Q&A

The last time the American Planning Association held its national conference in Los Angeles, the Lakers were playing in Inglewood, the only trains to serve Union Station were Amtrak, and the only people who spent the night downtown were homeless or business travelers. Today, attendees of the 2012 APA National Conference - to be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center April 14-17 - will find everything from light rail to lofts to Staples Center. A lot has changed in Los Angeles since 1986.

If you extrapolate from the current annual under-supply of affordable housing in California, California should have produced 5.5 million units of affordable housing during Cathy Creswell's career at the Department of Housing and Community Development. While the actual number is likely to be somewhat less, the point remains that HCD has faced and continues to face a monumental task. For the past year, that task has ultimately fallen on the shoulders of Creswell, as she has led the department as its interim executive director until stepping down in February.

Jim Kennedy may have taken the most thankless job in all of California planning. The former planning director of Contra Costa County and longtime board member of the California Redevelopment Association, Kennedy succeeds former executive director John Shirey, who recently became city manager for the City of Sacramento.

The preliminary results of the 2010 U.S. Census are in, and so far they depict a California quite different from the one that the state's localities have been planning for the past few decades. It is no longer a young, family-oriented state that lives in detached homes but rather an aging, childless state that is turning back towards the center cities. And, though California's population - estimated at 37.2 million - is bigger than ever, its growth rate is a shadow of its former self.

The American Planning Association has named the Los Angeles Conservancy as the 2006 winner of the Daniel Burnham Award for the conservancy's work in preserving cultural monuments, protecting historic districts and promoting historic preservation principles. The conservancy is the largest historic preservation organization in the United States. >>read more

Javier Mariscal is director of urban regeneration for John Laing Homes, where he helps one of California's largest developers implement urban infill and reuse projects.

Tom Mullen was a Riverside County supervisor from 1995 until January 2003. He was the initial proponent on the Board of Supervisors of taking a comprehensive approach to development, habitat and transportation planning. That effort eventually became known as the Riverside County Integrated Project (RCIP). Mullen spoke with CP&DR about the RCIP.

Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg is a Democrat from Sacramento and chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee. Since arriving in the Legislature in 1999, Steinberg has carried multiple bills that attempt to boost affordable housing production in the Sacramento region.