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The AIDS Healthcare Foundation has lost yet another appeal against the City of Los Angeles, this time in a case that challenged the environmental impact report associated with a proposed mixed-use highrise proposed by the owners of the Southern California Flower Market in the eastern part of Downtown Los Angeles. This continues a long string of appellate losses for the Foundation on housing issues. (See previous CP&DR coverage of AHF’s losses here , here , and here .)

In an ongoing dispute among commercial neighbors in Lafayette, a condominium developer appears to be besting an adjacent office building owner. Most recently the city got the go-ahead from an appellate court to use the infill exemption contained in the California Environmental Quality Act because the site doesn’t qualify for – in CEQA parlance – an exception to the exemption. Building on the  Berkeley Hillside case and other cases, the ruling appears to make it more difficult for project opponents to use the "unusual circumstance" exception to the infill exemption. The case came down to the dueling biologists – and which biologist made a more convincing legal argument to the appallate court. The case was originally unpublished but has now been published by the appellate court. A developer known as 3721 Land LLC obtained approval from the City of Lafayette to tear down a rehabilitation center on Mount Diablo Boulevard and replace it with a 12-unit condominium project. (During the approval process, one unit was shaved off of the original 13-unit proposal.) The city used a Class 32 infill exemption from CEQA on the project.

The City of Fresno appears to be finally putting to rest all legal challenges to its purchase of the iconic Tower Theater, whose prospective purchase by an evangelical church caused a firestorm of protest in the surrounding Tower District. The city obtained the property from private owners in 2022 after the owners cancelled a contract with Adventure Church, which is affiliated with the Church of the Foursquare. Just as the proposed sale caused a firestorm, the cancellation of the sale caused a firestorm of litigation, all of which the church has lost. Most recently, the city brought an anti-SLAPP motion, claiming that the church’s litigation against the city – arising from a claim of financial losses made to the city – was based on words and actions that were protected under the law. In an unpublished ruling issued on July 19, the Fifth District Court of Appeal agreed. The possible sale of the Tower Theater to Adventure Church – including renting the space to the church for its services – led to considerable blowback from the city’s LBTQ+ community, which is centered in the Tower District. Adventure argued in the most recent lawsuit that the city interfered with the sale of the property by Tower Theater Productions to Adventure, even as the sale unraveled for other reasons.

Amid the row of towers along Wilshire Boulevard in the affluent Westwood section of Los Angeles, the Westwood Presbyterian Church stands as a relic from an earlier era. Wilshire Boulevard was transformed into a high-rise corridor by the office boom of the 1980s, but the church – located just two blocks east of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, near UCLA – remains as a two-story house of worship surrounded by greenery and a surface parking lot on a 1.6-acre parcel.

Environmentalists have won the latest round one of California’s longest-running development battles, the attempt by HomeFed to build a 3,000-home Fanita Ranch development in an apparently high-wildfire-risk area of Santee east of San Diego. San Diego County Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal ruled in August that the Santee City Council erred in 2022 when rescinded all of the 2020 Fanita Ranch approvals, thus allowing  the council to remove the referendum  from the ballot, and then approved the same project anew under an urgenc ordinance not subject to referendum. The approval took place after the city recirculated some sections of the project’s environmental impact report in response to Judge Bacal’s ruling in March of 2022. An appeal is expected. Although Santee’s general plan and the project’s environmental review are also issues in the case, the critical factor was Judge Bacal’s interpretation of Election Code Section 9241, which states that if a legislative body repeals an ordinance in response to a proposed referendum, it cannot enact the ordinance again for a year. Santee and Home Fed attempted to argue that Ssection 9241 didn’t apply to this situation because Judge Bacal herself had previously ordered the environmental impact report struck down. But in this case Bacal said: “Section 9241 makes no exception for when a judicial body directs a city to rescind an approval pursuant to a writ.” Santee and HomeFed also argued – as they did elsewhere in the case – that Section 9241 did not apply because of expedited review required by SB 330. However, Bacal did not buy that argument. The plaintiffs in the case, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, also argued that the EIR recirculated in 2022 because of Judge Bacal’s order was defective because it conflicted with Santee’s general plan. Santee and HomeFed argued that the state Density Bonus Law permitted the approval of “essential housing” under the emergency ordinance even if it conflicts with the general plan. Bacal ruled with the plaintiffs. “The Housing Accountability Act restricts local governments from denying certain housing applications; it does not mandate local government approvals of projects,” she wrote. She also noted that in its statement of overriding considerations on the EIR, the city never mentioned either the Density Bonus Law or the Housing Accountaiblity Act. The battle over Fanita Ranch goes back more than 40 years, when a 1980s developer proposed 14,000 houses on the ranch.  In 1999 , Santee voters rejected a 3,000-home project . In 2012 , an appellate court shot down the EIR for a 1,380-home development proposal. In 2020, the City  approved a new proposal  for 3,000 homes,  designed by DPZ , by a 4-1 vote.  Project opponents  again sued, challenging the EIR on a number of grounds, and won a Superior Court ruling in March. Meanwhile, the opponents also qualified a referendum on the project approval for the November 2022 ballot. In response to the judge’s ruling in early 2022, the City Council rescinded all of the 2020 Fanita Ranch approvals, thus allowing  the council to remove the referendum  from the ballot. Then, on September 14, 2022, the council approved the same project anew, with a partially recirculated EIR – but this time the project was approved under an urgency ordinance, meaning it is not subject to referendum. Fanita Ranch Location (Courtesy of City of Santee) In August of 2021, while the lawsuit was pending, the city adopted a new “Essential Housing” program as an urgency ordinance, meaning the ordinance is not subject to the referendum process if it passes the City Council with a 4-5 vote. Under the “Essential Housing” ordinance, a project must meet certain criteria under a point system in order to qualify. The ordinance was adopted while Santee was going back and forth with the state Department of Housing and Community Development on its housing element, which was eventually approved last April. Fanita Ranch’s developer, HomeFed Fanita Rancho, applied for the Essential Housing designation in October and in December the staff certified that the project met the criteria. The  Essential Housing ordinance  contains a checklist of almost 40 items across eight categories: land use, housing mobility, open space and conservation, sustainability, safety, trails and sidewalks, and parks and recreation. To be eligible at all, a project must meet a variety of criteria, such as not being in a floodway and being listed in the housing element’s site inventory. A developer can receive up to a certain number of points for each item. A total of 183 points is available, but only 50 of the available points (27%) are for housing. To qualify as for the Essential Housing designation must obtain 50 points across all eight categories, including 10 points of the 50 available in the housing category. For example, designating 10% of homes for moderate-income residents is worth 10 points, as is a trail facilities contribution. In the case of Fanita Ranch,  the staff awarded the project  124 out of 183 points, including 35 out of the 50 housing points. The developer promised to set aside 10% of the project’s housing units for low-income residents, which was worth 20 points. The project also got 25 points for sustainability and 19 points for trails. The Case: Preserve Wild Santee v. City of Santee , San Diego County Superior Court Case No. 37-2022-00041478-CU-MC-CTL (filed August 9, 2024). The Lawyers For Preserve Wild Santee and other environmental groups: Peter Broderick, center for Biological Diversity, pbroderick@biologicaldiversity.org  For City of Santee: Amy Hoyt, Best Best & Krieger, amy.hoyt@bbklaw.com

Streetscape plans are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, an appellate court has ruled.

The Inland Empire warehouse wars continue. In the latest skirmish, an appellate court – overturning a lower court ruling – has said that the City of Upland’s environmental analysis for a 200,000-square-foot warehouse near Cable Airport is sufficient. The dispute was over the significance threshold that should be used for greenhouse gas emissions – as well as the environmental baseline under the California Environmental Quality Act. The ruling is especially important because it was published, meaning it can be used as precedent in other cases.

The new State Capitol Annex has survived yet another court challenge, this one arguing that SB 174 – the bill exempting the project from the California Environmental Quality Act – runs afoul of a 44-year-old constitutional amendment designed to protect the Capitol’s historic character.

A San Diego judge has ruled that a disposition and development agreement that includes a specific development program is a “project” subject to the California Environmental Quality Act. The case involves the potential development of Tailgate Park, a four-square-block, 1000-vehicle surface parking lot adjacent to Petco Park in Downtown San Diego that is owned by the City of San Diego. San Diego negotiated a DDA with a development partnership that includes the San Diego Padres, Tishman Speyer, and an investment firm called Ascendant Capital Partners. The developers agreed to purchase the 5.25-acre site for $35 million and in return committed to building 1,700 residential units in addition to 1.3 million square feet of office space and a 1,600-unit parking space among other things. The city concluded that because the EIR had already been certified CEQA did not apply. But San Diego Superior Court Judge Katharine Bacal, an experienced CEQA judge, concluded that the previous EIR did not contemplate zoning permitting so many housing units. “Adding these residential units would appear to cause a direct physical change in the environment, on a property that previously was identified for mixed commercial zoning that did not contemplate at least 1,710 residential units,” she wrote.

Of the dozens of Grateful Dead songs that have been autoplaying in my head since the news of Bob Weir’s passing broke this Saturday, “Shakedown Street” has been in particularly heavy rotation. The  bassline helps, but so does its commentary about American urbanism.  The Dead’s landscapes rarely involved cities. Dead songs are vivid: fairy tales set in the real world, though its landscapes are more pastoral than urban. In “Truckin’,” we pass through the likes of Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Buffalo — but we end up at “home.” In “Friend of the Devil,” we “set out from Reno” only to wind up in points unknown.  Bob Weir, 1947 - 2026 These landscapes illustrate the Dead’s greatest thematic virtues: their uncanny grasp of Americana. With assists from lyricists including Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow, the Dead sing of farmers, miners, outlaws, lovers, sailors, truckers, guitar pickers, criminals, innocents, prophets, and mortals. These characters danced, sang, schemed, and slipped away from sea to shining sea: in small towns, open spaces, celestial planes, trails, roads, rivers, and seashores.  “Shakedown Street” takes a surprising detour amid the long, strange trip.  Released in 1978, and performed live 164 times by the Grateful Dead (and many more by its successors, including Dead & Co.), it captures the demise of American cities as vividly as anything else I can imagine from that period. It’s Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, Andy Warhol, Dirty Harry, and Richard Roundtree. It’s Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the gas crisis, and the Zodiac killer. Fans in 1978 would have easily recognized all of these urban ills, many of them caused, in large part, by awful post-World War II policies that eviscerated cities from the inside out.  Compared to the rest of the Dead canon, “Shakedown Street” is darker — which is saying a lot for the band whose symbol is a skull — and it feels less ethereal and more of-the-moment. The Summer of Love was long gone by that time, and a malaise had come over the country, its cities, and music itself. By then, there’s “nothin' shakin’” in what “used to be the heart of town.” Even basic physics has turned against America: “the sunny side of the street is dark.” Jane Jacobs couldn’t have said it better herself. It’s their most urban sounding song, more funk and disco than country, blues, bluegrass, or rock. More Studio 54 than Woodstock.  The city of the Dead is neither Heaven nor Hell — it’s both. Like pretty much everything else in America and everything else in the Dead canon.  60th Anniversary show Dead songs capture the ambiguities and contradictions of American life like none other, equally aware of hippie idealism and the strong arm of The Man and bemused by the precarious balance between disaster and triumph. They express reverence for what America can be and bemusement for what it purports to be: a place where “every silver lining’s got a touch of grey: and "one man gathers what another man spills." The band itself, in its various incarnations and endlessly renewing audiences, lived those ambiguities exquisitely: living hard and singing softly night after night, decade after decade.  The anomaly of “Shakedown Street” is surprising given that the Dead are a thoroughly urban creation. Most bands are, of course. Cities bring together creative, multitalented people. But, whereas the bands of Los Angeles or New York consist of newcomers who step off the bus and find their people, the Dead were home-grown in San Francisco. The scene and the city were intertwined, and they were public.  The Dead’s 2,000-plus shows took them well beyond California, to venues as urban as Madison Square Garden and as rural as The Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State. There’s nothing necessarily special about that — plenty of big acts play big venues. But, of course, the Dead’s city traveled with them. Forming, reforming, and morphing at every leg, the extended Deadhead tribe exemplifies two of America’s greatest distinctions: the privilege of mobility and the yearning for community.  That’s one of many reasons for their resurgence. I hardly need to recount all the forces that have alienated Americans from each other these days: social media; politics; tribalism; covid; and, not insignificantly, urban stagnation and, especially, cost of living. “Bowling alone,” to invoke Robert Putnam, was the least of it. Dead & Co. shows brought people together, just as their predecessors had for decades. Most recently, they went back to their roots with a series of three shows in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, a venue rivaled for urban congregation only by New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Millennium Park. It turned out to be Bobby’s final farewell.  Drivin' that train to Golden Gate Park Whatever the location, the band evoked happier times — albeit idealized — when hippies could hang out on stoops and streetcorners, play some music, twirl around, and imagine a better world. All while making rent, without a tech founder or stock option in sight.  The Dead even managed to soften our least-urban city, holding down residencies at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Its most  spectacular effect was nothing if not a celebration of urbanism. A life-size recreation of 710 Ashbury Street pulls back into an aerial of San Francisco, then the entire Bay Area, the state, and eventually, into outer space, from which their stalwart frontman now looks down upon us.  The ‘60s are officially over. For American cities, and California cities, that’s probably a good thing. They have bounced back mightily from their “Shakedown” era trough. Today’s San Francisco remains remarkable, but it’s entirely possible that the cost of living means that it will never again be built on rock n’ roll. I just hope that, someday, they can rekindle at least a few aspects of the Dead’s heyday, back when kids envisioned a new world and old folks were the squares (how times have changed).  To state the obvious: a counterculture cannot be planned. But the conditions to nurture creativity, novelty, optimism, and fellowship most certainly can. You don’t need a miracle. You need affordability, equity, density, walkability, openness, and, yes, a little bit of fairy dust. You might need righteous causes to support and Establishments to rage against, which are in woefully ample supply today. You need freedom, and you need some love--for art, music, and one another.  Bobby Weir may be gone, but don't tell me these towns ain't got no heart. We all gotta poke around. Images: Dead & Company via X.

In the first important court ruling following up on the People’s Park case, an appellate court in Los Angeles has reversed its earlier ruling that housing project near the University of Southern California isn’t eligible for the Class 32 infill exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act.

A “reverse-reverse-CEQA” ruling from Lake County has been upheld by an appellate court, meaning the county still has not complied with the California Environmental Quality Act in trying to approve a controversial resort in Guenoc Valley north of Napa Valley.