“Housing is the top target of environmental lawsuits in California. Want to build housing, even put a prefabricated trailer home on your lot? $20,000 for traffic, $20,000 for sewer, $20,000 for electricity, $10,000 for transit, $5,000 for public art, just in fees. San Francisco got up to almost $300,000 per apartment before land, construction, and labor. And many jurisdictions are charging over $100,000”.
The cost of housing has skyrocketed in California. Siyamak sits down with Jennifer Hernandez, a land use, environmental, and civil attorney with 40 years of experience. Join us as we dive into all the components that make the cost of housing much higher in California than in the rest of the nation.
“People don’t believe it’s possible, that it’s legal. But in fact, it is. And it happens all the time. A piece of wood doesn’t need to cost more here than it does in Nevada.”… (more)
Aleshire & Wynder, LLP Secures A Legal Win for Restoring Local Control on Housing: Court Rules In Favor of Five California Charter Cities Declaring Senate Bill 9 Unconstitutional
On April 22, 2024 at 11:00 AM, the Honorable Curtis A. Kin in Department 86 of the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a ruling granting a Petition for Writ of Mandate challenging the constitutionality of Senate Bill 9, as applied to charter cities. Senate Bill 9 requires all California cities to ministerially approve an application for a lot split, and up to four total housing units, on a single family residential lot that meets certain specified criteria.
Five charter cities – Carson, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Del Mar, and Whitter – initiated a lawsuit in early 2022 against the State of California claiming that Senate Bill 9 is unconstitutional and invalid against charter cities. The League of California Cities and the City of Cerritos filed respective amicus briefs in the Trial Court in support of the Charter cities’ position. After extensive briefing and two hearings in Department 86, the Court ruled in favor of the five charter cities. In this litigation, the charter cities are represented by Managing Partner Sunny Soltani, Equity Partner Pam Lee, Partner Michelle Villarreal, and Associate Shukan Patel of Aleshire & Wynder, LLP along with Michael Webb from the Redondo Beach City Attorney’s office
For further information on what this ruling means or how your city can benefit from this decision, please contact Pam Lee at plee or visit awattorneys.com… (more)
A year after the Board of Supervisors forced a proposed 27-story residential tower back to the drawing board, a YIMBY lawsuit against the city has also been forced back to the drawing board, with most of its charges tossed out.
Last Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of a somewhat notorious San Francisco Board of Supervisors vote in favor of an an appeal that denied plans for a 27-story residential high-rise at 469 Stevenson Street (at Sixth Street) in what is currently just a Nordstrom’s parking lot. So on the anniversary, there was a rally at City Hall (complete with gravestones commemorating the development), which the SF Standard described as “Happy One-Year Anniversary to SF’s Peak NIMBY Moment.” But this was not an organic protest, it was more of a campaign stunt handled by the Yes on Prop D campaign.
But also last week, something far more significant happened with the fate of that particular project. The pro-development group SF YIMBY brought a lawsuit against the city in January over the denial, arguing the denial violated that state’s California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the Housing Accountability Act (HAA). But last week, it was revealed as reported by the San Francisco Business Times that a San Francisco Superior Court judge pretty much threw out the entire lawsuit.
The Business Times sums up the decision by saying “None of the laws referenced by SF YIMBY, including the HAA and Senate Bill 330, which also seeks to streamline housing development, can apply to the Stevenson project until it completes adequate environmental review under CEQA, the judge wrote.”…
It’s important to remember the supervisors did not “kill” the project, they merely sent it back asking for a better seismic plan. And we should recall this was just four months after Miami’s Surfside condominium collapse that killed 98 people. The developer Build Inc is indeed working on another plan for the property, with seismic upgrades, and it may or may not get appealed again to the board…(more)
The case against the case against “The Case Against Yimbyism.”
Are the wheels starting to come off the Yimby bandwagon?
The question may seem absurd. Last December, Yimbys took over the Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, which for the first time endorsed CEQA-hating Scott Wiener. In late February, Yimbys closed out their 2024 annual conference, an event that attracted 600 “red” and “blue” attendees and garnered coverage hailing the movement’s growing bipartisan support.
The Biden administration’s 2024 Economic Report of the President, released on March 24, claims that “zoning reform” will increase the supply of affordable housing and cites as a model, among other examples, California’s RHNA process. Meanwhile, the Yimby mystique continues to enthrall the California Legislature, as indicated by the Terner Center’s survey of current “pro-housing” bills, whose targets include development impact fees and environmental protections for the California coast…
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (Dem) vetoes a major Yimby bill…According to Hobbs’ office, the Department of Defense and the Professional Fire Fighters Association of Arizona asked her to veto the bill. “These groups,” wrote Barchenger, “cited concerns about development in noisy or ‘accident potential zones’ near Arizona’s military installations, and difficulty in responding to emergencies if density is increased, respectively.”…
The New Republic publishes an attack on Yimbyism… Moreover, “[Yimbys] are…explicit that deregulation won’t help those at the bottom of the market.”…
“Social” housing with profitability…Contra Friedrich, Resnikoff maintains that “Yimbys support a mix of [market and non-market policies.” For example, California Yimby “has sponsored social housing legislation,” specifically Alex Lee’s failed 2022 bill AB 2053…
But the real thrust of AB 2053, as Calvin Welch has explained, was to create a state agency, the California Housing Authority, “able to overrule or ignore local housing policy and issue debt for new housing construction.” As stated in the bill, the agency’s “core mission” was “to produce and acquire social housing developments for the purpose of eliminating the gap between housing production and regional housing needs assessment targets and to preserve affordable housing.”…(more)
This is only a taste of what the article covers. Please read the entire article and spread the message far and wide that the grass is not greener in San Francisco and we are not beating to a WIMBY drum. The results of gentrification and densification have lead San Francisco into debt, not glory. Our future lies in a strong pivot back to our strong historic neighborhood roots. We must save what is left of the heart and soul of San Francisco. As President Peskin said, “We do not have to destroy San Francisco to save it.” Fortunately many of our mayoral candidates agree with that sentiment.
For some reason, State Senator Scott Wiener has chosen to go after his constituents in a way that is somewhat astonishing. Does he believe that we are masochists and appreciate being punished or is he so sure that he can win by buying the loyalty of deep pockets who can convince the voters that he is on their side?
In 2023Senator Wiener started to write legislation targeted directly at San Francisco: In a last-minute amendment toSB 423Scott injected annual reviews of San Francisco’s progress on housing—making it the only jurisdiction in the state receiving elevated scrutiny. All others have four year reviews. See article in SF Standard about SB 423.
In 2024 Scott is continuing to attack San Francisco: He introduced SB1227 to exempt downtown projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, for a decade. The 1970 landmark law requires studies of a project’s expected impact on air, water, noise and other areas. Wiener’s excuse is that the city has used CEQA to slow down or kill infill development near public transit and that no environment damage can be done to a concrete jungle. See article in SF Standard about SB 1227
We will be targeting all coastal towns in CA with Wiener’s SB951 crazy ass law. So yes we will try to send to these folks too!
On 02/02/2024 11:31 AM PST zrants <zrants@gmail.com> wrote:
By Ray Burns : lostcoastoutpost – excerpt
The State of California wants in on the City of Eureka’s fight against the Security National-funded Citizens for a Better Eureka.
The Office of Attorney General Rob Bonta today submitted a request to file amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs in support of the City of Eureka and the Eureka City Council, and it says the court should reject the Citizens for a Better Eureka’s efforts to thwart affordable housing developments downtown.
Last month, Citizens for a Better Eureka filed a series of motions seeking preliminary injunctions that would immediately block the city and its partners, including Linc Housing and the Wiyot Tribe’s Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust, from breaking ground on affordable housing and transportation projects slated for development on municipal parking lots downtown.
The motions – five, in all – allege violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), arguing that the city failed to conduct legally required environmental review not only for the elimination of public parking spaces but also for the various planned redevelopment projects, which the group says will impact traffic and air quality…(more)
We keep warning the Democrats that they are risking losing support in communities that are barely on their side to begin with and these efforts to reign them is is stupid and irresponsible. They stand the possibly of losing seats in the House if they continue to attack the less urban communities. Where are the jobs and where is the need for housing in Eureka? Must contact them regarding ourneighborhoodvoices.com and other state organizations who are fighting their battles with them.
A dramatic change in the use of a longtime neighborhood and community planning process is about to happen; can the supes do anything about it?
Nothing is sacred to Senator Wiener.
If re-elected he will continue the land grab.
When the Board of Supes considers an appeal of a housing development on Sacramento Street Feb. 6, the main issue at hand whether turning a former medical library into housing will damage an historic resource.
But what’s really at issue here is a much bigger question.
For decades, San Francisco environmental and community activists have used the California Environmental Quality Act to challenge development that was damaging to the community. Some of the most important cases in city development history, including one that set new law around the requirement for the analysis of cumulative impacts of multiple projects, involved CEQA…
The statute the city is citing is Government Code Section 15183, which is part of CEQA. It states: “ CEQA mandates that projects which are consistent with the development density established by existing zoning, community plan, or general plan policies for which an EIR was certified shall not require additional environmental review, except as might be necessary to examine whether there are project-specific significant effects which are peculiar to the project or its site. This streamlines the review of such projects and reduces the need to prepare repetitive environmental studies.’”…
So this could mean the end of CEQA review for potentially hundreds of projects.
As I said in my first story on this, that’s a Yimby dream—but it’s also a huge policy change.
It gets worse: If the supes go along with this appeal, on a project that predates the Housing Element EIR, the developer can just come back and say: State law has changed. I can make this even worse.
San Franciscans need to be ready for what Sen. Wiener and his allies have wrought: destruction of historic resources, large-scale demolitions of existing housing, and a profound limitation on what the community can do on a local level to fight back.
All in the name of more market-rate housing, that won’t do anything at all to solve the current crisis, which is entirely a crisis of affordable housing…(more)
Please read the rest of the article, comment where you can, and send your concerns to your supervisors and whoever else you feel should take actions on this appeal.
The answer is that any citizen who has paid taxes to the state can sue the state (or an agency thereof) to restrain illegal, injurious, or wasteful expenditures under section 526a of the Code of Civil Procedure. Any such lawsuit needs to be brought in state court because federal courts have strict standing requirements…
The portion of SB 423 singling out San Francisco is illegal because it violates the California Constitution, Article IV, Section 16(b): “A local or special statute is invalid in any case if a general statute can be made applicable.” A taxpayer action could seek a declaration that this portion of SB 423 is an invalid special statute. Notably, there isn’t even language in the bill, as there is in other special statutes, purporting to justify it as addressing a problem unique to San Francisco.
A taxpayer action could also seek a broader declaration that the state housing laws do not take precedence over San Francisco zoning laws, because as a charter city, San Francisco has a right to home rule protected by the California Constitution. This power includes zoning. A conflicting state law, even on a matter of statewide concern, only prevails over home rule if the law is reasonably related to resolution of a matter of statewide concern and narrowly tailored to avoid unnecessary interference in local governance.
The state housing laws fail this test for numerous reasons. Studies by the Terner Center show the laws have failed to achieve their goals and scholars have described them as “ad hoc and not model based.”
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