California
A new study details the locations where homeowners are likely to be "equity rich" or underwater. Homeowners in western states are more likely to be equity rich, but many homeowners are still recovering from the Great Recession.
Globe St
SB 35 (Wiener) and AB 199 (Chu) make it more costly to build housing by requiring prevailing wages where applicable, pleasing construction unions but making affordable housing less affordable, opines CALmatters political columnist, Dan Walters.
CALmatters
The Orange Line, a bus rapid transit line running through Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, has been a success. To those calling for an expensive conversion to rail, several experts say, why bother?
Curbed Los Angeles
Recently, the Department of Justice announced it would investigate college affirmative action programs for discrimination against whites. More recently, HUD announced that it was suspending an Obama-era rule meant to prevent segregation.
UrbDeZine
No one's suggesting that freeways will be converted to tollways, but a pattern is emerging that when freeways are widened, express lanes, financed in part by user fees, are being added rather than mixed-flow lanes. Case in point: the Inland Empire.
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
A new pilot project doesn't have the funding to upend the housing market in one of the most expensive markets in the country, but it does set a precedent of support for new housing models.
Curbed Los Angeles
UC San Francisco is using a Campus Facilities Improvement Association (CFIA) to help build its Mission Bay campus. Infrastructure financing wonk Jim Chappell explains how it works.
UrbDeZine
Changing the color of L.A. streets and growing out the urban canopy are part of a campaign to fight the heat island in and around Los Angeles.
Gizmodo
Union Station in Los Angeles is featuring the latest in surveillance technology, meant to deter terrorists. The concern might also be that such technology is yet another impediment in the transit user experience.
ABC7
Is the bar for health risks in brownfield development set too high? Environmental attorney Richard Opper thinks so and argues the case in this opinion piece.
UrbDeZine
Some surprises and lots of blue-sky thinking are revealed in the new capital plan for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
San Francisco Examiner
Although no U.S. region has yet to even get halfway to sustainability goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement, certain U.S. cities are doing better than the rest.
CityLab
Los Angeles Magazine provided Los Angeles Director of City Planning Vince Bertoni an opportunity to speak in his own words on the ways planners are preparing for the future.
Los Angeles Magazine
Three bills at the top of the Democratic leadership's housing agenda will have little impact on the state's chronic housing shortage according to multiple analyses, and wouldn't affect the outcome of a Bay Area mega-development controversy.
Los Angeles Times
The changes in store for the main corridor through San Francisco's central business district connect to a larger story about accessibility for people with disabilities.
Next City
National organizations are mobilizing around housing as a human right.
Right to the City
A powerful lobby is more in interested in protecting its monopoly than lessening congestion and pollution.
Quartz
Neighborhood groups in the Mission District of San Francisco, already a hotbed of gentrification and displacement controversies, are opposing the expansion of the city's bikeshare system into a large, transit-adjacent area of the city.
San Francisco Examiner
Mayor Ted Winterer and Mayor Pro Tem Gleam Davis elaborate on the city’s new Downtown Community Plan, which includes what may be the state's highest inclusionary housing requirement.
The Planning Report
Purchased for $5 million, Nipton, California is slated to become "the country’s first energy-independent, cannabis-friendly hospitality destination."
Quartz
