For at least the third time in two years, litigation filed by housing advocates has resulted in a court order or settlement for hundreds of affordable housing units. The latest city to get hit with a judgment is Brea, whose redevelopment agency was ordered to produce 208 units of low- and very low-income housing by June 2012.
A state appellate court has upheld the City of Gilroy's housing element against a challenge filed by affordable housing advocates. The court ruled that, under the housing element law in effect when Gilroy updated its housing plan in 2002, the city did not have to provide a site-specific inventory and analysis.
As the popularity of inclusionary zoning for affordable housing has grown, so has the number of cities and counties who have a stake in affordable homeownership problems. Experts in those programs, however, warn that they are fraught with dangers and require extensive monitoring to ensure that units remain affordable.
The Association of Bay Area Governments has adopted a methodology for distributing fair-share housing units that directs housing growth to existing urban areas, especially those with jobs and transit, and downplays the trend of extensive development on the Bay Area's fringe.
Anaheim officials have sided with Disneyland and rejected SunCal's neighboring development proposal; report by LAO says Indian casinos will not provide significant revenues for the state of California; Madera County settled with Indian tribe; the Bureau of Indian Affairs has approved a proposed landfill on a Colusa County Indian reservation; Seal Beach has repealed a ban on three-story houses in the Old Town area; and the ongoing redevelopment of the former George Air Force Base in Victorville receives a boost from Newell Rubbermaid.
It could almost be a story from a Charles Dickens novel: Nearly 800 lower-income households find themselves evicted from an apartment complex in the Venice district of Los Angeles by developers who reportedly want to build luxury housing. The City Council opposes the deal but is defeated in court. After various attempts at mediation, the developers beckon sheriff's deputies to lock out hundreds of renters from their apartments, only to call off the authorities at the last minute. >>read more
Later this month, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors will meet to consider an appeal of the approval of Tentative Tract Map No. TT-5206 and certification of the accompanying Supplemental Environmental Impact Report. At first glance, this tract map approval might seem routine. It is the first of four tract maps that the developer anticipates bringing forward, allowing the developer to build 628 homes, a golf course, and other facilities on 846 acres of unincorporated land. It's a follow-on to a gener
The City of Palm Springs added improper conditions to a subdivision map approval when it considered a property owner's proposal to subdivide a mobile home park so that the park could be converted to resident-owned, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled.
After a delay of almost a decade, the battle over how localities in California divvy up their responsibility for low- and moderate-income housing has been joined once again. The first battlefield is metropolitan Los Angeles, where the Southern California Association of Governments is engaged in a struggle with its own members over the "Regional Housing Needs Assessment" (RHNA) process � and is lobbying the state to reduce L.A.'s overall obligation to provide low/mod housing. The SCAG battle is ...
