Appellate Court Upholds HAA's Objective Design Standards
- William Fulton
- Sep 14, 2021
- 4 min read
In an important new ruling, the Second District Court of Appeal has concluded that the City of San Mateo’s design guidelines are not “objective” under the Housing Accountability Act and has ordered San Mateo to reconsider its denial of a four-story 10-unit apartment buildings. The appellate court also upheld the constitutionality of the Housing Accountability Act, saying it does not impermissibly intrude upon local government powers.
The case is one of the first to deal with the strengthened Housing Accountability Act at the appellate level. While it overturned a San Mateo County Superior Court judge’s ruling, it mirrored a recent ruling in a case from Huntington Beach, where an Orange County Superior Court judge similarly found that the city’s design standards aren’t objective and the Housing Accountability Act is not unconstitutional.
The case involves a proposed apartment building on the corner of El Camino Real and West Inez Avenue in San Mateo. In 2017, a local developer proposed the project and the city staff recommended to the planning commission that the project be approved. Planning commissioners expressed concern that the project was inappropriate in scale compared to the adjacent single-family neighborhood. The staff then returned with a revised recommendation to deny the project based on a finding under the Housing Accountability Act that the project did not meet a standard in the city’s design guidelines calling for taller projects to be stepped back from adjacent single-family homes.
The developer appealed the decision to the San Mateo City Council, which affirmed the planning commission decision in early 2018. (This account is derived from the appellate court decision and could not be independently verified by CP&DR because all staff reports regarding the project, unlike other past staff reports, appear to have been removed from the city’s web site.)
California Renters Legal Advocacy And Education Fund then sued – the same organization that sued in Huntington Beach. The case revolved largely around the question of whether the stepback requirement in the design guidelines is an “objective” design standard as required the Housing Accountability Act in order to deny a project that otherwise meets a city’s planning requirements. Superior Court Judge George Miram ruled that the stepback requirement is an objective standard but he was overruled by the appellate court.
The specific standard the city relied on in denying the project, contained in San Mateo’s multifamily design standards, states: “If height varies by more than 1 story between buildings, a transition or step in height is necessary. Any portion of a building constructed taller than surrounding structures should have the taller section built to a width that acknowledges the traditional building width pattern of the City—generally 30 to 50 feet in width.”