January 25, 2019
California Sues City Over Lack of Affordable Housing
Amid state housing crisis, new governor says affluent Huntington Beach is not doing enough
By Alejandro Lazo
Wall Street Journal
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, Calif., on Thursday.
California is suing one of its own cities for not allowing the construction of enough affordable places to live, signaling an aggressive approach to the state’s housing crisis by the new governor, Gavin Newsom.
Huntington Beach, an upscale coastal city outside Los Angeles, is “standing in the way of affordable housing production and refusing to meet regional housing needs,” according to an announcement from Mr. Newsom that the California attorney general would file a lawsuit Friday.
The suit, the first of its kind under a state law passed last year, will seek to require the city to amend its housing plan for the building of more units accessible to people of all income levels, according to the governor’s office.
A representative for Huntington Beach could not immediately be reached for comment.
The governor’s office said that the city has since 2015 been out of compliance with a state law that requires localities to adopt plans to provide housing that keeps pace with job and population growth.
Advocates have long said that California cities have been submitting such plans but not doing enough to execute on them, causing a shortage that makes housing unaffordable for many low- and middle-income people. They have urged Sacramento politicians to take more aggressive action to enforce the law, like the suit Mr. Newsom announced Friday.
“The state doesn’t take this action lightly,” Mr. Newsom said. “The huge housing costs and sky-high rents are eroding quality of life for families across this state.”
Huntington Beach has a population of around 201,000 people and is located about 40 miles south of Los Angeles in Orange County. In 2015, a nonprofit housing group sued the city after officials revamped a housing plan to cut back on the amount of planned high-density affordable housing.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/california-to-sue-city-over-lack-of-affordable-housing-11548439811
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