Court Ruling Could Upset Low-Rent Housing Plans

In a ruling that could upset plans for low-rent public housing throughout California, the state Supreme Court held Monday that voters must receive the details of such projects before they may be approved in local referendums.

A sharply divided court ruled 4 to 3 that municipal officials must disclose the size and type of a project and the community in which it will be constructed. If several sites are under consideration, those sites must be revealed, the justices said.

The court invalidated a practice followed for nearly four decades in the state in which municipalities, in seeking voter approval, provided only a general description of the project and the number of units to be built.

As a result of Monday’s ruling, an estimated 70,000 units throughout California that have received voter approval, but have not yet been built, will have to go before the voters again with more detail if they are to be constructed, an attorney in the case said.

About 30,000 units have been authorized in the city of Los Angeles but remain unbuilt.

The ruling represented a major victory for a group of Berkeley residents and their backers in a suit against the city contending that voters could not make fair and informed decisions without details of a proposed project.

The city and its supporters argued that it was difficult to provide detail at the early stage of a project and that doing so would encourage opposition to specific projects and allow racial prejudice to play a role in housing referendums.

In the ruling, the high court said that municipal officials retain “reasonably broad discretion” to develop public housing and that they need not pinpoint the exact location of a project. But the state Constitution requires more than a generalized description of a block of units to be built in the future, it said.

“Specifically, (voters) should be told at a minimum the size, household-type (such as housing for elderly or for families) and the structure-type of the project and also the community in which it will be developed,” Justice Stanley Mosk wrote for the majority.

“They also should be told whether there are suitable sites for the project . . . and if so, what in general those sites are,” he said.

In a vigorous dissent, Justice John A. Arguelles, joined by Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas and Justice Allen E. Broussard, said the majority’s ruling represented a “radical departure” from 38 years of governmental interpretation of a constitutional provision requiring voter approval of low-rent public housing projects.

Arguelles listed 10 cities, ranging from Antioch to Stockton, that he said represented only a “sampling” of the cities that over the years successfully submitted referendums in the general terms the court now has invalidated.

Henceforth, he said, cities often will be unable to gain voter approval fast enough to secure already scarce federal low-rent housing funds when they become available.

“The majority opinion will, I fear, not only seriously set back the ongoing development plans of dozens of municipalities . . . but will also make it extremely difficult, and in many cases impossible, for this type of low-rent public housing to be successfully developed in the future . . . ,” said Susan Burnett Luten, attorney for the Berkeley residents who challenged the validity of the referendums.

“There are some 70,000 units that were approved in California under the process that the court struck down,” Luten said. “Under this decision, if any of those municipalities decides to build those units, they will have to go back to the voters with more specific information. . . . Among other things, the public will have to be informed of all the potential sites under consideration in the community.”

Other attorneys in the case were not available for comment Monday.

Local Referendums

Under an amendment to the state Constitution in 1950, local referendums must be held on low-rent housing projects proposed by California municipalities.

In the case before the court, the Berkeley group brought suit challenging a project that had received voter approval in 1977 and 1981 for 500 units to be built at unspecified sites in coming years.

While the legal fight went on, many of those units were constructed, and in its ruling Monday, the court refused to invalidate the Berkeley referendum, concluding it would be “harsh and disorderly” to threaten the existence of an existing project this late in the case.

Nonetheless, the court said, referendums like Berkeley’s that provide only generalized descriptions of a project do not meet constitutional standards and must be struck down.

The amendment passed by the voters 38 years ago “contemplates voter approval of specific housing projects rather than the prospective authority of a municipality to broadly formulate public housing policy,” Mosk wrote.

The primary purpose of the constitutional provision, he noted, was to “promote meaningful voter consideration of both the public costs incurred in the development of public housing and the evolving aesthetic character of local communities.”