La Cañada Flintridge, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley’s Verdugo Mountains, is home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Descanso Gardens. It also contains the 1.3-acre site of a battle over housing that’s become a case study for builder’s remedy.
The state provision, which allows developers to circumvent local zoning in cities that have not mapped out plans for future housing development, gave Cedar Street Partners the leverage it needed to push a mixed-use development forward.
After a Los Angeles judge ordered the city in March to post a $14 million bond in order to move forward on an appeal, La Cañada Mayor Mike Davitt said continuing the legal battle against Cedar Street’s proposed five-story apartment-hotel-office project at 600 Foothill Boulevard was “no longer in the best interest of the city.”
The development calls for 7,200 square feet of office and roughly 80 dwelling units, of which eight are affordable and 16 are slated for hospitality.
The project’s winding its way through city hall, and building plans are expected in six to eight months. The company is also looking to recover $6 million in costs related to the city’s litigation against the project.
Cedar Street managing member Jonathan Curtis sits from an interesting perch as a developer and a former La Canada Flintridge City Councilmember from 2013 to 2024, even serving as its mayor for a one-year term. He sat down with The Real Deal for a conversation on the push and pull of housing development.
Has the increased use of builder’s remedy prompted any shift in attitudes about housing developments among communities that have pushed back?
Builder’s remedy has definitely moved the needle. A number of jurisdictions realized that the games they’ve played in the past to prevent housing will not work in the future. They’ve come to realize that they need to do legitimate housing elements [required by the state].
The HCD, the Housing and Community Development Department of the state of California, reviews [housing elements] and is keeping closer tabs on what cities are doing as far as implementations. So, yes, I do think there’s a shift in cities.
At the same time, if you were to contact various lawyers around town, you will find that they have more builder’s remedy cases than they know what to do with. It’s just certain cities that are bad actors, so to speak.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed budget trailer bills in June paving the way for additional California Environmental Quality Act review exemptions. Similar bills have been proposed in the past. Why did they get so far this time?
A fundamental change of attitude toward realizing that the lack of housing is affecting the economy. It affects health. It affects all sorts of things. It’s a realization that we need to do something about housing. That’s number one.
Number two, there’s more of an acceptability of multifamily. It’s a change in attitude. Everybody realizes it is affecting California significantly on many different fronts, and it costs more to deal with homelessness than it would if you dealt with it in a logical way.
CEQA and other environmental laws are not being thrown out. They’re being reined in to what they should have been for a long time.
What might this shift in attitudes and policy changes mean for rebuilding places such as the Palisades and Altadena?
Those exemptions under CEQA are for the entitlements to get a permit, but you still have building plans that have to be done. So you’ve got the permitting time. You’ve got construction and construction inspections.
Rebuilding’s got to be done on a holistic basis, because you could get your entitlements, or even if you’re in the [Coastal Commission] zone, you could still sit there and wait a year for building plans. There’s been efforts by the state, the county and the city to set up separate programs for rebuilding. The challenge on some of the rebuilding is you have a limitation as far as how much more you can build [back]. You can change a little bit, but you can’t change it too much. What you’re losing there is other [development] opportunities.
Does Cedar Street have interest in going into any of the communities impacted by the fires for possible development?
We would probably prefer doing mixed use as opposed to pure retail. I think retail can be a tough one, at least in Altadena, just because you need the critical mass. But which one comes first? It’s really hard to tell.
What other challenges face the development community right now?
Tariffs. But we don’t know where tariffs are going to go because they keep changing.
There’s also financing with the higher interest rates, it’s more difficult, both on the construction financing as well as permanent financing. There’s talk of two rate cuts, so that could potentially help things.
We also still face the attitude a lot of cities have, despite what the laws are, in pushing back [against development].
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