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Rancho Planner Case May Move Forward

State Creates Map of Government-Owned Surplus Properties and Housing Element Sites The Department of General Services in partnership with the Department of Housing and Community Development released an interactive public map of property identified by local governments to help developers find land for housing development. The Housing and Local Land Development Opportunity Map shows potential development sites identified in local housing elements (housing plans) adopted on or after January 1, 2021, and locally-owned surplus and excess sites identified in housing element Annual Progress Reports. This new map allows developers to view all sites identified by cities and counties for housing through their housing elements, as well as locally-owned surplus and excess land, which may be subject to affordable housing requirements when disposed of through the Surplus Land Act. Further the map allows these sites to be overlaid with key datasets, including the HCD/Tax Credit Allocation Committee Opportunity Maps, Cal EnviroScreen 4.0, and fire hazard data to assist them in applying for state affordable housing funding sources and accessing streamlining benefits. HCD is also hosting a webinar on February 24, 2023 to introduce this tool. Concord Naval Air Station Redevelopment Stalls Again Three years after rejecting mega-developer Lennar to lead redevelopment of the former Concord Naval Air Station, the Concord City Council sent the project back to the drawing board again. On a 3-2 vote last week, the council rejected a term sheet with Concord First Partners, effectively firing the group after two years of planning. Totaling 2,225 acres and set to include 15,000 housing units, the $6 billion project would be the single largest housing development in the Bay Area (if not the state). The Navy still owns the property, but the city governs its reuse. Guy Bjerke, Concord’s director of economic development and base reuse, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “we are evaluating options and will seek Council direction in the near future.” (See related CP&DR coverage .) Oakland Taps African-American Developer for Coliseum Site The City of Oakland entered into an exclusive development agreement with Oakland developer AASEG to redevelop the 200-acre Oakland Coliseum site into a $5 billion mixed-use community focused on equity, with generous amounts of affordable housing for low-income, and especially African-American, residents. AASEG is owned by African-American businessperson Ray Bobbitt, who grew up in Oakland. The redevelopment is predicated on the Oakland A's departure from the Coliseum, and it could include an arena to host a WNBA or other professional sports team. But the focus would be on housing; "We're talking about affordable housing, so that we can keep those who have lived here in Oakland for generations, so their families can continue to live here," said Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao told ABC News. Any redevelopment would require the assent of the A's asset, which owns about half of the site. The A's have not commented on the AASEG development agreement. (See related CP&DR coverage .) Analysis of RHNA Progress Awards C- to Cities Statewide According to a study by the Southern California News Group most counties and cities statewide are falling behind state mandated goals on affordable housing as of 2021. The average rating, under California’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment program, statewide was a C-. Low-income housing projects, as displayed by these study results, fell behind market-rate development statewide. According to the study, only 29 out of 538 state cities and counties were on track to provide housing for very low-, low-, moderate-, and above moderate-income residents according to their previously decided upon goals. Deputy Director for housing policy at California’s Housing and Community Development Department “complained that cities fail to take the initiative in promoting new housing. In some cases, she said, they obstruct development.” Cities in the state argue that they are at the whim of a difficult market. Others claim the state itself is not creating enough financial resources or incentive to local governments for the construction of low-income housing. One California city — Norwalk — met and exceeded the Southern California News Group's rating standards and received an A-plus in 2021. CP&DR Coverage: Fulton Considers CEQA Appeal Based on recent cases, Bill Fulton wonders whether California's appellate courts are getting tired of hearing cases about the California Environmental Quality Act. In the Bay Area, home to the First District Court of Appeal, where justices have recently lamented that “something is very wrong” with CEQA, insisted that environmental documents don’t have to be perfect, and even allowed a malicious prosecution case to move forward against a prominent CEQA plaintiffs’ lawyer. In the Sacramento-based Third District, however, things appear to be different, as evidenced by the outcome of the recent appellate court involving the proposed new annex to the State Capitol. In the Save Our Capitol! Case, the Third District first said that the Department of General Services should have included visual representations of the new annex in its environmental analysis. Recently, a tentative ruling from the First District in the People’s Park case seemed to indicate that noise from students and potential problems associated with homeless persons could be viewed as environmental impacts under CEQA. Fulton concludes that it's "a confusing time for CEQA, where many courts are really resisting expansion while others are facilitating it. If ever there was a time that called for comprehensive legislative reform, it’s now." Quick Hits & Updates Interstate 980 in Oakland has been listed as a “Freeway Without a Future” according to the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU). CNU argues that instead of investing in costly repair and expansion of the 980, money should be put toward city streets, housing, and green spaces.  Clovis City Council approved a new 1,000- acre development of single family homes just beyond the city limits. Development of the homes had been halted previously due to the presence of an endangered salamander. The site will not include any affordable housing, and the city still needs to study the fiscal impact of the development as it considers annexing it into Clovis city limits. Assemblymember Alex Lee introduced AB 309, which would promote mixed-income "social housing" statewide. Social housing is protected from being sold to a private for-profit entity for the duration of its life, and residents are granted the same protections (if not stronger) as tenants in private properties, and residents are able to participate in decision making. Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry and his wife Ayesha weighed in on the tense housing debates in the San Francisco Peninsula. The couple wrote a highly publicized letter to the Atherton City Council asking the council to oppose upzoning of properties adjacent to their home. Atherton is known for large properties exceeding one acre. A new Oceanside development along the Sprinter rail-line received approval Jan. 12 after a heated City Council meeting. An appeal by impassioned residents concerned about looming traffic issues was denied, enabling the development.  Cerritos Mayor pro tem Bruce Barrows filed a lawsuit that could delay construction of a light rail line extending from downtown Los Angeles through southeast Los Angeles County. The suit alleges that LA Metro violated the Public Records Act for failing to fully discuss its plans for a "cut-and-cover" segment in Cerritos. A new report from the Public Policy Institute finds that, due to the inevitability of water supply vulnerability, California must learn to "thrive with less." The report includes several strategies for adapting to these changing standards, including modernizing water storage, making the most of wet years, consolidating small water utilities in rural communities, and water-limited farming for agriculture use. Glendale planners are looking to improve the industrial neighborhood surrounding the city's Transportation Center. New design proposals include employment, housing, and retail opportunities as well as sidewalk repaving, new light fixtures, urban greenery, and curb extensions. A recent report from UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute expands on previous explorations of the impact of exclusionary zoning on racial and economic segregation, this time in the San Diego region. The report stresses that over three-quarters of residential land is zoned for single-family housing, which is consistent with previous reports on the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento areas.Though fewer people left California between 2021 and 2022 than in the previous year, the statewide population is continuing to decline , according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In the past year, about 114,000 people left, resulting in a 0.3% population decrease, compared to the previous year's 0.9%. Los Angeles City Controller-elect Kenneth Mejia's leadership team includes former L.A. city deputy major Rick Cole as chief deputy controller. The entire team includes a mix of political veterans and those new to local government, all intending to promote accountability and transparency of the city budget. Los Angeles County Metro's assessment of the NextGen Bus Plan, a bus network intended to increase ridership by growing the number of bus lines, improving frequency, and create safer waiting stops. The assessment found that accessibility improved with the new network, especially for people in Equity Focused Communities. Burbank's Civic Center Redevelopment would bring over 5,600 new housing units to the city's downtown as well as a 65,000-square-foot library and 52,000 square feet of open space. Burbank officials may soon make a down payment on city-owned land. Sacramento city council members approved a policy that will increase the amount of protected bike lanes across Midtown and Downtown Sacramento. The lanes will be connected to currently-existing pathways. Pathways Climate Institute LLC and San Francisco Estuary Institute and the Aquatic Science Center studied and mapped Bay Area shallow groundwater response to sea level rise in an effort to understand the impacts, creating an interactive map of groundwater rise.

Have appellate justices finally had it with the California Environmental Quality Act? The short answer appears to be yes – at least in the Bay Area, home to the First District Court of Appeal, where justices have recently lamented that “something is very wrong” with CEQA, insisted that environmental documents don’t have to be perfect, and even allowed a malicious prosecution case to move forward against a prominent CEQA plaintiffs’ lawyer. “In all these cases, you are starting to see a thread of frustration that has CEQA been hijacked by labor unions, by NIMBYs, by competitors,” veteran CEQA lawyer Tina Thomas , who often represents agency defendants, said at the recent UCLA Land Use and Planning Conference. “I don’t know how these cases are going to turn out, but there is this sort of thread of frustration.” Not everybody is frustrated, however. In the Sacramento-based Third District, however, things appear to be different, as evidenced by the outcome of the recent appellate court involving the proposed new annex to the State Capitol. In the Save Our Capitol! Case, the Third District first said that the Department of General Services should have included visual representations of the new annex in its environmental analysis. (The court softened its position slightly on this issue after a rehearing; CP&DR coverage can be found here .) And back in the Bay Area, Alameda County appears to be particularly fertile ground for CEQA expansion rather than frustration. The whole battle over the CEQA implications of UC Berkeley exceeding its enrollment projections began when Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman ruled, essentially, that increases in student enrollment could create an environmental impact. Both the First District and the California Supreme Court declined to resolve the CEQA battle over student enrollment at UC Berkeley, leading the Legislature to take the unusual step of amending CEQA to clarify the issue. (You can read CP& DR’s analysis of the case here .) More recently, a tentative ruling from the First District in the People’s Park case seemed to indicate that noise from students and potential problems associated with homeless persons could be viewed as environmental impacts under CEQA. (Read CP&DR coverage here .) CEQA plaintiffs’ lawyers are clearly getting more defensive about the law, though even they acknowledge that judges are beginning to lose patience. “You’re starting to see this frustration show up,” plaintiffs attorney Kevin Bundy said at the UCLA conference. But like his counterparts, he argues strongly that CEQA, at its best, will make development projects better. “We risk losing a lot of what is very important about CEQA,” he said at the UCLA event. “It makes sense to understand what the impacts of a project are before you approve it. It makes sense to see if there are feasible ways to reduce those impacts. We have to plan for wildfire and droughts. We have to plan for sea level rise.” What judges think about CEQA matters a lot. Over the past half-century, the Legislature has repeatedly declined to reform CEQA by statute, in large part because of changing cast of powerful characters – mostly recently labor unions – have found CEQA useful in gaining leverage over developers for their own purposes. That means Superior Court judges and appellate court justices have had to fend for themselves in interpreting CEQA – and although trends have ebbed and flowed over the years, in general judges have tended to expand CEQA through their rulings. Remember that the most important CEQA expansion dd the judgment that CEQA applied to permits for private development projects as well as government projects – came originally from the courts in the Friends of Mammoth in 1972 . Though most CEQA cases are not challenged in court, there’s always the threat of litigation, and judges have a long history of finding environmental analysis inadequate in some way. “There’s always another study that can be done under CEQA,” Thomas told the UCLA audience. Even CEQA practitioners have begun to be concerned about endless CEQA expansion. Take, for example, the issue of evacuation routes in wildfire risk areas – an issue that has emerged recently in several CEQA cases. (For one example, take a look at CP&DR’s coverage of what we called the Lake County “reverse-reverse-CEQA case.) At the CLE conference in San Francisco in December, Fehr & Peers’ Ron Milam – one of the leading transportation analysts in the state, said: “This is one of those ones that if you’re not careful will expand. We’re talking about wildfire evauation. What about other evacuations, urban fire, terrorism, whatever. Be prepared for some opponent to a project to translate that to all those other things you should have looked at. I’m hesitate to want to jump there because it just gives more opposition to projects.” Still, judicial frustration appears to be mounting. The Tiburon case involved a fight over building 43 units on a spectacular 110-acre property overlooking San Francisco Bay that has been going on for almost a half-century. The appellate court’s ruling was written by veteran Justice James Richman, who concluded his 110-page analysis of the California Environmental Quality Act by saying, “Something is very wrong with this picture.” (See CP&DR coverage here .) In the Save Livermore Downtown case, which was just published in late January, the plaintiffs argued that the project’s specifics violated the city’s general plan and downtown specific plan in various ways. But, the appellate court ruled, “A given project need not be in perfect conformity with each and every general plan policy.” Last year, in Southwest Regional Carpenters Council v. City of Los Angeles , the First District Court of Appeal let an environmental impact analysis go forward even though the final project did not emerge until the final EIR and therefore the public didn’t have a chance to comment on it. “ Although we believe decision-makers and the public would be better served if the public had an opportunity to comment on the actual project before approval, we decline to engraft that requirement into CEQA,” the court wrote. (This was more or less the opposite of the conclusion in the Save Our Capitol! Case.) Perhaps most surprisingly was the decision of the First District to permit a malicious prosecution case go forward against prominent CEQA plaintiffs’ lawyer Susan Brandt-Hawley for supposedly misrepresenting the facts in a challenge to a single-family home in San Anselmo. Brandt-Hawley tried to invoke the anti-SLAPP law but failed. So what does all this add up to? A confusing time for CEQA, where many courts are really resisting expansion while others are facilitating it. If ever there was a time that called for comprehensive legislative reform, it’s now. But as the Berkeley enrollment situation proved, it’s unlikely that the legislators will do anything but create more CEQA Swiss-cheese when their backs are to the wall: We may see a little more tinkering around the edges, especially on UC enrollment. But comprehensive reform seems to be as far away as ever.

Schools have honor rolls, big-box stores have employees of the month, and now the California Department of Housing and Community Development has “Prohousing cities.”

The Second District Court of Appeal has published a recent ruling concluding that a developer in Ventura required to excavate an unexpected amount of fill did not pursue all administrative remedies before suing.

An appellate ruling rejecting a community group’s challenge to an affordable housing project in Downtown Livermore has been published by the First District Court of Appeal, meaning the case can be cited in other court cases as a precedent.

Caltrain Extension to Salesforce to cost $6.7 Billion The Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) released a new estimate that puts the cost of extending Caltrain 1.3 miles to the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco at $6.7 billion. In spite of the 34% increase in estimated cost from 2015, transit planners have set a completion date for “The Portal” at 2032. It would be one of the costliest rail projects, on a per-mile basis, in the world. The project costs come largely from building the new underground station and tunnel. In an effort to reduce budget Caltrain has already decided to shrink proposed tunnel size and eliminate an underground passage from Salesforce Tower, which was constructed with space for an underground rail station, to the Embarcadero BART station. TJPA is hoping to secure at least 50% of their proposed budget from the Biden administration, which may be difficult given that Caltrain ridership three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is still down 60%. Caltrain is already projecting operating on a deficit, which could affect its proposed 2024 rollout of electrified trains. Los Angeles Further Extends, Enhances Tenant Protections  11 days before COVID-19 anti-eviction protections were set to expire, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to expand tenant protections . Small landlords made their voices heard during public comment on the policy, with many claiming they were already severely burdened under the existing COVID-19 protections. The new tenant protections will stop landlords from evicting tenants unless there were documented lease violations, unpaid rent, and or owner move-ins. This will expand just-cause evictions protections, like those already given to tenants in rent-stabilized units, to an additional 400,000 units in the city. Evictions for tenants with unauthorized pets and with added residents not listed on leases are also paused until 2024. The council also voted to extend the timeline for tenants to pay back-rent, and directed city departments to propose new relief programs for smaller landlords within 30 days. Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit over Bay Area Toll Hikes; Capital Improvements to Proceed The California Supreme Court dismissed a 2018 lawsuit intended to challenge toll hikes at seven Bay Area Bridges through Regional Measure 3 . While Measure 3 passed in 2018 with 55% of the vote, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association argued that since the funds generated by the toll hikes would benefit the general public — not just bridge users — it should have been on the ballot as a local tax, which would have required two thirds of the vote. The toll hikes still went into effect in 2019, but the hundreds of millions already generated by the measure are sitting in an escrow account. Now, with the lawsuit dismissed, BART, MUNI, and other Bay Area Transit agencies will have access to funds that could alleviate their existing financial burdens. Money from Measure M will go towards projects like BART’s expansion into downtown San Jose, the ongoing replacement of old BART cars, the San Francisco Bay Ferry’s expansion into Mission Bay, and Caltrain’s extension into the Salesforce Transit Center. Major Sonoma County Redevelopment Faces Lawsuit  A bid to redevelop a former state-run Sonoma Developmental Center in Glen Ellen is facing a lawsuit from citizen groups. The plaintiffs, Sonoma County Tomorrow and Sonoma Community Advocates for a Livable Environment have filed suit to contest the county’s environmental impact report for the site, raising concerns about wildfire evacuation risks, danger to wildlife corridors, and preservation of historic buildings. The county’s land use and development agency, Permit Sonoma, has responded to the lawsuit insisting that they take their responsibility to uphold their obligations under the California Environmental Quality Act seriously. The county has a sizable need for additional housing, and the closed developmental center’s 945 acre plot posed a rare opportunity to combat the housing shortage. The county has already scaled down the proposed number of units from 1,000 to 700. (See related CP&DR coverage .) CP&DR Coverage: Does Los Angeles's New Mayor Understand Development?  Newly elected and installed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass comes into office with an unenviable task: solving the country's worst homelessness crisis and providing affordable housing for potentially hundreds of thousands of residents who are rent-burdened or otherwise housing insecure. She has pledged to develop affordable housing. Unfortunately, she has also expressed her antagonism toward "luxury housing," which, in Los Angeles, means pretty much anything with a door and four walls. CP&DR 's Josh Stephens explain how Bass is given into tired NIMBY tropes and why antagonism toward any housing type is not what the city needs right now.  Quick Hits & Updates An attempt by the city of Lakeport to annex 137 acres south of Main Street and East of Highway 29 was halted by the Lake Local Area Formation Commission (LAFCo). The area in question contains a lucrative commercial corridor which is at the heart of the city’s desire for annexation.  A study commissioned by the Housing Inclusionary Program in San Francisco casts doub t on the city’s ability to meet a state mandate of building 82,000 units by 2031. In the current market, many proposed projects are not financially viable for developers, and with mandated affordability requirements they become even less so.  The Los Angeles County city of El Segundo is revamping its Downtown Specific Plan, with the city hoping to adopt an updated version by summer 2023. The new update could accommodate up to 300 new residential units, 130,000 square feet of retail/restaurant space, 200,000 square feet of new office space, and 24,000 square feet of medical offices.  A Palo Alto environmental group bought an 839 acre propert y adjacent to Mount Madonna for $10.6 million. The property had been in the Estrada family since 1848, and sold it to Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) with the agreement that the property will be managed by the Estrada’s to ensure its preservation. POST, founded in 1977, has preserved 82,000 acres between Santa Cruz, San Mateo, and Santa Clara county.  A deal to sell the 387-acre Banning Ranch for public use as a natural open space has closed escrow. Environmental activists are celebrating the $100 million sale, a process which took over 30 years and will prevent future development on the land. A campaign titled Stop the Energy Shutdown is gathering signatures to place a referendum on the 2024 California ballot that would overturn the recently-passed SB 1137, which outlaws new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of schools, homes, and hospitals. San Diego developer 1HWY1 will seek $550 million in public funding to help finance site infrastructure and amenities as part of its downtown seaport redevelopment. The $3.5 billion proposal includes hotels, an urban beach, and new marinas. The Menlo Park City Council approved Meta's (formerly Facebook) plan for a mixed-use urban village with housing, office, and retail space in Willow Village. Despite unanimous approval, some council members remain concerned that the project, in its effort to avoid neighborhood opposition, is too distant from transit centers. Santa Monica developer WS Communities (WSC) has filed its first Builder's Remedy project application for a 10-story, 75-unit apartment building with 15 affordable units. WSC has proposed most of the Builder's Remedy projects expected to come to Santa Monica. (See related CP&DR coverage .)

CP&DR Vol. 38 No. 4 April 2023

CP&DR Vol. 38 No. 1 January 2023

In a new ruling issued after a rehearing, an appellate court has stood its ground in concluding that the California Environmental Quality Act required that the state provide visual representations of the new State Capitol Annex in the environmental impact report on the project.

The amenity wars are heating up in Los Angeles. Swimming pools, quartz countertops, and in-unit washer-dryers are old news. I recently toured a soon-to-open residential development in which the refrigerators dispense not just regular ice cubes for sodas or cold brew but also tennis-ball sized spheres for the perfect old fashioned. To hear newly elected Mayor Karen Bass tell it, this is exactly the kind of development that housing-starved Los Angeles does not need. Bass, who took office in December, was recently interviewed by Liam Dillon and Ben Oreskes of the Los Angeles Times about her land-use agenda. Among her goals for the future and complaints about the status quo, she decried the proliferation of "luxury" developments. I'm not sure if she's seen those fridges yet, or the rates that the developer will be charging for the rentals, but I'm pretty sure that they'd fit the bill. "I do think the city needs everything," said Bass, meaning that the city needs a variety of housing types. She'd have been fine if she'd stopped there. But, she continued, "Well, let me let me qualify that. I’m not sure if the city needs more luxury housing. But luxury housing and market-rate housing are two different things." There’s no doubt that Los Angeles needs deed-restricted affordable housing. Bass says she's "not sure" about the rest, though. I'm sorry, but, given that housing is arguably the number-one issue in Los Angeles, I think the mayor should be sure about how much housing is needed and about who needs what sort of housing. In Los Angeles, any new market-rate housing is almost inevitably going to be "luxury" housing. Developers build "luxury" buildings because the city’s combination of high land prices, high construction costs, bureaucratic friction, and ravenous demand make properties that are "merely" market-rate untenable. Rents in Los Angeles are what they are, regardless of whether they include fancy cocktail ice. A two-bedroom dump anyplace that's not underneath a freeway goes for at least $3,500 per month. Even if developers are building "luxury" properties just for kicks, let's look at Bass's most provocative claim: that the development of luxury properties results in displacement and/or increased rents for incumbent residents. In response to Dillon's statement-question, "The construction of market-rate homes in disadvantaged areas does not cause gentrification or displacement, but instead prevents it," Bass responded with an oddly definitive diagnosis, backed up by anecdote: "That’s completely false. I’m sorry. The area that I lived in until a few weeks ago in South L.A. People who paid $150,000 for their homes. If you put a market-rate house next door, it’s going to be close to $1 million." This is pure nonsense. In the very same interview, Bass praises Los Angeles's rent controls, which govern the vast majority of its older, less expensive housing stock. In additional to limiting rent increases, rent control makes it almost impossible to evict a tenant including, and especially, for the purpose of jacking up the rent. Rick Caruso could build Buckingham Palace next door to your dingbat and it would--by law--have zero influence on the rent you pay. Caruso is, of course, the developer whom Bass defeated in November’s mayoral election. He’s famous for his high-end shopping centers like the Grove. One knock on him was that he would be too felicitous to his fellow developers, turning the city into one big construction site. Instead, we elected someone who doesn't seem to understand development at all. I happen to support the development of new housing (affordable and market-rate) in expensive areas, for many reasons. Even so, plenty of academic research contradicts Bass's claim about the impacts of new development in low-cost areas. I'm particularly convinced by USC Planning Professor Dowell Myers's idea of "vacancy chains ," in which people who trade up to nicer, more expensive homes make less nice, less expensive homes for other people. This is how real estate works in growing cities. The real "luxury" units are the city's hundreds of thousands of single-family homes. The tiniest, oldest, ugliest cottage in Los Angeles goes for nearly $1,000 per square foot. Working class Angelenos can’t dream of affording those rates, and very few early-career professionals or young couples can pay that kind of money either. The former often double up, and the latter tide themselves over with cocktails and the hope that someday they'll have enough cash for a down-payment (or for an entire purchase, since many deals these days are all-cash). Bass seems to wonder who these tenants are, admitting, "I have never understood who lives in all that luxury housing." The subtext is well taken: any big-city major should prioritize the needs of lower-income residents. But, ignoring wealthier residents, and their market power, is not a sound basis for a housing policy. The fact of the matter is, the people who can afford those rents are the people paying those rents—and there are many thousands of them in Los Angeles. If that wasn't enough, Bass throws in a bit of xenophobia: "I do know that there’s a high vacancy rate, or put it this way, there’s absentee owners. People who don’t even live in the United States who own a lot of property here." Absenteeism is a legitimate concern, especially because neighborhoods with low occupancy rates can feel dead, and it's true that many overseas developers and investors are involved in Los Angeles real estate. But, the specter of "foreign owners" is usually raised to make development seem scary. If Bass thinks this is a genuine problem, she's now in a perfect position to propose an ordinance to tax or otherwise regulate absenteeism. From a policy perspective, very little of this makes sense. "Luxury" is not a land use designation. Absent deed restrictions or unusually prescriptive development agreements, developers can fit out buildings however they want and charge whatever they want. Unless Bass is considering a city ordinance to define "luxury" and restrict it, her comments amount to pure divisiveness. They alienate many housing advocates, most developers, and many upwardly mobile residents. And they play into the hands of the city's slow-growth establishment, who have historically exploited class rivalries and ignored economic reality mainly for the purpose of inflating their own property values. Here's what might: the Regional Housing Needs Allocation. As we at CP&DR have written before, the latest incarnation of RHNA, and the mechanisms Sacramento is now using to enforce it, obviates much of the hand-wringing and obstruction that takes place at the local level. Bass’s city has to accommodate 480,000 units over the next eight years, roughly half affordable and half market-rate (amenities optional). Los Angeles's housing element has already been approved, and the city is updating its zoning accordingly. The zoning is coming, and Bass going to have to sign off on it whether or not she likes it or not. Given the magnitude of the crisis in California, I hope Bass and other municipal leaders can drop the divisive rhetoric of political campaigning and embrace collaborative rhetoric that governance requires. The promotion of equitable development is one of the most difficult tasks a mayor can take on. Success requires thoughtfulness, openness, an appreciation for nuance, and a commitment to diversity. Those aren’t luxuries. They are necessities for everyone who lives in California and everyone who wants to live in California.

Several oil companies have filed suit against the City of Los Angeles, claiming the city’s recent ban on oil and gas drilling violates the California Environmental Quality Act.