The City of Cupertino once again finds itself at odds with the State of California’s Housing and Community Development Department (HCD) in a contentious legal battle playing out in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
A pair of lawsuits filed by pro-housing advocacy organization YIMBY Law allege the City’s rejection of two housing projects this January ran afoul of state housing laws known as the Housing Accountability Act (HAA) and the Permit Streamlining Act (PSA).
In its complaints, YIMBY Law argues the City’s denials violated the HAA’s ‘builders remedy’ provision requiring local governments to follow a streamlined approval process for qualified projects when those jurisdictions lack a certified housing element. Both rejected projects were indeed submitted between February 2023 and September 2024 when the City’s housing element had not yet been certified by HCD.
In a January 2024 settlement reached with YIMBY Law and the California Housing Defense Fund, the City of Cupertino expressly agreed to honor the builders remedy provision, seeming to turn a new page after years of project-specific obstruction and multiple letters of warning from HCD around the city’s failure to deliver its housing obligations.
YIMBY Law’s new complaints also allege the City’s denials violated the PSA because they attempted to enforce an improperly rigid interpretation of the 90-day deadline required for developers to address project feedback from reviewing government bodies.
The City contends applicants are only entitled to one 90-day window, regardless of when or how frequently local governments provide comments.
In a press release published April 11, 2025, the City stated developers of both rejected projects did not “complete their applications within the required timeframe as mandated by state statute.” The City also stated that the municipality is “fully compliant with the State housing law.”
However, both HCD and the judiciary have previously held there is zero gray area about the 90-day window.
In a letter sent to the Town of Los Gatos in a separate project dispute last August, HCD clarified that each new set of comments from a local government triggers a new 90-day window for project applicants to respond. Furthermore, HCD noted that the legal question had already been adjudicated in a Los Angeles Superior Court case ruling that found “when an applicant receives an incompleteness determination pursuant to section 65943 – not just the first incompleteness determination – an applicant has 90 days to respond.”
YIMBY Law contends the City’s rigid interpretation of the PSA would allow local governments to delay additional rounds of project feedback to the very end of the 90-day window only to subsequently issue a denial for arbitrarily missed deadlines.
While the litigation is still in its early stages, the cases’ capacity to invite additional judicial clarification of both the builders remedy and the PSA are sure to attract widespread attention from housing advocates, developers, local governments, and state officials alike.
