By Emily Hoeven :sfchronicle – excerpt

Sausalito, desperate to avoid the “builder’s remedy,” proposed constructing housing underwater. Its housing element is the subject of a YIMBY lawsuit…(more)

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YIMBY Law Set to Sue Sausalito Over Allegedly Out-of-Compliance Housing Element
By Joe Kukura : sfist – excerpt

The YIMBY crowd is unleashing their lawsuits on cities whose Housing Elements are not yet approved by the state, and in the case of an impending Marin County lawsuit, claiming that some proposed housing sites are literally “in the water.”

Here in San Francisco, the year-plus drama over passing the state-mandated Housing Element — a long-range planning document related to housing — was finally resolved in late January with a successfully approved plan that the state OK’ed at the deadline’s 11th hour. That state required that SF submit a plan to build 82,000 new housing units by the year 2031, and had we not gotten the plan approved in time, we’d have been subject to potentially losing billions in state funding, a range of other legal and financial consequences, plus the much-discussed “builder’s remedy” that would have allowed developers to just build whatever they pleased without regard for zoning or city approvals…

this lawsuit story seems to be fed to the Chronicle as an exclusive, with knowledge its claims would generate supportive, uncritical coverage for the plaintiffs. The article’s author has been retweeting YIMBY tweets all day since the piece was published.

There may be some credible claims in this still-unfiled lawsuit. It quotes one resident as saying their property was included as a potential development site “without any contact with me, and without any notice period or hearing.” But the claim that some sites are “mostly underwater” deserves a little scrutiny.…(more)

This sounds like a joke, and it may be one. How can a city built on a steep hill with little undeveloped buildable land expect to build a lot of anything without tearing out and replacing a lot of what is alraedy built? Given the famous houseboat community, buildng underwater is not too far-fetched. Perhaps one solution is to dredge the bay enough to bring in a large decommissioned ship to fullfill the housing goals.