If these communities are going to, at the same time, decry the invasion of newcomers and oppose most development, then they face but one option: they must promote development elsewhere.
OPR Finally Finishes SB 743 Guidelines
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.
Searching for Los Angeles in Blade Runner 2049
For all the theorizing about Blade Runner, it’s worth asking not what Scott was saying about the future of Los Angeles (or of cities in general) but rather why he chose Los Angeles in the first place.
Google Goes Urban: Campus for 20,000 to Rise in San Jose
Tech giant plans huge campus near Diridon Station in Downtown San Jose.
Freeway Caps May Reshape California Urban Areas
Now, as California’s urban resurgence continue apace, several cities are considering reconstructive surgery.
Los Angeles Learns to Play Ball: Review of City of Dreams
The all-time championship of uncertainty, politicking, and contentiousness surrounding a Los Angeles sports team goes to none other than the Dodgers.
Radical Left Burns Bridges amid Quest To Build Housing
Honesty and compromise remain admirable values and effective political tools — especially on the local level where policymakers, community members, and activists are literally rubbing elbows with each other.
L.A. Tower Reveals Downside of Skyscrapers
In a city that remains famously horizontal, it’s fun to get excited about something vertical.
Death by Gentrification: Review of ‘How to Kill a City’
A few weeks ago, Richard Florida assured me and a roomful of other journalists that “not everything is a neoliberal plot.” Tell it to Peter Moskowitz.
Why Cities Should Back Off of Setbacks
For all their popularity, setbacks have little basis in engineering or architecture. They are simply regulatory whims.
It’s Time to Stop Demonization of Developers
Among the grandiose promises, half-truths, and outright whoppers that sponsors of Measure S proffered, one of the most consistent messages concerned the depravity of real estate developers.
Post-Recession, Master Planned Communities Come Back to Life
Ontario Ranch is but the most massive of a new generation of large master planned communities that are in various stages of development statewide. Technically, Ontario Ranch is an annexation, consisting of nine master-planned communities that are enormous — on the order of several thousand residential units — in their own right.
Coalitions Square Off Over Los Angeles Anti-Growth Measure
Measure S, on the March 7 citywide ballot, is by many accounts the apotheosis of so-called ballot-box planning – for better or worse.
Tech Windfall, Deportation Order Threaten to Snap Los Angeles in Half
Deportation is — to say the least — the most perverse way to solve a housing crisis.
Richard Florida’s Reckoning: Review of The New Urban Crisis
Richard Florida’s forthcoming book, The New Urban Crisis, will likely elicit one of two responses.
Richard Florida’s Reckoning: Review of ‘The New Urban Crisis
Today, many cities, and perhaps Florida himself, have become victims of their own success.
California’s Nastiest Urban-Rural Rivalry
Nasty as it sounds, Green Acres ‘Farm’ in Kern County is an apt symbol of the symbiosis between rural and urban areas.