Planning Board Meetings Could Get a Lot More Interesting

This post at the NC Legal Landscapes blog has me thinking that when development starts to pick up again we could be in for some far more interesting planning board meetings. (Granted I might be dead and buried by the time development starts to kick into gear, but that's another story).  An excerpt:

When the economy returns, when developers begin to develop and builders begin to build, local governments will wake up to fair housing legislation passed last August.  The bill created legislative handcuffs that will affect affordable housing zoning and land use decisions in interesting ways, and you won’t need to see Paul Revere’s lanterns hanging in the church belfry to tell you that the lawsuits are coming...

Under G.S. 41A-5(a)(3), a local government will be found to have intended discrimination against affordable housing if “the government was motivated in full, or in any part at all, by the fact that the development contains affordable housing units . . .”

If I were a city or county attorney advising my board, that language would make me nervous.

The way the author, Tom Terrell, goes on to explain the situation it seems to me that planning boards and other land use governmental bodies will need to be very concerned about how they discuss a project.  In essence if the governmental body denies a zoning for a project for any legitimate reason like, say, density yet any one board member even appears to dislike the project simply because the project contains an affordable housing component, even if it's a small part of the project, then the developer can sue the board for discrimination.  Simply put the implied bias of one member on a nine member board, even a board that voted unanimously, that votes down a project that is even 10% affordable housing could be sued, probably successfully, for discrimination even if the discrimination had no real impact on the decision.

Yep, it's a safe bet that members of the boards and commissions will be much more circumspect during their debates.  If they're not I imagine there are going to be quite a few attorneys either hitting the bottle or looking for another line of practice.  Divorces probably look mundane by comparison.