Inside the Huntington Beach Housing Case
- William Fulton
- Aug 23, 2021
- 6 min read
Last week, CP&DR rank a link to a brief news item reporting that an Orange County judge ruled in favor of Huntington Beach on a controversial Housing Accountability Act case. To our surprise, this turned out to be one of the most-visited items on our web site in recent weeks – and it’s the latest in a long-running saga about fights over housing in Huntington Beach. So this week, we thought we’d take a deeper dive into the Huntington Beach case, which seems likely to become a pivotal appellate court case on the Housing Accountability Act. What the story shows is a developer – and a nonprofit legal advocacy group – trying to hold the city’s feet to the fire on the specifics of the Housing Accountability Act, while a local judge instead provided considerable deference to the city’s action and the city’s reliance on a traffic expert. The key to the city’s success may have been a fire expert who concluded that the project does not meet the city fire department’s standard for fire truck access.
