Category Archives: CEQA

CEQA, Housing, Politics

The Yimbys think they rule—but there are some serious signs to the contrary

By Zelda Bronstein : 48hills – excerpt

The case against the case against “The Case Against Yimbyism.”

Are the wheels starting to come off the Yimby bandwagon?

The question may seem absurd. Last December, Yimbys took over the Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, which for the first time endorsed CEQA-hating Scott Wiener. In late February, Yimbys closed out their 2024 annual conference, an event that attracted 600 “red” and “blue” attendees and garnered coverage hailing the movement’s growing bipartisan support.

The Biden administration’s 2024 Economic Report of the President, released on March 24, claims that “zoning reform” will increase the supply of affordable housing and cites as a model, among other examples, California’s RHNA process. Meanwhile, the Yimby mystique continues to enthrall the California Legislature, as indicated by the Terner Center’s survey of current “pro-housing” bills, whose targets include development impact fees and environmental protections for the California coast…

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (Dem) vetoes a major Yimby bill…According to Hobbs’ office, the Department of Defense and the Professional Fire Fighters Association of Arizona asked her to veto the bill. “These groups,” wrote Barchenger, “cited concerns about development in noisy or ‘accident potential zones’ near Arizona’s military installations, and difficulty in responding to emergencies if density is increased, respectively.”…

The New Republic publishes an attack on Yimbyism… Moreover, “[Yimbys] are…explicit that deregulation won’t help those at the bottom of the market.”…

“Social” housing with profitability…Contra Friedrich, Resnikoff maintains that “Yimbys support a mix of [market and non-market policies.” For example, California Yimby “has sponsored social housing legislation,” specifically Alex Lee’s failed 2022 bill AB 2053…

But the real thrust of AB 2053, as Calvin Welch has explained, was to create a state agency, the California Housing Authority, “able to overrule or ignore local housing policy and issue debt for new housing construction.” As stated in the bill, the agency’s “core mission” was “to produce and acquire social housing developments for the purpose of eliminating the gap between housing production and regional housing needs assessment targets and to preserve affordable housing.”…(more)

This is only a taste of what the article covers. Please read the entire article and spread the message far and wide that the grass is not greener in San Francisco and we are not beating to a WIMBY drum. The results of gentrification and densification have lead San Francisco into debt, not glory. Our future lies in a strong pivot back to our strong historic neighborhood roots. We must save what is left of the heart and soul of San Francisco. As President Peskin said, “We do not have to destroy San Francisco to save it.” Fortunately many of our mayoral candidates agree with that sentiment.

CEQA, Housing, Planning

Wiener and Alvarez attack the Pacific Coastline

Petition to stop SB 951: There is a bill in the State Senate, SB 951, authorized by Scott Wiener, sponsored by Mayor Breed, to streamline housing development near Ocean Beach by slicing off a piece of San Francisco from the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission (CCC). Critics say that, at best, it pushes a solution looking for a problem and, at worst, it benefits developers and the real estate sector, and it  sets a bad precedent that could undermine future environmental protections that have been in place for about 50 years. Petition to stop SB 951:  Share the link!
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/no-on-sb-951-keep-california-coastline-open-and-accessible-2

THE SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF SUPERVISORS AND THE CALIFORNIA COASTAL COMMISSION TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTIONS TO STOP THIS ATTACK!

Please let everyone know about this.

Senator Scott Wiener is also going after the California Coastal Commission’s  jurisdiction over what is left of a small strip of San Francisco’s Pacific coastline with another gem, SB 951.  Mayor Breed is a sponsor of this bill.  The Coastal Commission and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took immediate action to stop the bill that many feel threatens the entire Pacific Coast with unlimited development by Passing Peskin’s Resolution # 240065 opposing SB 951 – Opposing California State Senate Bill No. 951 (Wiener) Unless Amended and Expressing Support for the California Coastal Act and Recognizing the Authority of the California Coastal Commission.

Please support the opposition to this bill. SB951 is scheduled for a hearing on April 9 in the Senate Natural Resources  and Water Committee.  Letters need to be submitted to the committee by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 28.

SIGN THE PETITION TO STOP SB 951 AND ALL BILLS THAT PROTECT OUR CALIFORNIA COASTLINE! CON SIDER WHICH MAYORAL CANDIDATE WILL SUPPORT THIS RESOLUITON!

Assemblymember Alvarez of San Diego has extended the threat of development to the entire Coast of California with AB 2560. Senator Wiener, SPUR and the Bay Area Council are sponsors of this bill. 

AND: We now have SB 1037 – the “Make the NIMBYS pay Act!” 
and Planning and Zoning: housing element: enforcement.
Another Scott Wiener Bill as if we need another reason to boot him out of office. As if we needed another one! Calmatters explains it here:
https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240sb1037?slug=CA_202320240SB1037

Another site that is fighting the anti-car bills: https://ww2.motorists.org/ca/

Lawmakers also took on affordable housing. CalMatters housing reporter Ben Christopher writes that Attorney General Rob Bonta and San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener, both Democrats, rolled out a new bill Wednesday that would put the financial squeeze on cities found by a court to have violated state housing law.

Supporters might call it the “Make NIMBYs Pay” Act.

Sponsored by Bonta’s office and introduced by Wiener, the bill would require courts to slap scofflaw cities with a minimum fine of $10,000 per month. The cities would begin racking up legal debt starting on the day they stop following the law.

Currently courts can only start tacking on monetary penalties after giving cities at least 60 days to come into compliance. Wiener, on social media: “Cities thus have no incentive to avoid a lawsuit by following the law. Worst case, they get sued, lose & comply. SB 1037 creates actual incentives to comply with the law.”

All About Senator Weiner: https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/legislators/scott-wiener-100936

 

CEQA, Housing, Planning, Politics

SENATOR WIENER ATTACKS SF

For some reason, State Senator Scott Wiener has chosen to go after his constituents in a way that is somewhat astonishing. Does he believe that we are masochists and appreciate being punished or is he so sure that he can win by buying the loyalty of deep pockets who can convince the voters that he is on their side?

In 2023  Senator Wiener started to write legislation targeted directly at  San Francisco: In a last-minute amendment to SB 423 Scott injected annual reviews of San Francisco’s progress on housing—making it the only jurisdiction in the state receiving elevated scrutiny. All others have four year reviews.  See article in SF Standard about SB 423. 

In 2024 Scott is continuing to attack San Francisco:   He introduced SB1227 to exempt downtown projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, for a decade. The 1970 landmark law requires studies of a project’s expected impact on air, water, noise and other areas.  Wiener’s excuse is that the city has used CEQA to slow down or kill infill development near public transit  and that no environment  damage can be done to a concrete jungle.  See article in SF Standard about SB 1227

page link

CEQA, Housing

‘Terrified’: Latest billionaire acquisition in Carmel sets off alarm bells

By Andrew Pridgen : sfgate – excerpt

You haven’t heard about AB 2560 yet!!! It will allow density bonus projects (think Sloat) in our coastal zones!!! For the entire state.  Carmel’s coastal zone goes 1 mile in from the beach. Holy holy holy. Attached is the SB 951 letter sent to all local electeds on the coast. Next is my draft of the next one that includes AB2560. WAKE UP!! I’ll have to reach out to Carmel directly. I met some of them at the League meeting last year and they 100% were supporting ONV.

Carmel-by-the-Sea is being quickly bought up by Monaco billionaire who reportedly wants to ‘crush everyone’

On the surface, the La Rambla building in Carmel checks the box of nearly every ideal associated with the tiny village by the sea: It’s a two-story Spanish-style stucco building built in 1929, with space for retail on the ground floor and a pair of apartments on the second level, both featuring Juliet balconies facing the street.

Located on the corner of Lincoln Street and Ocean Avenue in the heart of the village’s main commercial corridor, the building’s defining feature is a courtyard, a little hideaway from the street that is decorated with a variety of tiles and hand-carved stone urns.

The building’s seemingly innocuous January sale for $7.5 million — the property was originally listed by local real estate agent Tim Allen for $9 million in 2020 — has stirred some into action here. Why? Because it was yet another cherished spot scooped up by Patrice Pastor, the Monaco billionaire who has quietly been accumulating more than a dozen such favored properties in Carmel, including the L’Auberge Carmel Hotel, the Brown-Spaulding Building and the Eastwood Building, over the past nine years…(more)

This looks like another addition to the coastline under threat by the Wiener anti-SF bill SB 951. You can line them up down the California coast and see the Miami towers coming unless some actions to stop it are taken soon. Wonder how much the owners donated to Scott’s lobbying efforts support SB 951, through a PR firm no doubt.

CEQA, Politics, Transportation

State Attorney General’s Office Joins the Fight Against the Pro-Parking Group ‘Citizens for a Better Eureka’

We will be targeting all coastal towns in CA with Wiener’s SB951 crazy ass law. So yes we will try to send to these folks too!

On 02/02/2024 11:31 AM PST zrants <zrants@gmail.com> wrote:

By Ray Burns : lostcoastoutpost – excerpt
The State of California wants in on the City of Eureka’s fight against the Security National-funded Citizens for a Better Eureka.

The Office of Attorney General Rob Bonta today submitted a request to file amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs in support of the City of Eureka and the Eureka City Council, and it says the court should reject the Citizens for a Better Eureka’s efforts to thwart affordable housing developments downtown.

Last month, Citizens for a Better Eureka filed a series of motions seeking preliminary injunctions that would immediately block the city and its partners, including Linc Housing and the Wiyot Tribe’s Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust, from breaking ground on affordable housing and transportation projects slated for development on municipal parking lots downtown.

The motions – five, in all – allege violations of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), arguing that the city failed to conduct legally required environmental review not only for the elimination of public parking spaces but also for the various planned redevelopment projects, which the group says will impact traffic and air quality…(more)

RELATED:

Eureka Planning Commission Chair Jeff Ragan Abruptly Resigns, Citing ‘Grave Concerns’ Over City’s Approval of Housing Projects on Three City-Owned Parking Lots

We keep warning the Democrats that they are risking losing support in communities that are barely on their side to begin with and these efforts to reign them is is stupid and irresponsible. They stand the possibly of losing seats in the House if they continue to attack the less urban communities. Where are the jobs and where is the need for housing in Eureka? Must contact them regarding ourneighborhoodvoices.com and other state organizations who are fighting their battles with them.

CEQA, Politics

Is this the end of CEQA as a tool to challenge housing projects that damage communities?

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

A dramatic change in the use of a longtime neighborhood and community planning process is about to happen; can the supes do anything about it?

Nothing is sacred to Senator Wiener.
If re-elected he will continue the land grab.

When the Board of Supes considers an appeal of a housing development on Sacramento Street Feb. 6, the main issue at hand whether turning a former medical library into housing will damage an historic resource.

But what’s really at issue here is a much bigger question.

For decades, San Francisco environmental and community activists have used the California Environmental Quality Act to challenge development that was damaging to the community. Some of the most important cases in city development history, including one that set new law around the requirement for the analysis of cumulative impacts of multiple projects, involved CEQA…

The statute the city is citing is Government Code Section 15183, which is part of CEQA. It states: “ CEQA mandates that projects which are consistent with the development density established by existing zoning, community plan, or general plan policies for which an EIR was certified shall not require additional environmental review, except as might be necessary to examine whether there are project-specific significant effects which are peculiar to the project or its site. This streamlines the review of such projects and reduces the need to prepare repetitive environmental studies.’”…

So this could mean the end of CEQA review for potentially hundreds of projects.

As I said in my first story on this, that’s a Yimby dream—but it’s also a huge policy change.

It gets worse: If the supes go along with this appeal, on a project that predates the Housing Element EIR, the developer can just come back and say: State law has changed. I can make this even worse.

San Franciscans need to be ready for what Sen. Wiener and his allies have wrought: destruction of historic resources, large-scale demolitions of existing housing, and a profound limitation on what the community can do on a local level to fight back.

All in the name of more market-rate housing, that won’t do anything at all to solve the current crisis, which is entirely a crisis of affordable housing…(more)

Please read the rest of the article, comment where you can, and send your concerns to your supervisors and whoever else you feel should take actions on this appeal.

CEQA, Housing, Planning, Politics

Letter to the editor: Yes, a taxpayer can sue over the state’s housing laws

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Retired real estate lawyer weighs in on state law.

I love letters to the editor. Here’s one from someone who actually knows the answer to a question I raised:

In “Peskin, Chan want to know if SF can sue the state over impossible housing rules,” Tim Redmond asks, “Could a San Francisco citizen, or organization [as distinguished from San Francisco itself], sue? ‘That,’ said Peskin, ‘is a very good question.’”

The answer is that any citizen who has paid taxes to the state can sue the state (or an agency thereof) to restrain illegal, injurious, or wasteful expenditures under section 526a of the Code of Civil Procedure. Any such lawsuit needs to be brought in state court because federal courts have strict standing requirements…

The portion of SB 423 singling out San Francisco is illegal because it violates the California Constitution, Article IV, Section 16(b): “A local or special statute is invalid in any case if a general statute can be made applicable.” A taxpayer action could seek a declaration that this portion of SB 423 is an invalid special statute. Notably, there isn’t even language in the bill, as there is in other special statutes, purporting to justify it as addressing a problem unique to San Francisco.

A taxpayer action could also seek a broader declaration that the state housing laws do not take precedence over San Francisco zoning laws, because as a charter city, San Francisco has a right to home rule protected by the California Constitution. This power includes zoning. A conflicting state law, even on a matter of statewide concern, only prevails over home rule if the law is reasonably related to resolution of a matter of statewide concern and narrowly tailored to avoid unnecessary interference in local governance.

The state housing laws fail this test for numerous reasons. Studies by the Terner Center show the laws have failed to achieve their goals and scholars have described them as “ad hoc and not model based.”

Nick Waranoff

Nick Waranoff is a retired real estate lawyer.

CEQA, Housing, Politics

The year in housing policy: State forced SF into a no-win situation (and Breed went along)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Photo shot from the year that the voters stopped SB50 from going through. Since then Wiener and company have gotten better at ignoring the will of the public. There might be enough pissed off voters to take him out this year. We finally have some opponents running with other ideas of how to do his job so voters have a chance to take him out and show the other Sacramento legislators that there are other ways to govern that do not involve forcing unwanted changes on the public.

The supes did what they had to do, although a lot of them didn’t like it—but it’s not going to matter anyway.

It was a crazy year for housing in San Francisco, with the state forcing to city to adopt new rules for “constraint reduction” to comply with a new construction mandate that nobody, even housing developers, thinks is remotely possible.

The Regional Housing Needs Assessment calls for 82,000 new housing units in San Francisco, 46,000 of them affordable. (I love that terminology; it means the state wants to see 36,000 new units in the city that nobody but the very rich can afford.)

The city has six more years to reach that goal…

So now Sen. Scott Wiener, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the folks at the state Department of Housing and Community Development are going to have to deal with a basic problem:

They are asking cities like San Francisco to approve housing that doesn’t meet community needs and that developers don’t want to build…

What’s the state going to do? Penalize San Francisco for something completely out of the city’s control?

Or admit that this whole RHNA gambit was a fraud?.…(more)

RELATED:

Letter to the editor: Yes, a taxpayer can sue over the state’s housing laws by Nick Waranoff, retired real estate lawyer

CEQA, Housing, Politics

Mission ‘group housing’ moves forward, likely to cut some affordable homes

By ANNIKA HOM : missionlocal – excerpt

It could be one of the first projects to utilize a
dial-back of inclusionary units

The long game may just be starting to pan out for the developer brothers Chris and Brian Elsey.

After four years, a 149-unit group housing project at 401 South Van Ness Ave. near 15th Street moved one step closer to development on Thursday, when the Planning Commission unanimously approved a special permit the project needed.

The four-year process, however, also means the project can incidentally abandon its previous 25 percent affordability requirement and slash it to just over 15 percent, thanks to city legislation that took effect approximately two weeks ago…(more)

People are looking for proof that the state developer bills are decreasing affordable housing in the state and this is one of the first projects to take advantage of those bills. This is also proof that there is no incentive to build on these lots since the longer they wait, the better the deal gets for the owners. They started with a 20% affordable, now they are down to ten. If they wait another year, the incentives to build any will diminish along with the fees to pay for the infrastructure. Those are shifting from developers to the taxpayers. Say goodbye to your city or wait to be screwed by the state.

CEQA, Politics

Once it was hailed as a drought fix — but now California’s moving to restrict synthetic turf over health concerns

By Shreya  Agrawal  : Calmatters – excerpt (includes audio track)

IN SUMMARY: California cities can ban synthetic turf under a law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed. He rejected a bill to ban PFAS in fake lawns.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week passed on a chance to limit the use of the so-called “forever chemicals” in legions of plastic products when he vetoed a bill that would have banned them in synthetic lawns.

His veto of an environmental bill that overwhelmingly passed the Legislature underscores California’s convoluted guidance on the plastic turf that some homeowners, schools and businesses use in place of grass in a state accustomed to drought.

Less than a decade ago then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law prohibiting cities and counties from banning synthetic grass. At the time, the state was in the middle of a crippling drought and fake lawns were thought to be helpful in saving water…(more)