The Fourth District Court of Appeal has blocked the City of Anaheim's attempt to build a surface parking lot on a property adjacent to two new hotels rather than a parking structure, as was implied in a conditional use permit the city approved in 1999.

Ever since Gov. Jerry Brown killed redevelopment in 2011, the conventional wisdom has been that eventually he would give it a second life - but only after he was sure the old system was completely dead, in a way that protects the state general fund, and probably after he himself won re-election to a final term.

Last week's unanimous, finely worded ruling by the California Supreme Court has spared builders their worst-case scenario in the long-awaited "CEQA in Reverse" case. It does not interpret the California Environmental Quality Act to require an environmental impact report whenever a project might attract more people within range of an existing hazard such as air pollution or earthquake risk.

Another Newhall Ranch case goes to the Supreme Court. The winning environmentalists seek a rehearing in the big Newhall lvictorh -- mostly to clarify the nature of their win. And, on another front, an appellate court reheard a groundwater extraction fee case and didn't budget.

After doling out $120 million in essentially free money in 2015, the program staff behind the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grants discovered almost as many opinions as there were dollars in the program. Public and private stakeholders alike expressed concerns about both the fairness and efficacy of the selection process. Large urban areas lobbied for population-based preferences, rural areas lamented their lack of qualifying transit, and fierce discussions took place over jurisdictional caps and underserved communities.

In light of a similar ruling by the California Supreme Court in a case from San Diego, the First District Court of Appeal has ordered Cal State East Bay to revisit the question of offsite traffic mitigation in the environmental impact report for its long-range master plan. As the Supreme Court did in San Diego, the court ruled that Cal State cannot simply declare mitigations infeasible unless the state legislature appropriates funds specifically for that purpose.

You can't fix a bad EIR with an addendum, even when the addendum was supposed to fix the EIR.

Oakland can't retroactively apply CUP in crematorium case.

San Bernardino County is not entitled to the return of $9 million in loan principal to the former county redevelopment agency, even though the funds were not tax-increment revenues and had come from the county's general fund, the Third District Court of Appeal ruled Monday.

California's Supreme Court broke the Newhall Land & Farming Company's long winning streak November 30 in a victory for environmental and community groups over the Newhall Ranch megadevelopment. 

If there's anything more confusing than one regional government bureaucracy, it's two regional government bureaucracies.  

A couple of weeks ago I heard a spiel by one of the founders of a new startup called Feastly, which is trying to pair up chefs with diners. Chefs wake up in the morning, go into their kitchen, prepare whatever they want, put out a call on the Internet - and if it's something you want to eat, you go to their house and dine. Feastly, in other words, turns every dining room into a restaurant.

Reconsidering the case in light of the California Supreme Court's recent Berkeley Hillside ruling, the Third District Court of Appeal has reaffirmed last year's ruling concluding that a rodeo at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds does not qualify as an "unusual circumstance" that can override an exemption under the California Environmental Quality Act.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal has rejected arguments from San Diegans for Open Government that the City of San Diego improperly created a joint powers authority in order to avoid a two-thirds vote requirement for issuing sale-leaseback Marks-Roos bonds.

The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA professor emeritus Don Shoup's landmark call for parking reform, was published in 2005. On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, some of his strongest devotees can, at long last, celebrate a victory in the state where the "Shoupista" movement began. 

The Second District Court of Appeal has upheld the environmental impact report for the extension of Los Angeles's Purple Line, removing another hurdle for construction of the "Subway to the Sea" through Beverly Hills. Now we'll see whether the Beverly Hills city and school district will appeal to the California Supreme Court.

Was Tuesday's election the turning point in the San Francisco density battles? 

The division of one parcel into four noncontiguous pieces via eminent domain does not automatically create four legal parcels and permit the landowner to avoid the Subdivision Map Act, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled. 

For all the appeal that “streamlining” would seem to offer, Gov. Jerry Brown's housing proposal has drawn stiff criticism – including some from traditional proponents of affordable housing.

Reversing itself on remand, the First District Court of Appeal has ruled in the Berkeley Hillside case that the proposed home of computer pioneer Mitch Kapor and his wife does not, in and of itself, represent an "unusual circumstances" under the CEQA Guidelines and therefore the  City of Berkeley acted properly in applying a CEQA exemption to the project.