Check out this week's featured stories:

1. Safe Streets for All Bike Ride

2. California Western Law Review publishes “City-Wide” article by our Executive Director Colin Parent 

3. Moderate Income Bonus Program Adopted After Years of Advocacy from Circulate San Diego 

4. CPG Reform Update 

5. Are Cities Designed for Women? 

Last week the San Diego City Council adopted a Moderate Income Bonus Program advocated for by Circulate San Diego. This policy will create new incentives to build mixed income homes near transit.

Due to our advocacy, the program allows developments to receive up to a 75 percent bonus above base density if they dedicate homes for low and moderate income families.

Last week the California Western Law Review published an academic article authored by our Executive Director and General Counsel Colin Parent. The piece titled “City-Wide: A strategy for Sustainable Growth,” is available online here.

Over the last few years, Circulate San Diego has been guided by a theory of change that land use reforms are more easily adopted when they are applied city-wide. This is in contrast to many other approaches that try to focus change through community plan updates, or even updates for subsets of community plans. 

We have focused our advocacy on city-wide changes like affordable homes bonus programs, parking reforms, and other programmatic policy. Our successes have been numerous, proving the value of a city-wide approach. People have taken notice. Even Mayor Faulconer’s Housing-SD plan largely focuses on city-wide changes.

In this recently published piece, Parent outlines the thinking behind Circulate’s theory of change. He examines how city-wide policies create the right political economies for reform. In contrast, land use reforms on smaller geographic scales are more likely to attract effective opposition from anti-housing forces and the defenders of the status quo. The piece also discusses recent experiences with land use reforms in San Diego, and lessons policymakers and advocates can draw both locally and in other regions.