"Environmental justice" is becoming the biggest buzzword in planning since "smart growth." There is an irony here, because, at least in California, the two appear to be on something of a collision course.
One of the cardinal rules of ballot-box zoning in California is that ballot measures beget ballot measures. That is, once the concept of making land-use decisions gets embedded in the local political culture, there is no getting rid of it — it only burrows deeper and deeper into the political landscape.
The Interior Department has announced plans to withdraw temporarily "critical habitat" designations for 19 different species of salmon and steelhead throughout the West. The March revelation came in the context of a federal judge's decision to order economic impact analyses of the critical habitat designations.
Perhaps no legislative proposal in recent memory has cut closer to the bone of California's state-local governance problems than AB 680, Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg's proposal to create a tax-sharing system for metropolitan Sacramento.
Despite a recession, $12 billion state budget deficit and already large debt obligations, numerous bond proposals will appear on the state ballot this year.
Here's a man-bites-dog story to top them all: The biggest redevelopment agency in the state may put itself out of business unless the state Legislature comes to the rescue.
California is an expansive state, but most people live and work in a series of spaces that are – proportionally – rather small. It may seem like it takes forever to traverse metropolitan Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area, but these population centers make up only a tiny portion of the state's overall land area.
You learn in school that planning is about vision, but in the real world planning usually boils down to numbers � numbers about what's going to happen in the future. But you can never really know what's going to happen in the future. The best you can do is guess.
Everybody knows there are lots of lots in California. And there's always been lots of controversy about what you can do with your lots. But now there's lots of controversy about the more basic question of what is a lot and what is not.
Jurisdictions all over the state are dealing with the question of how to handle old parcels that don't meet current standards. Increasingly, however, localities are facing big property owners who are asserting something a little different – the idea that big c
