Housing Justice and Land Use Litigation
California has an unconscionable deficit of affordable housing. To try to ensure adequate housing is planned, our Government Code requires each municipality to prepare a housing element in its general plan. The state Department of Housing and Community Development (“HCD”) and Department of Finance (“DOF”) determine the regional housing need and allocate to each region its “fair share” of the housing to be developed.
For publicly-owned lands, the California Surplus Land Act requires all local agencies to prioritize affordable housing on publicly-owned surplus land. The Act sets out a detailed procedure that all local agencies must follow when selling or leasing surplus land, and includes a substantive requirement that a minimum of 15% of any housing constructed must be affordable.
Because housing in communities where CBE organizes is both unaffordable and inadequate, we target legal advocacy to support community efforts to ensure healthy, new affordable housing is planned for and built and to prevent “renovictions” – evictions when a landlord is renovating a property.
In Huntington Park, more than a quarter of the population lives in poverty, and its unhoused population increased by more than 30% from 2019 to 2020. Despite the clear need for more affordable housing, not a single new housing unit had been built in Huntington Park since 2008.
As the COVID-19 pandemic raged through Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) it became increasingly important to provide adequate housing for SELA residents. SELA is the most densely populated part of LA County. As such, underhoused families were hit hardest by COVID-19 because many residents are frontline workers who are more likely to be exposed to the virus. These exposed workers then return home to overcrowded homes where self-quarantine is impossible.
On March 15, 2021 CBE filed suit against the City of Huntington Park, asserting the City’s housing element failed entirely to meet the HCD requirements. We co-counseled with Public Interest Law Project and Disabilities Rights Center, who also represented an individual CBE member who suffers from a disability and housing insecurity. We prevailed in 2022, and the court required Huntington Park to adopt a General Plan that addresses the flaws our case identified.
CBE members are actively engaged in the planning and public meetings to produce the Housing Element and Environmental Justice Elements they want. Empowered by this victory, community members in Huntington Park and neighboring cities are also advocating for protections against eviction, so people who have housing do not lose their homes when mega-landlords renovate their properties.
One of the Bay Area’s largest parcels of public land – the Oakland Coliseum complex – sits in the heart of the East Oakland communities where CBE organizes. Since the 1960s, the Coliseum has been jointly owned by the County of Alameda (“County”) and the City of Oakland (“City”).
For more than a decade, CBE has worked with housing and labor allies in the Oakland United coalition to secure a strong community benefits agreement to address potential development at the Coliseum. These efforts have included many meetings with the Athletics organization, which is led by Dave Kaval but owned and controlled by the billionaire Fisher family.
On December 23, 2019, without any efforts to comply with the Surplus Land Act and despite community opposition, the County signed a Disposition Agreement to sell its undivided half interest in the land to the Fishers, after a series of closed-door negotiations.
CBE and individual named plaintiff Esther Goolsby sued for violations of the Surplus Land Act. We are hopeful that, working with local, Black-owned developers, we will successfully resolve the underlying issues in this case.