NIMBYs cite a 155-year-old law to thwart a San Francisco project

California state lawmakers have spent years tilting the rules toward new housing. Projects that meet fixed standards can skip public hearings, and cities that say no face legal and financial risk. Still, muncipal and local neighborhood opponents never seem to run out of ways to try to scuttle projects. A Northern California federal court is embroiled in one of the latest examples. In San Francisco, one of the most expensive housing cities in the world, opponents of an 848-unit residential structure above an existing Safeway grocery store have escalated to a new level. They invoked the Civil Rights Act of 1871, a law passed to protect Black Americans from Ku Klux Klan violence, when they sued the city in September. Assembly Bill 2011 is increasingly at the center of these disputes. The 2022 state law lets qualifying projects on commercially zoned land skip public hearings and environmental review. Lawmakers broadened it last year, while community opposition groups keep probing its edges. Neighbors and other opponents argue that the Safeway project doesn’t qualify for the shortcut. They claim the city shut them out of the process. Last week, the Marina Safeway developer’s lawyers ask...