California’s feud with Surf City over its housing laws revolves around the city’s refusal to adopt a plan for the construction of more accessory dwelling units and multifamily housing.
SAM RIBAKOFF / February 23, 2024
SAN DIEGO (CN) — The city of Huntington Beach argued in a San Diego courtroom on Friday that California is trying to make a “political statement” with their request to kickstart the approval of building affordable housing in line with state laws as temporary relief in their lawsuit against the city.
California’s feud with Orange County’s famous coastal town over its housing laws has been bitter and multifaceted.
In November 2023, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit the city filed against the state in a bid to wriggle free of its legal obligation to build 13,000 additional housing units in compliance with the state’s efforts to build more affordable housing.
The state’s suit against the city revolves around Surf City’s refusal to adopt a state law requiring municipalities to create housing elements — essentially an outline for how to allow for the construction of a certain amount of housing units, especially lower income units, in their general plans — and the city council’s refusal to allow both accessory dwelling units, which are additional homes built on a single family home lot, and the subdividing of residential lots into multifamily housing projects, like duplexes and triplexes.
The state says the law is meant to boost the state’s housing supply and provide more affordable housing options for Californians while rent and real estate prices in the Golden State perpetually increase.
There isn’t any evidence the city of Huntington Beach is denying developers from building more housing, and if there was, the developers themselves would be suing them, said Nadin Said, an attorney for the city, during a hearing in the San Diego Superior Court’s Central Courthouse on Friday.
California asks for temporary relief from the court that would include mandating Huntington Beach streamline all affordable housing developments, along with a preliminary injunction that would enjoin the city from disapproving or reducing the density of proposed housing developments. The Golden State also seeks another order suspending the city’s authority to approve development that don’t satisfy minimum density requirements.
The requests are merely rushed “political statements against the city of Huntington Beach,” Said claimed, saying they were totally unrelated to the state’s original complaint.
“I’m not sure what the point of this is,” Said said. “They just throw things here and there.”
Deputy Attorney General Matthew T. Struhar argued that the state isn’t arguing that the city isn’t approving the construction of housing, it’s that they don’t have a set policy to accommodate the construction of enough housing.
The city’s position is that it can opt out of having to comply with state law, Struhar said, and because of that, the city is standing in the way of the entire region’s need for more housing.
“To not grant temporary relief is to reward the city for violating the law,” Struhar said.
Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal said she would take the matter under submission.