Smart Growth
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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CONTINUE READINGEven Worse Than Duke
San Francisco Takes NIMBYism to a New Level
A few years ago, an episode of South Park saw Cartman attempting to rescue Kyle in San Francisco from a SMUG alert. It was, as it is so often, ahead of its time: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously rejected a 63-unit apartment complex, including 15 below-market-rate units, because it would cast …
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CONTINUE READINGSB 827 (To Boost Homes Near Transit) Killed In Committee
Setback reveals tough politics behind restrictive housing policies & potentially guides new path forward
Yesterday afternoon, SB 827 (Wiener) was killed in its first committee. Though a number of legislators acknowledged California’s severe housing shortage, few were willing to risk the political backlash of taking on the local government lobby. The bill needed 7 votes on the 13-member Senate Transportation and Housing Committee but only got 4. Here were …
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CONTINUE READINGBerkeley Law Amicus Brief Highlights Benefits of Transit-Oriented Development
Smart growth alternatives would help end the vicious cycle of highway expansion and housing sprawl in San Diego region
Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) filed an amicus brief last week in a California Court of Appeal case with far-reaching implications for development, transportation, and California’s climate goals. The case, Cleveland National Forest Foundation v. San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), challenges the State’s first Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy …
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CONTINUE READINGSingle-Family Houses: A Smart Growth Strategy
Single family homes are a smart growth strategy as long they are planned and developed, well, smartly.
Sunday’s New York Times features a story by Shaila Dewan asking, “Is Suburban Sprawl on the Way Back?” Answer: not really, although highly compact urban development is hardly going to dominate, either. The best quote from the whole piece comes from Smart Growth America President Geoff Anderson, who correctly observed, The market isn’t all for smart growth, …
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CONTINUE READING(Another) Bad Day for Economists
One interesting project for future intellectual historians will be figuring out how economics became the queen of the social scientists when virtually none of their predictions have come true and so much of their empirical work is downright shoddy. Perhaps it will lie in the way ideology can take over the discipline because of data …
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CONTINUE READINGClear Views in the High Desert
If you are looking for a politically progressive city, Lancaster, California would not make it on your list. Located in the deeply conservative Antelope Valley of north Los Angeles County, it has attracted attention by, inter alia, 1) electing Pete Knight, one of the most vicious anti-gay politicians in the country, to a series of state …
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CONTINUE READINGA New Thought on Smart Growth
The Public Policy Institute of California just released its new report on SB 375, California’s smart growth law. I’m still working my way through it, and at the beginning, it seems pretty boilerplate. For example, it notes that three things California can do to reduce emissions are “Higher-density development, particularly in areas well-served by transit; …
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CONTINUE READINGUrban Sprawl and the Obama Administration
The American Prospect has an interesting article about Shelley Poticha, the director of HUD’s new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities. Poticha is working to encourage a suburban nation to live in ways that make it feasible to walk, take public transit, and bike. Her goal is to make suburban sprawl a thing of the …
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CONTINUE READINGMayor Villaraigosa Betrays Environmentalism AGAIN
A few days ago, I noted that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa likes to talk a good game when it comes to Greening the city, but conveniently abandons plans when they become politically difficult or require anything like a normal attention span. I was more right than I thought. I mentioned that the Mayor had …
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