Gavin Newsom has sued Huntington Beach for failing to meet housing quotas—a message to cities that they cannot stonewall development
governors start their administrations suing one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the state?” asks Gavin Newsom, California’s new governor, sitting in his office in the state Capitol. Not many. However in January, soon after Mr Newsom was sworn in, the state attorney-general’s office, at the governor’s behest, sued Huntington Beach, a coastal city in Orange County, for failing to comply with the state’s housing-supply law. “I love Huntington Beach,” Mr Newsom insists.
A warm welcome to “Surf City”, as Huntington Beach is known, may not be in Mr Newsom’s future, but that is not what he was hoping for anyway. California has a severe shortage of affordable housing, and he wants to bring a sense of urgency to the problem. The state has the highest poverty rate in America when adjusted for the cost of living. One-third of renters pay more than half of their income towards rent, and homeownership rates in the state are at their lowest level since the 1940s.
Huntington Beach is fighting back. It claims that the statute of limitations has already passed and is asking a court to toss out the lawsuit; a hearing to decide this will take place on April 3rd. The city has itself sued the state on several occasions. In February it filed two lawsuits taking aim at the state’s housing laws.
Huntington Beach is the only city that has been sued so far, but in his state of the state address in February, Mr Newsom called out 47 cities for not doing enough to build housing. Such public shaming, coupled with the Huntington Beach lawsuit, has brought dozens of local representatives to agree to meet with the governor about housing policy, and several cities are working to come into compliance swiftly.
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