Articles

I'll be making a couple of radio appearances this weekend to talk about a couple of PLF's cases. First, I'll be discussing our fight to vindicate Edmund's equal protection rights on the Randy Tobler Show at 5:35 AM on Saturday morning. Tune in to find out what the district court did last Friday, and what Edmund's family plans to do next. Next, I'l ...

In 2014 PLF successfully asked a federal court to strike down a San Francisco ordinance that required landlords to pay their tenants the difference between the rent they charged (often low due to rent control policies) and the current market rent for two years if the landlord removed their property from the rental market under California's Ellis Ac ...

A month ago PLF asked the Supreme Court to hear Common Sense Alliance v. San Juan County, a case against an ordinance that unconstitutionally takes portions of shoreline properties as community storm water filters. The issue in the case is whether Supreme Court decisions that limit government power to demand property in return for a permit approval ...

Mobile home park shakedown scheme challenged PLF attorneys filed this complaint this week in Jisser v. City of Palo Alto on behalf of a couple that would like to retire from the business of running a mobile home park but cannot do so unless they pay $8 million to buy our the current residents.  The City says the park contains some of the few affor ...

PLF received seven amicus briefs joining our request that the U.S. Supreme Court grant certiorari in the case, California Building Industry Association v. City of San Jose. As you may recall, PLF's petition asks the Court to review a California Supreme Court decision holding that a city or county can force landowners to dedicate private property to ...

A complaint that a four-year old could file? We filed this complaint in Oakland's mandatory art fee case, Building Industry Association of the Bay Area v. City of Oakland.  The premise is simple -- the City wants to be more like a big important city, a city with some "there" to it, and get from here to there it must have more public art. Taxpaye ...

Today's money-no-object urban planning elite have a long list of things they think no modern city should be without, but many have no money to buy the stuff on their list. And, city residents tend not to support tax increases to pay for many of these priorities, even if they support someone else paying for it. So city bureaucrats turn to other sou ...

This morning the California Supreme Court released its unfavorable decision in California Building Industry Association v. City of San Jose. The issue in this case is whether a city can withhold a development permit for new housing unless the builder ‘donates' some of the new homes at a price below the cost of building the homes. PLF argued that ci ...

. . . are all property interests that a developer must turn over to the City of San Jose as the price of building new housing for city residents. These transfers are called exactions when they must be given in exchange for a permit to use your property. I will be arguing this Wednesday morning to the California Supreme Court that permit exactions m ...