Colusa Ignored HCD's Corrective Action Letter — So HCD Decertified It
HCD gave Colusa 30 days to answer its corrective action findings. The city never replied, and HCD revoked its compliance finding.
If you're trying to move a project through a small California city — or you're the planner on the other side of the counter — the question underneath everything is whether the city's housing element is actually in compliance. That status decides which streamlining tools apply and what leverage a builder has. Colusa just became a clean example of how a city loses it.
On September 5, 2024, HCD sent Colusa a two-page letter revoking the compliance finding the city had held since 2021. It didn't happen because the city fought and lost. It happened because the city went quiet.
The ladder HCD climbed
HCD didn't jump straight to revocation. The letter lays out each rung.
Colusa adopted its housing element on December 1, 2020, and HCD found it in substantial compliance on March 1, 2021. That element included Program H-2 (Housing Element Regulatory Amendments) — the rezone actions the city committed to.
On May 24, 2024, HCD sent a Letter of Inquiry asking how those rezones were going. The city answered on June 17, 2024 — and the answer, in HCD's telling, was that the work hadn't started: the required zoning code amendments "had not yet been adopted or prepared for consideration by the planning commission or the City Council."
So on July 10, 2024, HCD issued a Corrective Action Letter with written findings that Colusa had failed to implement Program H-2, and gave the city 30 days to respond under Government Code section 65585, subdivision (i)(1)(A).
The silence that triggered it
Here's the thing: the city never wrote back. That's the whole hinge of the letter. In HCD's words:
"As of the date of this letter, HCD has not received a written response as requested in the July 10, 2024, letter; therefore, the City has not demonstrated implementation of Program H-2."
That's HCD's position on the record — no response, no demonstrated compliance. On that basis HCD found the element "no longer in substantial compliance with Housing Element Law" and revoked, in its words, "as of the date of this letter, its March 1, 2021, findings that the City's housing element is in substantial compliance with Housing Element Law."
The revocation cite is Government Code section 65585, subdivision (i)(1)(B). Because a housing-element compliance revocation is one of the few HCD actions that takes effect on its own, it landed the day the letter went out — no hearing, no court order.
Verified against: City of Colusa — HCD Revocation of Housing Element Compliance Finding, September 5, 2024.
What actually changes
For a builder, the practical payoff is what a non-compliant element exposes. HCD's letter lists the consequences, and it frames them as risk, not certainty:
"Various consequences may apply when a city does not have a housing element in compliance with Housing Element Law, including ineligibility or delay in receiving certain state funds, referral to the California Office of the Attorney General, court-imposed financial penalties, the loss of local land use authority to a court-appointed agent, and the application of the 'builder's remedy.'"
Read the verb: "may apply." The Colusa letter lists the Builder's Remedy among consequences that may follow — not something it declares already attached, so honor that framing. The Builder's Remedy (Gov. Code section 65589.5) generally limits a non-compliant city's ability to deny a qualifying affordable or mixed-income project for zoning inconsistency — but it's technical, actively litigated, and fact-specific.
And the fix is mechanical. HCD's non-compliance determination, the letter says, "will remain in effect until the City completes required rezone actions in Program H-2" — then transmits the ordinance and lets HCD confirm. No partial credit. No self-cure. Ignoring the deadline didn't make the rezone requirement disappear; it just cost the city its compliance finding.
What to do with this
If you're a developer, Colusa's non-compliance may be an opening — but confirm the city's current status before you count on it, because a later rezone plus HCD correspondence can quietly restore compliance and close the window. If you're a planner, the lesson is blunt: silence is not a strategy. HCD read no response as no compliance, and it had the authority to revoke.
One caution that isn't optional: an HCD letter is the department's interpretive position, and the downstream penalties it lists are statutory risk — courts are the final word on how far they reach. Confirm a jurisdiction's current compliance status directly, and run any Builder's Remedy approach past your own land-use counsel before you rely on it. This isn't legal advice.
What CrossBeam does with it
When the letter lands on your desk, CrossBeam turns it around the same day: what each item is actually asking, the code or law behind it, and a written response you can hand to your team or your attorney — the back-and-forth that used to eat weeks, done in a couple of hours.