Everybody wants to live in California. With its innovation industry, perfect climate, golden beaches, and gorgeous landscapes, it has long attracted doers, dreamers, and lifestyle seekers. And yet despite its bounty of natural resources and technoprosperity, the state has lost about 200,000 Californians since 2020.1 One of the major culprits of that decline is municipal crime, but it’s not what you’re thinking. This type is committed by the cities themselves. For when it comes to housing, it’s often California’s local governments that are breaking the law.
By blocking or evading state laws mandating more housing, these municipal scofflaws have criminally restricted its supply, leaving California with no shortage of reasons to live there—only of places to live.
“I’m done with [bill] signing ceremonies. I want ribbon cuttings,” Assemblymember Buffy Wicks told the first YIMBY Law Conference, held in San Francisco last week.2 California has passed a slew of housing laws, but what’s needed now is enforcement. YIMBY Law Executive Director Sonja Trauss declared that the housing movement is now in an “age of implementation,” as state lawyers and third-party legal organizations fight to make wayward cities follow the law. If the attorney general’s office is the sheriff, organizations like YIMBY Law, the California Housing Defense Fund, and Californians for Homeownership are the deputies in a system that still operates too much like the Wild West. As Matt Gelfand, In-House Litigator with Californians for Homeownership, put it, “We are the assholes. That’s our role.”3
Why are assholes needed? Well, because some cities are even bigger ones. Gelfand noted that at certain moments, such as during the last housing element cycle, you could find many cities out of compliance. Assemblymember Wicks, whose district includes twelve cities, said some are simply overwhelmed and trying to comply, while others are actively resistant.
Cities evade the law in different ways. Beverly Hills planned in name only. When its state-mandated housing target jumped from three new homes in the prior planning cycle to more than 3,000 in the most recent, the city identified sites like active medical clinics and leased-up office buildings that were unlikely to become housing. The state rejected the plan four times, but it took a lawsuit by Californians for Homeownership, and a judge’s order barring the city from issuing most permits, before a compliant plan was finally certified in May 2024. Huntington Beach claimed it was exempt. When the state sued, the city argued that it was immune from state housing law because it was a charter city with extra autonomy over local affairs. The courts rejected that argument and, in May 2026, imposed $160,000 in penalties, $10,000 for each month since January 2025. Those rose to $50,000 a month from June, when the city council adopted a plan, but the state has yet to certify it. In Elk Grove, the state alleged the city applied its own code selectively, denying a supportive housing project under a restriction it didn’t enforce against a market-rate project. This was in violation of a state requirement to approve qualifying projects that meet objective standards without discretionary review. The developer and state filed separate lawsuits, and the city eventually settled.
These three cases were cited repeatedly by speakers at the conference, but they’re far from the only offenders. The Elk Grove case, in particular, highlights another problem: a developer in Elk Grove could not read the law to learn what was actually allowed; applicants had to file and find out. A city resisting a state mandate may claim that outsiders are imposing unwanted development. But when a city refuses to honor its own standards consistently and objectively, it undermines the authority of the system itself. Trauss proposed a straightforward principle: cities should have to follow their own zoning and approve projects meeting local requirements.
It sounds obvious. That it needs saying points to a deeper problem with local zoning: compliance is what a developer must do, not what a city must do.
What would it mean for zoning to be lawful, for cities to comply? YIMBY Law General Counsel Ryan Patterson offered a checklist for housing rules that can actually be enforced: the city must make a decision, meet a deadline, approve compliant projects, and apply objective standards that are knowable in advance. In most cities, single-family housing often enjoys a more straightforward approval path. The projects that would add the most housing usually don’t have that option, and for those, discretionary review works the opposite way. Projects can be postponed, blocked through delay, approved with conditions, or otherwise derailed. The standards purport to be objective but they often aren’t: a code might specify height, density, and setbacks, but those numbers are really just opening bids that can be negotiated away, not binding standards. This is all, technically, legal. But morally, it’s hugely problematic: a system in which permission depends on the unpredictable judgments of various humans is one that has few restraints on arbitrary power, as the rule of law demands.
Public comment is the engine of discretionary review, and the public that comments often isn’t representative of the public at large. At the conference, political scientist Alexander Sahn presented his analysis of more than 40,000 comments from San Francisco Planning Commission hearings between 1998 and 2021. The median commenter was 23 years older than the median resident. In a majority-renter city, commenters were more than ten percentage points likelier than residents overall to own their homes. He also found that women were underrepresented and white people were overrepresented.
Who comments can influence outcomes. Across thousands of public hearings, Sahn found that each opposing comment decreased the chance of approval by 2.1 percentage points, while each supportive comment increased the chance of approval by only 1.7 percentage points. The planning commission’s votes were most closely tied to neighborhood groups and pro-development groups, which suggests the process rewards whoever organizes, not any one side.
Meanwhile, the people with the most at stake are usually missing from these hearings. Jeremy Levine, of Palo Alto Forward, made the point that you can’t get future residents of a project that doesn’t yet exist to speak up. Emily Ann Ramos, Mayor of Mountain View, identified another absent cohort: the children priced out of the communities they grew up in. The absence of potential residents from the discourse doesn’t make their concerns any less real, but the discretionary approval process is inherently biased toward those with the time and resources to show up.
The capture of the discretionary approval process over housing development is, of course, the problem that the YIMBY movement was formed to fight against. It’s also the other reason enforcers are needed: developers are often not willing or able to fight cities in court when their projects are unfairly denied. General Counsel Patterson argues that developers face several barriers, including speed, uncertainty, expenses, and acrimony. Developers don’t want to get bogged down in court while maintaining hefty carrying costs for an uncertain outcome, nor risk incurring the wrath of politicians or other officials they’ll have to work with again. If victory comes after too much time and too much expense, the project may no longer be viable, and then who has really won?
Even winning doesn’t guarantee a building. The first case under California’s “Rocket Docket” law, which requires courts to decide qualifying housing cases within 75 days of filing, was brought by a San Francisco developer against the city. At the conference, that developer said the case had gone from complaint in April to decision in August—longer than the statute allows, but far faster than the year or more such cases typically take—and the project still needed approval from another dozen agencies.
Still, each successful lawsuit pushes cities to behave better and makes their legal obligations harder to ignore. As State Senator Scott Wiener noted, back in 2010 nobody would have even suggested reforming discretionary review. California is still a long way from there, but that cities can now be sued—and defeated—is a sign of progress. The YIMBY legal movement is trying to make an inherently lawless system more lawful.
Of course, lawfulness does not guarantee housing abundance. A clear rule can still be too restrictive, projects still have to pencil, and discretion cannot be entirely removed from the process. But the goal of municipal compliance with the law is a worthy one. Compliance should not be a burden foisted only onto the people trying to solve a housing crisis. Cities should be held accountable to the law, whether handed down from the state or locally grown. They should write rules that are objective, applied consistently, and designed to let housing actually get built. What California needs is more cities willing to cut both red tape and ribbons.
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YIMBY Law is taking its conference next to Washington, DC this December: learn more here. For more takes on the San Francisco conference, read:
Source: Census Bureau.
The conference was held on September 28th at UC Law. Conference organizer Sonja Trauss invited me to write about it for City of Yes: YIMBY Law covered my registration fee but I paid for my own travel. In her invitation, Sonja also said I could complain about the conference, but I thought the content was generally excellent and the day was well-organized. No complaints!
Mr. Rogers used to advise children to look for the helpers during an emergency. In a California housing emergency, perhaps look for the assholes.