California, Huntington Beach in Legal Duel Over Builder's Remedy

California has filed a lawsuit against Huntington Beach, which last month adopted a ban on approving applications for builder’s remedy projects, seeking to strike down the ban as a violation of the state’s housing law.

The Orange County city responded by immediately filing a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s requirement that Huntington Beach rezone neighborhoods to make way for more than 13,000 new housing units.

In its lawsuit, filed last Thursday, the state asked for a preliminary injunction to prohibit Huntington Beach’s ban from taking effect while the case is adjudicated, the Los Angeles Times reported.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, said Huntington Beach’s ban had “infringed on the rights of property owners.”

“California is facing an existential housing crisis, one we should all be acting in unison to solve,” Bonta said. “Instead, the Huntington Beach City Council has chosen to stifle affordable housing projects, infringe on the rights of property owners and knowingly violate state housing law.”

Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland held his own press conference, at which he said the state is “not serious about producing more housing.”

“Their goal is to urbanize quiet private property-owning communities,” Strickland said, according to the Times report. “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.”

The lawsuit sets up the first major legal challenge to builder’s remedy, which is being imposed by the state on cities that fail to submit an approved housing growth plan.

Builder’s remedy is a legal remedy, created in the 1990s, that can be invoked to allow developers to bypass local zoning requirements—any kind of city zoning or planning approval process—essentially a state override of local authorities that now is being invoked in what the governor is calling a housing emergency.

The measure approved last month in Huntington Beach blocks building applications for housing construction filed under builder’s remedy on the grounds that the construction could “adversely impact public safety and the environment.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, in a letter to Huntington Beach city officials before the vote, told the city that any attempt to enact a measure blocking builder’s remedy would be illegal—at the time, the statement was the first time the state AG has publicly spoken about enforcing builder’s remedy.