Not long ago, the City of Stockton could hardly have paid for the paper to print a new general plan, much less actually craft the plan. Since the city declared bankruptcy in 2012 after a long slide, its finances have changed for the better. A new general plan update seeks to do the same for the city’s built environment.

In the perennial race between technology and public policy, the electric scooter got out to a serious head-start last year. But urban planners are catching up.

The federal Opportunity Zone program promises, according to supporters, to direct tens — and possibly hundreds — of billions of dollars of private investment capital into some of the nation’s most needy communities, including over 800 Census tracts in California.

President and CEO Gabriel Metcalf joined SPUR in 1997 — the year before Google’s first search engine came online — and became executive director in 2005. In the intervening years, he has witnessed, commented on, and helped shape the region’s economic and demographic growth ever since.

A coalition of advocacy groups has filed a quixotic, aggressively worded lawsuit against the California Air Resources Board’s 2017 AB 32 Scoping Plan, claiming in part that its encouragement of VMT reductions and other strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will unduly restrict development of new housing and victimized poor and minority residents of California.

Targets differ by MPO, but they all stick to the original formula of a percentage reduction in per-capita greenhouse gas emissions compared to the 1990 baseline. Generally, the new targets for 2020 are 1-2 percentage points higher than the current targets, and targets for 2035 are 3-4 percentage points higher.

Though comprehensive data is hard to find, the proliferation of sober living homes is thought to be particularly intense in coastal California, where the climate and lifestyle are marketed to prospective residents

The Office of Planning and Research has released long-awaited CEQA guidelines that, by many accounts, promise to revolutionize the way developers and lead agencies measure the transportation impacts of projects under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Tech giant plans huge campus near Diridon Station in Downtown San Jose.

Measure S, on the March 7 citywide ballot, is by many accounts the apotheosis of so-called ballot-box planning – for better or worse.

A permit for gas pumps at mixed use project in Sacramento has led to a protracted legal battle and a rare lawsuit against a city.

While the presidential race has put the charms of federalism on full display, direct democracy has never been more robust than it is in California this election cycle. In jurisdictions of all sizes, Californians face the biggest crop of land-use ballot measures in years.