A few months ago we were in YIMBY Law achieved a remarkable victory In Rancho Palos Verdes, an affluent city on the coast in Southern California — the city is lobbying the city council to approve an upzoning that would allow 647 homes.
We did this by taking advantage of the democratic process. After discovering that the City Council was considering a housing element that would bow to NIMBY pressure, we sent two letters to the city, reminding it of its legal obligations under state law to approve the upzoning – and that failure to do so could subject the city to a lawsuit. Not only were we within our rights to send those letters, we were also right on merit.
As we wrote in another letter: :
Your options are to honor the efforts of your staff that led to the housing element and subsequent rezoning and an application consistent with those measures, or waste time and open yourself up to a lawsuit from us, undermining your ability to meet the statutory RHNA obligation.
These letters, which we often send in cities, are really a pleasure to send. Thanks to our work and the work of our partners, city councils in California are facing three directions to vote against meeting their housing obligations – either Approving Housing Under SB 9facing builder’s solutionOr A lawsuit under the Housing Accountability Act. All roads lead to new housing. It is delightful.
But NIMBYs in SoCal were less happy. As you may have read San Francisco ChronicleOne of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar that I was practicing law without a license. He said that because I’m not a lawyer (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis”, which only licensed lawyers are allowed to do.
Here is an excerpt from the letter the State Bar sent me (I am omitting the name of the person who filed the complaint, but keeping their typos).
Our office has received a complaint […] Allegation that you are practicing law without a license in California. The complaint alleges that you [and] Yimby Law writes to CA cities threatening legal action and vilifying housing laws and city ordinance laws.
REDACTED INCLUDES [their] A copy of the complaint letter you sent to the City of Rancho Palos Verdes/City [sic] Council on March 17, 2025. Your letter provides legal analysis related to the removal of certain sites from the “Housing Site Inventory.”
To put it mildly, this is absurd. Not only am I not holding myself out as a lawyer, but, As the Institute of Justice explained in its response to the State BarSending such letters is protected under not one but two clauses of the First Amendment – the right of free speech and the right to petition the government.
As part of our work, YIMBY Law sends letters to California cities reminding them of their obligations under state law Housing Accountability Act. Those letters say something different each time, but usually the general gist is: “Hey, we noticed you’re thinking about taking some action that looks like it would violate state law. You shouldn’t do that. And if you do, we can sue you, and if we do we win.” Most of the time, our letters never turn into lawsuits. We send a letter and city officials realize that not only are we right, but the hassle of fighting in court isn’t worth it. So they do the right thing. This is the kind of work we and other YIMBY groups have done since Lawsuit against the East Bay suburb of Lafayette. (You can see the full list of those cases here) Here.) Recently, we are Sue the State of California On the Governor’s executive order banning duplexes in areas affected by the Palisades Fire.
I am confident that the State Bar would agree here with the Institute for Justice, which has cited case after case in which courts have held that such advocacy work is fully protected, regardless of whether the individual is a lawyer, not a lawyer, offering legal analysis, not offering legal analysis, right on the merits, wrong on the merits, fighting for a good cause, or fighting for a bad cause. The First Amendment protects our right to lobby the government, as well as it protects the rights of AARP, the NRA, the American Heart Association, the California Nurses Association, Livable California, the League of California Cities, the group in favor of the thing you love, and the group in favor of the thing you absolutely hate.
It’s important to be really clear about this – not only do the NIMBYs filing this complaint think we’re wrong about housing, but they also don’t think we should be allowed to argue for more housing. They don’t think we even deserve a fair trial. We must all understand that it is not easy to silence one’s political rivals and such complaints, even if they go nowhere, can have a negative impact on activists and common people who want to exercise their rights.
Speaking as an activist, this type of delegitimization is a NIMBY strategy we have to put up with all the time. NIMBYs not only think we’re wrong, but many of them think we don’t even get a chance to express ourselves. There is a consistent undercurrent in a lot of NIMBYism that can’t imagine why anyone would be in favor of more housing and laws that make it easier to build. Something about us breaks their minds. This is disappointing. Democracy only works when we can free conversation with each other. Really the only rule is that you must give reasons for what you believe and you must not exclude anyone else from the discussion.
There are many more examples. The first time my colleague Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, sent an email to a San Francisco supervisor expressing her opinion on public policy, he wrote back, “What’s that area code, where are you from?” The message was – it was not 415 and so it did not count. One of the most common tendencies in the early days of press coverage was for journalists to say – or outright say – that we were being smart about the real-estate industry, as if they couldn’t believe that anyone would actually be in favor of more housing if they weren’t being paid to do so. We’re still called shills sometimes even when we’re not being called one gentrifiers, inhumane, Alt-Right, white supremacistAnd – for some reason I can’t explain – Scientologists. (Yes in Xenu’s backyard, I think.)
This is not just online illegality. It is worryingly common that when we appear at public meetings NIMBYs yell and scream at us while we talk. Laura was once at a public meeting in Cupertino where the NIMBYs in the crowd started shouting “Where are you from? Where are you from?” He began quoting Martin Luther King as saying “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere,” when a woman who would later be elected to the city council ran up and grabbed the microphone from his hand.
NIMBYs in Santa Monica convinced the state Fair Political Practices Committee that the mayor pro tem is to distinguish oneself From votes on housing because he worked for the Housing Action Committee. (If you think this makes sense, ask yourself if a mayor pro tem who also works for a gun control group should recuse himself from voting on a gun control measure? Or, more importantly, if a mayor pro tem who owns property and doesn’t want competition should recuse himself from a zoning vote?)
More recently, a San Rafael planning commission The hearing on the mixed-income housing proposal became so heated that an opponent spit on a commentator who supported it.
In a democracy, even a democracy in crisis like ours, one of the most important things we can do is not spit on each other for having different opinions. This seems like the very minimum and is something we can all agree on, even if we don’t agree on accommodation.
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