A ruling at the tail end of 2025 brought with it a rebuke of the few things NIMBYs hold dear: their money and their anti-housing philosophy. 

In 2020, the small coastal city of Pacifica, California approved eight units of housing, and opponents spent five years fighting to kill the projects. They lost, but they didn’t stop there: the next step was to charge the city $1.2 million in legal fees on the basis that stalling new housing was a service to the public. Thanks in part to YIMBY Law, they lost that argument, too, and will not be rewarded for their years-long effort to block new homes.

YIMBY Law has created a new report that provides a powerful legal tool for challenging exclusionary zoning in the Keystone State. The report, The Pennsylvania Fair Share Doctrine: Excluding multi-family housing developments is already illegal in many Pennsylvania cities, details a decades-old legal principle that requires municipalities to provide their “fair share” of housing, particularly multi-family homes.

On August 6, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) abruptly withdrew from two major civil rights enforcement actions in Chicago. The cases concerned housing discrimination, and another addressed environmental racism from the siting of a metal shredding facility on the South Side. Both cases were nearing resolution after years of work from local and federal officials, and in both cases HUD had already determined that Chicago had engaged in unlawful discrimination. The administration justified this withdrawal, saying it would focus on “real concerns,” signaling that HUD’s own finding of racism in land use practices is not a concern for the current leadership.

This decision marks a serious setback for civil rights enforcement in Chicago and across the nation.