By Rag Staff
For those San Diegans resisting City Hall’s housing policies, 2026 is off to a good start with two recent major court wins in the fight for sustainable development. Everett Delano, the lawyer who scored one of them, will be the guest speaker at the San Diego Community Coalition’s third “Town Hall With A Newsmaker” forum on Saturday, January 17, at 10:30 a.m. at the La Jolla-Riford Library, 7555 Draper Ave.
The forum is titled “What Communities Need to Know About Land Use Court Battles,” and is free and open to the public. The event is co-hosted by Neighbors for a Better San Diego.
Delano has a distinguished record of representing neighborhood groups seeking to block environmentally destructive development. His latest win came December 31 when the California Supreme Court denied Mayor Todd Gloria’s effort to override the 30-foot height limit in the Midway/Pacific Highway district.
That decision followed a December 18 ruling against Chalcifica, a notorious 136-unit complex planned for Pacific Beach. Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal ordered the City to stop issuing permits for the project until a more comprehensive impact analysis is performed.
Suing the city over land use issues is a gargantuan undertaking. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the amount of time spent on gathering information is staggering.
But in a city where elected officials routinely deceive their constituents, and where the mayor openly embraces the building industry, the courts have become the last resort for communities threatened by predatory development.
The lawsuit that prevailed at the state Supreme Court was brought by Save Our Access. The group argued that successful ballot initiatives to raise the height limit were based on deliberately inadequate environmental reviews.
“From the onset, the city did not tell the voters the truth about the project and failed to comply with CEQA,” said former Councilmember Donna Frye, who supported the suit. “It is heartening to see some justice for the public, especially given the city’s ongoing public process failures.”
The suit to block Chalcifica was organized by Neighbors for a Better Pacific Beach. The group was represented by Josh Chatten-Brown, a land use and environmental attorney who has successfully argued cases before the California Courts of Appeal and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.
Chalcifica has been one of the zombie Bonus ADU projects that infamous developer Christian Spicer pushed into the development pipeline before the City finally cracked down on Bonus ADU abuses.
Merv Thompson of Neighbors for a Better Pacific Beach believes their lawsuit has struck at the heart of the City’s “build anything anywhere” approach to growth
“Winning a preliminary injunction in our case highlighted the City’s overreach of applying ministerial processing to all ADU bonus applications and where discretionary principles are apparent,” Thompson said.
“Together with the rollback of the bonus density program, I expect future challenges based on this principle even in grand fathered projects. This would especially include the City’s admissions that it ministerially approved ADUs in the most dangerous fire zones without the safeguards it later agreed to impose.”
The San Diego Community Coalition includes 80 neighborhood leaders from 28 communities across the city. It was launched last April to address two intersecting issues: overbuilding incompatible housing projects in residential neighborhoods and City Hall’s flagrant disrespect for constituents and communities.
Along with its Town Hall series, the Coalition helps mobilize the public by publishing “This Week at City Hall,” a regular bulletin that lists City Council and Planning Commission meetings, identifies high-impact agenda items, and provides logistics of how to attend and submit comments.
To join the Coalition list, send an email to OBRagBlog@gmail.com with “Coalition Roster” in the subject line.
I believe Everett Delano should receive a medal for saving San Diego’s 30-foot height limit!
Don’t forget Save Our Access. Thanks to everyone involved.
Also don’t forget the group that fought Measure E without any real money and brought its passage almost to a standstill — Keep the Coast 30.
Corporate developers are getting free legal representation at the taxpayer’s expense. Legislation should be introduced and adopted that forces corporate developers to meet all the necessary legal requirements, including CEQUA, at the time of submission of any proposal to build anything. It should not be incumbent on the City to defend egregiously illegal or unlawful corporate development proposals at the expense of our tax money. Especially when these predatory proposals skirt existing laws, insult our intelligence, bloat budgets and cause massive deficits, all-the-while drawing the ire of the communities they are ruining forever.
The City Attorney, the Mayor and the City Council deliberately obfuscate the staggering amount of legal costs incurred by the taxpayers by failing to transparently itemize legal costs incurred by City Hall on a case by case basis. The only budgetary accounting for legal staffing is done by allocating an annual “lump sum” each year to “defend the City” when in fact the City is covering the legal costs for defending Corporate Greed.