The Single-90-Day Trick: Why HCD Keeps Striking It Down
Cupertino, Los Gatos, Santa Barbara County, now Santa Clara — HCD keeps explaining the same rule: the 90-day clock resets every round.
By the time the second incompleteness letter arrives, you have already run this loop once: you filed a preliminary application to lock your vesting, submitted the full application inside the six-month window, fixed the flagged items, and resubmitted on time. Now the county's response is not just another correction list. It is a declaration that your preliminary application is expired and has no further force or effect — because you did not reach "complete" inside a single 90-day window.
Here's the thing: HCD's position is that the single-window reading is wrong, and the state has now put that in writing to one California jurisdiction after another.
What Santa Clara County did
The project is Gavello Glen — 173 housing units at 20202 Harry Road. The applicant filed its preliminary application on November 19, 2024, then submitted the full development application on February 12, 2025, inside the six-month vesting window under Government Code § 65941.1.
The county found the application incomplete on March 13, 2025, telling the applicant it "will have 90 days from the date of this letter to submit the remaining incomplete items" and that "[f]ailing to submit the remaining items within the 90 days will result in [the] Preliminary Application expiring and having no further force or effect."
The applicant resubmitted on May 29, 2025. On June 26, 2025, the county found the application still incomplete — and in the same letter, declared the preliminary application expired. HCD says it is aware of at least four other projects where the county treated preliminary applications the same way.
Verified against: Santa Clara County — Gavello Glen Permit Streamlining Act 90-Day Review, Notice of Violation, HCD, October 15, 2025.
HCD's bright line
Under the PSA, when a jurisdiction finds a vested application incomplete under Government Code § 65943, the applicant has 90 days to submit the missing information to keep vested status. Santa Clara County read that as one 90-day shot: miss it, and the vesting dies.
HCD's Notice of Violation rejects that reading. In HCD's words:
the 90-day deadline resets after each incompleteness determination made by the County
And it states the consequence plainly: "A project with multiple incompleteness letters and responses may have multiple 90-day periods." HCD's finding is blunt — the county's "failure to reset the 90-day period after each incompleteness determination is in violation of state housing law." HCD also points to a Los Angeles Superior Court ruling that reached the same conclusion, and it gave the county until November 14, 2025 to respond before escalating, up to referral to the California Attorney General.
Not the first jurisdiction — a roster
Here is why this letter matters beyond one San Jose project: HCD is not writing on a blank slate. The same document names the jurisdictions HCD says it has already explained the identical point to — the City of Beverly Hills, the Town of Los Gatos, Santa Barbara County, and the City of Cupertino. Santa Clara County is the newest name on that list, not the first.
The throughline HCD describes is simple: a diligent applicant who answers each incompleteness letter on time should get a fresh 90 days each round — not a countdown that quietly runs out mid-process. HCD frames the single-window practice as one that "makes the process more difficult for diligent applicants to benefit from the protections of the PSA's Preliminary Application process."
What it means for your project
If your jurisdiction is running the single-window play — treating a preliminary application as expired because it did not hit "complete" on the first 90-day try — this stack of HCD correspondence is worth knowing about.
One caution: this is HCD's interpretive position, expressed in an enforcement letter — not a final court judgment that binds every jurisdiction. It is a clear signal of enforcement risk, backed here by HCD's own prior letters and a cited Superior Court ruling. If you are staring at an "expired" preliminary application after more than one completeness round, treat it as a barrier that may not hold — and verify your specific situation with your jurisdiction and your own counsel before you rely on it. Nothing here is 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.