News

October 23, 2026

Press Conference: DWP with Mayor Bass & Caruso

TPR here shares remarks from an October 20 press conference at Palisades Village, where Mayor Karen Bass, Caruso founder and executive chairman Rick Caruso, Board of Water and Power Commissioners President Allan Marks, and LADWP Interim General Manager Dave Hanson marked six months of Executive Directive 19, the Mayor’s push to streamline permitting citywide.

October 21, 2026

Remarks on the State of Recovery in Pacific Palisades: Maryam Zar

Twenty-one months after the Palisades Fire tore through Pacific Palisades and parts of Malibu, the area’s commercial core faces a problem that reconstruction alone can’t solve: businesses are trying to reopen in a community whose customers haven’t come back. TPR here shares a statement from Maryam Zar, CEO of the Malibu Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce, delivered alongside the Department of Angels and allied recovery partners as they call on Congress to provide comprehensive federal disaster recovery funding.

October 21, 2026

Los Angeles Needs a New Idea of the City: An Op-Ed

TPR here republishes an op-ed by architect Gerhard W. Mayer and Lindsay Sturman, founder of the Livable Communities Initiative, originally published in CommonEdge on October 21, 2026. With Los Angeles apartment approvals at ten-year lows, the authors argue that zoning and permitting fixes are only restarting a development system built around an outdated, auto-oriented vision of the city. Citing Berlin’s International Building Exhibitions, they propose “Vision-Based Planning.” Under it, the city would design the neighborhoods residents want first. It would then pre-entitle a pattern book of proven building types, opening the market to small local builders.

October 15, 2026

Assemblymember Harabedian - Legislative Responses to Eaton Fire’s Devastation

Assemblymember John Harabedian, whose district includes Altadena, Pasadena, and Sierra Madre, has spent much of his first term turning the Eaton Fire's hard lessons into legislation. Speaking with TPR after the close of session, Harabedian reflects on AB 1642, his newly signed bill setting first-in-the-nation standards for testing and clearing smoke-damaged homes, and on why the Assembly let SB 492 die rather than declare "mission accomplished."

October 13, 2026

A Conversation with Bill Witte

Bill Witte, co-founder and now chairman emeritus of Related California, stepped back from day-to-day leadership at the start of 2026 after nearly four decades building market-rate and affordable housing across the West Coast. One of TPR’s longest-running interview subjects, weighs downtown Los Angeles’s housing ambitions against the realities of construction costs, capital markets, and City Hall—and offers the one test he would apply to every housing bill in Sacramento.

October 7, 2026

L.A. County CAO (fmr) David Janssen on Measure G: ‘We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know’

In 2028, Los Angeles County voters will elect the county's first executive, the centerpiece of Measure G, the charter amendment that narrowly passed in November 2024. Few people understand the job being redesigned better than David Janssen, who ran the county bureaucracy as chief administrative officer from 1996 to 2007 after 13 years in San Diego County's CAO office. TPR reached out and asked him “What problem the LA County Reform is purportedly meant to solve; whether Measure G, the skeleton reform offered, is likely to solve it; and, whether any charter reform can solve the reform challenges described.”

October 5, 2026

Portland’s Earl Blumenauer: Charter Reform’s Unintended Results  - Paralysis, Dissension & Delay 

Earl Blumenauer spent 28 years in Congress building a national reputation as the legislature’s most persistent advocate for livable cities. He came home to Portland in January 2025 to find his own city midway through the most radical governance overhaul any large American city has attempted in decades—and to find that the reform impulse he long ago helped pioneer in Oregon has begun producing results its authors did not intend. In this conversation with TPR the former congressman, now a Presidential Fellow at Portland State University’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, is unsparing about what he is watching, in Portland and well beyond it.

September 16, 2026

California’s Electric Utilities Are Becoming Uninvestable

With Sacramento letting SB 492 stall and California's strict inverse condemnation doctrine still leaving utilities liable for grid-caused wildfires regardless of negligence, PG&E and Edison International face mounting pressure on their cost of capital just as the state needs major grid investment. TPR here republishes Bloomberg Opinion energy columnist Liam Denning's analysis of why California's electric utilities are becoming uninvestable, and of the reforms that could shift wildfire risk away from ratepayers and toward insurance markets. See the original publication here.

September 16, 2026

Carmelita Ramírez-Sánchez & Catherine Baltazar: Lineage Fire

This past June 17th, fire broke out at the roughly 500,000-square-foot Lineage cold storage facility on the seam between Boyle Heights and unincorporated East Los Angeles. It burned through reignitions until knockdown on June 24, prompting a number of shelter-in-place orders and emergency declarations from both Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom. TPRVX, to better understand the Impacts and response, spoke with Carmelita Ramírez-Sánchez , executive director of the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, which operates a neighborhood resilience hub, and Catherine Baltazar, associate director of advocacy and organizing at Climate Resolve. The focus is on the response, the jurisdictional gaps it exposed, and why implementation, not legislation, is the binding constraint.

September 15, 2026

Wildfire Survivor Network’s Joy Chen on: Recovery & Accountability

Twenty months after the Eaton Fire, a pickleball WhatsApp group from the Altadena Town & Country Club has become one of the more consequential forces in California utility and insurance policy. The Every Fire Survivor's Network (EFSN)now speaks for more than 10,000 Eaton and Palisades survivors, and its executive director, Joy Chen – a former Los Angeles deputy mayor and Fortune 500 executive recruiter – spent the summer in Sacramento arguing that California does not have a wildfire liability problem so much as a fire causation problem.

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© 2026 The Planning Report | David Abel, Publisher, ABL, Inc.