Jessica Pilling and her husband, Chris, run Bike Healdsburg, a small “party bicycle” business offering a fun way to explore Healdsburg, California. The husband-and-wife team also operates a patent agency and, up until the COVID-19 pandemic, ran an international student-recruiting service.
The Pilling family
As the couple and their three young children outgrow the duplex where they currently live, Jessica subdivided their lot to build a new family home and an attached accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on the second lot, with a plan to rent their duplex on the housing market.
Under the City’s 1996 “inclusionary housing” program, permission for the Pillings’ building plans required them to either give land to the City for affordable housing purposes or pay a $20,134.75 fee. With little choice, the Pillings paid the fee under protest.
The City contends that new housing worsens housing affordability, necessitating land or money to offset these supposed negative impacts. The City has it completely backward: New residential development increases housing supply, which tends to lower housing prices.
But there’s also a fundamental constitutional defect with the City’s fee: Governments cannot burden homebuilders with costs for problems they do not create. The Supreme Court’s land-use triumvirate in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987), Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), and Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District (2013) established that permit conditions for new construction must be proportional and directly related to its impact. Anything above and beyond is an unconstitutional property taking.
Healdsburg’s requirements amount to an exorbitant ransom for permission to build much-needed homes. The City imposed an unfair burden on Jessica that was unrelated to her building plans and far more than her fair share toward addressing the city’s larger affordable housing problem.
Represented at no charge by Pacific Legal Foundation, Jessica is now fighting back with a federal lawsuit challenging Healdsburg’s unconstitutional permitting condition.
A win will restore her right to build essential housing and further protect the rights of all Americans who simply want to build a home, business, or other project on their own land.
What’s At Stake?
- Governments cannot force homebuilders to pay for problems they do not create. Fees for new construction must be proportional and directly related to the impact of the development.
- The government can’t hold the right to use your property hostage in order to extract exorbitant fees. That’s akin to extortion.
- Inclusionary zoning fees make building more expensive. Making something more expensive does not make it more affordable.
