Here’s a guest post by Sonja Trauss, Executive Director of YIMBY Law, on the troubling ideas behind the recent complaint to the state bar association.
A few months ago we at YIMBY Law scored a remarkable victory in Rancho Palos Verdes, an affluent city on the coast in Southern California — lobbying the city council to approve an upzoning that would allow 647 homes.
Rancho Palos Verdes (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
We did it by taking advantage of the democratic process. After finding out that the city council was considering a housing element that would have bowed 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 a failure to do so would open the city up to a lawsuit. Not only were we well within our rights to send those letters, we were right on the merits too.
As we wrote in the second letter:
The options in front of you are to respect the efforts of your staff which led to a Housing Element and subsequent rezoning AND an application consistent with those measures, or to waste time and open yourselves to our lawsuit while crippling your ability to meet the statutory RHNA obligation.
These letters, which we often send to cities, are frankly delightful to send. Thanks to our work and the work of our allies, city councils in California tempted to vote against fulfilling their housing obligations are hemmed in from three directions — either approving the housing under SB 9, facing the builder’s remedy, or a lawsuit under the Housing Accountability Act. All roads lead to new housing. It’s delightful.
But NIMBYs in SoCal were less delighted. As you might have read in the San Francisco Chronicle, one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license. They said because I’m not an attorney (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis,” which only licensed attorneys are allowed to do.
Here’s an excerpt of the letter that the state bar sent me (I’m leaving out the name of the person who filed the complaint, but keeping their typos).
Our office has received a complaint [...] alleging that you are practicing law without a license in California. The complaint alleges that you [and] Yimby Law writes letters to CA cities threatening legal action and stating incorrect housing laws and city ordinance laws. REDACTED includes with [their] complaint a copy of a letter you sent to the City of Rancho Palos Verdes/Citty [sic] Council on March 17, 2025. Your letter provides a legal analysis related to removal of certain sites from the “Housing Site Inventory.”
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