Cal. Apartment Assn. v. City of Pasadena (2025)

Citation: Cal. Apartment Assn. v. City of Pasadena (2025)
Parent Document: Cal. Apartment Assn. v. City of Pasadena (2025)
Jurisdiction: California (state)
Effective Date: 2025-12-18
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10761039/cal-apartment-assn-v-city-of-pasadena/ ↗

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express approval or disapproval severally as to each major
change suggested.” (Id. at pp. 332, 346.)
       Petitioners assert that Measure H’s changes are even “more
quantitatively substantial” than those in McFadden. They point
out that Measure H almost doubled the Charter’s length by
adding over 18,000 words in 24 new sections to a document that
had previously contained approximately 24,000 words and 166
sections. They contend this near-doubling of the word count in
the Charter “is indicative of far-reaching changes to the existing
structure of Pasadena’s government,” and assert that Pasadena
voters previously “adopted a comparatively straight-forward
governmental framework, centralizing all administrative and
executive power in the hands of the [City] Council, Mayor and
City Manager.”
       As an initial matter, Measure H is limited to the single
subject of housing. While its treatment of that subject may be
more comprehensive in comparison to other subjects in the
Charter, petitioners offer no principled reason to conclude that
past brevity in the drafting of Charter language is a barrier to
later efforts by the electorate to be more thorough or detailed in
its exercise of the initiative power. Moreover, Measure H added
to the Charter and did not purport to delete or alter preexisting
provisions. Measure H instead provides that it is not meant to
“revise, repeal, or supersede” any provisions beyond its scope of
enabling the Rental Board to exercise its authority and fulfill its
specified responsibilities. (§ 1821.) This stands in marked
contrast to McFadden, where the Supreme Court referenced the
number of words added by the proposed initiative within its
greater analysis describing the “wide and diverse range of subject
matters proposed to be voted upon” and the significant effects the

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