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To demonstrate it is serious about building new housing, the city of San Mateo must show state regulators a list of places where new development could be built in the next eight years. The city’s list includes several sites along El Camino Real, as well as the popular Bridgepointe Shopping Center. But there’s no way that housing could realistically be built on these sites anytime soon, housing advocates allege in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The Housing Action Coalition, a pro-housing advocacy group, claims that in its housing element — a state-mandated plan all cities must produce to show where they’ll accommodate new residential growth — San Mateo overestimated how much housing it could reasonably produce with its existing zoning. As such, the city claims in its housing plan that it does not not need to make further changes to its zoning map that would make it easier to build housing around the city. “We hoped that San Mateo would work in good faith to get their housing element to a place where it could actually plan for the housing the city desperately needs,” said Ali Sapirman, the Peninsula and South Bay Organizer of Housing Action Coalition.



“Unfortunately, the city chose to pass a housing element that will do no such thing, and claims that the status quo is good enough.” Mayor Liza Diaz Nash, contacted Tuesday, said that she was not aware of the lawsuit, but that the “city attorney will take a look at it and will respond accordingly.” The state’s ho.

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