Insight

Twenty years ago this fall, the population of California stood at slightly north of 27 million people - an alarming increase of 4 million since the 1980 Census. Many people were wondering how the state would be able to accommodate such a huge population. >>read more

Should Californians vote to "protect our homes," or should they vote against a "taxpayer trap?" This, in a nutshell, is the campaign about Proposition 90, the property rights initiative on the ballot in November. >>read more

Home prices are flattening out. Interest rates are going up. Foreclosures are at their highest rate in years. The real estate boom is clearly over. But does that mean California's high-density/infill/mixed-use boom is over as well? >>read more

The regional housing wars have begun again in Southern California. And how they come out will go a long way toward determining how much influence the state's four major "blueprint" regional planning efforts will have over local development patterns - especially infill housing - during the next few years. >>read more

So, the smart growthers have their candidate for governor. No statewide public figure in California has been more closely identified with "smart growth" and "New Urbanism" than Phil Angelides. This affiliation didn't matter in the Democratic primary. And it probably won't matter in the general election, either. But it will matter if Angelides is elected. >>read more

Back in January, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - still stinging from a unanimous round of losses in the 2005 special election - decided to focus on infrastructure as a way to change the subject and exhibit political leadership as he prepared to run for re-election. >>read more

How much infill can we build in California? This is the big question everybody is trying to answer these days. >>read more

Everybody in California is talking about form-based codes these days. Cities throughout the state are in the process of adopting these codes. The wave is growing so fast that form-based codes appear to represent a revolution in the making. >>read more

For almost 60 years, urban redevelopment and eminent domain have been intertwined, both in public policy and in the public's mind. Since at least the passage of the Housing Act of 1949 - and in some states even before that - eminent domain has been used to assemble large blocks of urban land out of small, cut-up parcels. Maybe urban development specialists can't imagine life without it. >>read more

All California governors try to turn into Pat Brown sooner or later, so it's not surprising that Arnold Schwarzenegger has now done the same. What's surprising is not that Schwarzenegger is using Pat Brown's legacy, but that he's using nearly the same suburban model as Pat Brown did almost a half-century ago. >>read more

It has now been two years since Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California under perhaps the most peculiar circumstances in American history. His political stock has been dropping rapidly for almost a year, culminating in his across-the-board loss in the November special election on which he had laid all his political chips. >>read more

New Jersey is not California. New Jersey is an intense and partisan place filled with rough-and-tumble politics, gritty urban centers both decrepit and revived, political corruption, ethnic tension, and the suburban snobbery that goes with a desire to escape all of the above. >>read more

With all the talk these days about New Urbanism in California these days, it is sometimes easy to overlook the old urbanists. These were planners of the 1950s and 1960s who worked in the context of urban renewal and Modernist architecture, trying to fight a rear-guard action against the rapid suburbanization of the time. >>read more

By the time I actually met Ed Bacon in person, the legendary urban planner who died last week at the age of 95, he was already in his late 80s, cranky and quirky. He had just read my book The Reluctant Metropolis, which reminded him that I had written a magazine article many years before that he had liked (see "Visionaries, Deal Makers, Incrementalists: The Divided World of Urban Planning" below). He called me up out of the blue one day to discuss whether I should write his biography. >>read more