Paone: California is a very highly regulated state. It was that way 25 to 30 years ago, it's that way today and will probably remain that way in the future. Right now, one of the major issues around land use is the effects of global climate change on legislation and how that legislation is going to make local agencies look at the entitlement process in a different way. For instance, with CEQA, SB 743 is producing new environmental guidelines to go into effect. In the upcoming year, it will be interesting to see how local governments address traffic. They used to just review levels of service by measuring delays at intersections, but the legislature said you can't do that anymore in the context of CEQA. You now have to look at vehicle miles traveled and the impact of those miles traveled on global climate change. So, you have to get down into the local communities and talk to people about how long it takes them to get to work, how much traffic they encounter getting to school in the morning—those kinds of things. It's going to be looked at differently. Cities can still look at level of service, but now there are competing ways of judging traffic, and the development community may need to look at both. This is one example of where the global local climate-change focus is going to have an impact on development and planning. The state is trying to push development into already-developed areas to densify the larger metropolitan areas, get people out of their cars and onto bikes and mass transit. These are good goals but they have an effect on development.

GlobeSt.com: What specific zoning issues are top of mind for you and your firm?

Paone: When it comes to zoning, that is really a city-by-city, agency-by-agency issue. There are different approaches taken by different communities. In Laguna Beach, for example, you're going to have a lot of focus on the character of the town and views and those types of things. In other areas, like Anaheim, which is a very progressive city in terms of new ideas, development and creativity, there are different issues. It depends on what you're building and where you're building it.

GlobeSt.com: As land availability continues to tighten in California, what strategies can developers and owners use to get properties built?

Paone: We're approaching things not just from a legal perspective—we have some very practical advice based on the practicalities in the city in which a project is located. What has been the trend and will probably intensify is adaptive reuse of existing properties—sometimes older properties. Cities are encouraging greater density, such as tearing down an old industrial building and putting up multifamily projects. This brings people closer to work and other services, and mass transit is nearby. That's a process that so far sounds better on paper than it actually is working. You can't drop all those components on a neighborhood at once—it's an evolution, but that's where things are headed: more density, closer to mass transit.