California is suing Huntington Beach, accusing the city of knowingly violating state housing laws.
In a clear warning to other cities, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, along with other state officials, lambasted Huntington Beach’s recent housing decisions.
California is suing Huntington Beach, they said Thursday, over not processing applications for property owners to build accessory dwelling units, ADUs, commonly called granny flats. And officials warned more action could occur should the City Council continue with its plan to oppose the builder’s remedy process.
“Huntington Beach has decided to slam the door in homeowners’ faces,” Bonta said. “No one gets to pick and choose the laws they want to follow.”
“The laws are clear, as is Huntington Beach’s willful, intentional refusal to follow them. That’s why we’re in court,” Bonta said.
Update: Huntington Beach announces own lawsuit against the state over housing mandates
Related: New laws at issue in latest round of Surf City vs. California
Starting in 2017, state laws lifted barriers to building secondary units on a single lot. Housing advocates and state officials argue ADUs will help meet housing goals, offering living space for multiple generations of families or much-needed rentals by making use of larger lots that were traditional in many communities.
But Huntington Beach officials said Thursday the city will accept new ADU applications and is processing 100 or so already in the pipeline.
The process for ADUs will be streamlined and reviewed by the council on March 21, along with other housing issues, but Huntington Beach is at present “following the state housing laws despite the fact that we believe the state has overreached,” said City Attorney Michael Gates. “But in the meantime, we’re following the state housing laws.”
As housing goals were handed out to cities throughout California for the number of homes — including mandates at various levels of affordability — they have to plan for over the next decade, the pushback was quick and loud. But most also got to work identifying in their required local planning where developers could build what the state figured is needed to meet housing needs.
As of March 9, there were 242 California cities, including 103 in Southern California, without a state-approved housing plan. That opens them up to the builder’s remedy process, where developers can propose housing projects with cities having less say in what’s planned.
State officials said Thursday they sent Huntington Beach councilmembers letters warning of the ramifications of their housing decisions prior to the lawsuit. The city has argued that as a charter city, Huntington Beach has greater autonomy and isn’t subject to state housing laws.
“At the end of the day, the state’s vision as it relates to housing cannot be realized anywhere else except locally,” Newsom said.
Huntington Beach, Newsom said, is not serving its community well with these housing policies and will “waste time, energy and taxpayer dollars.”
Earlier in the week, Councilmember Pat Burns called for resistance to state housing mandates, arguing that the relaxed state provisions on ADU constructions can harm the quality of life in single-family home neighborhoods.
“Sacramento thinks they can tell us how to zone our properties,” Burns said. “And we need to resist it in any way we can.”
Mayor Tony Strickland called the state’s lawsuit filed on Thursday “a bunch of bluster.” Officials said the city is “mid-stride” in its housing planning and more decisions will be made on March 21, so at this stage, they say the state’s allegations are a “non-issue.”
Strickland called the state’s press conference “nothing but grandstanding.”
“I feel like I don’t need to hear a lecture from Gov. Newsom,” Strickland said. “As mayor of San Francisco, he left the city in shambles. He should focus on his job as governor.”
Huntington Beach filed its own lawsuit against California Thursday afternoon in federal court, challenging the state-mandated goal of planning for the construction of 13,368 new homes by 2030.
Newsom’s “goal is to urbanize quiet, private property-owning communities,” Strickland said. “This lawsuit filed by our city attorney today is the first major step in taking the governor and the state to task over their faulty narratives about housing and their unconstitutional legislative and administrative means of stripping charter cities of their ability to make their own decisions.”
Regional Housing Needs Allocation, or RHNA, laws, Strickland said, would cause Huntington Beach to double in size.
“If Huntington Beach’s City Council majority wants to change the law, they are welcome to reach out to their state legislators, but to date my office and I have not heard from them on this issue, making clear that this is political theater of the worst kind, and a huge waste of Huntington Beach taxpayer dollars to boot,” Sen. Dave Min, a Democrat who represents Huntington Beach, said in a statement.
Assemblymember Diane Dixon, a Republican, said she had not read the lawsuit as of Thursday morning, but said she is “familiar with this issue and am sympathetic to the cities in my district that are wrestling with similar mandates.”
California has sued Huntington Beach over housing plans before. A 2019 lawsuit ended with Huntington Beach settling out of court, a point state officials harped on when announcing the new legal battle.
“They tested us in 2019,” Newsom said, “they’re testing us again.”
Huntington Beach not alone
While Huntington Beach is taking one of the more extreme stances against state housing policies, municipalities across the state are struggling with huge increases in state homebuilding mandates and stricter planning requirements.
Redondo Beach hasn’t outright banned builder’s remedy projects but has been slow to update its housing plans to accommodate its allocation, with Mayor Bill Brand a vocal opponent to the state’s housing mandates. Redondo Beach has two prominent builder’s remedy projects in the works, but both are on track for denials by the City Council, developer Leo Pustilnikov said.
Prior to Senate Bill 9’s enactment, about 240 cities and the League of California Cities presented Newsom with a letter urging him to veto the bill. Shortly after it became law, four charter cities — Redondo Beach, Torrance, Carson and Whittier — signed on to a lawsuit against the state, asking the LA Superior Court to find the law in violation of the California Constitution and ban its enforcement. (Court records show a hearing is scheduled in late April.)
Those four cities said they were in support of building more housing within their bounds — but categorized Senate Bill 9, the now state law that allows duplexes and lot splits in single-family neighborhoods, as a “one size fits all” approach that doesn’t adequately ensure the development of affordable places to live. Huntington Beach officials say they, too, support reasonable, locally controlled housing development.
“It is flawed legislation that strips our city of local control and residents of their ability to provide input,” Torrance Mayor George Chen said Thursday. “What we need instead is for the state to work with us in providing the needed tools and resources to allow cities to streamline local housing approvals in a responsible manner and fund affordable housing.”
In Manhattan Beach, where the City Council earlier this year reluctantly approved the development of an apartment complex that fell under the builders’ remedy, Mayor Steve Napolitano said he isn’t surprised by the lawsuit — as plenty of other cities are with Huntington Beach in spirit on maintaining local control.
And while the state’s intentions with these housing laws are good, Napolitano added, legislators don’t consider what it takes for cities to abide by them. Cities don’t need total control, he said, but they do want balance.
“Huntington is doing what other cities have been thinking, but didn’t want to risk themselves,” Napolitano said. “We’ve all been lobbying on local control for years, but that’s now falling on deaf ears; the courts are the only thing left for cities as far as local control goes.”
Staff Writers Jeff Collins, Tyler Shaun Evains, Kristy Hutchings, Lisa Jacobs and Erika I. Ritchie contributed to this report.
