San Jose affordable housing law headed to U.S. Supreme Court

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

The California building industry has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its legal challenge to a San Jose affordable housing law upheld earlier this year by the state Supreme Court.

In a petition filed Tuesday in the U.S. Supreme Court, lawyers for the industry argue that San Jose's law and others like it across California violate federal constitutional protections against the "taking" of private property. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative Sacramento group representing the industry, has taken its fight to the nation's high court.

"The California Supreme Court's ruling carves arbitrary limits and loopholes in core constitutional property-rights safeguards as laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court," said Brian Hodges, the foundation's attorney.

The California Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling in June written by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, determined that San Jose's affordable housing program is within the law, observing: "These problems have become more and more severe and have reached what may be described as epic proportions in many of the state's localities."

The case involves a legal challenge to a San Jose law that would require housing developers to include affordable, below-market priced units for low-income buyers on any new projects within the city. The building industry sued to block enforcement of the so-called "inclusionary housing" law several years ago.

The green religion has taken thousands of acres of land out of use and now they yell crisis! Anyway, there's no room for the middle class out in California.