Supermarket Sweep: City Hall Hands Developers Empty Shopping Carts—and No Time Limit

INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS - Large projects are increasingly difficult to finance. Between construction costs, insurance, interest rates and the expense of assembling large development sites, the math doesn’t always math. So what’s a developer to do, and how do we keep feeding that sector of the economy without making our budget crisis worse?

Sacramento and Los Angeles City Hall have an answer: make it easier to build more units on smaller residential parcels in established neighborhoods, where the streets, water lines, sewers and utilities are already in place and largely paid for.

City Hall is treating established residential neighborhoods as vacant land up for grabs, ignoring the families, homes and communities that are already there.

Sacramento has laid out the all-you-can-eat buffet, and now Los Angeles City Hall is handing developers shopping carts to fill—not with vacant lots, but with existing residential homes in neighborhoods we’ve spent generations building. Homes they can purchase, demolish and replace with four-story apartment buildings, potentially without providing a single parking space.

Only there’s one important difference between this supermarket sweep and the real thing. There’s no stopwatch. No time limit. Developers can take as much as they want, go back for another cart and then another, until there’s nothing left of the communities we once knew.

Until they’ve devoured us.

And nowhere is this becoming more apparent than in the northwest San Fernando Valley. From Sherwood Forest in Northridge to Granada Hills and Chatsworth, established residential communities are fighting to preserve their neighborhoods against increasingly aggressive development policies.

For decades, this part of the Valley has served as Los Angeles’s dumping ground, absorbing landfills, industrial operations and other burdens that much of the city would rather keep out of sight. Now our reward seems to be having the residential neighborhoods we’ve spent generations building offered up for redevelopment.

We weren’t vacant land then, and we aren’t vacant land now.

In Granada Hills, more than 190 residential parcels along the proposed Chatsworth Corridor could be affected by development rules allowing buildings of up to four stories, with reduced or eliminated parking requirements. These aren’t vacant lots; they are established residential streets built for a very different level of density.

Under existing state housing laws—and potentially under Los Angeles’s proposed Missing Middle ordinance—qualifying projects can receive ministerial approval, meaning they can be approved administratively without the traditional discretionary hearing where neighbors once had an opportunity to show up and object.

That is the refrain residents have heard repeatedly from City Hall: Sacramento passed the laws, our hands are tied, we wish we could do more. On some projects, the law is ministerial, the hearing is gone, the usual discretionary process is gone and residents may receive little or no opportunity to argue the merits before the project moves forward.

Fine. If Sacramento really has taken that much local control away, then Los Angeles should be protecting every remaining piece of process its residents still have.

Instead, on the smaller number of projects that remain discretionary—the ones where residents can still get a hearing, build a record and appeal a decision—the City is considering making that appeal dramatically more expensive.

Sometimes the California Public Records Act reveals more than how a planning decision was made. Sometimes it lets constituents hear what is being said about them when nobody expects them to be listening.

On June 11, 2026, Dan Rosales, Planning Director for Councilmember John Lee, emailed a City Planner about residents fighting a lot-splitting development at 17545 Parthenia Street in Sherwood Forest. He called the neighboring residents “retirees with too much time on their hands.”

During our five-year fight over the proposed MorningStar assisted-living development in Granada Hills, Rosales wrote to a City Planning staff member, “I hate adding more to your workload and cant wait for the advisement period to end.” Two days later, while asking about public-records requests being pursued in connection with the project, he wrote, “As you know these people are relentless.”

Those “people” were his constituents—the very people his office was supposed to represent.

They were residents asking questions, requesting public records and trying to understand a project that would affect their neighborhood, in other words, doing exactly what government tells us we are supposed to do: participate.

Without the California Public Records Act, I would never have known any of this: not “retirees with too much time on their hands,” not “these people are relentless,” and not that while residents were trying to keep the MorningStar record open, a council office staff member was writing that he “cant wait for the advisement period to end.”

Government looks very different when the public can see behind the curtain.

And now we get to the part City Hall cannot blame on Sacramento.

On August 25, 2026, the five members of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee—Bob Blumenfield, Heather Hutt, Adrin Nazarian, John Lee and Nithya Raman—voted unanimously, 5–0, to approve a new two-tier non-applicant appeal fee structure. The proposal would raise the fee to $1,145 for non-applicants within the noticing or mailing radius and to $2,289 for those outside it. On October 6, the Budget and Finance Committee concurred with PLUM’s action. The Council file remains pending and has not yet reached final City Council action.

The current non-applicant appeal fee is $229. Under the PLUM-approved structure, that would rise to $1,145 for residents within the noticing or mailing radius and $2,289 for those outside it.

That is a $916 increase, or 400 percent, for residents within the noticing or mailing radius. For those outside it, the increase would be $2,060—about 900 percent, or nearly ten times the current fee.

In what world does an increase of up to roughly 900 percent fly?

Two of the people voting yes know better than most what a functioning appeal process means to a community caught in a land-use fight. Bob Blumenfield represents Woodland Hills, where residents have battled the Del Moreno project through hearings, appeals and litigation. John Lee represents Granada Hills, where residents have spent five years fighting MorningStar and have relied on every administrative avenue available to them.

Both voted yes.

When resident appeals reach PLUM and the City Council, the record hardly suggests that paying thousands more is buying them much of a fighting chance. My revised five-year review of Los Angeles City Council planning appeals identified 67 appeal matters, with 52 clear project-survival outcomes. Del Moreno was the clearest example I found of the Council actually stopping a project at that stage, and even that decision was later vacated and remanded following litigation.

So let’s speak plainly. Residents could wind up paying as much as nearly ten times the current fee to challenge a project in a system where the overwhelming pattern is that the project survives.

Don’t take my word for it. You may need to see this to believe it.

Council File 09-0969-S4 — Planning Land Use Fees Update

Bob Blumenfield is terming out of the City Council, and I keep hearing speculation about higher office. If he does decide to run for something else, I suspect plenty of residents in Woodland Hills will remember this vote.

We’ve all heard that money is the root of all evil. Watching a cash-strapped government accelerate development while the public’s ability to object keeps shrinking, I’m beginning to think we’ve had it backward.

IT’S THE LACK OF MONEY THAT’S THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.

And increasingly, residents are being handed the bill.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m asking you to do more than shake your head or forward this article to a neighbor with a few choice words about City Hall. Get off the sofa. It’s time.

Reference Council File 09-0969-S4—Planning Land Use Fees Update. Read what is being proposed, put your position into the public record, tell your neighbors what is happening and make sure your neighborhood council knows. Attend the hearings if you can, and if you can’t get to City Hall, check the published agenda for whatever public participation options are available.

And please don’t tell yourself somebody else will take care of it. That’s exactly how we got here.

Remember that old Ten Years After song from 1971, I’d Love to Change the World?

“I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do.”

Well, I’m giving you the easy roadmap on what to do. Read the file, contact your councilmember, put your position into the public record, bring your neighbors with you and make sure City Hall knows you’re paying attention.

Just do it.

(Eva Amar is a West San Fernando Valley community organizer, contributor to CityWatch Los Angeles, and National Sexual Assault Victims Advocate.)