Recent state legislation has attempted to address California's housing affordability crisis by encouraging new development in transit-accessible and/or jobs-rich areas. But policymakers lack adequate information in two key areas: the effects of transportation laws and plans on the decisions of developers regarding whether and where to build housing; and the determinants of delays in approvals for proposed projects in jobs-rich and transit-accessible areas. Drawing on a unique dataset detailing all residential projects of five units or more that were approved from 2014 through 2017 in seven Southern California jurisdictions, this project will analyze the extent to which transportation policies, rules, plans, and investments influence the location of new housing and delay the construction of new housing. Using descriptive statistics and multivariate modeling, the research team will examine developers' decisions concerning whether and where to build housing, identifying how project-level attributes and contextual variables, including those related to transportation, affect decisions about whether and where to build infill projects in jobs-rich and transit-rich locations. This work will also include a systematic comparison of permitting timelines for otherwise comparable projects with different degrees of transit availability or job accessibility, along with multivariate modeling to assess the determinants of delay.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated renewed interest in how telecommuting can alter the workings of cities and regions, but there is little guidance on how to align planning practice with the new reality. Shelter-at-home policies forced businesses to rapidly develop a telework infrastructure to continue their operations to the extent possible. In the wake of the pandemic, the prevalence of telecommuting has become the new normal, although this varies across industries. New questions arise from this rapid technological adoption. How will telecommuting growth affect cities? Should planners be worried about telecommuting growth? How should planners deal with this proliferation? This report synthesizes the research on telecommuting and its consequences to help planners better understand what effects may occur from the proliferation of telecommuting and what lessons can be drawn from research findings. Emphasis is on the broad relevance of telecommuting to many domains of planning, including housing, land use, community development, and inclusive place-making, while attention is paid to changes in travel demand, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and greenhouse gas emissions. The research suggests that telecommuting can occur in a variety of ways, and its impacts are largely dependent not only on the type/schedule of telecommuting but on the built environment, transit accessibility, and other amenities/opportunities the location provides. The varying impacts reported in the research can be seen as an encouragement for planners to actively create a better future rather than merely responding to the rise of telecommuting. Given the breadth of telecommuting’s impacts, systematic coordination across various planning domains will be increasingly important. This report also calls for collaboration across cities to guide the ongoing transformation induced by telecommuting not in a way that leads to more residential segregation but in a way that provides more sustainable and inclusive communities.