Land Use
Urban 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 READINGNew White Paper Released on Local Government Land Use Planning and Climate Change
UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law released a new white paper today called “Plan for the Future: How Local Governments Can Help Implement California’s New Land Use and Climate Change Legislation.” The paper looks at steps that policy-makers and local government leaders can take to improve land use planning in California to meet the …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Property Rights (Part IV)
Environmental property rights, such as tradable permits, conservation trusts, and the public trust doctrine, can change the constitutional landscape of environmental law.
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Property Rights (Part III)
An environmental property right (EPR) can be defined as an enforceable interest deriving from an environmental asset such as air quality or an undisturbed forest. EPRs are diverse and varied. Most EPRs are derived from statute rather than the common law, and many are of recent vintage. Some EPRs are marketable; others are not. Fundamentally, …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Property Rights: Part II
The previous post in this series introduced the idea of environmental property rights. There are a surprising number of EPRs. A complete listing would include at least nine kinds of EPRs: In addition to the public trust doctrine and tradable permits (which were discussed in the first part of the series), here are seven more: …
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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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CONTINUE READINGHow Green is High-Speed Rail?
Life cycle costs can be a buzz kill. Just when you think you’ve got a great environmental solution, such as going paperless and doing everything digitally, or installing double-paned windows to make a home more energy efficient, you find out that manufacturing these supposedly environmentally-friendly technologies can create waste that offsets some of their “green” …
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CONTINUE READINGDon’t Give Up on the San Fernando Valley!
Ethan is surely right when he notes that MetroRail ridership in the San Fernando Valley: 1) isn’t as high as it should be; and 2) this results in part from a lack of leadership on land use. But I wouldn’t write the Valley off just yet. First, recall that there are only two Valley stations …
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CONTINUE READING10 Wasted Years of Subway Service to the San Fernando Valley
The Source, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s in-house blog, proudly links to an article on the ten-year anniversary of the opening of Red Line subway service to the San Fernando Valley from Hollywood. Blogger Fred Camino notes that ridership on the route is well below initial projections (153,000 daily boardings compared to a hoped …
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CONTINUE READING“Africa Is Dying”
This was the sobering message I received last week as part of a delegation to Senegal from the American Jewish World Service. Senegal is in the Sahel, a 1,000 kilometer-wide African region between the Sahara on the north and the sub-tropics to the south. It is relatively well-watered, but is nevertheless a poster child for …
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