Poor Timing Dooms Mobile Home Suit

The Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District affirmed a judgment following a jury verdict that found that a homeowners association complied with the California Solar Rights Act (Civ. Code, § 714) when it denied the application of property owners to install solar panels on a slope adjacent to their residence.

In a pair of decisions issued on the same day, the Second District Court of Appeal, Division Four, has addressed the scope of permitted regulation when a mobile home park owner elects to convert a park into a residential subdivision and sell individual spaces. In cases from the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles suburb of Carson, the court ruled that local government may apply state law and local considerations to restrict mobile home park conversions.

Use of redevelopment funds by a city-formed nonprofit organization to develop school administrative buildings and a housing project with units reserved for low- and very low-income residents was valid and did not require voter approval, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. 

In reaching its decision, the court had to interpret the various restrictions in redevelopment law as well as Article 34 of the state constitution.  

Article 34 as part of the California Constitution, adopted by voters in 1950, had the effect of requiring voter approval of "low rent housing projects." Over time, the Legislature has codified various interpretations of Article 34, excluding from the voter approval process certain types of affordable projects. On a parallel path, the Legislature has modified redevelopment law to ensure that cities spend a certain amount of their tax increments on affordable housing. 

The difference between California and, sadly, many other states is that our decline is taking place by choice.

Boundless as cyberspace may be, the companies that rule the internet still have to take up real estate. And their employees still have to put their heads down somewhere at night. For whatever reason, the mysterious forces of the "innovation economy" have lured an outside share of those companies, and their employees, to Silicon Valley. 

With all those likes, stock options, and organic cafeteria items comes, of course, a housing crisis. As absolutely no one is unaware, rents in Silicon Valley have gone up like Pets.com stock over the past few years. 

Last week Facebook announced that it was going to make an investment in the crisis. Not an investment in housing, mind you. Just an investment in the crisis. >>read more

A couple of weeks ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion reported that the City of San Francisco was looking to relocate because its current location had become too expensive. Funny though this was, I expected the follow-up story to focus on the economic development incentive package being put together to keep San Francisco where it is. >>read more

A week or so later, Gabriel Metcalfe - head of the respected San Francisco urban planning organization SPUR - published a provocative piece in CityLab blaming the city's affordability crisis on progressive politics - especially progressive politics of the no-growth kind. Progressive San Francisco, he argued, "had a fatal, Shakespearean flaw that would prove to be its undoing: It decided early on to be against new buildings. It decided that new development, with the exception of publicly subsidized affordable housing, was not welcome."

All up and down California - especially in the expensive coastal enclaves around San Francisco and Los Angeles - community activists have been lately decrying how the rising cost of housing is making it impossible for normal people with normal incomes to live in these towns. Yet, as Metcalf points out, most of the time these same community activists are arguing that the trend toward high housing cost must be countered with... less housing construction. Or at least less market-rate housing construction. 

In Quail Lakes Owners Assn. v. Kozina, the Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District affirmed a trial court's decision to grant a verified petition by a homeowners' association for an order under Civil Code section 1356. The petition asked to modify the association's governing laws to reduce a supermajority voting restriction. >>read more

A proposal to use eminent domain to ward off foreclosures in two cities in San Bernardino County has been slammed almost unanimously by both Wall Street and federal regulators. The most powerful dissenter was Edward J. DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who said on August 7 that he would resist any effort by local governments to "take" homes owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two agencies under his supervision; those agencies buy the majority of US home loans and repackage them as mortgage-backed securities.

When redevelopment was first introduced in California, it included no provisions for affordable housing and instead focused solely on fighting blight. Introduced in 1976, the affordable housing set-aside � amounting to 20% of an agency's annual tax increment � was intended to mollify critics who contended that redevelopment amounting to nothing more than a boondoggle for developers. With the governor's successful dissolution of redevelopment, affordable housing now counts among the most lamented collateral damage. 

If you extrapolate from the current annual under-supply of affordable housing in California, California should have produced 5.5 million units of affordable housing during Cathy Creswell's career at the Department of Housing and Community Development. While the actual number is likely to be somewhat less, the point remains that HCD has faced and continues to face a monumental task. For the past year, that task has ultimately fallen on the shoulders of Creswell, as she has led the department as its interim executive director until stepping down in February.

In the case of West Chandler Boulevard Neighborhood Association v. City of Los Angeles, the Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, considered the validity of the City of Los Angeles' grant of a conditional use permit, height variance and parking variance to a Chabad of North Hollywood, which was operating a synagogue in a residential neighborhood within the city. 

In the case of South Orange County Wastewater Authority v. City of Dana Point (2011) 196 Cal. App. 4th 1604 ("South Orange"), the Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District was asked to order an environmental impact report (EIR) be prepared to assess the impact on the environment of a proposed project pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The Court of Appeal declined to order such an EIR.