Land Use
Can Soils Solve Climate Change?
Another dubious claim of natural climate solutions makes the rounds
A few months ago, I questioned a claim that planting trees could solve climate change. According to some scientists, reforestation “is by far the cheapest solution that has ever been proposed,” and for $300 billion it could sequester 200 gigatons of carbon (GtC, or 733 GtCO2). Many media outlets swooned, but the assertions were weak …
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CONTINUE READINGTOC Under Fire
Fix the City’s new lawsuit challenges a key transit-oriented housing program
Last week, a Los Angeles slow-growth group, Fix the City, filed a lawsuit challenging a West Los Angeles development project on Santa Monica Boulevard. The project, a seven-story, 120-unit apartment building less than half a mile from the Century City mall, was approved using density bonus, height, and setback incentives through the City of Los …
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CONTINUE READINGParking versus Housing at UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley faces same dilemma as much of rest of California in addressing the housing crisis
UC Berkeley is not immune to California’s housing crisis. Indeed, as the student newspaper noted, the campus “has housing for 22 percent of undergrads and 9 percent of graduate students – vastly lower than the UC average of 38.1 percent for undergraduates and 19.6 percent for graduate students.” Moreover, soaring housing costs have made it …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat I Wish The Green New Deal Hadn’t Left Out
Greening our infrastructure is part of the solution, but so’s city planning.
While there’s certainly been no shortage of criticism of last week’s Green New Deal resolution, the common line hasn’t been that the resolution doesn’t try to cover enough ground. On the contrary, it’s been called an everything-but-the-carbon-sink approach; even Trevor Noah devoted a few minutes of the Daily Show to gaping at the proposal’s efforts …
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CONTINUE READINGLA’s Trying to Build Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing
But could we make it easier?
My colleague Jonathan Zasloff rightly points out that one way to harness the benefits of upzoning to alleviate our housing crisis is to promote inclusionary requirements for transit-oriented development. Los Angeles has adopted just such a program through its Transit-Oriented Communities ordinance, which I’ve written about here. Per the City of Los Angeles’ initial assessment, …
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CONTINUE READINGDeveloping Policy from the Ground Up
New article provides more detailed data and analysis of housing entitlement in the Bay Area
This blog post (and the underlying article) was co-authored by Moira O’Neill, Giulia Gualco-Nelson, and Eric Biber. Our team has released a new article on land-use regulation and housing in the Bay Area, building on our report from last February that explored the role of local law and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) on …
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CONTINUE READINGWe’re Never Going to Meet Our GHG Transportation Goals Unless We Radically Rethink Our Cities
Introducing an ongoing series focused on reducing vehicle miles traveled as a crucial climate mitigation strategy
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about vehicle miles traveled, or VMT. Specifically, why is it so hard to get people to think seriously about reducing VMT as a climate mitigation strategy? Building on my earlier ode to electric scooters, this post begins a semi-regular series on different aspects of VMT reduction strategies, beginning with …
CONTINUE READINGCEQA and Local Land Use Regulations: Shakedown Street
Local Government Discretion Has Powerful Political Support
Eric’s post the other day about CEQA and local land use regulation states an important and often-overlooked truth: environmental review can only hold up a project if it is discretionary. If local land use regulations state clearly what a developer can and cannot do, then no amount of environmental review could change a decision, and …
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CONTINUE READINGSB 827 and the Concept of Deregulation
When land-use deregulation gets characterized as regulation, and why
Perhaps the biggest topic in land-use law and housing affordability in California over the past couple of months has been a piece of legislation introduced by State Senator Wiener, SB 827. Ethan has blogged quite a bit about the bill – the basic concept of the legislation is to eliminate or significantly restrict a number …
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CONTINUE READINGGlobal market for ecosystem services surges to $36 billion in annual transactions
New article in Nature Sustainability tracks global payments for ecosystems services
In the early 1990s, New York City began paying for land management in the Catskills watershed to ensure safe drinking water for the city, avoiding the cost of building an expensive water treatment plant. New York City provides just one example of a growing number of programs – called payments for ecosystem services (PES) – …
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