Los Angeles NIMBY Fight Makes NYC Look Like Housing Heaven

For all the complaining I do about how New York politicians screw real estate and the city’s housing market, it could be worse.

It could be like Los Angeles.

In L.A., residents living near the Woodland Hills Country Club are treating a 398-home plan like the Angel of Death sweeping through to claim their firstborn sons. The level of community outrage at the idea of welcoming a few hundred renters to a single-family neighborhood of 80,000 residents is obscene.

The Woodland Hills project proposed by Arrimus Capital.

Fortunately, 380 miles north in Sacramento, the state Legislature had already reacted to the damage that not-in-my-back-yard opposition to housing was doing to the state, passing several laws to neuter it.

Those laws are now being tested across the state. The apartment and townhome project slated for part of the country club’s golf course will tell us whether the new laws or the NIMBYs are winning.

Sacramento versus Albany

Without a doubt, California’s state lawmakers are better on housing than New York’s. Much of the credit goes to a state senator named Scott Wiener, who rallied his colleagues to do something about their state’s absurdly expensive housing.

Among the measures they passed were bills to strip localities of their power to block much-needed projects. When Gov. Kathy Hochul tried the same thing in New York, she had to back down two months later. That was three years ago, and she has yet to try again.

New York has one of the more powerful governorships in the country. It’s quite amazing that a rank-and-file state senator in California pulled off a feat that a New York governor could not. While Golden State legislators acted in the best interests of the state, their Empire State counterparts clung to the failed regime of “local control.”

Newport Beach-based developer Arrimus Capital designed the Woodland Hills project to check the boxes laid out by the new laws, notably AB 2011, and avoid the obstacles that have choked off California’s housing supply. But irate local residents pressured their local council member, Bob Blumenfield, to support their argument that the project did not qualify.

When the local planning board agreed, Blumenfield gleefully announced, “Great news!”

“I tried many different ways to secure a discretionary process — not to stop any development, but to make sure that the project would not endanger the health and safety of our community,” Blumenfield wrote, helpfully using an em dash to separate the truthful part of his sentence from the BS.

Every last Californian knows full well that a “discretionary process” in their state is the equivalent of stopping the development.

Feline fraud

Blumenfield and his NIMBY constituents have thrown the kitchen sink at the project, starting with a claim that it would make it impossible for them to escape a wildfire. They said chemicals used on the fairways would make housing unsafe. Even flooding was brought up, despite L.A.’s famously dry climate.

Their most laughable objection was that the links must be preserved as habitat for mountain lions because it’s the only local green space. The rest was sacrificed for their own single-family homes.

When the developer found a study showing that the big cats tended to avoid the golf course, the NIMBYs claimed that “avoid” meant something else. Then they asked locals to report bat sightings, in case flying mammals could do the trick.

Make no mistake: These are not animal lovers, they are housing haters. And not just apartments — in 1988, locals defeated a proposal for 120 single-family homes along the same golf course.

Pro-housing folks in Southern California are mocking the notion that much-needed new homes should be blocked for the sake of golfing mountain lions. But this is a real fight with real consequences.

The good news is that the developer is not backing down.

“The city has left us with no choice but to file a lawsuit to enforce the law,” a representative of the developer told the L.A. Times. “When the city loses in court, it will be required to approve the project and pay millions of dollars in fines.”

It’s too bad that the fines won’t come out of the pocket of Blumenfield, who is risking the city’s money for the sake of his own re-election.