For partners, journalists, and researchers
Everything on this site is available to reuse: 52 documented cases, 104 decision records, 21 pending decisions, and 39 city profiles. Every endpoint is read-only, cacheable, open to cross-origin requests, and sends an X-License: CC-BY-4.0 header. How the database is built is described on the methods page.
Every case researched by hand: the project, jurisdiction, mechanism used, actors with their stated positions, dated timeline, decision records, and sources. The nested JSON carries everything; the CSV is one flat row per case.
Dated actions by deciding bodies (council, commission, board, voters, court) on documented cases: the action in neutral terms, the vote tally when recorded, the staff recommendation, and the source. Per-official votes are not published.
Pending hearings, votes, appeals, and deadlines on projects that show signs of obstruction, drawn from public agendas and reporting, each with a linked source. Also available as RSS.
One row per jurisdiction: case counts, units proposed, mechanisms with counts, recurring organizations, decision summary, housing element status, HCD permit lead count, and pending decisions.
Permit activity reported by jurisdictions in California HCD Annual Progress Reports, geocoded and shown on the map and on each lead page. Coverage is partial: a jurisdiction with no imported leads has not been imported yet, which says nothing about its permit activity. No bulk endpoint in this phase.
Responses carry Cache-Control: public, s-maxage=3600, stale-while-revalidate=86400 and Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *. Printable one-to-two page briefs are available for every case at /projects/[slug]/brief.
The data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, and build on it for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you credit the source and note any changes you made.
Cite a case as:
Who Killed the Building?, [case name], whokilledthebuilding.com/projects/[slug], accessed [date]
Each case in /api/v1/cases carries a ready-made citation field. To cite the database as a whole: Who Killed the Building?, California Housing Obstruction Database, whokilledthebuilding.com, accessed [date].
Every entry here is built from primary sources: court filings, planning department records, state enforcement actions by the California Department of Housing and Community Development, and contemporaneous reporting. For any case in the database, we can provide the full sourced timeline on request, including the underlying documents and the basis for each data-quality rating.
If you are reporting on a project, researching housing policy, or working a related case, get in touch. We are glad to share what we have, point you to the primary records, and answer questions about how a given figure was reached.
To cite the database with its author: Stephen Lloyd, Who Killed the Building? California Housing Obstruction Database, whokilledthebuilding.com.
Read how cases are built on the methods page. If something is wrong, use the corrections and right of reply process. For anything else, write to stephen@whokilledthebuilding.com.