Blogs

Don't start dreaming about that downtown loft just yet. 

Reports indicate that Gov. Jerry Brown will name Ken Alex director of the Governor's Office of Planning and Research. If confirmed, Alex will succeed Cynthia Bryant, who served under former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governor's office has yet to make a public announcement and would neither confirm nor deny Alex's appointment. 

I have published so many corrections in my journalism career that I now write the correction along with the story. To wit: The following story is all made up. There is no draft EIR for the downtown football stadium yet. Yet few readers are aware that I possess the flawless crystal sphere of Nostradamus, which gives me super powers to see accurately into the future. (Note to editor: Do I have to run corrections for inaccurate statements about myself? I mean, who would know?)

Gosh, it's really, really hard to guess what the negative impacts might occur, when building a football stadium with seating for 70,000 or so people rises in downtown Los Angeles. Let's see now.

This is how far out of whack things have gotten in Sacramento: Jerry Brown is now the one who sounds sane.

Earlier this week, Brown canceled the planned sale of 11 state-owned office complexes to a group of private investors calling themselves, ironically enough, California First. The deal would have netted the state about $1.2 billion, equal to roughly 5% of the state budget deficit.

Quick: what economic sector most reminds you of Los Angeles? Hollywood? Aerospace? Yoga? According to sports and entertainment giant AEG and a certain pastoral insurance company, it's none of the above. 

Last week AEG announced that Los Angeles' nonexistant downtown football stadium, to be developed door to Staples Center and LA Live, will be funded in part by a sponsorship by Farmers Insurance. Thus, the world will know Los Angeles as the home of -- I'm not kidding -- Farmers Field. 

In advance of the Feb. 9 Senate Governance and Fi­nance Committee hearing on the fate of redevelopment, the Legislative Analyst's Office has produced an extensive briefing paper encouraging senators to ask some hard questions about Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to eliminate redevelopment and redistribute its tax increment. 

A few weeks ago, I had a good time taking apart anti-anti-sprawl critic Wendell Cox's self-referential analysis supposedly showing that highly regulated metropolises have higher housing costs because they are highly regulated. ("Wendell Cox's Voodoo Economics.") In sum, Cox concluded that because any variation in housing cost must be due to regulation, all variation in housing cost must therefore be due to regulation.

Governor Jerry Brown's "State of the State" speech last night was probably so familiar that you might have thought you'd written it yourself. He outlined, in remarkably plain terms, the crisis that the state faces and, unlike his predecessor, took an adult approach to bipartisan cooperation. In his eyes, there were no girlie-men in the chamber. Instead, his rhetoric suggests that he was speaking to a group of public servants with different ideologies and a common challenge. 

The constitution mandates that we build highways, but not bike lanes. So says Duncan Hunter, a freshman Republican congressman from suburban San Diego.

I'm not making this up. A short interview with Hunter, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, posted by DC Streetsblog is the talk of the alternative transportation crowd.

"SB: But you're OK with mandating highways?"

The clamp on local governments in California grows only tighter and tighter.

The number and detail of state mandates continues to increase. The ability to raise revenue continues to decrease. The amount of litigation never decreases. Redevelopment is in doubt. Keeping a city or county out of financial or legal trouble seems to get more difficult every year.

Those were the implicit – and sometimes explicit – messages during the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference in Los Angeles last Friday. As always at the conference, expert practitioners and analysts reviewed last year's lawmaking, rulemaking and courtroom activity, and speculated about the year ahead. It was difficult to detect many rays of light for cities or counties.

While redevelopment might once have been considered a key weapon in the War on Poverty, redevelopment officials now find themselves gearing up for a different kind of battle. They rallied the troops today, laying out a strategy for opposing the elimination of redevelopment in order to help close a $24 billion budget gap. 

When organizers of the UCLA Extension Land Use Law and Planning Conference sponsored sessions on ethics in previous years, yawns and frequent checking of cell phones was the overwhelming response.

They expect a far more engaged audience this year for the session titled "Unringing the Bell: When Land Use Decision Making and Ethics Collide."

The dissolution of redevelopment agencies may be the biggest bombshell that Gov. Jerry Brown dropped on the land use community. But it is not the only one. He is also targeting the Williamson Act, Enterprise Zones, and fire safety in order to help close the state's $28 billion deficit. 

Enterprise Zones

Like redevelopment project areas, Enterprise Zones are intended to stoke economic development in disadvantaged areas. However, rather than using tax increment financing and being orchestrated by a public agency, Enterprise Zones simply confer tax credits and other financial incentives on businesses that set up shop within the zones. 

As expected, the budget proposed today by Gov. Jerry Brown calls for the wholesale elimination of redevelopment agencies.  This dramatic move would free up roughly $5 billion in annual tax increments that redevelopment agencies control and would redirect those increments to fund a range of local services. 

The proposal has set off what will likely be an ongoing debate over the value of redevelopment as it has been implemented in the 59 years since California voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the use of tax increment financing to combat blight.