CP&DR

Voters No Longer SOARing; Density Could Be the Next Ballot Fight

Dec 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 12 Dec 2000, William Fulton

Election Day 1998 sure looked like a watershed for ballot-box zoning in California. That was the day that voters in Ventura County and five cities there passed the so-called SOAR (Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources) initiatives, which created an almost "air-tight" system of urban growth boundaries around the cities and agricultural preservation in unincorporated areas. In the months after that election, California began to look like "SOAR-land". Reporters from around the country troo...

Redevelopment Project Areas Shrink in Number But Grow in Acreage

Nov 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 11 Nov 2000, William Fulton

Redevelopment is supposed to be out of fashion. The legislative reforms passed in 1993 made it more difficult for local governments to find "blight" — and cut down on the financial incentives for using redevelopment as well. Furthermore, California's appellate courts have made it increasingly clear that they have little patience for California's redevelopment games. In three recent rulings, appellate judges have hammed local agencies for playing fast and loose with the definition of both "blight" and "u...

History Tells Us the Voters want to Slow Growth, Create Boundaries

Oct 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 10 Oct 2000, William Fulton

The process of initiative and referendum is California's most peculiar institution. Other states rely on their legislators or other elected officials to hash out controversial public issues in lengthy, complicated and subtle debates. But Californians prefer the blunt instrument of the ballot box — a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down from voters. We all know this is true at the state level, where voters are confronted on each ballot with a bewildering array of initiatives and bond issues. But it...

Shrinking Contra Costa Growth Boundary Sets Off cities and Builders

Sep 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 09 Sep 2000, William Fulton

It goes without saying that in land-use planning, as in most other aspects of governance, where you stand depends on where you sit. One person's sprawl is another person's prosperity; one jurisdiction's responsible stewardship of resources is another jurisdiction's lost opportunity for economic development. When you get this kind of conflict in California land-use planning, usually you wind up in court — simply because there is no other forum for appeal. And so it is not surprising that the City of Br...

The Missing Link? Cities Want Business to Fund Affordable Housing

Aug 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 08 Aug 2000, William Fulton

Linkage fees are back. But will they do any good — or any harm? A "linkage fee" is a fee imposed on one kind of development to help fund a different kind of development that otherwise might not get built. Most commonly, this means slapping a fee on commercial development (which presumably brings more jobs to a community) in order to fund affordable housing development (which presumably will house the workers who take the jobs). Linkage was all the rage back in the late '80s — when office developmen...

Governor Bypasses Traditional System for Planning Transit and Highways

Jul 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 07 Jul 2000, William Fulton

No government planning process is more given to cumbersome bureaucratic procedures than transportation planning. The whole process by which we determine what transportation projects get built is often portrayed — even by policy wonks — as little more than a mind-numbing collection of acronyms: ISTEA, TEA-21, CTC, MPO, RTP, RTPA, STIP, RTIP, and on and on. The very bureaucratic denseness of this system, however, reveals the solid public policy logic on which it is based. When we talk about transportati...

Southern California Cities Argue Over SCAG's Regional Housing Allocations

by William Fulton on Jun 1, 2000

Housing, Insight, RHNA, Vol. 15 No. 06 Jun 2000, William Fulton

After a delay of almost a decade, the battle over how localities in California divvy up their responsibility for low- and moderate-income housing has been joined once again. The first battlefield is metropolitan Los Angeles, where the Southern California Association of Governments is engaged in a struggle with its own members over the "Regional Housing Needs Assessment" (RHNA) process ï¿½ and is lobbying the state to reduce L.A.'s overall obligation to provide low/mod housing. The SCAG battle is ...

Land-Use Authority in L.A. Shifts Up and Down--At Expense of Council

May 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 05 May 2000, William Fulton

Los Angeles is the second-biggest city in the United States, but nobody who lives there has ever seemed especially proud of this fact. For many community activists the city's size has always seemed like an annoyance. L.A.'s neighborhood groups — especially homeowner associations in the San Fernando Valley — have complained for decades that the downtown City Hall bureaucracy is too remote and unresponsive to meet the needs of the city's varied neighborhoods, especially when it comes to pla...

Local Slow-Growth Measures Fare Poorly in March Election

Apr 1, 2000

Insight, Vol. 15 No. 04 Apr 2000, William Fulton

Everybody always complains about growth but nobody ever does anything about it. That, at least, is one way to view the March 7 election returns. According to most polls, sprawl tops many lists of community problems these days. But voters in almost a dozen California communities rejected the opportunity to use "ballot-box zoning" to stop growth and development. And it will be interesting to see whether that trend continues in the November election — when some very big anti-growth initiatives ar...

New Partnership Tackles Bay, Valley Growth Questions: IRP Urges Better Jobs-Housing Coordination in 5-County Region

Mar 1, 2000

Featured Articles, Vol. 15 No. 03 Mar 2000, William Fulton

A five-county "Inter-Regional Partnership" between the Bay Area and the Central Valley is taking more tangible form. The Partnership will ask the Legislature this year for a pilot project to designate housing and job "incentive zones" — similar to enterprise zones — that would include a re-distribution of existing property tax revenue and streamlined environmental review to encourage better jobs-housing balance. The Partnership is also seeking $625,000 in state funding to integrate computer mappin...