A coalition of North Beach businesses and community groups has filed suit to block the new rules that in effect end the North Beach Special Use District and allow more large-scale businesses in the historic area.
The suit, filed in December, argues that the city needed to do an environmental review of the new zoning rules before implementing such sweeping changes.
Instead, city planners ruled that the zoning changes didn’t amount to “a project” and thus needed no review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
CEQA has become a punching bag for developers and Yimbys, blamed for pretty much everything from the housing crisis to the delays in high-speed rail. State legislation has limited the use of the landmark environmental law to question new housing and its impact on the environment.
But the rezoning in North Beach has nothing to do with housing. It’s all about the size and type of business that’s allowed in the area.
For years, the special zoning has protected small, neighborhood serving businesses by limiting the size of storefronts and preventing two or three commercial units to be merged to create larger spaces for bigger stores, including possibly chain stores. The zoning has also prevents retail and other uses from being replaced by more restaurants and bars, preserving a mix of uses and keeping North Beach from becoming nothing but a tourist destination that doesn’t serve the residents.
Sup. Danny Sauter, who sponsored the new zoning, said it was necessary for North Beach to recover from the pandemic. I walk around North Beach enough to know that it’s far from collapsing. In fact, opponents of the new zoning say “North Beach doesn’t need fixing.”
The lawsuit hinges on a key question: Is the rezoning a “project” under the meaning of CEQA?
The lawsuit, filed by land-use lawyer Richard Drury, states:
A decision by a public agency to eliminate a zoning district entirely and expand allowable uses and increase use size limits in certain zoning districts is a “project” and a discretionary action that is not exempt from CEQA.
The law is, of course, complicated, but the controlling case in California according to the lawsuit, involves a group of medical cannabis dispensaries suing San Diego for a zoning law that limited where the outlets could go.
In that case, Union of Medical Marijuana Patients v. San Diego, the plaintiffs argued that the restrictive ordinance could impact the environment because
1) restrictions on the siting of dispensaries would require “thousands of patients to drive across the City” to obtain medical marijuana; (2) the City might prosecute and close existing, unpermitted marijuana dispensaries, causing medical marijuana users to engage in the “inherently agricultural practice” of growing their own marijuana; and (3) “the unique development impacts associated with [dispensaries][ would be] shifted to certain areas of the City and intensified due to the limit on the total number of [dispensaries].
The court didn’t address those questions; instead, the issue at hand was the definition of “project.” And here, the state Supreme Court was clear:
We conclude the City erred in determining that the adoption of the Ordinance was not a project. Prior to the Ordinance, no medical marijuana dispensaries were legally permitted to operate in the City. The Ordinance therefore amended the City’s zoning regulations to permit the establishment of a sizable number of retail businesses of an entirely new type. Although inconsistency with prior permissible land uses is not necessary for an activity to constitute a project establishment of these new businesses is capable of causing indirect physical changes in the environment.
That, the plaintiffs will argue, is exactly what is going to happen in North Beach.
If the lawsuit succeeds, the city will have to go back and do a full CEQA review of the new zoning. That could potentially set a precedent for the much larger zoning rules that encompass Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Rich Family Zoning Plan.
