What happens in a lawsuit against the city? The city might have to pay, but this is basically the people paying themselves - tax payers pay the tax payers. If you sue the city and win, the judge orders the city to follow the law, and they still don't, do elected officials go to jail or something?
There are zero consequences for elected officials that knowingly and willfully violate laws that constrain municipal actions.
I've seen enough willfully block affordable housing in violation of law that I've looked several times.
NIMBYs also encourage these sorts of lawsuits, because even if they know they will lose, these projects are 1) so close to not making sense that an affordable housing developer literally can not afford to fight for legal rights, and 2) there's a big fear that fighting the city legally will make all further building attempts by an affordable housing developer even more difficult and likely to fail.
I have zero empathy or sympathy for my NIMBY neighbors that have been displacing so many people in my community after several years of trying to fight for affordable housing. People that are otherwise "nice" behave in the most amoral ways when it comes to excluding people from their neighborhoods. It's been very eye opening for me in a sad way.
It seems reasonable to me that the city pays, and it comes from tax payer money. After all, these tax payers elected those officials, and can choose to recall them.
In other words, if "NIMBYs" are to blame, it's fine if they are the one that need to pay.
The NIMBYs are almost exclusively wealthy homeowners. Not 100% but close to 99%. But in California, the wealthiest homeowners also co-opt the language of the displaced, and take on the mantle of those who can no longer afford rent, even as their actions of exclusion increase their home values and rents in general.
There are many avenues for enforcement, including and up to the state taking over the city's land use powers if they are unable to comply with state law. At that point, California could issue permits to build.
There are a lot of friendlies in the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), but NIMBYism tends to attenuate at higher levels of office since you can't simply move externalities outside your jurisdiction. Citywide officeholders in San Francisco itself tend to be pro-development; it's the district officeholders who have bad incentives.
that's the dark side of democracy really. The city officials and the judges are elected (in California) by a majority of the people and so, by extension, a majority of people oppose the judgement. This probably falls under tyranny of the majority and it's an ongoing problem. This is at least my opinion.
A vanishingly small number of people are informed on local issues enough to elect people that represent their views. And in California at least, local politics is completely toxic and has very nasty people that have been allowed to bully, yell, and spread falsehoods about anybody new to politics.
It kind of reminds me of a much more innocuous version of the French Revolution when it was going off the rails, and the wrong political opinion meant death. Almost nobody voted in elections, because keeping your head down was the best way to keep it attached to your body.
> If you sue the city and win, the judge orders the city to follow the law, and they still don't, do elected officials go to jail or something?
There are various things that might happen; an obvious one here is that, with the city declining to follow its own procedures, it would be prohibited from enforcing them against you. You would then not require a permit to do whatever it was you were trying to do.
> do elected officials go to jail or something?
No. In fact, I doubt there will be any consequence to them. The officials do what they do to please most of their constituents. It is the SF people who want them to behave like that or who don't care about what happened to the housing market. Case in point, SF has a booming tourism industry. People working in this industry simply don't want more houses built for obvious reasons.
Most of the suits in these cases are forcing or fast tracking approvals of housing projects that have a certain level of affordable housing, they’re not for monetary damages. CA has put in place certain triggers for this kind of approval process and can withhold state funding if these requirements are not met but it’s enforcement is stretched thin.
