Housing Law Litigation

SB 158 raises a question that cuts to the heart of California's housing reform effort: can the state legislature pass a law that specifically targets one project to protect a politically connected city from a Builder's Remedy application? The Mission LLC v. State of California argues that SB 158 was drafted so narrowly — applying only to cities of 85,000-95,000 residents in counties of 445,000-455,000 — that it effectively singled out one development for elimination. If that argument succeeds in federal court, it would establish that legislative workarounds to Builder's Remedy are constitutionally suspect. If it fails, it signals that Sacramento can carve out exceptions for individual cities willing to fight back politically.

Costa Mesa passed a series of ordinances specifically designed to shut down sober living facilities and group homes for people in recovery — applying permitting requirements, density limits, and use restrictions that did not apply to other residential uses. The Ohio House cases, litigated across both federal district court and the Ninth Circuit over several years, established the boundaries of when cities can use zoning to exclude housing for people with disabilities. The pattern Costa Mesa used — neutral-seeming zoning rules selectively enforced against disability housing — is the same mechanism documented in the Elk Grove Oak Rose entry in this database, applied to a different protected population.

Former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar was sentenced to 13 years in prison in a corruption case involving at least $1.5 million in cash and benefits in exchange for help approving downtown LA real estate projects. The enterprise solicited and received nearly $2 million in bribes from real estate developers, including cash, casino chips, prostitution services, political contributions, flights, luxury stays, and meals. The Huizar case is the inverse of every other case in this database: instead of a city blocking housing, this is a city official extracting payment to allow it. Both are forms of obstruction — one uses denial as leverage, the other uses approval. Development in the downtown area "is now tainted because of this defendant," the prosecutor said at sentencing. Every project that paid a bribe to get approved is a project that couldn't get approved on its merits alone.

A companion case to the Ohio House litigation, also against Costa Mesa, also involving the city's systematic use of zoning and permitting to exclude sober living facilities from residential neighborhoods. Together the Ohio House and Insight Psychology cases established Costa Mesa as the leading California test case for Fair Housing Act challenges to disability-based housing exclusion. The pattern — a city applying objective-seeming rules selectively to housing for a disfavored population — is the civilian version of what the Elk Grove case documented with homeless residents.

A coalition of housed residents and business owners sued the City of Los Angeles for failing to address homeless encampments on public property, arguing the city's inaction violated their constitutional rights. The case produced a controversial preliminary injunction requiring LA to offer shelter to encampment residents before clearing them — then was substantially modified on appeal. It matters for this database because it sits at the direct intersection of homelessness and housing supply: the reason encampments exist in LA is the same reason the projects in this database were never built. The case made the cost of housing obstruction visible in a different register.

A developer in Los Angeles alleged that a litigant had filed multiple CEQA lawsuits against its projects with no other aim but extortion — saying "you know the drill, it's going to take a check to make this go away." The developer sued under federal RICO law hoping to hold the CEQA filer accountable. Five years later, the Ninth Circuit ruled the CEQA suits were protected by the First Amendment's Petition Clause, meaning that using environmental litigation as an extortion tool against housing developers is — as a matter of federal law — constitutionally protected activity. The ruling effectively closed the federal courthouse door to developers trying to fight back against bad-faith CEQA abuse, leaving state-level remedies as the only recourse.

Orange County has some of the most expensive housing in California and simultaneously some of the most visible homelessness. This case — filed by housing advocacy groups after the mass clearing of the Santa Ana riverbed encampment — argued that the county and several cities had created a homelessness crisis through systematic failures to build shelter and housing, then responded with criminalization rather than solutions. The case was largely dismissed on standing grounds, but it sits at the direct endpoint of the obstruction documented elsewhere in this database: Huntington Beach refusing to plan for 13,368 homes, Orange County cities blocking affordable development, and the human cost of that refusal visible on the Santa Ana riverbed.