From citrus trees to spring breakers, Transforming the Irvine Ranch tells the story of Orange County’s metamorphosis from 93,000 acres of farmland into an iconic Southern California landscape of beaches and modernist architecture. Drawing on decades of archival research and their own years at the famed Irvine Company, the authors bring a collection of colorful characters responsible for the transformation to life, including: Ray Watson, whose nearly century-long life took him from an Oakland boarding house to the Irvine and Walt Disney Company boardrooms Joan Irvine Smith, a much-married heiress who waged war against the US government and the Irvine Foundation's reactionary board and won William Pereira, the visionary architect whose work became synonymous with the LA cityscape. Spanning the history of modern California from its Gold Rush past to the late 1970s, Transforming the Irvine Ranch chronicles a storied family’s largely successful attempts to remake the vast Irvine Ranch in its own image.

The Irvine Ranch: A Time for People describes the excitement, the accomplishments and the conflicts during the first 50 years of development of the 90,000-acre Irvine Ranch in Orange County, California, into the largest master-planned new community in the United States. The book highlights The Irvine Company, the privately held corporation which developed the Ranch under three ownerships during the post World War II years, focusing on the firms seven presidents and current chairman. Here is the dramatic transformation of an agricultural dynasty into an urban empire told in eight engrossing chapters wrapped around the actions and personalities of Myford Irvine, Arthur McFadden, Charles Thomas, William Mason, Raymond Watson, Peter Kremer, Thomas Nielsen and Donald Bren. The book provides the reader with an intimate perspective of the workings of the sometimes mysterious and frequently misunderstood Irvine Company.

In Transforming California, Stephanie Pincetl argues that the transformation of nature in order to enhance economic development lies at the heart of much of the state's recent history. She sees late-twentieth-century California on a path of continued environmental degradation, gripped by cynicism about government. Transforming California describes the evolution of the state's institutions of government as they apply to land use and development, and it shows how land-use decisions affect people's quality of life and their daily interactions with each other and with their environment. Pincetl offers an alternative vision for the renewal of the democratic spirit and process in California and for a reconciliation with nature.

The "new community" movement of the 1960s and 1970s attempted a grand experiment in housing. It inspired the construction of innovative communities that were designed to counter suburbia's cultural conformity, social isolation, ugliness, and environmental problems. This richly documented book examines the results of those experiments in three of the most successful new communities: Irvine Ranch in Southern California, Columbia in Maryland, and The Woodlands in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. Based on new research and interviews with developers, designers, and residents, Ann Forsyth traces the evolution, the successes, and the shortcomings of these experiments in urban innovation. Where they succeeded, in areas such as community identity and open space preservation, they provide support for current "smart growth" proposals. Where they did not, in areas such as housing affordability and transportation choices, they offer important insights for today's planners, designers, developers, civic leaders, and others interested in incorporating new forms of development into their designs.

California has been invaded by three imperial powers: Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Deep California examines in depth the lingering psychological traumas and motifs emanating from that long history of conquest. These unhealed events have not been left in the past: they recur symbolically again and again, growing in intensity as the overbuilt land and its distracted occupiers unconsciously but definitively demonstrate that environmental justice and social justice can no longer be thought of as separate. Pacing crusaders and colonizers from county to county along El Camino Real, Deep California studies the lingering impact of continuous oppression of people and places as images and themes of displacement and exile filter down into architecture, agriculture, politics, art, culture, psychology, and even folklore and dream. Yet within the shadows cast over California also dwell resistance, humor, irony, tragedy, and hope for more heartfelt and soulful connections to this story-rich "land of the sundown sea." "History" is an inadequate term for such a sweeping and deep discovery of how the past informs the present. This work deserves to be read widely by all Californians and Americans, and taken to heart, and the hard lessons applied to all places we inhabit on this stolen land. -Lesley Thomas, author of Flight of the Goose (Far Eastern Press, 2005) "A monumental and much-needed study in depth of the conquest, occupation, traumatization, and animation of the mission cities and counties of coastal California, places which have worked their way into our unsuspecting psyches." -Linda Buzzell, MA, MFT, co-editor of Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009)

Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

Acclaimed historian Walter Nugent brings us what is perhaps the most comprehensive and fascinating account to date of the peopling of the American West. In this epic social-demographic history, Nugent explores the populations of the West as they grow, change and intersect from the Paleo-Indians, the Spanish Conquistadors, to displaced Okies, wartime African American immigrants, and all the disparate groups that have made California the most ethnically diverse state in the union. Their tale, in all its complexity, is a tale that surprises, that subverts traditional stereotypes and that illuminates the multifaceted character of one of the world’s most unique and dynamic territories.