A new court ruling ‘blows up’ California housing law. Our incoming Senate leader isn’t helping
By Emily Hoeven, Opinion Columnist
Oct 31, 2025
California continues to stay in the news for its swath of lawsuits against President Donald Trump. Attorney General Rob Bonta teed up his 45th suit against the administration this week — this time over SNAP benefits.
Yet one of the juiciest lawsuits of the year involving California has nothing to do with the president — it was filed against the state on Oct. 24. And it has mostly flown under the radar.
Here’s what’s going on:
Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 158 into law. It aimed to clean up recent sweeping reforms that exempted most urban infill development projects from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
So far, so good.
But a strange provision buried in SB158’s dense, complex text did the opposite: It applied CEQA review to projects located in cities with more than 85,000 and fewer than 95,000 people and in counties of more than 440,000 but fewer than 455,000 people — as long as a piece of the parcel was located on wetland and a regulatory floodway and was adjacent to a California historical landmark.
As far as anyone can tell, only one project in the entire state meets those specific criteria: a proposed eight-story apartment building with 270 units, including 54 reserved for low-income residents, near the historic mission in Santa Barbara, which happens to be represented by California’s incoming state Senate leader, Monique Limón, a Santa Barbara Democrat.
Limón eventually acknowledged that she was responsible for the provision, raising serious concerns that she was using her political clout to strong-arm special treatment for her wealthy district through the Legislature.
Unsurprisingly, the project developer is now suing.
The Mission LLC filed a lawsuit in federal court against California and the city of Santa Barbara, arguing that SB158 violates the equal protection clause of the California and U.S. constitutions by targeting a single project. The suit also argues that it flouts nondiscrimination laws, illegally seeks retroactive application and violates a ban on “special legislation” that grants or removes rights to a single person or piece of land.