A key tactic: Sue the suburbs Citing a state law that limits cities’ power to reject developments, lawsuits sometime result in new housing projects, sometimes just a big payout

A key tactic: Sue the suburbs Citing a state law that limits cities’ power to reject developments, lawsuits sometime result in new housing projects, sometimes just a big payout

The campaign to tackle the Bay Area’s housing crisis by forcing residential development in reluctant communities started with a simple idea: Sue the suburbs.

About the series The Bay Area is suffering from an acute lack of housing, driving up prices and forcing some people to leave the region altogether. The Chronicle is looking at the roots of the shortage, how our communities are dealing with it, and what solutions might be possible.

Pro-housing activist Sonja Trauss, a pioneer in the YIMBY movement, was reading about a controversial 315-unit affordable apartment project in Lafayette in 2015 when she learned about a 1982 state law she’d never heard of before: the Housing Accountability Act.

The law said municipalities must approve a housing development as long as it is consistent with local zoning rules and general plan objectives, would not create a public health hazard or take water from neighboring farms, and would meet state environmental standards.

“Once I started reading about it, I realized it was a very powerful law, and nobody was enforcing it and it could help make a difference around the state,” said Trauss, a candidate for San Francisco District Six supervisor in Tuesday’s election.

The discovery of the largely ignored law gave the growing YIMBY — Yes In My Back Yard — movement a tool for taking its pro-housing fight into exclusive bedroom communities that routinely reject code-compliant housing proposals.

Some communities are more welcoming to new residential development, but the state as a whole has a dismal record. California is 49th out of the 50 states in per capita housing inventory, according to a new report by the McKinsey Global Institute. Just 2.4 percent of California communities meet the state’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment, which quantifies the need for housing within each jurisdiction.

The needs assessment is mandated by state housing law as part of the periodic process of updating local housing elements of the general plan. The assessment quantifies the need for housing within each jurisdiction during specified planning periods.

The California Renters Legal Advocacy Fund, or CaRLA — a group Trauss and her YIMBY allies formed in 2015 — is waging the sue-the-suburbs campaign. CaRLA has used the Housing Accountability Act to sue on behalf of developers in Sausalito, Berkeley, San Mateo, Sonoma, Dublin and Lafayette.

•In Sausalito, the town dropped its opposition to a two-unit building and paid CaRLA’s legal fees.

• In Berkeley, the city dropped opposition to a three-unit building, allowing it to go forward. The city paid CaRLA $45,000 in attorney’s fees.

• In San Mateo, CaRLA sued over a 10-unit building, in Dublin a 220-unit building, in Sonoma a three-home development. All those cases are pending.

•In Lafayette, CaRLA sued when a 315-unit, moderate-income apartment complex facing local opposition was replaced with a plan for 44 homes on 22 acres. The town settled, but the original project has since been revived.

In other places, like Gilroy, Clayton and San Luis Obispo, the simple threat of a suit was enough to prompt those cities to allow proposed housing developments to go forward.

While the lawsuits will eventually result in some increase in the Bay Area’s housing stock — none of the projects in question have opened yet — the bigger impact so far has been to make municipal officials aware that violations of the Housing Accountability Act could result in expensive litigation.

“There are YIMBYs all over the place, paying attention and seeing violations of the law. We get phone calls pretty regularly — ‘Hey, we’ve got this embattled project. Can you help?’” said Ryan Patterson, an attorney who represents CaRLA in these cases.

The YIMBYs delight in forcing the state’s most exclusive communities — the richer the better — to build housing.

One such case was in Sausalito. Over three years David Holub had tried to get permission to add a second home on his “through lot” — it runs street to street — at 77 Crescent Ave.

Holub sat through 14 public hearings over nearly four years trying to win approvals for the project. The City Council ultimately rejected his plan in September 2017 on the grounds that the the project was “out of scale with the village-like quality of Sausalito.”

“I was not asking for a variance ... I was not asking for any exceptions to any rules whatsoever,” Holub said.

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Eventually he contacted CaRLA, which has its offices in San Francisco.

“They brought me in out of the wilderness,” Holub said. “It was a clear example of precisely the type of behavior they are trying to correct — communities and neighbors acting selfishly with a purely subjective criteria.”

In April, the lawsuit CaRLA filed against Sausalito was dismissed as part of a settlement agreement under which the city approved Holub’s project.

Victoria Fierce, CaRLA executive director, said after the settlement, “Today, the city of Sausalito learned a valuable lesson. No suburb is safe from the watchful eye of CaRLA.”

While the YIMBYs were successful on a small scale in Sausalito, the outcome of their suit in Lafayette was less definitive.

A developer had proposed a 315-unit, moderate-income apartment complex on 22 acres at Deer Hill and Pleasant Hill roads. The project, which was consistent with zoning, was en route to being snuffed out by neighborhood opposition, so the city and developer scrapped the apartments in favor of 44 single-family homes.

CaRLA sued, arguing that city support of the single-family homes equaled a rejection of the apartment complex and was therefore a violation of the Housing Accountability Act. Lafayette agreed to settle before the suit got to court — but it didn’t agree to reinstate the apartment plan.

Lafayette Mayor Don Tatzin said he didn’t have a problem with the YIMBY’s position but that he wished they hadn’t sued the city.

“What they accused us of was turning down the apartment project,” he said. “We didn’t take a vote to deny the apartment project. We and the developer came to an agreement to process a different project. It was a waste of their resources and our resources to sue us.”

He said that the lawsuit was without legal merit: “We paid them to go away.”

In June, Lafayette voters killed the single-family home project. The original 315-unit complex has been resurrected, although it still faces opposition from the City Council.

So while the YIMBYs didn’t get the project they favored, they did get money. The settlement amount wasn’t disclosed, but public records show CaRLA had revenue of $295,000 in that time frame.

“The (settlement) created a war chest for the sue-the-suburbs campaign going forward,” Patterson, the CaRLA lawyer, said.

The YIMBYs and CaRLA registered a lobbyist in Sacramento and started supporting pro-housing bills in the Legislature. They have worked with state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, to pass legislation strengthening the Housing Accountability Act — the 2017 bill increased penalties for violations, closed loopholes and put the burden of proof on the local communities to prove that the law didn’t apply.

But while the initiative to force housing on suburban communities has found support among lawmakers in Sacramento, it has come with a price: a strong backlash across the state.

Earlier this year, a group of elected officials and other concerned citizens formed a new group called Livable California, with a mission to “protect California cities” and “oppose state overreach and big money influence.” The group started after a February town hall meeting at the Taraval Police Station in San Francisco and has several hundred members, including candidates for local office in Pleasanton, Cupertino, Orinda and San Luis Obispo.

Livable California co-founder Susan Kirsch of Mill Valley said the group has gained momentum among people who believe that the top-down push for housing development — and big money flowing into the YIMBY movement — is “eroding representative democracy and local decision-making.”

“The consensus was that we are getting clobbered,” said Kirsch. “There has been an amassing of power into the hands of state and regional government. We are not NIMBYs or anti-housing; for us the issue goes back to democracy and local control.”

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen