An appellate court concluded that San Diego staff emails constituted a "smoking gun" that the city had not considered a proposed increase in the height limit in the Midway area's programmatic EIR.
In a new case from Oakland, an appellate court ruled that the city can impose new fees on an old project despite signing an agreement that seemed to lock the fees in.
One camp says CEQA litigation stifles housing production and reinforces the status quo. The other camps says CEQA litigation isn't all that frequent and leads to better projects. But what if they're both right?
At least that's what an appellate court ruled in a case from Pomona that was brought, ironically, by a prospective cannabis merchant who argued otherwise.
Dueling environmental groups disagreed over how much the university should thin non-native trees to reduce fire hazard. They both sued -- and they both lost.
Most developers have been trying to get their projects approved for years. Some are adding multifamily affordable units to single-family projects in order to qualify.
Or is one Huntington Beach City Councilmember's attempt to decertify the Beach and Edinger Specific Plan EIR simply a sideways attempt to repeal the plan?
One-for-one mitigation may work for agricultural land or biological resources. But a court has found that it won't work for "The Sphinx" -- a unique and now-demolished brutalist building in downtown San Jose designed by the famous architect Cesar Pelli.
But Berkeley neighbors lose two other cases in the appellate court -- one dealing with student enrollment levels and the other dealing with a different aspect of the People's Park development.
The city claimed that because the entire 8,800-square-foot property had been conveyed as one more than 75 years ago, the original 25-foot-wide parcels from 1851 were not legal. An appellate court disagreed.
Davis situation highlights the growing tension between local ballot measures requiring voter approval and the Housing Accountability Act's restrictions on project denial.
Appellate court says overlay zone doesn't meet state's minimum density requirements because underlying zoning allows less -- and as a result discrimination laws were violated as well.
