Church claims San Diego is blocking affordable housing project

SAN DIEGO (CN) — A San Diego church trying to build an apartment complex under an affordable housing law passed in the California legislature says that the city is stonewalling them over environmental concerns.

The Free Sacred Trinity Church asked a San Diego Superior Court on Thursday to clarify the affordable housing law and help fast-track a construction project. At issue, the church says, is the city’s refusal to permit its project under the Affordable Housing on Faith and Higher Education Lands Act of 2023, also known as Senate Bill 4.

Attorney Brian McPherson, of LiMandri & Jonna, argued that the city is denying the church the ability to build the affordable housing project based on an incorrect interpretation of the law.

“We went again and again, back and forth regarding this pure question of law,” McPherson said. “Does Senate Bill 4 take away some of the city’s discretionary ability to approve or disapprove projects and make them go through this very long discretionary process?”

Their efforts with the city seemed futile at this point, he told the court.

“We could go on and spend several hundred thousand dollars, or perhaps more than a million, to create thousands and thousands of pages of records applying to many small narrow issues that were not raised by the city in this process, and we would come back to the same position we are in now,” McPherson said. “We would come back to the place where ‘Senate Bill 4 does not apply to you because we read it this way.’”

In its petition, the Free Sacred Trinity Church says it originally planned to build between 600 and 750 affordable housing units in a vacant lot at the end of a short, dead-end street off of Interstate 8 in the city’s Mission Valley neighborhood.

The law is meant to streamline the process for religious and educational institutions to build affordable housing projects on land they owned before 2024. It allows the project to bypass some local discretionary reviews as well as some of the more burdensome requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act, so long as they meet certain requirements.

But the city has denied the project because of the steep hillsides of the valley and because of the ecologically sensitive Diegan coastal sage scrub present in the property parcel.

Deputy City Attorney Jenny Goodman said that Senate Bill 4 did not preempt CEQA, but rather provided some exemptions.

“Counsel seems to misconstrue preemption through exemption, and I think it’s an important distinction,” she said. “If, in the future, petitioner submits a new application where they’re doing a project outside of the open space easement and can address the issues of being in a high fire safety hazard zone and other environmental issues, then the city can provide that ministerial approval if it qualifies. At this point, we’re putting the cart before the horse.”

The dialog between the church and the city is meant to resolve these issues before the city can approve them, Goodman said.

“We are a pro-housing designated municipality, but you can’t just put affordable housing anywhere,” she said. “It has to be properly sited.”

But McPherson argued that there’s no place on the property that does not have sensitive habitat on it. Any proposal would be rejected by the city, he said.

Furthermore, the city’s requirement for a new application just amounts to spending more time and money for desperately needed affordable housing, he said.

“This is why laws were passed like this in the first place," McPherson said.

According to court records, Free Sacred Trinity Church submitted a proposal in May of 2024 that included 360 affordable housing units built in three different buildings, which the city flagged for different violations. In July of that year, the church submitted a different proposal that included blueprints for a 150-unit building, which was again flagged.

Superior Court Judge Wendy Behan tentatively ruled Thursday that she was concerned whether either of the proposals submitted in May or July constituted a formal application for the project.

“The court cannot order respondent to ministerially approve a project that has not been rejected, or to approve a project that was never contained in a qualifying application,” she wrote.

Also, both proposals were substantially different and did not appear complete under the requirements for Senate Bill 4, she wrote.

“In any event, while petitioner is generally correct that there is not necessarily a ‘format’ that an application must take or be submitted through, it is logically imperative that the submission to the city contains all information required before the city’s duty to issue ministerial approval is triggered,” Behan wrote.

Behan told attorneys that she was not inclined to change her position.

San Diego County reports that there are about 7,000 affordable housing units available with about 3,000 planned or under construction, according to an affordable housing unit dashboard the county launched on Thursday.