A couple of days ago in the California Planning & Development Report, Bill Fulton asked if the window on the Builder’s Remedy is closing. He makes the case that the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) is settling many of its disputes with cities like Beverley Hills and that many cities are now getting into Housing Element compliance. What an ever increasing number of cities in compliance with State housing law, the opportunity for Builder’s Remedy projects is diminishing. However, the numbers don’t quite bear that out, and it ignores the biggest affect the Builder’s Remedy had on this Housing Element cycle.

In the SCAG Region, which has been the biggest focus for Builder’s Remedy projects, there are still 56 of the 197 jurisdictions out of compliance. Of those 56, 14 have draft housing elements in review by HCD. Bill assumes that those 14 will largely be approved, but my recent experience with HCD is that they are still holding cities to the same standards that they always have. While some of those 14 housing elements will be approved on their merits, HCD will continue to have comments on many others. Given all that, there are still roughly a quarter of all jurisdictions in the SCAG Region subject to Builder’s Remedy projects.

Despite so many cities in the SCAG Region being out of housing element compliance for years at this point, there have been relatively few Builder’s Remedy projects. According to data from YIMBY Law, there have been 48 Builder’s Remedy projects in the SCAG Region. However, more than a third of those are in Santa Monica alone. The Builder’s Remedy never became a way for developers to produce large number of new homes. For many pro-housing advocates, this has been a real disappointment and great failure of the Housing Accountability Act in general and the Builder’s Remedy in particular.

The biggest constraint to using the Builder’s Remedy has been a lack of certainty regarding approvals and timelines. Many cities subject to Builder’s Remedy worked hard to drag the process out as long as possible, often with never-ending CEQA analysis¹. Even though cities generally lost their Builder’s Remedy cases in court, the delay in approvals often made projects infeasible. As has become abundantly clear, especially with LA’s experiment with 60-day approvals, certainty and short timeless allow for a lot more housing to be built than just increasing the allowable density.

With all that said, the Builder’s Remedy was much more impactful on this housing element cycle than the raw numbers would suggest. The Builder’s Remedy loomed large in the minds of residents, city council members, and city staff. It was a real and persistent threat to the character of their communities. More than any other consequence of being out of compliance with State housing law, the Builder’s Remedy provided the necessary motivation for cities to adopt a complaint housing element. While many cities were unhappy with the requirements of State law, they found adopting a compliant housing element that they hand some control over the lesser of two evils when faced with Builder’s Remedy projects upon which they had no control.

While the opportunity for new Builder’s Remedy projects is slowly closing, the threat of those projects has done more than anything else to get many cities to adopt complaint housing elements. In this way, the Builder’s Remedy has been a huge success, even if it hasn’t produced as many new homes as many advocates hoped it would. With a little clarification through legislation or the courts, the Builder’s Remedy could produce significantly more homes and be an even bigger threat to cities in the future.

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1. HCD made an interesting argument in the La Cañada-Flintridge case that approval of Builder’s Remedy projects are ministerial and therefore not subject to CEQA. Specifically, they said that the City of La Cañada-Flintridge “is legally compelled to approve” the application for new housing. Unfortunately, this argument was never decided by the courts and therefore remains an open question.^{^}

When I wrote about the book Crossings at the end of January, I said, “the book could have been greatly expanded to talk about how the growth of road networks in our cities over the past century have transformed our cities and society.” City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequity, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimble is the follow on to Crossings that I was looking for. City Limits focuses on highway development and opposition in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. While all three of these cities are obviously in Texas, their stories are diverse enough that they can be instructive for cities outside of the Lone Star State as well.

Much of the first part of the book talks about the social ills of ever-expanding highways. This feels like old information for folks who have been interested in cities for a while, but for people just being introduced to the freeway fight this is useful background and history. This first part of the book also introduces us to many of the personal stories that will carry us throughout the book as various aspects of highway widening and the first against them are explored.

These personal stories are really the focus of the book. Sharing the lived experiences of the people in the path of highway widening is the heart of this book. These stories illustrate the real human impact of highway widening projects. In fact, these stories are such a focus that we often miss the wider perspective and data that can be useful in opposing wider freeways elsewhere.

As the book progresses, it starts tracking the current fight against proposed future highway expansion in these three Texas cities. The book looks at the various ways groups have opposed freeways at every level of government. Unfortunately, the book clearly demonstrates how many of these fights may delay wider freeways, but rarely stops them.

One bit of hope is the explanation of how highways are funded and how it compares to other transportation infrastructure projects. Simply stated, the Federal government picks up a much larger portion of the cost of highway construction than other transit projects. This implies that there is a clear lever to pull to drive a re-prioritization of transit projects by state Departments of Transportation and local transit agencies.

Unfortunately, City Limits only focuses on the harm of cutting highways through cities. It does not talk about the other harms caused by car dependency in our cities. There is no mention of how car dependency harms local business or how wide fast roads dictate every other aspect of our built environment. While the book does talk about how highways divide communities, it does not address the more insidious ways car dependency isolates us.

Overall, City Limits is a good continuation of the conversation started this year with Crossings. I’m looking forward to it continuing with Killed by a Traffic Engineer next month and the War on Cars book sometime in the near future. Hopefully, at least the War on Cars book, will take a 40,000 foot view of car dependency and really round out the conversation.

Community plans written for public entities have a completely different objective and require an opposing view of cities than what is required to prepare community plans written for private developers. Too many planning consultants who have made a career out of preparing specific plans and other planning documents for private developers expect to be able to use that expertise to prepare specific plans for cities. Not only is the process different (it requires a lot more public input to prepare a plan for the public), but the entire planning philosophies underpinning each type of plan are diametrically opposed to each other.

The goal of planning for most private developers is to build a community to a finished state. At the end of the project, roads will be built to their final right-of-way width to accommodate any future growth in traffic, all of the homes will be in situated in the middle of their lots and covenants in place to prevent changes in the future, and retail centers will have their big box stores and national credit tenants in place for the next decade or more. This sells to the new residents the feeling of certainty, stability, and permanence. It also allows the developer to make their profit and walk away from the community without concern for its future.

While these types of planned communities provide a superficial sense of order, they forbid any future change or growth. Jane Jacobs described this type of community preserved for eternity as underlying a deep disorder.

“If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is—sameness—it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is me same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented. Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos.”

On the other hand, community plans for public entities must embody the complete opposite goals. Local jurisdictions do not have to option to take their profit and walk away from the community. They must care about the long term vitality of the communities they design.

With these opposite goals in mind, public planning documents must allow for a changing, evolving, growing city. Instead of a community plan that envisions a neighborhood built to a finished state, public plans must embrace the seeming disorder of city life.

Here too, Jane Jacobs describes the underlying order in a seemingly disorderly city.

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city. wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

These two views of the city, the view of the private developer that brings what seems like order but is truly stasis and decay, and the view of the public planner who accepts a messy city that is vibrant and growing, are diametrically opposed. Planners that come to public projects from the private developer’s viewpoint will kill the vitality of the communities they plan.

I’m an avid amateur photographer and I’m fascinated by the intersection between photography and our built environment, especially historic photos of the cities and towns I’m familiar with so I can see where we’ve come from and how quickly things can change.

It’s interesting comparing the different feelings historic and contemporary photos evoke. The only real difference is the passage of time, but the feelings one feels looking at them are so much different. I am sure that people looking at those historic photos when they were new felt much the same as we do today looking at current pictures. In many ways, the subjects of photos probably weren’t that interesting since they were seen daily. It is just with time that they become interesting.

Watching the movie Lost in Translation is a great example of this. The movie still feels recent, even though it’s already more than twenty years old, but it shows a Tokyo that simply doesn’t exist anymore. All of that neon has been replaced by LEDs. There was recently a great exploration of this changing image of cities in cinema focused on Los Angeles and Hong Kong that dove into this in more detail. It focused on the changing sources of light in our cities, but it’s equally true for the city as a whole.

Today, we have more photos and video of our built environment that we ever have before, but in some ways, we are also more restricted in the photos we can capture. In the most recent issue of Torched, Alissa Walker’s new newsletter about the 2028 LA Olympics, she linked to some photos from LAX’s Flightpath Museum of the construction around the airport in the run up to the 1984 LA Olympics. Many of the aerial photos in that online exhibit would simply be impossible to take today.

The explosion of commercial drones has led to ever-increasing restrictions on where people can fly to document our cities. Every bit of color on this drone facilities map is a place with flight restrictions that make it difficult to take aerial photos of our cities. Combined with the blanket prohibition of flying over moving cars and people, I’m surprised we see as many aerial photos of our cities as we do.

As Orange County changes, and throughout my travels, I’m trying to be mindful of documenting the built environment we have today so that we can look back decades from now to see where we came from. Many of these photos I’m capturing today feel pedestrian. It will be interesting looking back on them decades from now to see how those feelings might change.

For the past decade, Human Transit by Jarrett Walker has been the preeminent book for non-transit planners to understand transit planning. A revised edition of the book was released earlier this year which incorporates an additional decade of experience Jarrett has obtained as a practicing transit planner. Overall, Human Transit is the best example that I’ve found of books by consultants that walk the tightrope between advocacy and execution.

Overall, Jarrett’s framework for thinking about transit is that access is the key metric that transit agencies should be paying attention to. He defines access as “the freedom to do anything that requires leaving the home.” This focus on access, and the chapter dedicated to it, is new in the revised edition. While the rest of the book has not been substantially changed, this lens of access changes the understanding of the rest of the book even if the words did not change. It provides this idea that when designed and evaluating different transit options, transit agencies should be looking at how many people will have access to jobs and school and shopping and anything else that will take them out of the house via transit versus other modes of transportation. This is a significantly different way of evaluating transit than that which was presented in the first edition.

As part of this evaluation, Jarrett identifies seven demands that people have if they are to use the transit system:

1. It takes me where I want to go.

2. It takes me when I want to go.

3. It is a good use of my time.

4. It is a good use of my money.

5. It respects me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides.

6. I can trust it.

7. It allows me spontaneously to change my plans.

In essence, these are the levers transit agencies can pull to affect the amount of access transit users have, and in turn the ridership of the transit system.

Having this type of framework is critical as our cities continue to grow and densify. Southern California especially has grown with cars as the primary, and often only, way of getting around. As is heard in nearly every community meeting across the southland, as we grow, we’re pushing up against the geometric limit of car dependency. Parking and traffic are constant issues that we face, and that’s simply because every car takes up 200 square feet of land everywhere it goes. The only way to continue ensuring people have access to jobs and services is by growing the transit network.

Human Transit is a vital book that will provide any city builder with the needed framework to discuss and understand transit options as our cities grow. In fact, Human Transit has something for all consultants, not just city builders. The introduction of the book includes a two-page section entitled “Listen to Your Plumber: Values Versus Expertise.” These two pages should be required reading for every consultant, regardless of industry. This is written in the context of transit planning, but it’s broadly applicable. The basic premise is that consultants can provide expertise, but that they must rely upon their clients to provide the values that will guide any given project. One primary role of any consultant is to ask the right questions to reveal what those values are.

This new edition of Human Transit should sit on everyone’s shelf right alongside Walkable City and Building the Cycling City. These three books provide the framework necessary for transitioning cities away from car dependency and towards greater access in growing cities.

The border of Anaheim and Garden Grove. (Photo by Brianne Lucchesi)

Whenever I leave the megacity of San Angeles, or better known as the Greater LA Area, I am struck by how unique it is. The unending expanse of built up city, from Camp Pendleton in the south up to the Angeles National Forest in the north, is unlike any human geography anywhere else in the world.

Taking the train out of Manhattan and up to Buffalo on Monday, I was amazed at how much time we spent rolling through forests and farmland. It took no time at all to get off the island and through Yonkers. From there, the landscape was dotted by towns and small cities, each one separate and distinct. These were not just distinctions based on subtle changes to the public rights of way, but true separation between where one town ends and the next begins. The same has been true in Florida and Oklahoma and Massachusetts and Washington and North Carolina. It’s even true in San Diego and the Bay Area. Southern California is the only place where every city abuts its neighbors without any separation.

So much of the discussion of urban planning, especially transportation planning, feels foreign and no applicable to San Angeles. The simple idea of connecting places with transit and high speed roads, while restricting speeds through places, makes sense in a place like upstate or western New York, but it feels completely nonsensical in Los Angeles. Any given arterial road or intersection in San Angeles is simultaneously a place and not a place. It’s a place to go, and a landscape to drive through.

Planners working in Southern California must translate and adapt the best practices and teachings of urban planning that originate elsewhere to the context of San Angeles. This is not to say that planners can ignore the best practices from elsewhere, but that we must work harder to transform our cities to accommodate planning’s best practices. City builders must focus on building up distinct places that can serve as complete communities, separate from one another, and be connected regionally.

San Angeles’ regional planning authority, SCAG (the Southern California Association of Governments), already identifies regional job centers, many of which are already connected by transit. These areas can be seen as Southern California’s version of the distinct cities and towns found elsewhere. These job centers are the future of San Angeles, and most new development should be focused within their boundaries.

To ensure these areas become the focal points for new development that will transform them into complete communities, local transit service should be provided within each job center, radiating out from the existing regional transit lines provided by Metrolink. Streets and public realm improvements should be made to ensure these areas are walkable and provide transportation options. Building upon these transportation improvements, enough housing should be built to accommodate the job demand in each center, along with all of the necessary neighborhood services like grocery stores and schools.

This would transform San Angeles from being a giant placeless expanse to being a series of distinct places with their own identities and unique personalities. This is not a transformation that can happen overnight, but a half century of consistent progress could lead to a radically transformed Southern California.