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This story about California's somewhat recent approach to stem NIMBYs ability to stop, delay, or minimize new housing caught my eye. I'm uber-YIMBY and love seeing pirates like this guy force the issue. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/business/economy/california-housing-nimby.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2k8.UKcn.gZz-NTY2rYzq&smid=url-share

Spoiler

One way or the other, the answer was going to be yes.

When Leo Pustilnikov filed an application in 2023 with the City of Beverly Hills to build a 19-story apartment tower with a hotel, the developer didn’t care that it flouted the zoning code or that the City Council was unanimously opposed to the project or that neighbors had described it as a “monstrosity.” He had the city backed into a corner and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“My philosophy is always this: If I can work with a city, I’m more than happy to,” Mr. Pustilnikov said. “When a city doesn’t want to help, I have no problem ignoring them and doing it my way.”

This was not the way business was normally done in Beverly Hills, a famously wealthy enclave where development is tightly controlled. It’s a tough place to build. Land is expensive, labor is expensive and NIMBYism — the not-in-my-backyard sentiment that exists everywhere — is particularly strong. The city’s zoning rules discourage projects that are tall and bulky and that might anger the owners of single-family houses nearby. Five stories is the tallest allowable height for a multifamily residential building — and those are permitted on only a few blocks of the city.

Mr. Pustilnikov was determined to change that. After two decades of investing in low-income apartments in downtown Los Angeles, he had stumbled upon a little-known state law that allowed him to ram high-density projects like the 19-story tower on South Linden Drive into cities that didn’t want them.

The law is called the “builder’s remedy,” and it was designed to break the political logjams that have made California one of the most difficult places in the country to build. The law works by nullifying local zoning rules when cities fail to plan for enough housing as required by the state.

While the builder’s remedy has been on the books since 1990, it was effectively dormant until 2022. Since then, however, developers across the state have filed dozens of plans to build 10- and 20-story buildings in neighborhoods where they had never been allowed. Mr. Pustilnikov, who helped pioneer the tactic, has proposed 10 such projects across Los Angeles County.

Brian Hanlon, chief executive of California YIMBY, a group that pushes for more housing, referred to the builder’s remedy as “the NIMBY sword of Damocles.” Just the threat of it has prompted cities to accept more housing than they had in decades.

California’s housing crisis is well documented and severe. But it’s not unique. From New York to Los Angeles, and countless smaller places in between, a festering housing shortage has forced Americans to spend more of their budgets on shelter, making them feel poorer and stuck in place.

There is wide agreement that America hasn’t been able to build enough housing; the need to do something about the shortage is one of the few things Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on. Despite this, the gap between the abstract agreement that we need more housing and the construction of a specific project on a specific block makes it difficult to build what the country requires.

Interest groups are reluctant to curb regulations, such as environmental rules, that can add years even to small projects. And the desire to keep a neighborhood from changing is deeply ingrained in local politics and the human psyche. There are just too many things to object to: Traffic. Not enough parking. Complaints that the building is poorly designed or blots out sunlight, or should be a park instead.

To address this, Sacramento legislators have spent the past decade writing a slew of laws that aim to create more housing. The laws vary from tiny coding changes that ease the way for backyard “granny flats” to a tectonic rewrite of the state’s landmark environmental law. The net effect is to nudge neighborhoods to become taller and denser by eroding local control over land use. Other states, including Oregon, Massachusetts, Montana, Texas and Arizona, have used similar tactics to increase the housing supply.

Buffy Wicks, a Democrat in the State Assembly from Oakland who has written several laws to speed housing production, argues that the state has to slice through both local rules and the bureaucracy that the state itself produced.

“We have gotten in our own way and created a quagmire that makes it impossible to build the housing we need,” she said.

The builder’s remedy has the potential to supercharge this, though it’s still too early to say how effective it will ultimately be. So far, developers seem to have the upper hand: When cities have challenged the cases, builders have often won. In response, cities have started reluctantly approving taller buildings that used to be unthinkable. In August, Mr. Pustilnikov prevailed in a case against Beverly Hills over the Linden Drive project.

“It is unfortunate that the state has seen fit to take a good deal of local zoning out of the hands of cities,” said Larry Wiener, the city attorney for Beverly Hills, in a statement.

The irony is that the builder’s remedy was rediscovered almost by accident. Even Ms. Wicks, one of California’s most staunchly pro-housing lawmakers, said the Legislature would never be able to pass the law now because of opposition from local governments. Thus, one of California’s most effective laws for building housing was not a product of its housing emergency or political will, but a legislative relic.

“The politics to pass anything resembling builder’s remedy would be way too difficult today,” Ms. Wicks said. “So one of the most powerful tools in combating our housing crisis is a law that passed” three decades ago.

Mr. Pustilnikov wasted no time trying to teach the city a lesson. After the judge ruled in his favor, he threatened to amend the Linden Drive building to make it even taller.

Building Where People Live
A truism of development is that it is harder to build things where people live than where they don’t. In the decades after World War II, California grew to become the most populous state not by constructing tall buildings but by spreading subdivisions over farms and orchards and connecting them with thousands of miles of freeways. Sun Belt cities like Dallas and Phoenix copied that playbook.

The backlash to sprawl came in the 1960s and ’70s, with local growth moratoriums and fights against freeways. As an alternative, environmentalists suggested building more densely in existing cities, what became known as smart growth.

But as much as people might lament paving over a cow pasture, nothing seems to rile them up as much as new construction in their own neighborhood. Over the past 30 years, California’s Legislature has been trying to counteract this hyperlocal opposition. The process has been a zigzagging slog. But the overall trend shows the state trying to wrest power from local governments. The laws the state created play out mostly out of public view through a web of arcane planning processes, the end result of which is a document called a “housing element.”

A housing element is basically a planning report that cities have to file with the state every eight years. In it, they detail, over hundreds of pages of maps and dense bureaucratese, how they plan to permit a certain amount of housing at various levels of affordability, a number that is decided by state and regional governments.

The problem is that the process has historically been a charade. Cities often produced housing elements that positioned future housing in inaccessible areas, and while developers and the state could challenge the plans, usually neither did. Since local officials were beholden to voters who rarely wanted new development, little was built.

Excavating the Builder’s Remedy
About a decade ago, the California Legislature started revving up its housing efforts again by sharpening the existing laws’ teeth. Among those changes were two tweaks that would prove pivotal: Urban areas would now have to plan for much more housing than they had in the past, and it became easier for developers to sue cities that deny their projects.

Those efforts got an unexpected boost on New Year’s Day 2019. That afternoon, Christopher Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, whose social media account is followed closely by developers and their lawyers, published a thread on Twitter. In it, he detailed a little-noticed clause that, in certain instances, could nullify a city’s zoning completely.

“CA housing folks: Why haven’t builders exploited the state law exempting 20%-affordable projects from zoning / plan in cities that don’t accommodate enough?” it began.

What he had suggested was the land use equivalent of plutonium.

Over more than a dozen tweets, Mr. Elmendorf argued that since 1990, California had had a loophole that allowed developers to bypass the local zoning codes in cities whose housing element was deemed noncompliant by the state. In a follow-up paper, he called it the “builder’s remedy,” a nod to a similar mechanism that arose from New Jersey court rulings that have shaped housing policy in that state.

The clause had rarely been used. But, as it happened, the conditions for exploiting it were historically perfect. Cities across the state were about to be hit with increases in housing target numbers so steep that regulators were all but guaranteed to deem their plans noncompliant.

Few cities saw a bigger impact than Beverly Hills: The city’s previous housing element required it to plan for three (yes, three) new housing units. Under the new allocation that would take effect in 2023, it had to plan for more than 3,000.

Beverly Hills did file a plan for more than 3,000 units, but placed most of them in high-traffic areas occupied by retail and office buildings, including the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Was a developer really going to turn the academy’s building into apartments and condos?

An advocacy group called Californians for Homeownership sued the city, arguing that much of the new housing that Beverly Hills had planned for would never be built. A judge agreed, and the city’s housing element was ruled out of compliance with state regulations.

Even so, many builders were reluctant to bring builder’s remedy cases, worried that those projects would alienate cities that they would likely have to work with in the future.

“Just like any other industry, sometimes you need a few pirates to change the dynamic,” said Dave Rand, a partner at Rand Paster & Nelson in Los Angeles, a land-use firm that represents Leo Pustilnikov.

Mr. Pustilnikov was willing to be that pirate.

Remaking Cities (and Suburbs)
On a recent afternoon I met Mr. Pustilnikov at a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills about a mile from his Linden Drive lot. Mr. Rand, his lawyer, had told me to look for the worst-dressed guy in the room. Sure enough, there I found Mr. Pustilnikov waiting for me in shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt whose collar appeared to have just come out of a tug of war.

Munching bread while waiters wearing ties moved from table to table, Mr. Pustilnikov explained that his specialty were deals with “hair,” by which he means complicated transactions with a lot of risk. Until recently, his public profile came mostly from being the owner of several aging buildings in downtown Los Angeles that are set aside for low-income tenants, many of them exiting homelessness.

As for the builder’s remedy projects he had proposed in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Redondo Beach, he told me that in most cases he didn’t plan to build them himself. Rather, his hope is to get the buildings entitled and sell the land to another builder for a premium. This would allow him to profit from engaging in the sort of pitched battle — in other words, hair — that a more conflict-averse developer might be reluctant to tackle.

Beverly Hills was a particularly enticing target. On paper it is an independent municipality of 32,000 people with its own school district and police department where boundaries are marked by the city’s iconic, shield-shaped signs. But it is surrounded by Los Angeles.

When Mr. Pustilnikov began pursuing the Linden tower, builder’s remedy projects had to set aside 20 percent of their units for below-market-rate tenants. (The percentage has since been lowered by new state legislation.) Paradoxically, building affordable units is more feasible in affluent areas like Beverly Hills because developers can charge much higher rents on the market-rate units.

Beverly Hills has since seen 16 applications for builder’s remedy developments. Residents are appalled. In letters opposing Linden Drive, neighbors said the project would destroy the neighborhood by encouraging other developers to “build huge” and made it feel as if “the walls are caving in, and we have no word.”

“None of us are opposed to affordable housing,” said Kenneth Goldman, president of the Southwest Beverly Hills Homeowners Association. But a building that was almost four times the city’s height limit?

“You don’t have to be a NIMBY to say that’s just so far out of line,” he said.

After Mr. Pustilnikov submitted the Linden Drive project, the City Council unanimously rejected his proposal.

The city was sued — twice, first by Californians for Homeownership and then by Mr. Pustilnikov. The suits were joined, and in August, Judge Curtis A. Kin — who, because this is Southern California, was once a contestant on the reality-TV show “Big Brother” — ruled for Mr. Pustilnikov. Beverly Hills still has a month to appeal the decision, but it would be expensive. To discourage cities from dragging out development fights in court, state law mandates that cities appealing their losses for this type of case post a bond that can easily eclipse $10 million.

The Linden Drive litigation is likely to be a bellwether, Mr. Rand said, prompting other cities to approve builder’s remedy projects outright or at least quickly cut deals with developers.

In the months since Mr. Pustilnikov’s court victory, the Beverly Hills Planning Commission has voted to approve nine builder’s remedy projects, totaling 659 units. That would be more housing than Beverly Hills had built in recent memory.

How to Create a Credible Threat
If California is ever going to dent its housing problem, it will have to figure out how to make it easier to add more housing in urban cores. Sprawl remains the cheapest and most effective way to add a lot of housing in a hurry, and there’s almost no way the nation can solve its housing shortage without building a lot more of it.

But in California and around the country, the highest rents and worst cost burdens are almost always in the job-rich areas that are already developed. Figuring out how to build housing in neighborhoods where building is expensive and difficult, and large blocs of voters reject it, is a puzzle that no U.S. city has fully solved.

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, and Joseph Gyourko, a finance professor at the Wharton School, noted in a recent paper that many of the fast-growing Sun Belt cities — the ones to which people priced out of California tend to relocate — had seen a sharp run-up in housing costs. The reason, the authors concluded, is that their residents are no more enthusiastic about adding density in single-family neighborhoods than are the people of Berkeley or Beverly Hills.

To once again become the nation’s housing pioneer, California will have to develop the political will to reform its urban areas and old suburbs into something denser and easier to navigate without a car. The lesson of the builder’s remedy is that, so far, the most effective way of doing this is to create a credible threat that housing-averse cities can’t ignore.

Last year, the Legislature passed a bill, introduced by Ms. Wicks, that explicitly codified the builder’s remedy in a modified form: Developers could more easily avail themselves of the tactic in exchange for set limits on density. They cannot build anything they want, but the allowable densities are still several times as large as what local zoning rules allow.

The ultimate impact of the builder’s remedy is likely to be measured not just in units that are built by using it, but in the ones built in fear of it. A few years ago, when Santa Monica was working on its housing element, Jesse Zwick, who was running to be a member of the City Council, sat in frustration while his future colleagues voted for a plan that the state ultimately rejected for failing to provide enough units, he said.

Then developers, including Mr. Pustilnikov, came along, and the wealthy beachfront city was blanketed with housing proposals. The city ended up settling with builders, and the effect is likely to be felt long after.

“The fear of builder’s remedy brought along a lot of people whose inclination was to fight everything,” Mr. Zwick said. “They realized it was in our interest to grow and at least be able to have a say in how we do that.”

 

 

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  • Like 1
Posted

I read that this morning, thanks for sharing with the board.  

My favorite part:

14 minutes ago, Orale said:

None of us are opposed to affordable housing,” said Kenneth Goldman, president of the Southwest Beverly Hills Homeowners Association. But a building that was almost four times the city’s height limit?

“You don’t have to be a NIMBY to say that’s just so far out of line,” he said.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard variations of that from neighborhood groups in testimony before the city and it deserves to be on Watson's staff's constituent bingo game.  

 

Posted
2 minutes ago, CleverNickname said:

EvbeYM4VgAEqiau.thumb.jpeg.e2cc3a30596086d4a3f76d9b02cc0b69.jpeg

Sounds like literally every single fucking Austin neighborhood group.  Every one.  No exceptions.  All they offer is soft-pedals of variations of "no," without ever suggesting any credible, concrete, realistic alternative.  Which means...fuck 'em.  If all you do is bitch, and don't offer anything that is a real-world solution, you're just whiny noise.

Posted
5 hours ago, Orale said:

This story about California's somewhat recent approach to stem NIMBYs ability to stop, delay, or minimize new housing caught my eye. I'm uber-YIMBY and love seeing pirates like this guy force the issue. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/business/economy/california-housing-nimby.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2k8.UKcn.gZz-NTY2rYzq&smid=url-share

  Reveal hidden contents

One way or the other, the answer was going to be yes.

When Leo Pustilnikov filed an application in 2023 with the City of Beverly Hills to build a 19-story apartment tower with a hotel, the developer didn’t care that it flouted the zoning code or that the City Council was unanimously opposed to the project or that neighbors had described it as a “monstrosity.” He had the city backed into a corner and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“My philosophy is always this: If I can work with a city, I’m more than happy to,” Mr. Pustilnikov said. “When a city doesn’t want to help, I have no problem ignoring them and doing it my way.”

This was not the way business was normally done in Beverly Hills, a famously wealthy enclave where development is tightly controlled. It’s a tough place to build. Land is expensive, labor is expensive and NIMBYism — the not-in-my-backyard sentiment that exists everywhere — is particularly strong. The city’s zoning rules discourage projects that are tall and bulky and that might anger the owners of single-family houses nearby. Five stories is the tallest allowable height for a multifamily residential building — and those are permitted on only a few blocks of the city.

Mr. Pustilnikov was determined to change that. After two decades of investing in low-income apartments in downtown Los Angeles, he had stumbled upon a little-known state law that allowed him to ram high-density projects like the 19-story tower on South Linden Drive into cities that didn’t want them.

The law is called the “builder’s remedy,” and it was designed to break the political logjams that have made California one of the most difficult places in the country to build. The law works by nullifying local zoning rules when cities fail to plan for enough housing as required by the state.

While the builder’s remedy has been on the books since 1990, it was effectively dormant until 2022. Since then, however, developers across the state have filed dozens of plans to build 10- and 20-story buildings in neighborhoods where they had never been allowed. Mr. Pustilnikov, who helped pioneer the tactic, has proposed 10 such projects across Los Angeles County.

Brian Hanlon, chief executive of California YIMBY, a group that pushes for more housing, referred to the builder’s remedy as “the NIMBY sword of Damocles.” Just the threat of it has prompted cities to accept more housing than they had in decades.

California’s housing crisis is well documented and severe. But it’s not unique. From New York to Los Angeles, and countless smaller places in between, a festering housing shortage has forced Americans to spend more of their budgets on shelter, making them feel poorer and stuck in place.

There is wide agreement that America hasn’t been able to build enough housing; the need to do something about the shortage is one of the few things Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on. Despite this, the gap between the abstract agreement that we need more housing and the construction of a specific project on a specific block makes it difficult to build what the country requires.

Interest groups are reluctant to curb regulations, such as environmental rules, that can add years even to small projects. And the desire to keep a neighborhood from changing is deeply ingrained in local politics and the human psyche. There are just too many things to object to: Traffic. Not enough parking. Complaints that the building is poorly designed or blots out sunlight, or should be a park instead.

To address this, Sacramento legislators have spent the past decade writing a slew of laws that aim to create more housing. The laws vary from tiny coding changes that ease the way for backyard “granny flats” to a tectonic rewrite of the state’s landmark environmental law. The net effect is to nudge neighborhoods to become taller and denser by eroding local control over land use. Other states, including Oregon, Massachusetts, Montana, Texas and Arizona, have used similar tactics to increase the housing supply.

Buffy Wicks, a Democrat in the State Assembly from Oakland who has written several laws to speed housing production, argues that the state has to slice through both local rules and the bureaucracy that the state itself produced.

“We have gotten in our own way and created a quagmire that makes it impossible to build the housing we need,” she said.

The builder’s remedy has the potential to supercharge this, though it’s still too early to say how effective it will ultimately be. So far, developers seem to have the upper hand: When cities have challenged the cases, builders have often won. In response, cities have started reluctantly approving taller buildings that used to be unthinkable. In August, Mr. Pustilnikov prevailed in a case against Beverly Hills over the Linden Drive project.

“It is unfortunate that the state has seen fit to take a good deal of local zoning out of the hands of cities,” said Larry Wiener, the city attorney for Beverly Hills, in a statement.

The irony is that the builder’s remedy was rediscovered almost by accident. Even Ms. Wicks, one of California’s most staunchly pro-housing lawmakers, said the Legislature would never be able to pass the law now because of opposition from local governments. Thus, one of California’s most effective laws for building housing was not a product of its housing emergency or political will, but a legislative relic.

“The politics to pass anything resembling builder’s remedy would be way too difficult today,” Ms. Wicks said. “So one of the most powerful tools in combating our housing crisis is a law that passed” three decades ago.

Mr. Pustilnikov wasted no time trying to teach the city a lesson. After the judge ruled in his favor, he threatened to amend the Linden Drive building to make it even taller.

Building Where People Live
A truism of development is that it is harder to build things where people live than where they don’t. In the decades after World War II, California grew to become the most populous state not by constructing tall buildings but by spreading subdivisions over farms and orchards and connecting them with thousands of miles of freeways. Sun Belt cities like Dallas and Phoenix copied that playbook.

The backlash to sprawl came in the 1960s and ’70s, with local growth moratoriums and fights against freeways. As an alternative, environmentalists suggested building more densely in existing cities, what became known as smart growth.

But as much as people might lament paving over a cow pasture, nothing seems to rile them up as much as new construction in their own neighborhood. Over the past 30 years, California’s Legislature has been trying to counteract this hyperlocal opposition. The process has been a zigzagging slog. But the overall trend shows the state trying to wrest power from local governments. The laws the state created play out mostly out of public view through a web of arcane planning processes, the end result of which is a document called a “housing element.”

A housing element is basically a planning report that cities have to file with the state every eight years. In it, they detail, over hundreds of pages of maps and dense bureaucratese, how they plan to permit a certain amount of housing at various levels of affordability, a number that is decided by state and regional governments.

The problem is that the process has historically been a charade. Cities often produced housing elements that positioned future housing in inaccessible areas, and while developers and the state could challenge the plans, usually neither did. Since local officials were beholden to voters who rarely wanted new development, little was built.

Excavating the Builder’s Remedy
About a decade ago, the California Legislature started revving up its housing efforts again by sharpening the existing laws’ teeth. Among those changes were two tweaks that would prove pivotal: Urban areas would now have to plan for much more housing than they had in the past, and it became easier for developers to sue cities that deny their projects.

Those efforts got an unexpected boost on New Year’s Day 2019. That afternoon, Christopher Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, whose social media account is followed closely by developers and their lawyers, published a thread on Twitter. In it, he detailed a little-noticed clause that, in certain instances, could nullify a city’s zoning completely.

“CA housing folks: Why haven’t builders exploited the state law exempting 20%-affordable projects from zoning / plan in cities that don’t accommodate enough?” it began.

What he had suggested was the land use equivalent of plutonium.

Over more than a dozen tweets, Mr. Elmendorf argued that since 1990, California had had a loophole that allowed developers to bypass the local zoning codes in cities whose housing element was deemed noncompliant by the state. In a follow-up paper, he called it the “builder’s remedy,” a nod to a similar mechanism that arose from New Jersey court rulings that have shaped housing policy in that state.

The clause had rarely been used. But, as it happened, the conditions for exploiting it were historically perfect. Cities across the state were about to be hit with increases in housing target numbers so steep that regulators were all but guaranteed to deem their plans noncompliant.

Few cities saw a bigger impact than Beverly Hills: The city’s previous housing element required it to plan for three (yes, three) new housing units. Under the new allocation that would take effect in 2023, it had to plan for more than 3,000.

Beverly Hills did file a plan for more than 3,000 units, but placed most of them in high-traffic areas occupied by retail and office buildings, including the headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Was a developer really going to turn the academy’s building into apartments and condos?

An advocacy group called Californians for Homeownership sued the city, arguing that much of the new housing that Beverly Hills had planned for would never be built. A judge agreed, and the city’s housing element was ruled out of compliance with state regulations.

Even so, many builders were reluctant to bring builder’s remedy cases, worried that those projects would alienate cities that they would likely have to work with in the future.

“Just like any other industry, sometimes you need a few pirates to change the dynamic,” said Dave Rand, a partner at Rand Paster & Nelson in Los Angeles, a land-use firm that represents Leo Pustilnikov.

Mr. Pustilnikov was willing to be that pirate.

Remaking Cities (and Suburbs)
On a recent afternoon I met Mr. Pustilnikov at a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills about a mile from his Linden Drive lot. Mr. Rand, his lawyer, had told me to look for the worst-dressed guy in the room. Sure enough, there I found Mr. Pustilnikov waiting for me in shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt whose collar appeared to have just come out of a tug of war.

Munching bread while waiters wearing ties moved from table to table, Mr. Pustilnikov explained that his specialty were deals with “hair,” by which he means complicated transactions with a lot of risk. Until recently, his public profile came mostly from being the owner of several aging buildings in downtown Los Angeles that are set aside for low-income tenants, many of them exiting homelessness.

As for the builder’s remedy projects he had proposed in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Redondo Beach, he told me that in most cases he didn’t plan to build them himself. Rather, his hope is to get the buildings entitled and sell the land to another builder for a premium. This would allow him to profit from engaging in the sort of pitched battle — in other words, hair — that a more conflict-averse developer might be reluctant to tackle.

Beverly Hills was a particularly enticing target. On paper it is an independent municipality of 32,000 people with its own school district and police department where boundaries are marked by the city’s iconic, shield-shaped signs. But it is surrounded by Los Angeles.

When Mr. Pustilnikov began pursuing the Linden tower, builder’s remedy projects had to set aside 20 percent of their units for below-market-rate tenants. (The percentage has since been lowered by new state legislation.) Paradoxically, building affordable units is more feasible in affluent areas like Beverly Hills because developers can charge much higher rents on the market-rate units.

Beverly Hills has since seen 16 applications for builder’s remedy developments. Residents are appalled. In letters opposing Linden Drive, neighbors said the project would destroy the neighborhood by encouraging other developers to “build huge” and made it feel as if “the walls are caving in, and we have no word.”

“None of us are opposed to affordable housing,” said Kenneth Goldman, president of the Southwest Beverly Hills Homeowners Association. But a building that was almost four times the city’s height limit?

“You don’t have to be a NIMBY to say that’s just so far out of line,” he said.

After Mr. Pustilnikov submitted the Linden Drive project, the City Council unanimously rejected his proposal.

The city was sued — twice, first by Californians for Homeownership and then by Mr. Pustilnikov. The suits were joined, and in August, Judge Curtis A. Kin — who, because this is Southern California, was once a contestant on the reality-TV show “Big Brother” — ruled for Mr. Pustilnikov. Beverly Hills still has a month to appeal the decision, but it would be expensive. To discourage cities from dragging out development fights in court, state law mandates that cities appealing their losses for this type of case post a bond that can easily eclipse $10 million.

The Linden Drive litigation is likely to be a bellwether, Mr. Rand said, prompting other cities to approve builder’s remedy projects outright or at least quickly cut deals with developers.

In the months since Mr. Pustilnikov’s court victory, the Beverly Hills Planning Commission has voted to approve nine builder’s remedy projects, totaling 659 units. That would be more housing than Beverly Hills had built in recent memory.

How to Create a Credible Threat
If California is ever going to dent its housing problem, it will have to figure out how to make it easier to add more housing in urban cores. Sprawl remains the cheapest and most effective way to add a lot of housing in a hurry, and there’s almost no way the nation can solve its housing shortage without building a lot more of it.

But in California and around the country, the highest rents and worst cost burdens are almost always in the job-rich areas that are already developed. Figuring out how to build housing in neighborhoods where building is expensive and difficult, and large blocs of voters reject it, is a puzzle that no U.S. city has fully solved.

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, and Joseph Gyourko, a finance professor at the Wharton School, noted in a recent paper that many of the fast-growing Sun Belt cities — the ones to which people priced out of California tend to relocate — had seen a sharp run-up in housing costs. The reason, the authors concluded, is that their residents are no more enthusiastic about adding density in single-family neighborhoods than are the people of Berkeley or Beverly Hills.

To once again become the nation’s housing pioneer, California will have to develop the political will to reform its urban areas and old suburbs into something denser and easier to navigate without a car. The lesson of the builder’s remedy is that, so far, the most effective way of doing this is to create a credible threat that housing-averse cities can’t ignore.

Last year, the Legislature passed a bill, introduced by Ms. Wicks, that explicitly codified the builder’s remedy in a modified form: Developers could more easily avail themselves of the tactic in exchange for set limits on density. They cannot build anything they want, but the allowable densities are still several times as large as what local zoning rules allow.

The ultimate impact of the builder’s remedy is likely to be measured not just in units that are built by using it, but in the ones built in fear of it. A few years ago, when Santa Monica was working on its housing element, Jesse Zwick, who was running to be a member of the City Council, sat in frustration while his future colleagues voted for a plan that the state ultimately rejected for failing to provide enough units, he said.

Then developers, including Mr. Pustilnikov, came along, and the wealthy beachfront city was blanketed with housing proposals. The city ended up settling with builders, and the effect is likely to be felt long after.

“The fear of builder’s remedy brought along a lot of people whose inclination was to fight everything,” Mr. Zwick said. “They realized it was in our interest to grow and at least be able to have a say in how we do that.”

 

 

Finally finished it and does a diplomatic job of conveying the absolute insanity of California housing politics, but he was too gentle. 

 

Posted

Solving the housing crisis with a 19 story building in....checks notes.....Beverly Hills.  

Sounds to me he did in fact find a loophole to plop down RE that will instantly become valuable because of the premier location.  

  • Hook 'Em 2
Posted
30 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Solving the housing crisis with a 19 story building in....checks notes.....Beverly Hills.  

Sounds to me he did in fact find a loophole to plop down RE that will instantly become valuable because of the premier location.  

I'm sure the units in the building will be more affordable than general Beverly Hills' prices (average home price of $3.5 million). And making more units there can have spillover effects to other areas. 

Posted
3 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

I'm sure the units in the building will be more affordable than general Beverly Hills' prices (average home price of $3.5 million). And making more units there can have spillover effects to other areas. 

It's Beverly Hills.  One of the most expensive places in the country to live.  So units are "more" affordable, so instead of catering to A-list actors and CEO's, we're bringing in the B-listers and those slumming C-suite execs instead?

This is a RE play, not an "affordability" play.  

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Posted
18 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

It's Beverly Hills.  One of the most expensive places in the country to live.  So units are "more" affordable, so instead of catering to A-list actors and CEO's, we're bringing in the B-listers and those slumming C-suite execs instead?

This is a RE play, not an "affordability" play.  

Sure, that is the motivation. This guy isn't striving to solve affordability, but that is really irrelevant. Cheaper housing in Beverly Hills means that individuals that can't afford current Beverly Hills prices will move there, freeing up space in other areas. Increasing supply decreases prices. That's just how it works. His one building obviously isn't a solution for the housing crisis. But it is part of the solution of increasing density and total supply of housing. 

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Posted
57 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Sure, that is the motivation. This guy isn't striving to solve affordability, but that is really irrelevant. Cheaper housing in Beverly Hills means that individuals that can't afford current Beverly Hills prices will move there, freeing up space in other areas. Increasing supply decreases prices. That's just how it works. His one building obviously isn't a solution for the housing crisis. But it is part of the solution of increasing density and total supply of housing. 

Are you really trying to make the case that cheaper housing in BH's is going to create a trickle-down effect into other housing markets?  

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Posted
53 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Are you really trying to make the case that cheaper housing in BH's is going to create a trickle-down effect into other housing markets?  

It unquestionably will by freeing up supply. Obviously, it doesn't move the needle much by itself. But it will help. Again, the premise isn't that this one building solves anything. But increasing supply through denser housing is most definitely a very effective solution to lowering housing prices. 

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Posted
9 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

It unquestionably will by freeing up supply. Obviously, it doesn't move the needle much by itself. But it will help. Again, the premise isn't that this one building solves anything. But increasing supply through denser housing is most definitely a very effective solution to lowering housing prices. 

I'm no finance or real estate expert, but I think this premise is very questionable.  I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that when supply increases, demand will also increase, and the demand for these new units will far outstrip the supply, because who wouldn't love to have a Beverly Hills address in their real estate portfolio?  If the demand is stronger than the supply, the prices aren't dropping, and may actually increase, but then again, I'm just guessing.

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Posted
Just now, Dahobbs said:

It unquestionably will by freeing up supply. Obviously, it doesn't move the needle much by itself. But it will help. Again, the premise isn't that this one building solves anything. But increasing supply through denser housing is most definitely a very effective solution to lowering housing prices. 

So trickle down.....that could "theoretically" free up housing downstream by building in arguably the most expensive piece of RE in the country.....unless they are first-time homebuyers or renters dying to live in a prestigious zip code.  

If the state really wanted to look at solutions to lower housing prices, you start by not building in the most expensive zip code in the state.  

There are three things that make housing affordable or not:  the rate, the amortization period, and the amount financed.  CA is looking to reinstate their "Dream for all" program in '26.  If those that are familiar with the program remember, it was a shared equity solution where the state gave homebuyers up to a 20% DPA.  Upon sale of the house, the state receives 20% of the sale of the house.  WA state experimented with this as well.

You can offer a focused approach with a program like this if you really want to help people, especially teachers, first responders, etc that can never afford to live in the communities they support.  For ex. School districts could offer this as an employment perk for new/existing teachers to shop for homes closer to the schools, knowing they can now put up to 20% down.  The elasticity of their purchase power is now stretched considerably.  

Firefighters, LEO, etc could do the same.  

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Posted
3 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

Solving the housing crisis with a 19 story building in....checks notes.....Beverly Hills.  

Sounds to me he did in fact find a loophole to plop down RE that will instantly become valuable because of the premier location.  

He ain’t building shit.  He’s going to get it entitled and then sell the entitled property.

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Posted
3 minutes ago, 83Horn said:

I'm no finance or real estate expert, but I think this premise is very questionable.  I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that when supply increases, demand will also increase, and the demand for these new units will far outstrip the supply, because who wouldn't love to have a Beverly Hills address in their real estate portfolio?  If the demand is stronger than the supply, the prices aren't dropping, and may actually increase, but then again, I'm just guessing.

100% spot on.  Hence that call out that this is a RE play and has jack shit to do with solving anything.  He found a loophole to build in the nicest part of CA that he can cash out on

1 minute ago, Upgrayedd said:

He ain’t building shit.  He’s going to get it entitled and then sell the entitled property.

Even better.  Sell your loophole, avoid all the aggravation of building/codes/etc. and sail off into the sunset with fatter pockets.  

Posted

We need more housing but we also need to do a better job incentivizing people and families to get in the right housing. 
 

We have too many retirees and empty-nesters occupying houses built for families and working families pushed into rentals and multi-family units. Entire neighborhoods clearly built to have bikes and kids that are deathly quiet cul-de-sacs without a child in them. There needs to be incentives to sell those houses or get families into them somehow. 
 

Things like a luxury property tax that kicks in once a single family home slides under certain occupancy per square foot. Tax incentives for selling to real people and penalties for selling to developers or PE. Additional taxes on rents from single-family houses. 
 

But of course instead we are debating not making retirees pay property tax. Universal Boomer Income.

You want those people to sell houses and go to a condo! 

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Posted

 

21 minutes ago, 83Horn said:

I'm no finance or real estate expert, but I think this premise is very questionable.  I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that when supply increases, demand will also increase, and the demand for these new units will far outstrip the supply, because who wouldn't love to have a Beverly Hills address in their real estate portfolio?  If the demand is stronger than the supply, the prices aren't dropping, and may actually increase, but then again, I'm just guessing.

Demand for housing generally is based upon population. Building more houses is how you address the demand. There may be a local increase in demand as new housing gets completed, but it isn't going to completely offset the negative pressure on prices from increased supply. 

17 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

So trickle down.....that could "theoretically" free up housing downstream by building in arguably the most expensive piece of RE in the country.....unless they are first-time homebuyers or renters dying to live in a prestigious zip code.  

If those first-time homebuyers or renters didn't live in Beverly Hills, they'd have to live somewhere else. Them leaving wherever they currently area, frees up that supply for someone else. It absolutely has a trickle-down effect. 

Quote

 

If the state really wanted to look at solutions to lower housing prices, you start by not building in the most expensive zip code in the state.  

There are three things that make housing affordable or not:  the rate, the amortization period, and the amount financed.  CA is looking to reinstate their "Dream for all" program in '26.  If those that are familiar with the program remember, it was a shared equity solution where the state gave homebuyers up to a 20% DPA.  Upon sale of the house, the state receives 20% of the sale of the house.  WA state experimented with this as well.

You can offer a focused approach with a program like this if you really want to help people, especially teachers, first responders, etc that can never afford to live in the communities they support.  For ex. School districts could offer this as an employment perk for new/existing teachers to shop for homes closer to the schools, knowing they can now put up to 20% down.  The elasticity of their purchase power is now stretched considerably.  

Firefighters, LEO, etc could do the same.  

 

Again, I don't think this guy is trying to solve the housing crisis. And I don't think that is his job. He is trying to make money. But that doesn't mean that him making money will not also have a negative effect on housing prices. I agree that other actions could have a more substantial and direct effect on housing prices. And I agree that the state could and should do other things to incentivize or create more affordable housing. But yes, building higher density housing in more expensive areas can cause negative pricing pressure in surrounding areas. 

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Posted
3 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

It's Beverly Hills.  One of the most expensive places in the country to live.  So units are "more" affordable, so instead of catering to A-list actors and CEO's, we're bringing in the B-listers and those slumming C-suite execs instead?

YARN | Well, doggies, how about that, Granny? | The Beverly Hillbillies  (1962) - S07E05 The Ghost of Clampett Castle | Video gifs by quotes |  4e8952c4 | 紗

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Posted
50 minutes ago, 83Horn said:

I'm no finance or real estate expert, but I think this premise is very questionable.  I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that when supply increases, demand will also increase, and the demand for these new units will far outstrip the supply, because who wouldn't love to have a Beverly Hills address in their real estate portfolio?  If the demand is stronger than the supply, the prices aren't dropping, and may actually increase, but then again, I'm just guessing.

You are wrong. The “induced demand” theory of housing supply has been repeatedly debunked. Supply benefits ultimately outweigh any localized induced demand (Meta study on the subject ). 

 

39 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

If the state really wanted to look at solutions to lower housing prices, you start by not building in the most expensive zip code in the state.  

That’s the first thing you do, because in California the Bay Area and Southern California have stymied housing production for almost 50 years. 

And with regards to the “Dream For All” plan - subsidizing demand just further increases prices. And in any event funding for that program was oversubscribed, like, immediately. 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

That’s the first thing you do, because in California the Bay Area and Southern California have stymied housing production for almost 50 years. 

 

Then you look at revoking or changing the process.  zoning restrictions (including upzoning) and CEQA permitting that can take years.  Two good areas to focus on.  

 

8 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

And with regards to the “Dream For All” plan - subsidizing demand just further increases prices. And in any event funding for that program was oversubscribed, like, immediately. 

It was idiotic how it was rolled out.  They ran out of money in a matter of hours.  This is also because it was free money to anyone/everyone.  As mentioned earlier, tie it to an employee benefit for certain facets of the community you are trying to incentivize.  Maybe start with teachers & first responders.  Maybe not, but it's another way to address access within a landscape that makes it almost impossible to build.  

Posted
7 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

You are wrong. The “induced demand” theory of housing supply has been repeatedly debunked. Supply benefits ultimately outweigh any localized induced demand (Meta study on the subject ). 

 

That’s the first thing you do, because in California the Bay Area and Southern California have stymied housing production for almost 50 years. 

And with regards to the “Dream For All” plan - subsidizing demand just further increases prices. And in any event funding for that program was oversubscribed, like, immediately. 

Yeah, programs to help certain classes of buyers don’t do much to address the issue of prices being too high to begin with. The only way out is to increase supply and encourage efficient use. 
 

It needs to be economically not tenuous to park money in a single family home and then pay the mortgage with rent while treating the house as a long-term investment. It makes houses more expensive, it puts capital into piles of wood and shingles that aren’t making anything real for the economy. Ma and Pa investor need to be looking at index funds and business opportunities, not snapping up bungalows to extract rent. 
 

Obviously some carveouts for things like resort communities with no residents but once a certain number of single-family homes in an are become rental properties, penalties and incentives need to kick in to force sales t real people.  

Posted
8 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Then you look at revoking or changing the process.  zoning restrictions (including upzoning) and CEQA permitting that can take years.  Two good areas to focus on.  

 

It was idiotic how it was rolled out.  They ran out of money in a matter of hours.  This is also because it was free money to anyone/everyone.  As mentioned earlier, tie it to an employee benefit for certain facets of the community you are trying to incentivize.  Maybe start with teachers & first responders.  Maybe not, but it's another way to address access within a landscape that makes it almost impossible to build.  

Why make housing more expensive for everyone to provide a benefit for only some classes of workers? If you’re doing a job in a community, that job is clearly needed by someone and it’s not obvious why those people shouldn’t also be able to afford to live close to work, too. 

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Posted (edited)
7 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Why make housing more expensive for everyone to provide a benefit for only some classes of workers? If you’re doing a job in a community, that job is clearly needed by someone and it’s not obvious why those people shouldn’t also be able to afford to live close to work, too. 

This.  My question upon driving into a nice enough neighborhood in San Diego 20 years ago, and knowing what the home prices were: as we passed a Jiffy Lube, I asked "where in the fuck do THOSE guys live?"  Imagine having an hour commute from your "affordable" shithole apartment well outside of SD just to get to your job at....Jiffy Lube.

We NEED guys who work at Jiffy Lube.  Just like we need people to work at the Ralphs, and the dry cleaner, and the coffee shop in that same shopping center.  Where is affordable housing for them?

That said, I've long thought that schools COULD use some of the land they have to create staff/teacher housing, providing both a compensation/benefit and giving themselves more flexibility and power to hire qualified personnel.  Shit, fancy private schools do it.  That's a tool that any land-rich enterprise could use, on its own.

Edited by Brisketexan
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Posted
15 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Then you look at revoking or changing the process.  zoning restrictions (including upzoning) and CEQA permitting that can take years.  Two good areas to focus on.  

That’s exactly what we are working on! This summer was a huge one for CEQA reform in Sacramento. I actually think project in question in the article was the result of legislation giving the builder’s remedy teeth through CEQA streamlining. 

Posted
1 hour ago, Upgrayedd said:

He ain’t building shit.  He’s going to get it entitled and then sell the entitled property.

But when it gets built the entire thing will be sold unit by unit to Chinese nationals trying to get any wealth they can out of China

Posted
18 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Why make housing more expensive for everyone to provide a benefit for only some classes of workers? If you’re doing a job in a community, that job is clearly needed by someone and it’s not obvious why those people shouldn’t also be able to afford to live close to work, too. 

Pick whoever you want - the point was the original plan had no aperture.  It just vomited out money and ran out in hours with no targeted approach to who received.  Municipalities across the country are crying about a lack of teachers, LEO, etc.  The reasons are simple.  They can't afford to live in the areas they are needed.  If you can't build more houses, then incentivize those that you deem necessary and give them an entry point into the community.

Posted
13 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

That’s exactly what we are working on! This summer was a huge one for CEQA reform in Sacramento. I actually think project in question in the article was the result of legislation giving the builder’s remedy teeth through CEQA streamlining. 

The state has been "working" on these problems for decades now.  And if you read the article, it's a loophole from the 90's.  

Posted
37 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

This.  My question upon driving into a nice enough neighborhood in San Diego 20 years ago, and knowing what the home prices were: as we passed a Jiffy Lube, I asked "where in the fuck do THOSE guys live?"  Imagine having an hour commute from your "affordable" shithole apartment well outside of SD just to get to your job at....Jiffy Lube.

We NEED guys who work at Jiffy Lube.  Just like we need people to work at the Ralphs, and the dry cleaner, and the coffee shop in that same shopping center.  Where is affordable housing for them?

That said, I've long thought that schools COULD use some of the land they have to create staff/teacher housing, providing both a compensation/benefit and giving themselves more flexibility and power to hire qualified personnel.  Shit, fancy private schools do it.  That's a tool that any land-rich enterprise could use, on its own.

Jayton, Texas did this about 50 years ago with tax from oil royalties. My history/aviation teacher was from there. We went by the school, and they had nice single family homes that they provided for the teachers since Jayton is 100 miles from anywhere. I think Guthrie did the same.

CHIEF

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Posted
31 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

The state has been "working" on these problems for decades now.  And if you read the article, it's a loophole from the 90's.  

While I share your pessimism for the Sisyphean task of addressing California’s housing crisis, I note, for the sake of arguing on an internet message board on a slow Friday, that the entire point of the article is about the state’s decision in 2022 to actually begin enforcing housing elements (ie, the builder’s remedy) and subsequent legislation to chip away at CEQA. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, CHIEF said:

Jayton, Texas did this about 50 years ago with tax from oil royalties. My history/aviation teacher was from there. We went by the school, and they had nice single family homes that they provided for the teachers since Jayton is 100 miles from anywhere. I think Guthrie did the same.

CHIEF

There used to be a nice little cafe in Jayton that I would stop at with some frequency a few decades ago.  That town, like so many, has shrunk down to almost nothing now.  Maybe 500 people?

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