The clamp on local governments in California grows only tighter and tighter.
The number and detail of state mandates continues to increase. The ability to raise revenue continues to decrease. The amount of litigation never decreases. Redevelopment is in doubt. Keeping a city or county out of financial or legal trouble seems to get more difficult every year.
Those were the implicit and sometimes explicit messages during the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference in Los Angeles last Friday. As always at the conference, expert practitioners and analysts reviewed last year's lawmaking, rulemaking and courtroom activity, and speculated about the year ahead. It was difficult to detect many rays of light for cities or counties.
While redevelopment might once have been considered a key weapon in the War on Poverty, redevelopment officials now find themselves gearing up for a different kind of battle. They rallied the troops today, laying out a strategy for opposing the elimination of redevelopment in order to help close a $24 billion budget gap.
As expected, the budget proposed today by Gov. Jerry Brown calls for the wholesale elimination of redevelopment agencies. This dramatic move would free up roughly $5 billion in annual tax increments that redevelopment agencies control and would redirect those increments to fund a range of local services.
The proposal has set off what will likely be an ongoing debate over the value of redevelopment as it has been implemented in the 59 years since California voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the use of tax increment financing to combat blight.
When 5.7 million people say they want to shield local funding from grabbing hands as they did in November -- that should be the end of the story. At least, that's what California's redevelopment agencies would hope after this annus horribilis in the redevelopment world.
There have not been a great many surprises in the world of California land use planning and real estate development during 2010. At least that's what I can see now, with the year nearly complete. But in late 2009, I made three predictions for the coming year that turned out to be about half right.
My three predictions were:
Housing production will increase. This was too easy, and I was right. But not by a lot.
The SB 375 backlash will start to hit. A number of builders and local government officials jumped off the SB 375 bandwagon this year, but I expected the fallout to reach the general public. It didn't. I got this one half right.
And that's the end of the fairy tale: Prince Nokia came to Princess Downtown Sunnyvale, providing the city with new jobs, plus helping complete the long-unfinished office building that had annoyed Sunnyvale for years. And the prince and princess lived happily ever after .
Oh, Gramps, I love that story! Tell it to me again.
It's past your bedtime, swee' pea, and it's even getting late for me .
If a new generation of transportation advocates and federal officials has their way, California will soon have miles of brand-new rail lines, strategically sited to enliven cities, increase real estate values, and whisk passengers several whole blocks at speeds ofοΏ½ nearly 20 miles per hour.
High-speed rail, it's not. But $40 billion, it's not either.
Local voters in the Nov. 2 California election were not necessarily "pro-growth" or "anti-growth" but rather seem to have embraced smart growth like never before. They expressed subtle but clear preferences for preserving open space while accepting compact development. Urban growth boundaries were a big hit, and several infill plans and projects were approved while anything that would have led to encroachment on greenfields or urban fringes was shot down.
Property taxes collected by redevelopment agencies provide the largest ongoing source of funding for low- and moderate-income housing development in California about $1 billion annually. How agencies account for and spend that money may be about to change in light of a state Senate investigation and front-page newspaper stories.
