An army of build-it city dwellers, funded by the CEO of Yelp, is heading to court to force a sleepy East Bay suburb to go dense.
The San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation — which goes by the name SFBarf — is suing the city of Lafayette, demanding that it resurrect a scrapped plan to build high-density housing on a 22-acre knoll of Deer Hill Road, just north of Highway 24. It’s the first legal challenge in what SFBarf has promised will be a “Sue the Suburbs” campaign to push places like Lafayette to help the Bay Area build its way out of the shortage of housing.
The case is making a central Contra Costa County town known for good schools and cow-dotted hillsides a battlefront in a regional housing war.
“Why Lafayette? It’s on BART, it’s right next to Walnut Creek, and yes, people want to live there,” said SFBarf’s 34-year-old founder, Sonja Trauss, a full-time activist with a master’s degree in economics who lives in West Oakland.
“It’s a nice place,” said SFBarf’s lawyer, Ryan Patterson.
Now Trauss is trying to force Lafayette to do what she sees as its fair share. Her organization sued the city in September after hearing that a developer had tabled plans to build 315 moderate-income apartments on a stretch of open space, instead opting for 44 single-family homes with a dog park, sports field and parking lot.
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