City activists' brazen new battle cry: Sue the suburbs!

Photo: Rendering Of The Homes At Deer Hill, Via O'Brien Homes/San Francisco Magazine Photo: Rendering Of The Homes At Deer Hill, Via O'Brien Homes/San Francisco Magazine Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close City activists' brazen new battle cry: Sue the suburbs! 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

It's an urbanist's dream come true: The ability to sue a bedroom community for not building its fair share of housing. And a San Francisco renters group is threatening to make it happen.

In an effort that could turn the Bay Area's housing wars on their head, the pro-development San Francisco Bay Area Renters' Federation (SFBARF) is launching an effort called Sue the Suburbs, setting its sights on the East Bay city of Lafayette, where a newly trimmed down residential community is shaping up to be a novel kind of battleground.

Between 2007 and 2014, the nine Bay Area counties issued permits for only about half the number of housing units needed to keep pace with population growth, according to an assessment by the Association of Bay Area Governments. This has created "a classic tragedy of the commons or collective action problem," says Gabriel Metcalf, director of the urban planning think tank SPUR. "Every neighborhood has an incentive to say no to higher-density development because some of the impacts are felt locally. But when you aggregate that at the level of the whole Bay Area, the net effect of each neighborhood saying no is a profound crisis of affordability."

But now the housing activists at the (unfortunately acronymed) SFBARF are attempting to use the court system to reverse that dynamic. The first case could center on the Homes at Deer Hill, a development that won approval from Lafayette's city council last month. The project will bring 44 single-family homes, along with sports fields and a playground, to a grassy slope on Deer Hill Road, just north of Highway 24.

When it's built, the development will house far fewer people than the 315-unit moderate-income apartment complex that developer O'Brien Homes initially proposed for the site back in 2011, called the Terraces of Lafayette.

With Deer Hill home prices ballparked at around $1.2 million, future residents will also be wealthier than the Terraces' inhabitants, who would have paid around $2,100 per month in rent, according to the Contra Costa Times.

Read the full story at San Francisco magazine.