Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles
Case Summary
The Superior Court ordered the City to halt further approvals of building permits that were inconsistent with applicable community plans (approximately one out of four permits then being issued) and to bring all parcels then inconsistent with the applicable community plan (approximately one-third of the City’s parcels composing of a total area the size of Chicago) into consistency with those plans. With the oversight of a court-appointed referee, the City completed the rezoning program and described it as its “most important accomplishment of the decade.”
Additional Information
Throughout the 1970s, as the state legislature sought to reform planning and zoning in California, the City of Los Angeles resisted these efforts. When the legislature required the City to comprehensively bring all of its zoning into conformity with up-to-date, environmentally sound general plans, the City responded with a lawsuit claiming its home rule powers were being infringed upon. Although the Court ruled against that contention, the City essentially left the comprehensive plans for each community laying unused on a shelf, and still undertook only minimal rezoning efforts, thereby allowing the very substantial resources and effort that had gone into preparing those plans to lie fallow.
CLIPI sued in 1985 to force the City to undertake the needed comprehensive rezoning. Initial discovery revealed that approximately one of every four building permits being issued with the City was inconsistent with the applicable community plan. Major plan/zoning inconsistencies included such massive projects as the Westside Pavilion, the Beverly Center, and numerous high-rise apartment buildings located immediately adjacent to single family residential areas.
After the Los Angeles Superior Court ordered the City to immediately cease issuing inconsistent building permits and to undertake the required rezoning effort, the City spent the next decade rezoning some 300,000 parcels (out of 800,000 total parcels), an area larger than the city of Chicago. The massive undertaking was completed in 1996, and the Planning Department reported to the Court that the successful rezoning program constituted its “biggest accomplishment” of the decade.
The lawsuit’s revitalization of the City’s community plans and the new stress on the importance of comprehensive planning, including wide citizen involvement, has been described by local historians and political scientists as the primary catalyst for the substantial empowerment of citizen groups in local politics in Los Angeles in the late 1980s.
(Published in the 30th Anniversary of CLIPI Dinner Program)
Where were at today
In more recent times, the “abundance” Democrats -- led by the YIMBY movement and followed by many young people who feel squeezed out of the housing market -- have argued that local planning and zoning over-regulate urban development and overly favor single family residential development to the detriment of affordable housing opportunities. Some critics have specifically faulted the Hillside Federation zoning consistency orders. These critics contend that private developers should not have their development choices squeezed into more constricted urban planning frameworks such as those established by CLIPI’s litigation in LA City and LA County. Rather, developers should have a wide choice of potential building venues, and issues generated by proposed new housing (e.g., traffic, noise, privacy concerns) should generally be resolved in favor of building housing. It’s not clear whether these critics would prefer the land use approval system in place before the legislative planning/zoning consistency reforms went into place. Certainly, they generally endorse the requirements that localities must plan and provide for their “fair share” of affordable housing. But without massive, to date politically unacceptable subsidies, it’s not clear how these critics expect affordable housing to be built at scale.
