San Bernardino County faces a fair-housing test over the Bloomington warehouse it already lost once

Citrus Belt Review: The county's supervisors approved the Bloomington Business Park 4-0 in November 2022, clearing a developer to remove more than 100 homes across 213 acres for distribution space. Community and environmental groups, represented by Earthjustice and the Western Center on Law & Poverty, sued the following month on two tracks at once: that the county's environmental review violated CEQA, and that approving the project breached the state's fair-housing obligations. The CEQA claims got decided first. In September 2024, Judge Donald Alvarez set aside the county's certification of the environmental impact report, ruling its analysis of alternatives, air quality, greenhouse gas, energy, and noise fell short, and halted construction until the county redoes the work. More than 100 homes were already gone by then.

What returned to court this month is the second track. California's AB 686, in force since 2019, requires every county to affirmatively further fair housing across all of its housing and land-use activity — a duty broader than the federal version, which reaches only agencies spending federal housing money. The plaintiffs argue the county can't satisfy that duty while approving a project that erases owner-occupied homes in a community Bloomington's size — roughly 23,000 residents, 84% Hispanic — and hands the land to industry. The county hasn't been found to have violated AFFH; that's the question now in front of the court.

The reason this matters past Bloomington is that CEQA, the tool that has slowed warehouse projects across the IE, only forces a better environmental study. A county can redo the report, address the gaps, and approve the same project again — which is the path San Bernardino is on, having reopened public comment on a revised study. A fair-housing finding would cut differently. It would reach the land-use decision itself, in a region where the warehouse-versus-housing fight keeps landing on the same demographic map. The Bloomington ruling tells the county to study harder. An AFFH ruling would ask whether the approval was lawful at all.