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.

While AB 32 and SB 375 have garnered attention for their efforts to limit California's greenhouse gas emissions, even the most ardent supporters of those measures admit that they are small pieces of a much larger puzzle. For the past year, the California Climate Adaptation Task Force has been trying to figure out what some of the other pieces should look like. Convened by the Pacific Council on International Policy, the task force was invited by Gov. Schwarzenegger to make official recommendations about how the state can adapt to, rather than mitigate, climate change. >>read more

In Year Three of the Great Recession, it's comforting to think that California has heard all the bad news it's going to hear. Or at least we're so accustomed to bad news, that we've stopped getting depressed by it. As a result, many of this year's top stories come with silver linings.

The no-growth vs. slow-growth vs. build-everything debate has become a faint murmur, since not much of anything is getting built anyway. What is getting built, though, is generally pleasing to the smart growth crowd.

Fans of infrastructure development have surely cheered the progress on projects like High Speed Rail and Los Angeles Metro's 30/10 Initiative. Then again, skeptics may be assuring themselves that these projects will never get built.

A Santa Monica apartment complex owned by a religious group did not fall within a statutory exemption from local historic preservation regulations because the property has always been a commercial enterprise, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled.

An environmental impact report for a 560-housing unit specific plan in the Riverside County city of Beaumont has been upheld by the Fourth District Court of Appeal. The court approved the city's use of a baseline for examining water usage that was favorable to the developer, accepted the city's determination that loss of farmland could not be mitigated, and upheld the city's statement of overriding consideration for approving a project with significant environmental impacts.