A Victory for Housing: NIMBYs in Pacifica Can’t Fight Homes with Tax Dollars

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.

To move this case forward, the NIMBYs manipulated science and the law wherever possible. Their initial suit relied on the California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA was put in place to improve the environment but for years it’s been abused to preserve the state’s suburban status quo. At trial, the NIMBYs won, in part because of an expert geologist’s report that saw its author publicly reprimanded and fined by state regulators for using misleading and erroneous information. No party chose to appeal that part of the ruling but NIMBYs weren’t content with obstructing new housing projects. Their next tactic was to abuse the Private Attorney General Doctrine, which allows the payment of attorneys' fees to plaintiffs who vindicate important public policies and confer benefits on the public.The lower court agreed with their twisted logic, but the NIMBYs lost on appeal.

For that appeal, YIMBY Law submitted an amicus brief. As we laid out in detail and the Court discussed, California’s legislature has spent years working on the problem of litigation weaponized to kill housing projects. AB 1663 was amended as a response to CEQA overreach; it created a new way for developers to challenge bad CEQA suits and limit attorneys fees by requiring courts to examine if: “a significant benefit, whether pecuniary or nonpecuniary, has been conferred on the general public or a large class of persons.” § CCP 1021.5.

In what appeared to be a crude joke but was actually a legal argument, the litigants argued that wasting time and resources to keep rents high was just such a significant benefit. They believed their work for the public was so beneficial that they should be paid more than their actual legal fees, including a multiplier for working in the public interest.

While the Court found that enforcing environmental law could be a legitimate public benefit, it also noted the legislative history of the law, and the legislature’s growing interest in stopping exactly these kinds of lawsuits. The court was not willing to overturn every decision about the housing itself, but it did find that Pacifica was acting reasonably enough for approving the housing that it should not be punished with a future fine. After all, the project received unanimous support at the Planning Commission, and Pacifica was worryingly behind its RHNA target, having permitted less than 25% of the total by half way through the cycle. Considering that the prior applicant for this site applied for development in 2002 and gave up after their application was not deemed complete until 2015, it was reasonable for the city to move on a reasonable timeline for this project.

In the end, the appellate court’s ruling sent a clear message: CEQA and the Private Attorney General Doctrine are not meant to be blunt instruments for stalling cities from their lawful duty to permit housing. They exist to protect the public from real environmental harm, not to subsidize obstructionists who see housing scarcity as a goal. The court drew a line between legitimate environmental enforcement and litigation designed to make building so painful that nothing gets built at all.

That line matters. For decades, California has allowed a small, well-resourced minority to hijack laws written for the common good and turn them against the very communities those laws were meant to serve. Pacifica’s modest eight-unit project was not defeated by environmental reality but by procedural gamesmanship that tried to profit off of delay. The California Legislature has been steadily closing those loopholes, and this decision shows that the courts are beginning to follow suit.

Pacifica still needs far more housing, and this single project will not close its RHNA gap or solve its affordability crisis. But the ruling protects cities that approve homes in good faith from being punished for doing so. In doing so, the court affirmed that enabling housing production is itself a public benefit.