Recent legal settlements with fire affected cities expose the evil genius of the YIMBY strategy — and also its weaknesses

As the saying goes, game recognizes game. As a former litigator, I have to respect the evil genius of the YIMBY movement’s legal strategies. Late last month those strategies produced one of the movement’s most significant recent victories, a pair of settlements extracted from the cities of Pasadena and Malibu by the nonprofit legal group YIMBY Law.

During the January 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires, 170 homes burned in Pasadena during the Eaton Fire and some 720 burned in Malibu in the Palisades Fire. Tens of thousands of people evacuated, wondering if they’d ever see their homes again. In many places those evacuations turned chaotic, and in some places ground down to gridlock even in areas the fires ultimately didn’t reach. In Pasadena, memories of the 2009 Station Fire and the 2020 Bobcat Fire were still fresh, as were memories of the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Malibu. The latter burned more than 1,700 homes and led to snarled traffic from Malibu to Venice Beach and into West L.A.

In light of these experiences, in the wake of the 2025 firestorms both cities passed ordinances exempting their burn zones from a housing law known as Senate Bill 9 (SB 9), which incentivizes the construction of multifamily homes in neighborhoods zoned for single family. Around the same time, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive order exempting the Pacific Palisades burn zone. Governor Newsom issued his own order exempting all burn zones within the boundaries of state-designated very high fire hazard severity zones (VHFHSZs) in Los Angeles County. YIMBY Law sued all three cities, as well as Bass, Newsom, and the state. Notably, Newsom’s order included nearly all of Pacific Palisades but left out most of Altadena. This is another example of how fraught efforts have been to protect vulnerable areas from overdevelopment amid the recent onslaught of state housing laws.

SB 9, passed in 2021, allows homeowners (or buyers-owners-developers) to add a second single family home to an existing single-family lot. Subject to size and other restrictions, owners also have the option of splitting their lots into two smaller lots. Do both, and where there used to be one house there can be four. While that may not sound like much (unless you happen to live next door) it’s madness to require cities to shoehorn more residents into areas with already constrained and in many cases overburdened evacuation and emergency ingress routes, particularly in places that already burned. It’s equally bonkers to leave cities on the hook for necessary upgrades to roadways, fire protection and high pressure water service (read: fire hydrants) that would be required to protect those new residents. The City of Los Angeles, for example, has lived beyond its means for years, with each annual budget cycle devolving into a panicked race to stave off financial disaster. To believe the city can come up with the kind of money for that new infrastructure at scale is to believe in unicorns.

Meanwhile, less than eighteen months after the fires, and even before this summer’s heat wave and extreme fire weather, residents in the Palisades burn zone are raising the alarm about threats posed by regrown undergrowth, brush, and chaparral, particularly on properties that have not been rebuilt, which is most of them. The same is true in Altadena, and for that matter places that have burned statewide. In some ways these areas are actually more fire prone than before, with many empty lots full of dried out overgrowth and others occupied half finished wood frame buildings surrounded by building materials and equipment. California’s natural wildfire cycle, which human intervention paused for more than a century, is back with a vengeance.

These are the realities into which YIMBY Law is suing cities to force them to approve more density, including in fire, flood, liquifaction and other hazard areas, and more residents who will have to flee in the face of the next disaster. Again, it’s madness.

Paying lip service to safety – barely

It’s worth noting what SB 9 purports to say about wildfire exemptions, because the law’s sponsors and supporters have made a big deal about them. SB 9 excludes parcels in VHFHSZs unless developers take certain mitigation measures. This sounds good until you actually parse the text and realize that every one of those measures, including fire-resistant construction and defensible space clearance rules, is already law. Developers cannot build in a VHFHSZ, burn zone or no burn zone, without complying with them. In other words, SB 9 mandates compliance with existing laws, which is another way of saying SB 9 plain language excludes nothing new at all. Call it the Sacramento Two Step.

Nothin’ to see here, folks: A local business burns during the Palisades Fire. Photo by Christopher LeGras

In its lawsuits, YIMBY Law’s lawyers argued that the cities lack legal authority to suspend a state housing law. Strictly speaking, they’re right. Cities are creations of the state and are obligated to abide by state laws. In context, however, their argument amounts to the triumph of black letter law over experience and ideology over reason.

Which is where we come to the crux of the YIMBY’s evil legal genius. As noted, Pasadena and Malibu settled the lawsuits before they could go to trial. Both cities agreed to repeal their ordinances and, equally consequentially, to accept all pending and future SB 9 applications, including ones they had already paused or rejected.

Precedent by stealth

Voluntary settlements aren’t legal precedent. They’re not trial court orders or appellate opinions. While settlement agreements typically are public records subject to disclosure laws, those documents are beside the point. The public will never know what happened during negotiations, which interpretation of the statute the cities were convinced they would lose on, what expert testimony was given, if any, what pressure was brought to bear, why the cities’ lawyers concluded the fight wasn’t worth it, or what a judge would have made of any of it. A published opinion comes with an argument the public can analyze, distinguish, attack, or ask the legislature to override. It comes with an entire case file that the public can access (albeit with no small amount of effort).

In other words, in a settlement the only available document amounts to a record of capitulation. The message to every other city attorney in California is crystal clear. If wealthy cities like Pasadena and Malibu decided, for whatever reasons, that the fight wasn’t worth it, even in the immediate aftermath of historic wildfires, what chances do Atascadero or Watsonville or Chico have? Should the city of Los Angeles ultimately join the Chamberlain-esque capitulation, the legal fight over the issue of adding density to vulnerable areas will largely be over.

That’s because these settlements send a message as clear as any published court of appeals ruling. Other city attorneys draw the obvious conclusion: resolve every ambiguity in every SB 9 applicant’s favor, no matter the extenuating circumstances, or risk an expensive lawsuit that will almost certainly result in a settlement that’s even worse. Enough city attorneys make that decision, and the YIMBY reading of SB 9, right or wrong, becomes the operative law of the land without any court ever weighing in. Individually, each city’s decision is a rational exercise in self-preservation. Collectively, they amount to de facto legal precedent. Bonus for the YIMBYs, it’s insulated from public scrutiny.

Two sides of the same coin

Which brings us to the other half of the YIMBY legal machine. The vast majority of legislation that moves through Sacramento these days isn’t actually written by legislators or their staffs. Most bills are what’s known as “sponsored legislation,” meaning they’re drafted or shaped by outside special interests. In the case of housing legislation, the nonprofit California YIMBY — though it’s an independent entity with no formal connection to YIMBY Law, the organization and its members sing from the identical hymnal — has sponsored hundreds of housing streamlining laws over the last decade. For example, here’s their webpage listing the major bills they sponsored or co-sponsored in 2025 alone, including SB 79.

California YIMBY and YIMBY Law are formally separate entities, with their own leadership, budgets, and functions. In practice, though, they are symbiotic. California YIMBY does the sponsoring; YIMBY Law does the threatening and suing. And if you don’t think they’re coordinating behind the scenes, I have a bullet train in Fresno to sell you. Again, game recognizes game: The YIMBYs have been staggeringly successful at pushing a unified agenda not just statewide but nationally, and even internationally.

After last month’s settlements YIMBY Law founder and Executive Director Sonja Trauss — who incidentally isn’t a lawyer — told CalMatters, “For people who are living, or hoping to live, or hoping to move back to Malibu and Pasadena, SB 9 is back.”

The question, of course, is whether anyone wants it. That question reveals a potentially fatal flaw with YIMBY Law’s otherwise successful track record of suing cities: Their efforts to keep state housing laws out of court, thereby depriving cities and the state of clear, public, binding legal precedent, which creates uncertainty in the marketplace. As noted, Altadena is largely unprotected by Newsom’s executive order. As of July 2026 there were just 52 active SB 9 applications in a community in which 5,645 homes and structures burned.

It’s safe to wonder if the YIMBYs, in their zeal to force cities to comply with laws that even seasoned land use attorneys often find opaque if not downright inscrutable, are stymieing their own agenda. Real estate investment and development are long-term plays that thrive in stable, predictable markets. Rather than curing the uncertainties created by admittedly dated, sometimes arduous local planning and zoning rules, the YIMBYs may be in the process of adding more layers of the kind of ambiguity that discourages those long-term investments.

YIMBY Law’s success with their stealth precedent approach will cause more cities to bend the knee when it comes to SB 9, but it won’t automatically force homeowners or developers to take the kinds of risks the laws over which they’re suing incentivize. They may have created a circular trap: The lack of a definitive judicial interpretation of SB 9 means there’s the possibility that, sometime in the future, a court will rule on the law, and that ruling may not be in developers’ favor. Developers who otherwise might be interested in Altadena, where the law remains in effect, may be reluctant to take on projects for this reason. For example, what happens if Developer X gets approval for a project, invests the capital and resources to break ground, only to have a court halt all such developments in all burn zones and VHFHSZs statewide, in perpetuity? Developers know these laws, and the most recent legal developments (pardon the pun) better than anyone.

This isn’t speculation. SB 9 currently is the subject of an intensive five year legal battle in actual court. In City of Redondo Beach v. Bonta, filed in 2021 by four Southern California charter cities, later joined by a fifth, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that SB 9 unconstitutionally violated those cities’ home rule authority. The trial court’s judgment was reversed on appeal in 2025 in an unpublished opinion that set no precedent. The court of appeals remanded the case, and it’s currently working its way back through the judicial process. No matter how many cities acquiesce to YIMBY Law’s stealth precedent strategy, Redondo Beach remains a potential sword of Damocles hanging over SB 9. Crucially, in that case the plaintiffs are cities, not YIMBY Law. What happens if and when more cities sue, not just over SB 9 but other YIMBY housing laws?

Indeed, Altadena may be the canary in the coal mine for the YIMBYs, or perhaps an exemplar. Despite a decade’s worth of new statutes that streamline housing development, rein in local control, and give developers a buffet of incentives, the envisioned burst of construction in California hasn’t manifested. Along with the legal uncertainties, in Altadena the issues include slow insurance payouts and even basic topography. Elsewhere in California the barriers include costs of materials and labor, interest rates, population flux, and overall economic uncertainty brought about by federal tariffs and even the war in Iran. No law, no body of settlements, changes those fundamental realities.

A final note: When the law is clearer, development follows. After fits and starts in the late 2010s, California lawmakers and the state Department of Housing and Community development buckled down and clarified the state’s ADU laws. The result has been a boom in ADU construction. It didn’t require litigation, just a scintilla of common sense.

Game recognize game, but in the long run the YIMBYs evil legal genius may well prove to be too clever by half. When this history is written, the lesson might be “just because you could have, doesn’t mean you should have.”

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