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With a unanimous vote, the U.S. Supreme Court has ended California’s practice of allowing looser standards for exactions and impact fees when they are imposed as part of a general plan.

A Los Angeles judge has declared SB 9 unconstitutional for charter cities, saying that it cannot guarantee that new housing created will be “affordable” and “below market” and therefore it does not align with the law’s rationale for overriding local powers. The problem, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Curtis Kin said, is that the law relied on the state’s classification of affordable housing as a matter of statewide concern, not a lack of housing supply – which the state has also classified as a matter of statewide concern but which SB 9 did not reference. The ruling only applies to charter cities, which have more home rule power than general-law cities. In a footnote, Kin said, “The Court recognizes the provisions of SB 9 might support a finding that SB 9 addresses the shortfall in housing generally … SB 9 takes away the ability of local governments to impede the state's goal of increasing housing production to address the shortage in housing. But, the Court declines to decide whether SB 9's provisions permissibly address some other concern (housing supply) not identified by the Legislature in enacting SB 9. Kin is the same judge who late last year suspending the City of Beverly Hills’ permitting power because he found the city’s housing element “deficient”. ( CP&DR ’s coverage of the Beverly Hills case can be found here .) SB 9, which went into effect in 2022, essentially did away with binding single-family zoning in most parts of California. The law permits landowners build up to four units on their single-family parcel by to splitting their parcels in two and build two units on each of the resulting parcels, all by ministerial action. The bill was very controversial during legislative debate in 2021 and has received a lot of national publicity. However, its actual effect has been limited. Relatively few single-family parcel owners have chosen to go the SB 9 route. The general consensus is most single-family homeowners find it easier to add an accessory dwelling unit on the property, an action that is also available by ministerial approval thanks to a different state law. Decades ago, California declared that both a shortage of housing and a lack of affordable housing as matters of statewide concern, thereby allowing the state to override the California Constitution’s guarantee of local home rule. SB 9, however, mentioned only “affordable housing” and not “a lack of housing supply” as the justification for interfering with home rule. This was the basis of the constitutional challenge brought by several cities led by Redondo Beach. Other cities involved in the lawsuit include Carson, Cerritos, Torrance, and Whittier. In his ruling, Kin defined “affordable housing” as deed-restricted below-market-rate housing. Because SB 9 does not require any of the resulting housing units to be dedicated as affordable, he concluded, it does not further the affordable housing goal stated in the law as the rationale for the local override. In its defense of SB 9, the state attorney general’s office tried to argue that simply because SB 9 uses affordable housing as the stated rationale, that doesn’t preclude also using the shortage of housing supply as a rationale as well. But Kin didn’t buy the argument – and to back up his position, he contrasted SB 9 with other state override bills such as SB 423, which was passed last year as a followup to SB 35. SB 423 allows some housing projects to be approved by ministerial action but specifies that units must be deed-restricted affordable. “Through the enactment of SB 423,” he wrote, “the Legislature requires developers who seek to avail themselves of a streamlined, ministerial approval process for their development to record a covenant requiring any lower or moderate-income housing units to remain available at affordable prices for specified periods of time. “By contrast,” he added,” SB 9 contains no similar provision to require, promote, or incentivize dwelling units within single-family residential zones or on subdivided urban lots to be affordable or designated as affordable. SB 423 also amended SB 9 to allow four units to be built on single-family parcels in California but it did not otherwise require any development resulting from ministerial approval of a subdivision to be available at below market-rate levels.” The Attorney General's Office attempted to back up its case with a deposition from Melinda Coy, the head of the Housing Accountability Unit at the Department of Housing & Community Development, who addressed the question of how SB 9 might help solve the housing problem in California. But Kin was not persuaded, sticking closely to the idea that "affordable housing" means below-market deed restricted housing. "Coy's declaration supports a finding that, at best, an increase in housing development may slow or stop the rise in housing prices," Kin wrote. "But Coy never states that the removal of barriers to housing development through enactment of sB 9 would lead to housing that is below market rate and affordable." The Case: City of Redondo Beach et. al. v. Bonta, Los Angeles County Superior Court No. 22STCP01143 (filed April 22, 2024) The Lawyers: For Redondo Beach and other plaintiffs: Pam Lee, Aleshire & Wynder, plee@awattorneys.com For California Attorney General’s Office: Deputy Attorney General, kevin.kelly@doj.ca.gov

In an unpublished followup to an important 2017 ruling, the Fourth District Court of Appeal in San Diego has overturned a jury’s decision to award a developer $800,000 in an inverse condemnation case against Coronado. The owners of an historic bungalow in the case never sought a permit from the city’s Historic Resource Commission for their final alteration plan, although they did show the plan to a staff planner for the city. The court concluded that the case was not ripe because the permit was never sought. The court also concluded that the “futility’ exception to the ripeness requirement in an inverse condemnation case also did not apply, again because no permit was ever applied for. The property in question is a 100-year old bungalow in Coronado owned by the J.A. Abbott Trust. In 2014, the Coronado Planning Commission – and, on appeal, the City Council – designated the bungalow as historic even though the city had previously concluded that similar bungalows built by the same builder dating from the same era were not historic. Trustees Arthur and John Young sued to challenge the designation but lost all up the way through the Court of Appeal. “This court's role is not to reweigh evidence, but rather, to determine whether the findings are supported by substantial evidence,” wrote Justice Cynthia Aaron for a unanimous three-judge panel in a 2017 ruling. ( CP&DR ’s previous coverage of that case can be found here .)

A trial judge has ruled that Huntington Beach – perhaps the most resistant city in California to state housing law – must adopt a housing element. Attorney General Rob Bonta said the judge is requiring the city to adopt the housing element within 120 days – which would be mid-September – though the judge’s order didn’t seem to include that specification.

For the second time in a row, critics of a new annex at the State Capitol building in Sacramento have won at the Court of Appeal. This time, the court nailed the Department of General Services for re-certifying a defective environmental impact report – but not vetting its adequacy with the trial judge.

Fix The City, the limited-growth advocacy group, has lost a second appellate court case against the City of Los Angeles because of filing a lawsuit at the wrong time. The ruling would seem to put an end to Fix The City’s challenge to the city’s Expo Line Plan.

The California Supreme Court has reminded everybody that the California Environmental Quality Act is just a law – one that can be changed by the legislature at any time. On Thursday, June 6, the court finally ruled in the long-awaited “People’s Park” case – the one where an appellate court ruled last year that noisy students can be a “significant impact” under CEQA, possibly triggering the need for an environmental impact report and mitigation. But the Supreme Court went the other way, overturning the lower court decision and clearing the way for construction of student residences in People’s Park. Enraged that more student housing at UC Berkeley might be put at risk by CEQA the Legislature quickly passed – and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed – AB 1307, which specifically stated that noisy college students aren’t a significant impact on residential projects and that the University of California can’t be required to consider alternative sites under some circumstances. Both these provisions were targeted directly at the People’s Park case, as innumerable legislators made clear at the time. That law made UC’s appeal to the Cal Supremes in the People’s Park case a bit anticlimactic. The plaintiff in the case – a group known as ‘Make UC A Good Neighbor” – acknowledged that AB 1307 applied to the project they were challenging, a student residence project in People’s Park in Berkeley. But the group still claimed that a noisy students argument should apply to the environmental review of UC Berkeley’s Long Range Development Plan, or LRDP, because that isn’t a “residential project”. And the plaintiff also argued that the Cal Supremes should weigh in on the alternatives question.

The Department of Housing & Community Development has issued a wide-ranging set of recommendations to update the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process – including, most importantly, adding homelessness to the range of housing needs cities and counties must grapple with in planning for their RHNA targets.

This article is brought to you courtesy of the paying subscribers to  California Planning & Development Report . You can subscribe to  CP&DR  by clicking  here . You can sign up for  CP&DR ’s free weekly newsletter  here . State Ceases Effort to Recoup $4 Billion in Federal Funds for High Speed Rail Henceforth, the state will no longer expect the federal government to help fund California High Speed Rail. This summer, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would renege on $4 billion in Federal Railroad Administration that had been promised for the under-construction Bakersfield-to-Merced segment. The FRA cited delays and cost overruns among its reasons for the cancellations. Attorney General Rob Bonta sued to recover the funds, asserting the the FRA had violated agreements with the state. The state recently dropped this lawsuit and will proceed using state funds, including $1 billion per year allocated from the state's cap-and-trade revenues. “This action reflects the State’s assessment that the federal government is not a reliable, constructive, or trustworthy partner in advancing high-speed rail in California," a spokesperson for the rail authority wrote in a statement, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. "As a result, the State has opted to move forward without the Trump administration. We regret that they will not share in California’s success." State Awards $866 Million for Housing & Sustainability The state is making more than $866 million in new investments to build affordable housing, expand transit, and protect communities from climate change. The awards include funding for new affordable housing in 17 communities across the state, thousands of new homes, and major sustainable transportation upgrades, with $185.6 million going to Los Angeles County as it rebuilds infrastructure after last year’s wildfires. The funding approved by SGC included more than $866 million in grant funding for 39 projects within three programs: 1. Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program – $835,318,208 for 21 affordable housing and green transportation projects(external link) in 17 jurisdictions through Round 9 grants; this round will support the creation of 2,393 new rent-restricted homes; 2. Transformative Climate Communities Program — $29,484,224 from the anticipated fiscal year 2026-2027 Proposition 4 (Climate Bond) to fully fund four Round 5 grants; 3. Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation(external link) Program — $2,051,490 for 14 capacity-building projects(external link) in 25 counties through Round 10 grants. This round of awards is the largest in SGC history, with total awards now exceeding $5 billion. Report Describes Persistent Residential Segregation in California A new report from UCLA, "The Impact of Residential Mobility on Segregation in California," leverages a new dataset — the University of California Consumer Credit Panel, which contains anonymized information for all adults with credit scores in California, including where they have lived — to explore patterns of residential mobility and their relationship to segregation in ways not previously possible. The analysis examines the characteristics of origin and destination neighborhoods for movers of different socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County as well as for the remainder of the state of California. Moves into neighborhoods in each opportunity map category (e.g., Highest Resource) and poverty category (e.g., 20-30% poverty) between 2011 and 2022 almost exactly matched substantially segregated pre-existing residential patterns by race/ethnicity. Moving and residential patterns for Asian/Pacific Islander people were similar to those for white people, and patterns for Latino people were more disadvantaged but not to the same degree as for Black people. Black movers were substantially more likely to make downward moves into high-poverty neighborhoods and were much less likely to move up into low-poverty neighborhoods, compared to other racial and ethnic groups. By contrast, white movers were the least likely to move into high-poverty neighborhoods across all regions, including only 4% of such moves in the Bay Area. The findings in this report point to the need for both housing supply- and demand-side interventions that show promise in inducing more equitable residential mobility patterns and achieving this vision of a more integrated and equitable society, as well as to the need for further research to identify the most effective strategies. CP&DR Coverage: La Cañada Flintridge Approves Controversial Builder's Remedy Project The court battle over a five-story mixed-use project on Foothill Boulevard in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada-Flintridge once seemed likely to define the legal contours of housing element compliance. The dispute centered on whether compliance with housing element law required approval by the Department of Housing & Community Development or merely city approval. In April of 2024, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff ruled in favor of the developer and ordered the city to process the builder’s remedy application. The city originally filed an appeal, but abandoned its pursuit of the lawsuit last spring . By dropping the appeal, the city allowed the builder’s remedy project to move forward. Quick Hits & Updates A judge sided with environmental activists in a lawsuit over Dublin's Measure II ballot measure, which opened up protected spaces to potential development, ruling that the city had an obligation to conduct an environmental review of possible development before placing the question on the ballot. In November 2024, Measure II passed with 53% of the vote, giving the city power to start commercial development in the Doolan and Collier canyons, which were placed beyond an urban limit line in 2014. New data shows that rents are rising in San Francisco, the Peninsula, and East Bay . The median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in San Fransisco was $3,090, and the 12% increase from the 2024 median was the highest of any city in the data collected by Apartment List. While rents in the much of the Bay Area sunk during and after COVID and remain below 2019 levels, the new data suggests this trend is reversing, with rents in Berkley and Oakland rising 10% and 3% year over year respectively. The Menlo Park City council will place the Downtown Parking Plazas Ordinance on the ballot next November. The ordinance would require voter approval for the city to change the use of, sell, or lease eight parking plazas in downtown Menlo Park that have been at the center of a right over a city plan to use them for affordable housing. Hard Rock Casino Tejon , the new $600 million casino and entertainment resort, opened in November in a largely undeveloped part of Kern County near Tejon Ranch. The casino, a joint bet by Hard Rock International and the Tejon Indian Tribe, promises 1,100 regional jobs, with future plans for a 400-room hotel and a concert venue. (See related CP&DR coverage .)

Top Stories 2025  In a perfect world, urban planning and wildfires would scarcely make acquaintance with each other. Settlements would be built far from fuel, with well managed buffer zones. Building materials would be resilient. Escape routes would be clear. And humanity and nature would live in perfect harmony.  Alas.  Last year’s wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena were not the biggest by land area, nor were they the most deadly. They were, though, the most costly, the most destructive (each burned more structures than the previous record-holder), the most urban (moreso than the Oakland or Santa Rosa fires), and, arguably, the most surprising (the dead of winter). Accordingly, fire coverage dominated California’s news cycle and CP&DR’s readership in 2025. In reviewing the most-read stories on our web site in the past year, we found that two of our top four stories overall were fire coverage:  We Don't Have A Wildfire Crisis. We Have An Everything Crisis. How Planners Can Help LA Recover -- And Help After Other Disasters Too And, fire factored into many other stories: the suspension of state laws; innovative, approaches to permitting; and, a national award from the American Planning Association.  Let us hope that CP&DR gets its clicks differently in 2026.  In more conventional news, legislation -- especially SB 79 and other pro-housing bills -- dominated CP&DR’s news coverage and commentary. The single most-viewed article centered on a familiar topic -- parking, and the overabundance thereof -- on a sad occasion, the passing of legendary UCLA professor and bon vivant Donald Shoup. Bill Fulton’s remembrance went viral among the extended Shoupista universe, celebrating the professor’s activism and economic acumen in “ Donald Shoup Wasn't Just About Parking. He Was About The Economics Of Public Goods. ” Here are the rest of CP&DR’s top stories of 2025:  News   The legislature’s appetite for housing bills has not waned, and neither has readers’.   Key Wins in Builder’s Remedy Cases Reshape Cities’ Approaches to Housing Budget Bill Would Expand CEQA Infill Exemption   What the CEQA Bills Will Do   CP&DR's Quick-And-Dirty Guide to Everything the Legislature Did on Housing and CEQA   Major CEQA Reform Bill Runs Into Trouble   Commentary   Aside from wildfires, here are the top issues on readers’ minds:  Why Hollywood and the Housing Industry Need Each Other Is The Era of Swiss-Cheese CEQA Over? How Will SB 79 Affect Local Planning in California?   Frank Gehry's Star Quality Outshined His Urbanism   "Freedom Cities" Won't Liberate California Legal Digest  For all its reforms, disputes over the California Environmental Quality Act continue their romp across California’s landscape. Plus, a federal Supreme Cour decision with direct local impacts. Cities Can't Assume Infill Development Reduces VMT Cities, Housing Advocates Battle Over Builder's Remedy's "90-Day Rule" Court Rejects MND, Requires EIR To Be Prepared Over Aesthetic Issues In Sheetz Followup, Court Okays El Dorado County Exactions System When CEQA and Housing Elements Conflict

So, in the battle between the California Environmental Quality Act and the Housing Accountability Act, which law wins?

The City of Davis doesn’t have to do an environmental analysis under the California Environmental Quality Act in order to move playground equipment from one location to another.