city of Los Angeles

Why Is Los Angeles Embracing Stupid Growth?

Council Wants Hotels, But No Housing

Yesterday, I expressed wonder that the City of Los Angeles actually did planning right for a change. Obviously, I jinxed it. Reducing VMT, and thus carbon emissions, requires cities to plan and zone for affordable housing (whether defined as deed-restricted or simply at a reasonable market rate). But despite city leaders’ claims of an affordable …

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Grandma Saves The City!

New Data Shows Hope For Affordable Housing In the Most Unlikely Place: Los Angeles

It’s not often that you get some good planning news from Los Angeles, but at least if you believe the City’s numbers, there are some. The Planning Department’s latest housing numbers, from its year-end 2018 Quarterly Report, state that in light of SB 1069 (Wieckowski), which substantially liberalized the construction of Accessory Dwellling Units (ADUs), …

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City of Los Angeles will promote widespread adoption of “cool roof” technology, citing benefits documented in Emmett Center report

One of the core goals of our environmental law programs at UCLA Law is to influence and inform public policy with our research.  I’m proud to say that our Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment is doing exactly that.  The City of Los Angeles, influenced by the Emmett Center’s work, is moving forward …

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C-Change.la and a Sea Change in Climate Change Communication

It has become increasingly clear that in order to address climate change effectively through carbon emissions reduction and adapting to new conditions, we will need new communication tools. Last week, I blogged about a new, groundbreaking climate impact study that projects the impacts of climate change on southern California’s communities at unprecedentedly high resolution.  What …

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UCLA and City of Los Angeles Publish First-Ever Detailed Long-Term Climate Forecast for a City’s Neighborhoods

A team led by UCLA researcher Dr. Alex Hall has released a study that projects temperature trends by neighborhood within the Los Angeles region for the mid-21st century.  The report is the most sophisticated regional study of climate trends that has ever been developed, and is based on climate modeling two orders of magnitude higher …

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How CEQA Saved Mono Lake

Environmental lawyers and policy wonks know that the California Supreme Court’s famed decision in Nat’l Audubon Soc’y v. Superior Court, better known as the Mono Lake case, saved California’s second-largest lake from drying up.  And to some extent this is true: I am working on a full-length book about the case, and so far that story seems to check out.  …

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UCLA Emmett Study Says Cool Roofs are Way Cool (and Bring Lots of Environmental Benefits)

UCLA Law’s Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment released a new report today called Bright Roofs, Big City:  Keeping L.A. Cool Through an Aggressive Cool Roof Program.  The report is the second Anthony Pritzker Environmental Law and Policy Brief issued by the Center. Cara Horowitz, the author of the report, used a dataset …

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Unintended Consequences and Environmental Policy

Last summer, Los Angeles experienced a rash of water main breaks that at the time baffled  city officials responsible for the 7000 plus miles of underground pipes.  In a new report,  a panel of experts concluded that the city’s 2009 water conservation program, which limited lawn watering to Mondays and Thursdays during the summer, increased the number …

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