Woodside’s battle over affordable housing is exactly why we need comprehensive reform
/After years of battle and several violations of housing law (remember when it claimed to be a mountain lion habitat?) the city of Woodside, California has seen fit to approve four units of housing. There is no greater proof that local officials cannot be given discretion over these decisions. The project was modest, safe, and legally compliant, but still took years of effort, four YIMBY Law letters, and legal representation to get off the ground. Along the way it faced illegal obstruction, including from the local government itself.
The development at 10 Still Creek Road is composed of a single family residence and three smaller units. The applicants, a married couple, want one unit for themselves, another for a family member, and the other two reserved for very-low income workers within the town. The proposal spent years being bounced around between different levels of administration before finally being denied by the Planning Commission in November of 2025. This denial was illegal on several counts, and would take another six months before finally being approved by the City Council in 2026.
Without intervention from YIMBY Law, Peninsula for Everyone, and the attorney the applicants had to hire at their own expense, the illegal denial would have forced them into suing the city. This is despite numerous housing laws that exist to prevent exactly this from happening. As a General Plan and Zoning compliant project with affordable units, state law grants it many explicit protections:
The Housing Accountability Act mandates approval if a project is needlessly delayed for more than five hearings. Woodside went through years of hearings, totalling seven by the end of the farce.
Woodside has a statutory RHNA requirement to permit new housing, bolstered by specific programs in its Housing Element
Opponents of affordability repeatedly brought false claims of environmental unsuitability, despite a categorical CEQA exemption and a project design that exceeds safety requirements.
The Planning Commission attempted to apply illegal, non-objective standards to the project to obstruct it.
The Woodside Housing Element itself explicitly contained program 3.8 to encourage ADU and JADU construction, which city officials attempted to ignore.
While a few neighbors did participate in this obstruction campaign, the most vocal voice in opposition was a neighbor, HOA board member, and member of the city’s planning commission. He refused to recuse himself from any votes on the project, and spoke at length on the destruction that would be wrought if the people who worked in Woodside could afford to live there.
To defend his stance against affordability, he quoted the Man in the Arena Speech from Teddy Roosevelt. Have a gander:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
FOUR UNITS! He said this, encouraging Woodside to break the law and decertify its housing element, over FOUR UNITS of housing! Here we see the problem: NIMBYs raise concerns that are not serious and can never be satisfied. Compromising with them is impossible, because the only community they will accept is a smoking crater. Their vision of the world involves no one ever being born or moving without their permission. It is unconscionable and illegal under California law.
Luckily, the law carried the day. A family was finally able to move forward without taking the extra years and expense of suing the city. But their victory didn’t come because the city’s leaders changed their minds. Rather, it was that they were certain they would lose in court. Where sense, practicality, and the town’s own Housing Element commitments weren’t enough, the law forced their hands.