Housing Advocate Sues Lafayette for “Misleading” Housing Plan

Lafayette, a city of $2 million homes, has played a shell game with state housing regulators to avoid building its share of affordable housing.

That’s the contention of the Housing Action Coalition, a San Francisco-based housing advocate that is suing the East Bay city for creating “misleading and unrealistic housing sites” to satisfy state-mandated housing goals, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The lawsuit seeks a court to compel the city to adopt a revised plan with an update to its zoning laws. The city must rezone to build 2,114 homes, 943 of them affordable, by 2031.

The coalition accuses the city of “pretending” to comply with the planning blueprint, known as the housing element, required of every city and county across the state every eight years.

Lafayette’s alleged shell game includes relying on faith-based institutions and longtime businesses with no plans to develop housing as potential building sites for homes, according to the complaint filed by Farella Braun and Martel a San Francisco-based law firm.

In one case, the city said a CVS will be torn down and rebuilt into 26 homes — but CVS has a long-term lease, with no intention of moving, according to the lawsuit. Other examples were not disclosed.

“We hoped that Lafayette would take its responsibility to plan for housing seriously, but instead, they passed a housing element that deliberately ignores the facts,” Ali Sapirman, the advocacy and policy manager with the Housing Action Coalition, told the Chronicle. “Lafayette is continuing a pattern of obstruction, using questionable calculations to block much-needed housing while pretending to comply with state law.

“The housing crisis is severe, and every city, including Lafayette, must do its fair share,” Sapirman added.

In its housing plan, Lafayette proposed using city-owned parking lots for housing, as well as sites downtown and at religious institutions to build affordable housing. The city projects that 27 accessory dwelling units will be built each year, for a total of 216 units.

Officials also said more than 150 units were under construction, with another 570 approved units in the development pipeline.

The city didn’t immediately return a request for comment by the newspaper.

Lafayette was once a battleground for the region’s housing wars, with two lawsuits, a ballot referendum and more than 100 public hearings that delayed a 315-unit apartment building for almost a dozen years.

Last year, the state Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a neighborhood group attempting to stop the development, allowing it to move forward. The project has not broken ground.

Within a 10-year span, 115 homes were built in the city of 25,000 residents, including 10 in 2010, 76 in 2018 and 29 in 2019 — according to its housing element plan.

— Dana Bartholomew