Land Use

After buying 17,750 acres in Palmdale for an intercontinental jetport that has not gotten off the ground, Los Angeles airport officials say they might finally have a use for much of the property: a solar power facility capable of generating up to 100 megawatts of clean energy.

The Georgetown apartment complex was one of this city's most coveted properties back in 2005. Now Greg Chelius and Alex Size were touring it as if examining an exotic ruin. They walked past the unmanned guardhouse and its broken windows. Size snapped photos with a digital camera. Chelius lifted the green fabric on a fence tacked with No Trespassing signs. Building after building loomed in the near distance, all of them quiet and vacant.

The college sits on a crest in Rancho Palos Verdes with a multimillion-dollar view of the ocean. But it is a view that students living in the dorms don't see. Instead of being on campus, student housing is six miles away in San Pedro. Marymount College has tried to remedy that situation for nine years. But because of opposition from neighbors who say that moving student housing there would bring too much noise and traffic, no students yet live on campus.

Summer Dunsmore, 19, glanced over her shoulder at the 50 or so harbor seals snoozing on a small horseshoe-shaped beach beside the Children's Pool in La Jolla. "Look at them," said the La Jolla High graduate who is now a student at San Diego Mesa College. "They're such peaceful creatures."

The city of Los Angeles' experiment in grass-roots democracy -- its system of far-flung neighborhood councils -- is by many accounts at a crossroads nearly a decade after its birth. Although some of the 89 locally elected councils can point to worthy community projects and slick websites, others have been branded as petty and bumbling. A city commission recently determined that the relationship between the small councils and City Hall must be "redefined and renewed."

In a move that immediately angered business and development interests, Los Angeles officials declared Thursday that only a fraction of industrial land in downtown would be opened to residential and commercial uses. The joint directive by the city's planning department and redevelopment agency -- supported by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- would preserve about 2,633 acres of land zoned for industry while opening 261 acres to residential development.

A relic of the tortured Belmont Learning Complex project was laid to rest last month when school officials voted to spend $35.9 million to turn an abandoned shopping center shell beneath the school into a training and testing center for teachers. The commercial space was to have been part of an ambitious re-imagination of what a school could be -- as well as a potential money-generator.

Leaders in a small Texas border city said Wednesday that they felt blindsided after learning that a judge had ordered public land turned over temporarily to the federal government as it works on a fence along the border with Mexico. U.S. District Judge Alia Moses Ludlum ordered Eagle Pass to surrender 233 acres of city-owned land. The Justice Department had sued for access to the land Monday. Ludlum's ruling came the same day, before the city could muster a challenge.

The site of a proposed low-cost housing project near Disneyland that ignited a firestorm of protest has been sold to a Texas hotel developer. Renaissance Development, a Fort Worth company with more than $1 billion in past projects, said Thursday that it planned to build three upscale hotels and restaurants, shops and pubs on the 26-acre parcel. The sale could signal an end to a battle that has divided Anaheim over the last 18 months. Irvine-based SunCal Cos.

The passing of Propositions 94-97, which give four Indian tribes a stronger hold on gambling in the state, was a blow to Hollywood Park, but not a knockout punch. "We will continue to run the business of horse racing at Hollywood Park as though it will be carried on indefinitely," said Jack Liebau, the president of the Inglewood facility as well as sister track Bay Meadows in Northern California. "We're not going to run it as a lame-duck track. And we will apply for race dates in 2009."