Court overturns state ruling on San Francisco’s infamous 469 Stevenson project | Hacker News Reader

Court overturns state ruling on San Francisco’s infamous 469 Stevenson project

sfchronicle.com

117 pointsjseliger128 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20221102211129/https://www.sfchr...

This ruling is frustrating (to say the least) in the short term, but overall I think this ruling going to tremendously backfire in NIMBY's faces. This judge just unintentionally put the state's spotlight on CEQA -- previously, the dearth of housing laws passed this year were careful to navigate within its framework without attempting to change it.

Newsom has demonstrated he takes housing starts seriously (Really! The fact that virtually every commercial lot is now zoned for ministerial housing approval statewide, abolishing parking minimums statewide, passing SB9 to allow 2-4plexes on single family parcels statewide, and passing SB10 to exempt apartments of less than 10 units from CEQA, and directing the housing authority to decertify rich cities' zoning codes that flout RHNA housing obligations like Santa Monica is huge) and I don't expect him to let up.

> State housing laws, she ruled, do not apply to a project until after a city “certifies” the project’s environmental review.

> Although CEQA puts a one-year limit on environmental review, the court held that this deadline is just advisory

If these rulings stand, you can absolutely bet that CA state housing laws in 2023 will now turn their focus toward CEQA. At a minimum, expect that "advisory" deadline to be formalized, shortened, and certification expedited or even exempted if the project falls within certain categories. Bike and bus lanes were just exempted from CEQA this session, and I absolutely imagine housing that is X% affordable will be soon, too.

In fact, really all California has to do is expand SB 330 or their 2019 Builders Remedy Law (which itself gave an existing state law from 1990 teeth) which states that developers are guaranteed ministerial approval regardless of zoning in any municipality determined to have a non-certified housing element to include expedient and ministerial CEQA approval. What would once be considered unthinkable politically a decade ago is now just a legislative hop and a skip away.

I really really hope you are right.

> directing the housing authority to decertify rich cities' zoning codes that flout RHNA housing obligations like Santa Monica is huge

The true test is whether or not this works in Palo Alto. That's the NIMBY capital of California.

I don’t understand why. It’s ugly and boring there

Hahaha very true, but bougie attracts bougie.

> In fact, really all California has to do is (…)

I guarantee they when Charlie actually does that, Lucy will nevertheless pull away the ball again.

But that time if they try they'll fail. Almost all avenues to municipal NIMBYism have been closed:

Strict SFH zoning? It can often be ignored now and build duplexes and four-plexes by right (no CEQA necessary!)

Amply sized commercial lots but no residential multifamily zoning? Those can be residential now. No CEQA necessary in some cases. I believe it's <400 units.

Parking requirements? Gone. In fact a city cannot even consider parking in deciding to issue a permit or not.

Procedural tactics? New laws have been passed capping the amount of required public comment meetings to 3, along with various other things like maximum review windows and mandatory ministerial approvals.

Bad zoning? Cities for which CA decertifies their zoning codes (housing elements) can be considered to _have no zoning_ until they present a housing element the state is satisfied with. Such cities include Santa Monica (recently fixed, but not before 4000+ units qualified), Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Redondo Beach, Davis, soon to be Palo Alto and San Francisco.

The only thing that's left, really, is CEQA reform. California is _so close_ to realizing a building boom. You have the Coastal Commission, too, but that only affects properties directly within the vicinity of the beach, and as a state agency is not something a city itself can really influence.

Well, I hope you’re right about this, but if experience is any guide, I bet that new obstacles will be invented, and in a decade you will still believe that the building boom is just around the corner.

The big issue now will be financing, with increased fed rates, leading to drastic drops in prices. It’s extremely high risk for a builder to build in a market with dropping prices.

It will lead to a boom in 4-5 years most likely after big turnover in existing boomer home owners and resets in price expectations lead to cheaper house valuations, which lead to lower land values, which lead to lots being somewhat affordable again.

Then tear downs and builds at higher density become more economic, and the rules unblock it.

For those who are curious, the appellant that is holding up the 469 Stevenson project is the Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium [1], an LLC run by Tenants and Owners Development Corporation (aka TODCO) [2]. TODCO plans and develops new and rehabilitated senior and SRO housing, with 968 units completed in eight properties since 1977 [3].

According to Wikipedia [4], "Since the early 2000s, the organization has not built more housing. The organization derives resources from the rising value of its properties, which is a consequence of skyrocketing property prices in San Francisco."

EDIT: more context from the Wikipedia quote: "The organization has used these resources to lobby against housing construction, as well as fund various other propositions. The organization has been criticized for using the windfalls of its operation on political advocacy rather than on its properties and resident services."

In other words, they’re basically the real estate equivalent of patent trolls, except you can’t pay them to go away.

1. https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5127075...

2. https://www.todco.org/advocacy

3. https://yellow.place/es/todco-group-san-francisco-usa

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_and_Owners_Development...

> The organization derives resources from the rising value of its properties, which is a consequence of skyrocketing property prices in San Francisco.

To make it explicit, this is a very perverse incentive, because essentially, the housing crisis getting worse leads to more resources for them (and vice versa)!

Looks like SF's equivalent of LA's Aids Healthcare Foundation, which spends less than 10% of its budget on treating AIDS or on healthcare, and instead spends nearly all of its money fighting construction in Hollywood that would interfere with the sightlines of the AHF HQ.

Those same guys are active here too.

> except you can’t pay them to go away.

Has anyone tried?

Mate, the reason TODCO makes money is that they get paid[0] for the government for providing affordable housing. The amount they get paid is proportional to the difference between the rate they charge and the current market rate. This is supposed to last a certain amount of time after which they have to run through some statutory rehab thing which need not do anything meaningful, at which point they just start collecting again.

So, to be clear, we are currently paying them to not go away, so you're going to have to come up with something truly exceptional to get them to go away.

0: Tax credits, strictly, which are transferable

Because anyone has standing to file objections, even if you paid the first lot a $$$$$$ ransom, surely anyone else could file the same objections in the hopes of also receiving a $$$$$$ payout?

For those not following the California housing crisis and the government's response to it, I would urge you to do so. This is an issue of national significance and Newson is actually trying to do a lot. The article mentions the Berkely case but let me highlight it [1]:

> That’s essentially what Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman ruled this week when he froze enrollment increases at UC Berkeley in response to a lawsuit by a local NIMBY group called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods. The judge found that the university failed to account for the impact of increased enrollment — including late-night parties and crowded parks — in its plans to add more student and faculty housing, in violation of the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA.

Well-intentioned laws (ie environmental impact) are effectively being weaponized for the benefit of rich people.

There have been some victories in Newson's push. A notable example is Santa Monica. The city is quite famous for fighting development to going back decades. Now the state mandates cities have to have a "Housing Element", which is a plan for increasing affordable housing. Santa Monica fought this but got out of compliance. This allowed developed to bypass the city and get thousands of units approved. The city is now in compliance but is lookking at legal options for fighting the approvals.

Santa Monica, like many wealthy cities, also fought against the Westside rail extension into the city [2]. Why? "Crime" of course. What this really means is "undesirables", which itself means "poor people".

You really see the awful cruelty of some people in all this. Rampant NIMBYism and the impact it has on housing supply and affordability is a key contributor to homelessness, poverty and property crime. Oh well, I guess we'll ship everyone off to Martha's Vineyard. Problem solved.

[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...

[2]: https://la.curbed.com/2013/7/16/10219386/westside-nimbys-han...

A lot of California's NIMBYism is rooted in Proposition 13, passed in 1978. Many homeowners cannot sell their current home and buy one elsewhere in the state without significantly increasing their annual property tax burden. (Prop 19 in 2020 carved out an exception for homeowners over 55.) When a house is a family's single largest investment, and Prop 13 makes that asset even more illiquid than in other states, stiff opposition to any nearby development should surprise nobody.

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I actually believe the tide is turning on Prop 13 and it may well get repealed in the next decade. I'd probably still bet it won't be repealed but I feel like there's a real chance.

"Throwing seniors out of their homes" was effectively used to give incumbent homeowners a massive tax break. Worse, it gave Disney a massive decades-long tax break. What people often don't talk about with respect to Prop 13 is how it benefitted corporations.

Corporations end up owning property in LLCs and they simply buy and sell the LLCs. This doesn't technically count as a transfer (which would trigger a revaluation for tax purposes) so Disney in Anaheim is paying a tax rate for their theme park that was capped (with 1-2% max annual increases) in the 1960s.

The other horrible part is you can inherit a decades-old preferential tax rate. I mean, you wouldn't want to kick people out of their parents' home would you?

California needs to be more like Texas in this regard. Reassess for property tax frequently. Allow property tax deferral for seniors who don't want to move. And there's no beneficial tax rate to inherit.

> Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I actually believe the tide is turning on Prop 13 and it may well get repealed in the next decade. I'd probably still bet it won't be repealed but I feel like there's a real chance.

Why do you think there's a chance?

Almost 80% of home-owners vote - and the CA home-ownership rate is above 55%. Usually less than 50% of renters vote.

Prop 13 is currently popular with both liberal politicians (think about the poor old ladies who'd have to move!) - and conservatives (we actually like regressive taxes).

I can't even see a path to start being hopeful in the next 10 years.

> California needs to be more like Texas in this regard.

California and Texas both need to drop sales/income/property taxes entirely and replace them with land value taxes.

I'm less optimistic than ever. Voters recently rejected the split roll property tax ballot initiative, which would have affected Disney but not their home property tax.

If most people in California are renters, then Prop 13 doesn't apply to them anyway. So maybe in 10 years we will see Prop 13 being repealed.

We had a Prop 13 challenge in 2020 called Prop 15. The idea was to "split" the way Prop 13 works so that homeowners would still have Prop 13, but commercial properties would not (after a phase in of 5 years or something). It was rejected 52-48 in a historical voter turnout election.

I was surprised it failed, but it cemented the idea for me that Prop 13 is untouchable.

That was an extremely evil proposition, and would have put me and many other small businesses out of business. You see, big companies like Apple get to negotiate with their local governments for commercial property tax rates, but small businesses are paying full list price. Adobe, for example, is paying almost no property tax for its first San Jose tower, but the businesses like the electrical contractor, the body shop, and the metal shop on my block pay list price. If prop 15 passed, the increased cost would have put them all under.

(See https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/labor-business-spar-over-... for information about tax breaks for giant developers)

The people who supported prop 15 are evil and racist (it would have put many minority businesses out of business). The only businesses left would be giant corporations who could make deals. (See https://calmatters.org/commentary/my-turn/2020/10/prop-15-wo... ).

Prop 15 would have made all business pay the same rate. If you think there should be a lower rate for minority owned or small businesses, that's fine, but a subsidy based on the age of your business is not good policy.

No. Big businesses that build their corporate HQ get to negotiate with the county for property tax rates. Small business that buy small buildings don't.

You have every right to want to see small businesses replaced by corporate megaliths, but don't pretend you're doing that out of "fairness." That's evil.

Don’t big businesses try to do this everywhere in the US? What does that have to do with prop 13?

That’s why “Prop 15” which would have overturned prop 13 protection for business but not homeowners was so obscene: it would only adversely affect small Mom & Pop businesses. Big mega corporations could negotiate.

Big corporations already negotiate subsidies, even with Prop 13. This just makes one less thing that they pay less on by default. You were hoodwinked.

NIMBYs are just people on the business end of falling real estate values, and they can't sell or rent your place for what they paid. For many people, their property is their largest investment and they'll defend this to the extreme.

To dismiss this political reality is to "bring a knife to a gunfight."

Motivations vary, but in my experience the most active individual NIMBYs care more about quality of life issues than real estate values. Most of them have lived in the same home for years and have no plans to sell. But they don't want the noise, traffic, parking shortages, and loss of privacy that come with developing higher density housing in their neighborhoods. That is not irrational. If politicians and housing developers want people like that to stop objecting then they need a better strategy than just labeling NIMBYs as greedy obstructionists.

This might be the case in wealthier neighborhoods among younger families. I grew up in a very poor part of the Bay (starts with "East") and the motivation for people to thwart change was generally around property values. Many of the families that could afford to own where I grew up (many couldn't and rented, as it was a rough area) both leveraged their house for lifestyle reasons and often either relied on it as a retirement nest egg or handed it to their children as a way to transmit generational wealth. Many Bay Area seniors would be bankrupt in retirement without their house.

ALL of the political spam I've been getting has prominently talked about "protecting home values"

Perhaps these NIMBYs should instead come up with their own plans for increasing housing density then, ones that address their concerns. I don't see them doing that though.

Perhaps "the YIMBYs should instead come up with a way to guarantee rising property values, then talk about development, social agendas, etc."

Again, to property owners this is their biggest asset and they're not playing around.

> Perhaps "the YIMBYs should instead come up with a way to guarantee rising property values, then talk about development, social agendas, etc.

Making large and single family homes more scarce will increase the market value of existing large single family homes.

Allowing more dense development increases land value.

YIMBY policies increase both the improvement and land value of existing real estate with single family homes.

Yyy! I agree with these policies, and put my money where my mouth is, but I'm in NYC... In the suburbs you have issues of traffic, parking, services, infrastructure, etc.

Telling other people what they "should" do is seldom very productive.

You're right, which is is why more and more they're not being told what they should do, but what they must do whether they like it or not.

It's right there in the name. Build more high density housing, just not near us.

Which is not entirely helpful when the base premise is the higher density housing is needed near them.

"All politics is local" begins and ends with property values. Everything else is fluff. Crime rate, racism/multiculturalism, etc. The root of it all is property values.

There is zero evidence that build densely decreases property value. Structure is by itself a depreciating asset. Land value will increase when the neighborhood densifies.

Prop 13 is not a national problem. In most parts of the country, municipal governments are incentivized to support residential housing.

NIMBYism is a national problem. It just takes different forms in different places.

For example, in most of the US, it is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes ("SFHs"). This is NIMBYism and intentionally exclusionary. If you have minimum lot sizes and can only build an SFH on it, you're creating an economic barrier to people living there, usually under the guise of preserving the "character" of that commu8nity.

Likewise, most places are completely car-dependent. This too is intentionally exclusionary.

Even in built up areas like Manhattan, a lot of units are bineg built but they're heavily weighted towards the ultra-luxury segment (>$3,000/sq ft). There were tax incentives to build this ultra-luxury property (ie J-51).

Pretty much every facet of US housing is designed to limit supply and be exclusionary at the policy level.

> Likewise, most places are completely car-dependent. This too is intentionally exclusionary.

Which also results in unsustainable neighbourhoods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

Santa Monica is not the source of the state's housing crisis, and in a democracy where power should rest at the local level, the people of cities like Santa Monica should be free to determine their future in terms of railroads and housing density.

There's an element of tyranny and expropriation in the YIMBY movement.

Actually every city in California is mandated to present a realistic plan to satisfy their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) every 10 years if they wish to keep access to state infrastructure funding in addition to local control of city zoning. That is a law from 1970 reaffirmed and strengthened in 1990 and 2019.

Santa Monica has refused to do so for the past 10 years. This year they just had their entire zoning code essentially overturned by the state (again, per that law) until they were back in compliance. In the 3 months they were deemed noncompliant before they got their act together, applications for 4000 units were filed and now must be approved ministerially, which goes a long away to satisfying their 8000 unit shortage as determined by RHNA!

Beverly Hills and Pasadena just had their housing elements (zoning) thrown out for the same reason. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto will be next unless they get their act together. No city itself is the source of the state's housing crisis. But Santa Monica is one part of it.

The YIMBY's are asking the individual property owners be allowed to decide what to do with their own properties. Not letting government dictate what people do doesn't seem like "tyranny" or "expropriation" to me.

A democracy that defines itself so narrowly as to exclude most people isn't a democracy, it's an oligarchy.

The only tyranny in California housing politics is the assumption that people who own houses in a town are the only ones who should get to determine the future of that town.

“ Any city may now pick up the 469 Stevenson St. manual and use it to impose an unreviewable death by delay on almost any housing project it wants to kill.”

Anyone who doesn’t understand California housing politics won’t understand why every city would want to arbitrarily kill every housing project. California cities don’t want housing in THEIR city. They want housing in their neighboring city and want the commercial buildings in their own city. This is because Prop 13 prevents cities from collecting RISING taxes from residential properties (but they can collect rising taxes from commercial properties)

This is why California looks obscenely underdeveloped despite its GDP per capita rising 15x in 50 years.

>This is because Prop 13 prevents cities from collecting RISING taxes from residential properties (but they can collect rising taxes from commercial properties)

The parenthetical here is incorrect - all property taxes, regardless if they are for residential, commercial, or industrial properties, have capped yearly increases under Prop 13. In 2020, there was a ballot initiative, Prop 15, which proposed a "split roll" to remove the Prop 13 rate caps from certain types of businesses, but it did not pass. You can read more about Prop 15 here: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_15,_Tax_on_Co...

Prop 13, however, doesn’t apply to sales tax.

This means that really the best way to increase income is to approve more mixed-use zoning. Hopefully we will see a push for that moving forward.

And also payroll and gross receipts tax.

> AB2656 made it through the Assembly and the policy committees of the Senate, only to be killed without a vote by the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

This is a common fate for laws in CA; they don't like voting down things when they can silently kill them. In this case it'd be popular, as all YIMBY laws are, but was killed by building trade unions. Unions and activists alike rely on a lot of "trolling" features in state law where they just annoy developers to death with process and fake lawsuits until they agree to negotiate with whatever their demand is today. It's probably not a good way to do things.

> This is a common fate for laws in CA

1st to be pedantic, this was a bill not a law. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBpdxEMelR0

2nd, this is the fate of many a bill in all 50 states and is not something unique to the legislative process in CA.

AB2656 may have also been killed because it was a victim of compromising too much and the proponents did not see much value in trying to get it across the finish line.

A developer having to (1) wait a year after submitting the approval to then "call into question" the deadline and then (2) wait another 3 months for a decision after that and then (3) sue the city for a court order to proceed

is not a "streamlined" process. In fact it's more or less what the process already is today in some cities. I'd much rather see a better system introduced, rather than that bandaid solution:

"If the completed environmental review is not approved within a year after submission [for some projects which fulfill X criteria], it is assumed compliant." with further safeguards like "a city must start the review process within 90 days and present major findings within another 90 days after that" to avoid the "we just started reviewing it a day before the deadline" delay tactic.

> it would be fairer to call the judge’s decision tone deaf rather than outrageously wrong

It isn’t a court’s job to evaluate tone or make policy decisions. If laws lead to bad outcomes, the laws are the problem. Not the courts.

You often hear of courts issuing injunctions but not so often writs of mandamus. That's because a judge can easily order someone NOT to do something, and police show up and prevent them from doing it. Ordering them TO do something gets more complicated.

That's not to say the courts can't make things happen, but it's harder. The relevant party can say "look, I'm doing it!" and the court then has to rule "no, you're not."

The reason why you do not hear of courts issuing writs of mandamus against someone to compel them to take some private commercial action is because that is not what a writ of mandamus is.

A writ of mandamus obligates a government official do do his job. If a court wants to order “someone” (read: a citizen who is not a government official) to take some positive action they issue what is known as a positive injunction which is, as the name suggests, a type of injunction.

When a court issues a negative injunction, the enjoined party can say, “Look, I’m not doing it!” and the court still has to decide whether or not that is true, so I’m somewhat unclear of the nature of your argument against positive injunctions.

where do I say "private commercial action"? We're talking about government agencies, which a writ of mandamus CAN apply to.

Besides ordering specific performance the most common way is for the court to say "You need to have done this by this date" which then can cause another hearing when that date passes and it hasn't been done.

As you said: "another hearing."

And probably, when that date passes,

1) someone has to complain to the court

2) the court has to schedule a hearing, where both parties are represented.

In other words, time goes by. Not saying it's impossible.

> warned that they may have violated the Housing Accountability Act, which says that cities generally can’t deny or downsize housing projects that comply with whatever rules are in place at the time the project application was submitted.

This sounds like a law which states that you can't break the law.

It specifically sets the grandfather date to the project application date - so if I roll into your town and submit a proposal for a building, you can't tomorrow add a "hendrikrassmann law" that requires me to do something additional.

Note that this is NOT the case usually - if you propose a building today and construction starts in 4 years you often have to code-update everything to the construction start date; or even the construction end date. So the law has a purpose.

Another way to say it: You can't move the goal post once you've started running towards it.

I've always wondered what would happen if you simply ignored zoning laws in construction, assuming you could exceed the legitimate safety requirements and use modern technology (modular construction, etc.) to do it quickly (weeks) and fund everything from cash vs. bank finance. Would SFPD actually send armed police to intervene (on camera, livestreamed...) or just a bunch of stupid civil actions?

They don't even have to use cops. They are able to let you lose your cash. They can prevent you from selling the apartments by refusing to issue titles to buyers. They can stop you from connecting to city-owned utilities. They can write you a big ticket for zoning violation and put a lien on your land title if you don't pay the fine.

California’s _Tax revenue alone_ ($250B) is about the size of Finland’s GDP.

Imagine if they spent that on improving the housing situation.

The crazy thing is that there are many fixes for the housing situation that require no spending at all. Just allow construction of housing and it will get built without spending.

Try to keep the scale in mind. Even if the state spent 100% of that revenue building housing the most optimistic production rate would be half a million dwellings per year which, while substantial, is essentially treading water and will do nothing to address the accumulated deficit from the last 40 years of under-building.

Whenever someone says "image a billion dollars" just remember that amounts to 1000-2000 small apartments at best.

Whenever someone says "image a billion dollars" just remember that amounts to 1000-2000 small apartments at best.

A billion dollars for a thousand apartments is one million per apartment. Even in corrupt, dysfunctional California that's crazy high.

The cost should be a few hundred dollars per square foot to build, plus land cost. Anything over that is overhead California forced on itself.

And you can find houses for $500k in California right now, so clearly they can build them, but where people want?

Don't know if this will work, but Zillow found 285 properties between 475-500k built in 2022 that are houses:

https://www.zillow.com/ca/?searchQueryState=%7B%22pagination...

> clearly they can build them, but where people want?

its time for the California City Development Company to shine. It's already the 3rd largest city in the state so surely they can adequately handle the population growth with current infrastructure.

http://www.desertnews.com/article_7ffe4cb4-fa34-11eb-b387-53...

https://laist.com/news/california-city-podcast-investigation...

It is clearly not in accordance with the state’s adopted climate and energy policies to build five million houses in sprawling car-choked desert hellscapes.

It is clearly not in accordance with the state’s adopted climate and energy policies

Then they are part of the housing problem. You can't have everything - more immigration, cheaper housing, and more restrictions on building.

Apparently building much of anything isn’t in accord with their policies what with the homeless piling up.

I wonder if a state can put a “bugger off we’re full” sign on the border?

This isn't quite a million, but a current candidate for San Jose mayor, Matt Mahon, makes the point that the "housing solution" for homelessness is now costing over $100K per new unit. He has a proposal to build them for $8K / unit.

Is that realistic? I don't know, but it seems clear that any real solution has to be cheaper than what's being spent now.

Is that crazy high though? That would barely get you half a toilet in SF.

“Plus land costs” is doing a lot of work in your analysis.

You forgot the high-speed rail line to every apartment.

> Whenever someone says "image a billion dollars" just remember that amounts to 1000-2000 small apartments at best.

No, small apartments do not cost $500,000-$1,000,000 to construct in CA. In dense urban cores (whuch are very small parts of even major metro areas) they may cost that much to buy, but that’s not construction costs.

They 100% do, because local government regulation has launched the "soft costs" into the stratosphere. A developer has to count on carrying their project for a minimum of 4 years while the city considers their application, their EIR, their design review, their historical resource evaluation, etc etc etc. Even when projects are city-funded, the per-unit costs are generally 600k-1m per unit. See: Berkeley Way/Hope Center, 189 total units on city-donated land for $120 million. See: https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2022-06-20/ca...

> They 100% do, because local government regulation has launched the "soft costs" into the stratosphere.

Even if that was true, it would be irrelevant in this context, since we are talking about the cost of a hypothetical program that would be enacted through State law, not private action by developers. And State law can (as demonstrated by things like the builders remedy) suspend or otherwise bypass local administrative barriers.

The whole article is about how the bypass is imperfect.

This subthread, not the article, is about a proposal that the State use its power and funds to directly build housing, and, were it to choose to do so, it could alter the power of subordinate jurisdictions to impede that in any way it chose. So, current local administratively imposed costs are not, legitimately, part of the building cost the state would necessarily face in such a hypothetical, only actual construction costs or federally-imposed administrative costs.

Hypothetically, the state can dissolve any city with a simple majority vote in the legislature, clearing the decks of any irritating "lead agencies" with bothersome CEQA conclusions. But realistically, the state has only ever dissolved one entity involuntarily.

Short of dissolution the state cannot simply ignore local agencies, as we see with UC vs. Berkeley.

> Short of dissolution the state cannot simply ignore local agencies

No, short of dissolution, it can also adopt any restriction on or state immunity from local authority it wants. (There are some resrictions that might take a ballot measure rather than just the legislature, but since the hypothetical didn’t limit the methods by which the proposed program would be adopted, that is immaterial.)

> UC vs. Berkeley.

UC, while established by the State, is not coextensive with it and does not independently exercise the full powers of the State.

I appreciate both your willingness to follow the replies, and your openness to practical solution that so few seem to consider. This isn't a federal system where the cities have real powers. All the power in our state lies with the state, but the state government so seldom exercises it.

Imagine if you spent that billion dollars on improving the situation around housing to add incentive for affordable housing projects, purpose-built rental, and multi-tenant dwellings, so that the path of least resistance (and most profit) would be to build the housing that the community needs.

Just start filling the thing with garbage and/or shipping containers... whatever the ugliest most foul thing they can legally do with the property in the interim.

We need to repeal CEQA and replace it with something else. Enough is enough.

Can we get a ballot initiative on this for god's sake?

It doesn't need to be repealed. It can be narrowly amended such that it does not apply to residential projects within existing urban growth boundaries, on previously-developed parcels.

The ballot initiative would lose; CEQA is notionally an environmental protection measure.

The judge is up for election in 2025: https://ballotpedia.org/Cynthia_Ming-Mei_Lee

Time to swap her out!

She's not wrong, it's because the law is bad. It'd be better to fix the law. CEQA and NEPA are bad ideas in the first place; they were designed by environmentalists to slow down bad projects, but instead they just slow down everything. Other countries don't make you write 300 page reports and get sued by all your neighbors to install solar panels.

In the meantime, this can be appealed.

You elect judges???

Who in hell thought that was a good idea?

The Progressive movement of the early 1900s - see e.g. Pg 4 of https://www.ca-ilg.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/uni...

What do you think is a better way of doing it? Elections seem like the most fair way to me

Fair?

Every politician ever says they're tough on crime, and this basically turns judges into politicians. I don't want a judge that's tough on crime, I want a judge that's impartial. I want a judge judging a case purely on its merits, not with one eye on the upcoming election, and what's popular with voters.

I don't know how it's done elsewhere. Probably selection by peers, some kind of veto from the government? You need someone capable of assessing the quality of someone's judgements. The general public ain't it.

Do you think the outcomes on, say, the US Supreme Court are better?

Instead of being angry at judges in a lot of cases it would be better if the laws were designed better.

At this point any San Francisco company that requires its employees to come to the office is enabling NIMBYism.

Am I understanding this right - cities in CA are fighting the State of CA?

Isn't the State of CA supposed to be made of the cities in CA, rather than in opposition to their desires?

If the city doesn't want housing, that should be fought at the city level, rather than the state stepping in. The whole thing just seems upside down to me.

We both agree that a government is made up of citizens, yes? Absent any enforcement mechanism, it would be the natural and logical choice for any one of these citizens to decline to pay their taxes, a classic example of the free-rider problem.

The classic solution to this problem is to create a central authority with the power to compel each citizen to do their fair share. Similarly, the people of California have shown through their votes that they believe the state should take collective action to build enough housing to allow the next generation to move out of their parents' houses.

Absent state action, no city would volunteer to do their share; they would prefer to keep their abundant parking availability and endlessly-rising property values. And so the state steps in to ensure that voters' goal of increased housing production is achieved.

That's not what's happening here. The actual party challenging this project is TODCO [1], a non-profit housing organization that actually hasn't built any housing in the last 20 years and has spent its revenue in the form of appreciating property values in fighting new housing projects by challenging them on environmental issues. The Californian law in question that allows this challenge is a state (not city) law known as CEQA [2]. This issue is much more complicated than a mere issue of power delegation between states and cities.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_and_Owners_Development...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quali...

https://www.calcities.org/

the League of California Cities fights the State of California daily, forever.. also Counties do it, and the several regional government associations do, too.

it was supposed to be better this way.. compare to Argentina maybe ? the bill is overdue on all of this

When a city becomes unlivable the smart decision is to move. It's the easiest answer for all parties involved.

Proposition 13 makes that option untenable for many homeowners. They cannot sell and buy a house elsewhere in the state without significantly increasing their property tax burden.

No longer true. You can move anywhere in the state and keep your tax bill, as long as it's not a more expensive house.

If you are referring to Prop 19, that only applies in limited situations. The homeowner must be over 55, disabled, or a victim of natural disaster.

yeah, as I was running, I was wondering if I'd misremembered.

Still, this does handle the supposed problem of aging Boomers being stuck in their houses because of Prop. 13.

"stuck" ? under Prop19, property tax on a paid-off 3-bedroom home in a wealthy area is less than rent in the ghetto. It has been that way for twenty years.

Please don't call me "dude."

Supposedly, Boomers in a paid off house in a wealthy area were dissuaded from moving, because their property taxes would skyrocket. Unless they moved to a county that accepted the Prop 13 swap for over-55's, which not all counties did.

Now that is eliminated. Dude.

The court has rendered its judgment. Now let it enforce it. The developers should ignore the judge and move forward with the project. Bring those bulldozers to the construction site. Put shovels in the ground. What's the judge going to do?

Too much progress in this country is being slowed down by judges legislating from the bench, on both sides. Everyone should just stop following judges orders, Democrats and Republicans. The only matters judges are qualified to judge are trials.

Too much legislating from the bench is a symptom of too little legislating in the legislature...

Normally that is the case, but California has been very active passing significant housing reform legislation in the past couple of years. Just this last legislative session over 20 housing bills were passed: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2022/10/calif...

The problem is that city counsels and judges are skirting laws by violating clear legislative intent.

> What's the judge going to do?

Issue an injunction, have the construction workers arrested and charge the developers with contempt?

The judge wouldn't have to do anything. A city that wants to stop construction could use a police officer to do it, and they would be legally in the clear.

> Everyone should just stop following judges orders, Democrats and Republicans.

So... no more rule of law. Got it. What could possibly go wrong? /s

There would be an emergency injunction filed and they would send police to the job site if they didn't listen

So disputes should be settled using guns instead? Violence is the general alternative to the rule of law.

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