wealthier residents, and their market power, is not a sound basis for a housing policy. The fact of the matter is, the people who can afford those rents are the people paying those rents—and there are many thousands of them in Los Angeles. If that wasn't enough, Bass throws in a bit of xenophobia: "I do know that there’s a high vacancy rate, or put it this way, there’s absentee owners. People who don’t even live in the United States who own a lot of property here." Absenteeism is a legitimate concern, especially because neighborhoods with low occupancy rates can feel dead, and it's true that many overseas developers and investors are involved in Los Angeles real estate. But, the specter of "foreign owners" is usually raised to make development seem scary. If Bass thinks this is a genuine problem, she's now in a perfect position to propose an ordinance to tax or otherwise regulate absenteeism. From a policy perspective, very little of this makes sense. "Luxury" is not a land use designation. Absent deed restrictions or unusually prescriptive development agreements, developers can fit out buildings however they want and charge whatever they want. Unless Bass is considering a city ordinance to define "luxury" and restrict it, her comments amount to pure divisiveness. They alienate many housing advocates, most developers, and many upwardly mobile residents. And they play into the hands of the city's slow-growth establishment, who have historically exploited class rivalries and ignored economic reality mainly for the purpose of inflating their own property values. Here's what might: the Regional Housing Needs Allocation. As we at CP&DR have written before, the latest incarnation of RHNA, and the mechanisms Sacramento is now using to enforce it, obviates much of the hand-wringing and obstruction that takes place at the local level. Bass’s city has to accommodate 480,000 units over the next eight years, roughly half affordable and half market-rate (amenities optional). Los Angeles's housing element has already been approved, and the city is updating its zoning accordingly. The zoning is coming, and Bass going to have to sign off on it whether or not she likes it or not. Given the magnitude of the crisis in California, I hope Bass and other municipal leaders can drop the divisive rhetoric of political campaigning and embrace collaborative rhetoric that governance requires. The promotion of equitable development is one of the most difficult tasks a mayor can take on. Success requires thoughtfulness, openness, an appreciation for nuance, and a commitment to diversity. Those aren’t luxuries. They are necessities for everyone who lives in California and everyone who wants to live in California.

Schools have honor rolls, big-box stores have employees of the month, and now the California Department of Housing and Community Development has “Prohousing cities.”

Following the January 31 deadline by which the 109 or so jurisdictions of the Bay Area were supposed to have adopted certified housing elements, it's hard to tell whether many of them are being savvy to a fault or simply tempting fate.