States Defang Housing Opponents, But LA NIMBYs Fight Back

A mountain lion walking down the street would usually be cause for alarm in the suburbs of Southern California. But in Woodland Hills, a grainy photo of a feline interloper has been greeted like the Messiah by some local residents.

No, they are not nature lovers. They are NIMBYs. More about them in a moment.

State and local legislators have been fighting over housing development in Florida, California, New York and elsewhere. In a nutshell, officials with a regional perspective are trying to stop those with a provincial view from dragging out and killing projects.

The latest example in Florida is state legislators’ stripping localities of their power to block residential redevelopment of closed golf courses and other recreational sites 5 acres or larger in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. Those projects now just need administrative approval, not public hearings.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul has been chipping away at local obstructionism since her proposed Housing Compact was scuttled by a “local control, not Hochul control” campaign in 2023. Her state budget this year will exempt some projects from environmental review.

In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker says his BUILD initiative is about “adding a few more homes everywhere in the state” and is not “a radical removal of local zoning,” but localities are raising the same objections that doomed Hochul’s plan.

California’s state legislature has passed a slew of laws — notably AB 2011, AB 2243, AB 893 and SB 79 — to de-fang “not in my back yard” opposition.

For an example of how this is playing out, we return to Woodland Hills, where a frenetic band of NIMBYs is waging a comprehensive effort to stop the creation of 398 homes, 97 of them affordable.

They call the 20-acre site a “hillside area with a fragile and biologically diverse ecosystem within a fire zone.” It is actually a golf course.

The opponents want the Woodland Hills Country Club redevelopment to go through the kind of costly, politicized approval process that has made California’s housing the most expensive in the continental U.S.

However, as in Florida, lawmakers in Sacramento have carved a path for some residential projects to avoid that gauntlet. Arrimus Capital, the Newport Beach-based developer that bought the golf course several years ago, is trying to check all the boxes to do that.

That hasn’t kept the not-in-my-backyarders from doing all the usual things they do: fundraise, form a 501(c)4, hire lawyers and experts, commission studies, and put up every argument you could imagine — and some you couldn’t.

Besides the usual predictions of traffic and noise, opponents claim the 800 new residents (but apparently not the 80,000 current ones) would clog the streets and prevent the neighborhood from evacuating in the event of a brush fire.

They also claim that the golf course absorbs torrential downpours, saving Woodland Hills from biblical flooding. They never complained that the golf course consumes water increasingly needed for drinking, not to mention firefighting.

Chemicals used on the golf course would make the new housing unsafe, they say. They never complained that dangerous chemicals are being spread across the landscape so people can hit a little white ball into a cup.

The mountain lion, however, is their most creative strategy yet. A few months into the fight, the NIMBYs began looking for animals that could save the golf course, like the striped bass that blocked Westway. They found one in the mountain lion.

Normally a Ring doorbell photo of a wild carnivore wandering through a neighborhood would prompt calls for its capture and removal, lest the unpredictable beast snack on their Shih Tzus and toy poodles. But not when there’s a housing development to stop.

The opponents now claim they want mountain lions in their sleepy suburb, but fret that the big cats won’t survive without the golf course because it’s their “habitat” and “transit corridor.”

Who knew that greens, fairways and sand traps surrounded by cul-de-sacs and single-family homes could serve that purpose? Maybe the stealthy predators are using the course as a shortcut to take their cubs to day care and karate at local strip malls.

The developer has hired experts and commissioned studies of its own, but after four months of back-and-forth, its application was deemed incomplete in March by the Los Angeles planning department.

The saga looks a lot like the protracted, polemic process that California’s state legislature was trying to avoid.