California officials are suing Huntington Beach, a wealthy coastal city lambasted by the state’s governor as the “poster child for nimbyism”, in an attempt to force it to build more affordable housing.
Defiant Huntington Beach officials have filed their own lawsuit in response, pledging to fight any attempt by the state to “urbanize” their affluent, majority-white community.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said the lawsuit was part of the state’s effort to crack down on cities and counties that “that flagrantly violate state housing laws”, and said that a nimby, or “not in my backyard”, attitude towards housing development could not longer be tolerated.
“My administration will take every measure necessary to hold communities accountable for their failure to build their fair share of housing,” Newsom said in a statement.
Huntington Beach is required by state law to approve more affordable housing and to build more than 13,000 new homes over the next eight years, state officials said. Instead, officials accused the Huntington Beach city council of “unlawful and willful attempts to flout state housing law”, including considering a new local ordinance that would attempt to exempt the city from certain state housing requirements.
The lawsuit filed by the state attorney general, Rob Bonta, in Orange county superior court, asks a judge to order the city to comply with the law and to impose a fine. A state law, passed in 2019, says a state judge can impose fines starting at $10,000 per month for cities that refuse to comply. The law also says the court can appoint someone “with all the powers necessary” to force the city into compliance.
Hours later, city officials announced their own lawsuit, asking a federal judge to block the state from forcing them to build a wave of new homes they said would transform their suburban community.
“Their goal is to urbanize quiet, private property-owning communities,” Huntington Beach mayor Tony Strickland said at a news conference announcing the city’s lawsuit, the Los Angeles Times reported. The mayor claimed that “neither the state or Gavin Newsom are serious about actually producing more housing”.
“I am committed to defend the city and its wonderful property owners who enjoy this quiet suburban beach town,” Strickland said.
This is the second time California officials have sued Huntington Beach for not following state housing laws. The city settled the first lawsuit back in 2020.
The lack of affordable housing in California is at the center of a growing humanitarian crisis, with rising numbers of people becoming homeless in the nation’s most populous state.
State housing officials say California needs an additional 2.5m homes by 2030 in order to keep up with demand. But the state currently builds about 125,000 houses each year, which leaves California well short of that goal. California has about 170,000 homeless people on any given night, accounting for nearly one-third of the nation’s unsheltered population, according to federal data.
Huntington Beach, dubbed “Surf City USA”, has a largely suburban feel with residential neighborhoods of single-family homes flanked by busy main roads linked with strip malls and office buildings. Sixty per cent of the city’s residents are non-Hispanic white, according to census estimates, while only 1.2% are Black.
Last year, four new council members won election with a politically conservative bent. Since taking office, the four-member council majority has taken on state housing mandates and limited the flying of flags on city property, including removing the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag that has flown in the city the past two years.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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