Daniel S. Gonzales

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Since it has been several months since I last wrote in this blog about my own ADU project, it seemed that people might be curious to know where things stand.  Also, reflecting general increased interest and activity in this type of housing stock, I have been seeing more ADU matters in my own law practice.  Given these developments, I

Many of us who live in California, especially the suburbs, are conditioned to expect free parking in the places we live, work, shop and take recreation.  We expect laws to require it, builders to provide it and operators of commercial establishments to offer it, at least to their customers.  As a matter of fact, the availability of parking has been

California law governing ADUs has been revised pursuant to two new “clean up measures”, SB 897 and AB 2221, which went into effect January 1, 2023. These new laws clarify and correct several different unforeseen barriers to the approval and construction of ADUs that had surfaced after the adoption of previous ADU legislation by the state.  These revisions will require

Last October, I had the privilege of attending the Real Estate Fall Gathering and Coppola Family Speaker Series, presented by the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate (“FIRE”) at my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame.  FIRE was established in 2019 to educate and inspire the next generation of real estate professionals at Notre Dame to “create places of

Over the last several years, a plethora of legislation has been adopted in Sacramento with the intention of spurring housing development in California in response to our housing crisis, with a number of these laws being previously noted in this blog.  Hand in hand with these efforts, the Association of Bay Area Governments (“ABAG”), a regional planning agency, has

A twelve-year saga of pitched battles between housing advocates, developers and an obdurate NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard”) assemblage was finally resolved last month by California’s First District Court of Appeal.  In a victory for California housing proponents, the City of Lafayette’s approval of the 315-unit Terraces of Lafayette project has been upheld against the challenges of the Save Lafayette

The California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”) has been a regular topic of discussion in this blog over the years, from challenges to local zoning bans against mobile medical marijuana dispensaries, to the expansion of the use of “categorical exemptions” from environmental review, to modifications to the methods of measuring traffic impacts of development projects.  As one of