INVESTIGATIVE PERSPECTIVE - Drive through the beautiful community of Sherwood Forest in Northridge, and it is easy to understand what generations of zoning and planning laws were intended to protect.
The neighborhood is known for its large residential lots, mature trees, distinctive homes and low-density character. People bought homes there with an understanding of what could ordinarily be built around them.
The zoning map meant something.
Or at least it used to.
Over the past several years, Sacramento has rewritten the rules governing what can happen on residential property throughout California—all under the banner of addressing California’s housing affordability crisis.
The theory has been repeated so often that it has almost become an article of faith: California has a housing shortage. Build more housing—at virtually any price point—and increased supply will eventually make housing more affordable.
But that premise was never equally true everywhere.
Many communities did not have a shortage of housing. They had vacant units. What they had was a shortage of housing people could afford.
That is the simple, plain truth.
A vacant apartment that costs more than a family can pay does not solve an affordability crisis. Neither does a newly constructed home priced beyond the reach of the people the legislation was supposedly intended to help.
Yet Sacramento’s prescription has largely been the same:
Build more.
But instead of requiring the extraordinary development rights it created to produce affordable housing, Sacramento built law upon law around the theory that additional supply would eventually deliver affordability.
First came SB 9.
Then SB 684.
Then SB 1123.
And then SB 1211 entered the mix, expanding what could be accomplished through accessory dwelling units and, as Sherwood Forest demonstrates, what can happen when these laws operate together.
These are separate statewide housing laws. But layer them onto California’s existing planning system—and sometimes onto the same property—and something much larger begins to emerge.
For qualifying projects, local zoning and subdivision authority can be sharply constrained. Discretionary approval can become ministerial approval. The traditional public hearing can disappear. Ordinary project-level CEQA review can disappear with it.
Yet the affordable housing requirement somehow never arrives.
What began as legislation purportedly aimed at California’s housing affordability crisis has accumulated into something resembling an unsightly carbuncle on California housing law—one statute growing upon another, granting additional development rights or removing another layer of traditional local control, all while relying on the theory that simply building more housing will ultimately make housing affordable.
But a theory is not a statutory requirement.
And nowhere is that distinction easier to see than when you consider what these laws can actually permit.
In some circumstances, the progression reaches as far as streamlined subdivision and development of up to 10 residential units.
10.
Yes, you are reading that correctly.
It is not an ocular hallucination.
Imagine your own little piece of heaven: your 1,500- or 2,000-square-foot home on a quiet residential street, surrounded by other homes much like yours.
Then one day, the house next door is sold.
It is torn down.
And in its place comes a development of as many as 10 residential units—on a qualifying property, processed under state law without the traditional discretionary public hearing and without ordinary project-level CEQA review.
Now riddle me this:
Where is the provision requiring even one of those 10 units to be affordable housing?
There isn’t a general statewide requirement in SB 684 or SB 1123 requiring even one of those units to be deed-restricted affordable simply because the project receives this streamlined treatment.
So what is this really about?
At some point, incompetence becomes an inadequate explanation.
Could the Legislature really be this inept?
Or is it time to ask whether increasing housing supply—at virtually any market price—was the objective all along?
To understand how we got here, follow the legislation.
SB 9: The Single-Family Experiment
Signed into law in 2021, SB 9 fundamentally changed what could happen on qualifying single-family residential property.
It allows a qualifying property to accommodate a two-unit residential development and potentially permits a parcel to be divided through an urban lot split.
Qualifying approvals are ministerial.
That word matters.
This is not the traditional land-use process in which a decision-maker hears from an applicant, listens to neighbors, considers competing concerns and decides whether a project should be approved.
If an SB 9 project satisfies the applicable statutory and objective requirements, local discretion is sharply constrained.
The neighbors don’t get a traditional discretionary hearing simply because they believe the development is incompatible with their street.
SB 9 does contain what appears to be an important protection against speculation.
For an urban lot split, the applicant must sign an affidavit stating an intention to occupy one of the housing units as a principal residence for at least three years following approval.
At first glance, that sounds reassuring.
Then I went looking for the other half of the requirement.
Who checks?
Where is the statewide requirement for annual proof of residency?
Where is the statutory monitoring system verifying that the applicant actually remains there?
California requires local governments to report SB 9 urban-lot-split applications. But the statute does not establish a comparable statewide system for tracking whether applicants actually fulfill that three-year representation.
So if the safeguard against speculation is an applicant’s stated intention to remain for three years, but there is no comparable statewide mechanism for tracking whether that intention becomes reality, how much of a safeguard is it?
And SB 9 was only the beginning.
Then Sacramento Went Further
SB 684, authored by Senator Anna Caballero and signed in 2023, created a ministerial subdivision pathway for qualifying projects of 10 or fewer residential units.
SB 1123, also authored by Caballero, expanded that small-lot framework to qualifying vacant property zoned for single-family residential use.
SB 1211 added another layer by expanding California’s ADU provisions, which can operate alongside other state housing laws.
Different statutes. Different mechanisms.
But the direction is unmistakable.
SB 9 changes what can happen on qualifying single-family property.
SB 684 creates the small-lot subdivision pathway.
SB 1123 extends that framework into qualifying vacant single-family-zoned land.
SB 1211 expands ADU development rights.
And this isn’t theoretical anymore.
It has arrived in Sherwood Forest.
Welcome to Sherwood Forest
At 17545 and 17531 Parthenia Street, residents found themselves confronting an SB 1123 development in a neighborhood where traditional planning rules would have produced a very different result.
We don’t have to speculate about that.
Council District 12 Planning Director Dan Rosales explained it himself.
Rosales wrote that under a traditional discretionary planning case, the Shoshone-Parthenia development would require a zone change, a subdivision and a General Plan Amendment.
Most Sherwood Forest parcels, he wrote, allow one home on a minimum 17,500-square-foot lot.
Then he said something remarkable:
“This current project would never succeed or receive our support under traditional planning rules but it prevails because SB 1123 erodes local control, preventing everyone from blocking this project.”
That isn’t a neighborhood activist describing SB 1123.
That is the Planning Director for the elected Council office representing the neighborhood.
Rosales also explained what ministerial approval meant: no public hearing, discretionary approval, City Planning Commission review, City Council review, Neighborhood Council review or CEQA review was required.
But before providing that explanation publicly, Rosales discussed these residents rather differently in an internal City email.
On June 11, 2026, he wrote:
“The abutting neighbors at 17545 Parthenia Street are retirees with too much time on their hands.”
Perhaps those retirees had time on their hands.
They also had questions.
And Rosales’s subsequent explanation demonstrates why those questions mattered.
Their neighborhood was confronting a development his office acknowledged would never succeed under the traditional planning rules governing Sherwood Forest.
There would be no traditional public hearing where residents could make their case. No discretionary decision for them to appeal. No Neighborhood Council proceeding capable of stopping it.
The state had already made the decision that mattered most.
When Your Representative Says His Hands Are Tied
What happens when residents turn to the people they elected to represent them?
In Sherwood Forest, they have essentially been told the Council office’s hands are tied. State law controls. There is no discretionary hearing. The Councilmember cannot simply stop a qualifying project.
That may explain the limits of CD12’s legal authority.
It does not explain the limits of its advocacy.
An elected representative who believes a state law is harming the community can organize residents, demand legislative amendments, seek safety analysis, help constituents navigate state agencies, publicly challenge the law and use the platform of elected office to demand change.
Instead, behind the scenes, CD12’s Planning Director described residents adjoining the project as “retirees with too much time on their hands.”
These are constituents watching the planning rules governing the community where they invested their lives being rewritten around them.
They cannot demand a traditional discretionary hearing because the state eliminated it. They cannot ask their Councilmember to vote against the project because there is no Council vote.
So they ask questions.
And inside their Council office, they become retirees with too much time on their hands.
Sherwood Forest is not the first time Rosales’s correspondence has raised questions about which side of the counter CD12 believes it occupies when residents oppose development.
During the MorningStar controversy in Granada Hills, Rosales of CD 12 wrote:
“The Community groups have been challenging and we want to proactively help the Developer work with the Community and avoid any misunderstandings before their hearings.”
In another communication, he wrote that the applicant had “always looked to us for help with the local Community Members.”
A Council office certainly has a legitimate role communicating with developers, City Planning and residents.
But when the community opposing a project becomes something the Council office helps a developer work with, while neighboring residents are privately dismissed as retirees with too much time on their hands, constituents are entitled to ask:
Who exactly is being represented?
And Who Is Responsible for Safety?
Where does responsibility go?
When Sacramento makes a housing project ministerial, City Planning may lose much of the discretionary authority it once had to say no.
But does every other public-safety responsibility disappear with it?
It shouldn’t.
California learned a horrifying lesson in Paradise.
The 2018 Camp Fire became the deadliest wildfire in California history, killing 85 people. Evacuation routes became gridlocked. People abandoned vehicles and fled on foot as fire overtook the community.
Many of those who died were elderly.
California responded.
In 2019, the Legislature enacted AB 747, requiring local safety elements to identify evacuation routes and evaluate their capacity, safety and viability under a range of emergency scenarios.
That is also state law.
AB 747 does not require a separate project-specific evacuation study for every ministerial housing application. It operates through the local government’s Safety Element.
But that makes the larger question even more important.
If individual ministerial projects are not where cumulative evacuation impacts are evaluated, where are they evaluated?
What happens when one state law tells cities to streamline housing while another requires them to evaluate whether residents can safely evacuate?
Where does City Planning’s responsibility end?
Where does the Los Angeles Fire Department’s responsibility begin?
If additional density is placed into a neighborhood with constrained evacuation routes, who determines whether those routes can actually carry the additional population during a wildfire?
Who considers whether fire apparatus can get in while residents are trying to get out?
Streamlining cannot become an excuse for governmental abdication.
A ministerial housing statute may remove a city’s discretion to reject a qualifying project for ordinary land-use reasons.
It does not erase every other law enacted to protect public safety.
Somewhere in this process, someone still has to be responsible.
And someone must ultimately be willing to ask the simplest question of all:
Can the people who live here get out alive?
Because Paradise taught California what happens when they can’t.
(Eva Amar is the Granada Highlands Community Coordinator and a West Valley community advocate. She is also a national advocate on campus sexual violence.)
