Judge rejects Stanford suit over housing ordinance
A federal judge says Stanford University’s major campus development project must include affordable housing, rejecting — at least for now — its challenge to a Santa Clara County ordinance requiring 16% of housing units in new residential developments on university property to be modestly priced.
Stanford, which is planning substantial construction of academic facilities and housing on its campus over the next two decades, argued that it was unfairly singled out in the new ordinance, since the shortage of affordable housing is a countywide problem. But U.S. District Judge Beth Freeman of San Jose said Thursday that a government agency can address such problems one step at a time, even if it treats some property owners differently than others.
“The county has discretion to take an incremental approach to a perceived problem” with “an ordinance that targets some but not all contributors to the problem,” Freeman said.
But she said Stanford could try to redraft its suit to specify reasons that the ordinance, which applies only to university property, is irrational and discriminatory. Stanford spokesman E.J. Miranda said Friday the university would add the needed information to its suit while “seeking an opportunity to work collaboratively with the county” on a housing plan.
“The issue in the litigation is not about Stanford’s commitment to more affordable housing, but rather that it is unlawful for Stanford to be singled out for unequal treatment,” Miranda said.
County officials, in a statement, said the ruling was “a critical step in requiring that developers take accountability for the effects of their largescale development.” While Stanford builds housing for its students, faculty and staff, the officials said, “it has failed to adequately construct affordable housing units accessible to the lowincome workers that service Stanford’s development.”
Stanford says its 20year expansion would ultimately bring 9,610 more people to campus each day. The university says more than onefourth of the new residential units in the plan would be affordable housing. But county officials say Stanford has not committed to complying with the ordinance, which requires 16% affordable housing units in any new nonstudent residential development with three or more units.
The county suspended negotiations with Stanford in April.
In its lawsuit, Stanford noted that while its property amounts to less than half of 1% of all land zoned for residential development in unincorporated areas of the county, between 1999 and 2014 the university produced 1,324 affordable housing units, or 75% of the total built in those areas. The totals do not include dormitories for Stanford undergraduates.
In the ordinance, passed in September 2018, county supervisors asserted that countywide concerns about affordable housing “are particularly acute at and around Stanford University due to the high housing prices in the area.” Supervisors approved the ordinance over the opposition of the county Planning Commission.
Freeman’s ruling supported Stanford on that issue, saying the cause of the shortage of affordable housing was in dispute. A county grand jury report in June 2018 concluded that the need was regionwide, she said, and allegations in the university’s lawsuit, if proved, “would establish that the need for affordable housing is not more acute at or around Stanford than in other parts of the unincorporated county.”
But she said Stanford’s claim that the county lacked a rational basis for its universityonly ordinance faced a potential legal obstacle, the established authority of government agencies to address regional problems by starting in local areas. Freeman cited a 1999 federal appeals court ruling upholding a Berkeley livingwage ordinance that targeted a small number of employers in the Berkeley Marina.
While those employers also argued that they had been singled out unfairly, Freeman said, the appeals court reasoned that “reform may take one step at a time” as long as there is some rational basis for it. She also said Stanford had not yet identified a comparable housing developer in the county that was being treated better than the university.