California Attorney General Wants to Get Serious About Housing

California’s Attorney General is asking the state legislature to empower his office to more strictly enforce state housing laws, which many California cities have been attempting to skirt or challenge since the state strengthened its enforcement of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA), reports Dustin Gardiner in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The proposal comes in the form of Assembly Bill 1485, which would give the state’s Attorney General the “unconditional right” to get involved in lawsuits regarding state housing law.

“Two years ago, Bonta’s office launched a Housing Strike Force, a special division within his office that’s designed to hold cities accountable for skirting laws the Legislature has passed in recent years to fast-track some local processes that are often used to fight denser housing, including planning, zoning and permitting approvals.” However, when Bonta tried to intervene in housing-related lawsuits, he has sometimes been delayed by judges. 

The proposed law would let the Attorney General’s office intervene in third-party cases more easily and confront anti-housing interests more directly. According to Todd David, special projects director for the Housing Action Coalition, “This is another tool that indicates to recalcitrant municipalities that the state is really concerned about this issue.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener, co-author of the bill, says the Attorney General, unlike individual developers engaged in lawsuits, “has a broader public interest to protect the enforcement of state housing policy and to prevent a patchwork of legal interpretations that could be harmful.”