This summer, San Diego municipal leaders were forced to allow more dense housing along transit lines to comply with a new state law.
Now a court may decide to rid even more barriers to housing density after pro-housing organizations sued, alleging that cities disqualified too many urban parcels in their maps, now subject to state law.
Lawsuits are piling up. The organizations sued the city and the San Diego Association of Governments, which produced new maps this summer under California’s transit-density Senate Bill 79 law that took effect July 1.
But San Diego and SANDAG aren’t the sole targets in testing how strictly cities statewide must apply SB 79. San Diego suburb Oceanside came under a litigation microscope in a Sept. 11 lawsuit. San Francisco and a Los Angeles suburb also have been sued.
A central theme is that the cities aren’t following the law and could expand density opportunities even more to address the state’s need for more housing.
Most of the lawsuits aren’t complicated. They hinge on how narrowly or broadly a walkway is defined under the law, and how you count train frequency at stations.
Passing such ordinances is difficult enough in California and elsewhere in the country. Implementing them frequently means fighting over what the exact verbiage in the law conveys.
Interpreting laws
Lawsuits fly in both directions. Local governments and neighborhood groups push narrow interpretations because they believe the law goes too far, while pro-housing groups sue because they believe it hasn’t gone far enough.
Florida’s Live Local Act has followed the same arc. Passed in 2023, it has been amended three times since – in 2024, 2025, and again this year – specifically to clarify vague language and close loopholes local governments used to stall projects.
It has also drawn litigation from both sides. Counties have sued the state arguing the law strips local zoning control, while developers have sued cities for rejecting qualifying projects outright.
California is now seeing the same dynamic play out with SB 79. Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened cities with legal action if they didn’t comply with the law. But pro-housing groups have taken the lead.
“We’re suing on every violation,” Matt Gelfand, supervising counsel for Californians for Homeownership, one of the groups behind the wave of suits, told HousingWire TBD.
What counts as a walkway
That approach starts with defining a walkable route to a transit stop under SB 79. The pro-housing groups sued Oceanside for excluding a parcel directly adjacent to a nearby station because of a sidewalk gap.
The lawsuit argues that the city’s exclusion of the parcel violates the law’s exemption provision. SB 79, the suit contends, only lets cities exempt a site if there’s truly no walkable route within a mile.
The filing follows a nearly identical lawsuit filed against San Diego last month. The city had said it would exempt a property with any gap in sidewalk coverage near a station, even a small one.
A missing stretch of sidewalk shouldn’t disqualify a parcel when walkable access to transit is evident, according to the suit. The central example is a lot just 375 feet from a trolley station that was cut from the map because reaching it means crossing about 100 feet of a paved, multi-use alley with no formal sidewalk. That station is plainly visible from the property.
The city also published multiple maps with conflicting designations of which parcels were exempt, the suit says. It claims San Diego separately carved out far more land under a wildfire-risk exception than the state’s fire-hazard maps support.
What counts as transit train traffic
Foot traffic gives way to transit train traffic in the other half of Oceanside’s lawsuit. The city classified its transit center at a lower tier, justifying a delay of the densest rules there.
It offered no evidence that the surrounding area meets the conditions required for that delay. The classification also raises the same question at the heart of the separate SANDAG suit: how to count trains at a station each day.
State guidance says an agency must add up every rail line serving a station combined. SANDAG instead counted each line separately, according to the lawsuit.
That miscalculation kept two North County stations from qualifying for denser rezoning tiers, the suit says. One station clears the 48-train-per-day threshold for a mid-tier radius.
The other clears an even higher bar. Served by four rail lines totaling roughly 130 trains a day, it should qualify for the largest rezoning radius under the 72-train threshold.
SANDAG’s map reflected neither station’s true frequency.
Two other cities, two other theories
The same plaintiffs sued San Francisco and Montebello in the same window, using different legal theories. The San Francisco suit is the only one YIMBY Law joined as co-plaintiff alongside the two housing groups.
San Francisco’s suit is the most legally tangled of the five. It argues the city invented three ‘industrial employment hubs’ – including areas where housing is still allowed – to dodge SB 79’s density rules. It then walled off that density from the state’s separate density bonus law.
Montebello’s case is the most straightforward of the five. The suit alleges the city violated SB 79 when its city council passed a moratorium on SB 79 projects in part of town. It also alleges the ban violated a separate state law that bars housing moratoriums and requires cities to process applications on time.
The plaintiffs want the court to force Montebello to rescind the moratorium or bar the city from enforcing it.
Why lawsuits, not state enforcement
California cities and counties haven’t sued the state over SB 79 as they have with other housing reforms. They kept losing in court.
Instead, cities have shifted strategy toward administrative resistance and delay. Los Angeles, for example, passed an ordinance that takes advantage of a provision permitting delay of most upzoning requirements until 2030.
Californians for Homeownership, the California Housing Defense Fund and YIMBY Law tend to operate in unison on lawsuits against cities. The California Association of Realtors created Californians for Homeownership in 2017 to fight non-compliant, anti-housing local governments.
This trio has fought cities before. A major case involved a 2023 ruling against La Cañada Flintridge over self-certifying a housing plan under the state’s housing element laws. Californians for Homeownership won that round.
That ruling led to a second lawsuit from the California Housing Defense Fund with help from YIMBY Law. When creating the housing plan, the city had denied a multifamily project proposed under the state’s builder’s remedy law. The city settled rather than fight.
The trio is taking a similar approach statewide on SB 79.
“We’re collectively ensuring that every violation of the law matures into litigation – be that by one of our organizations, two of our organizations, or all three organizations,” Gelfand said.
They are choosing battles differently on SB 79 violations. Litigation isn’t the first course.
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel sometimes with violations of the California housing law,” Gelfand said. “But in this particular battle, we’re going to cities and offering an opportunity to talk to us and delay litigation.”
He said they have reached agreements with Beverly Hills, Pasadena and Burlingame in the San Francisco area. They were rebuffed in places they sued.
