The cedarbrook saga
Hillsides Against Hadid and the Fight to Protect Franklin Canyon
By Steven L. Weinberg, founder, Hillsides Against Hadid
Forward
For years, the unfinished construction site at 9650 Cedarbrook Drive loomed over Franklin Canyon like an open wound.
The project conceived and developed by Mohamed Hadid was a hotel-sized private estate of approximately 75,000 to 78,000 square feet, perched along a prominent ridgeline adjoining Franklin Canyon Park. Its plans included massive grading, an elevated roadway, enormous retaining walls and the destruction of substantial natural habitat. By the summer of 2020, heavy equipment and large construction crews had transformed what had been a lush hillside habitat into a vast field of exposed earth, concrete and steel.
What followed was a five-year struggle involving neighborhood advocacy, new hillside-protection laws, multiple bankruptcies, disputed building permits, emergency court filings, accusations of political interference, a major defeat in the bankruptcy court—and, ultimately, a decisive victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Hillsides Against Hadid was present at every critical stage.
HAH investigated the project. It documented the destruction. It challenged the legality of the permits. It monitored the bankruptcy proceedings when virtually no one else from the affected community was doing so. And when a single sentence spoken in bankruptcy court revealed that the City of Los Angeles might be preparing to extinguish the Cedarbrook permits—but might also be negotiating them back to life—HAH acted immediately.
That intervention helped transform an obscure permitting dispute into a public campaign involving neighborhood representatives, environmental agencies, elected officials and the City itself.
In the end, the original Cedarbrook permits from 2018 were judicially determined to have expired in March 2020. The proposed mega-mansion lost its grandfathered status. The property attracted no qualifying third-party bidder at auction and was transferred to its lender. Any future development must now confront the substantially more protective land-use laws enacted after the original permits were issued.
This is the story of how it happened.
The Destruction That Started It All
Hillsides Against Hadid was formed in August 2020 after residents began sharing reports and photographs of a sudden and extraordinary construction operation at 9650 Cedarbrook.
The project had advanced largely outside public view. Neighbors had received no meaningful notice or community hearing before construction equipment began removing trees, cutting into the hillside and erecting immense retaining structures. The approved plans called for a residence exceeding 75,000 square feet, together with a roughly 2,000-foot elevated roadway supported by retaining walls reaching approximately 30 feet or more in height. According to Forbes, Hadid intended to sell the resulting mega mansion for $250 million.
The physical transformation was staggering. Before construction, the Cedarbrook ridgeline contained mature trees, foliage and wildlife habitat. By August 2020, large sections had been decimated, stripped and excavated. To preserve the record of what had occurred to the hillside, HAH photographed and filmed the site from the ground and air using drones and other technologies.
HAH was created with three principal objectives: to investigate and disclose what was happening; to educate the public about the environmental and community consequences; and to work with elected officials and public agencies to secure meaningful protections for the remaining hillsides and wildlife habitat.
From the beginning, HAH was an independent, largely self-funded community effort. It received no institutional financing and relied principally on volunteer time and out-of-pocket expenditures.
HAH Challenges the Cedarbrook Permits
By 2021, HAH’s investigation had identified serious questions concerning how the Cedarbrook project had been permitted initially. On August 27, 2021, HAH founder Steven Weinberg wrote directly to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety and asked the Department to withhold all supplemental permits and consider revoking the existing permits. The objections were specific and backed by expert engineering analysis.
The plans appeared to contain at least four separate retaining-wall systems, although only two were permitted by right without approval from a Zoning Administrator. Multiple walls appeared to exceed the ordinarily permissible height of 12 feet, with some structures rising approximately 40 feet. The amount of grading appeared to vastly exceed the amount permitted by right. HAH also questioned whether the proposed building envelope exceeded applicable height restrictions.
HAH’s position was that the walls had been improperly characterized as components of the residence’s foundation, allowing the project to evade requirements that would otherwise have triggered discretionary review and public scrutiny.
While LADBS acknowledged receipt of the information, the inquiry did not immediately produce a public enforcement action. But HAH continued to monitor the permits and the changing legal landscape.
The Bankruptcy— a New Opportunity to Protect the Ridgeline
Construction at Cedarbrook had substantially stopped by 2020 after the project experienced financing issues and creditors (including numerous subcontractors) sought payment. The debtor’s later court filings acknowledged that work commenced in 2019 with grading, caissons and partial retaining-wall construction, but halted in 2020 when construction lending was pulled back. The Cedarbrook ownership entity, Treetop Development, LLC, ultimately entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022.
Bankruptcy changed the battlefield. The project was no longer simply a dispute between a developer and a neighborhood. It became an asset to be protected, financed and marketed for the benefit of lenders and creditors. The existing permits were essential to that strategy.
While the bankruptcy proceeded, however, the law governing the property changed dramatically.
The Expansion of the Hillside Construction Regulation
The Hillside Construction Regulation (“HCR”) (Ordinance No. 184827) was passed in 2017 (LA Clerk’s File 16-1472-SI). In a nutshell, the HCR requires any single family dwelling within an HCR District exceeding 17,500 square feet to obtain discretionary Site Plan Review approval under LAMC § 16.05 before any related grading, foundation, building, or land-use permit may issue. The threshold applies cumulatively, preventing developers from avoiding review through successive permits, piecemeal additions, or multiple buildings treated as parts of one larger project. The HCR was a pilot program when initially passed into law and unfortunately did not include Coldwater or Franklin Canyons. This loophole allowed developer Mohamed Hadid to obtain permits for Cedarbrook without any neighborhood oversight
In early 2021, HAH and other community stakeholders advocated for the expansion of the HCR to include the Coldwater Canyon and Franklin Canyon areas. Through HAH’s efforts (including a recommendation by the Bel Air Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council), that expansion was adopted as Ordinance No. 187747 in January 2023 and signed into law February 2023. The new HCR expansion created a fundamental problem for the Cedarbrook developers. If their 2018 permits remained valid, they could argue that the enormous project was grandfathered under the more permissive land-use rules in effect when the permits were issued.
If the permits expired, the entire project would have to start over under current law—including the expanded HCR. The proposed 75,000-plus-square-foot estate could not simply be resurrected as originally designed.
In short, the permits had become, in the debtor’s own words, the “life blood” of the bankruptcy case. The debtor warned that losing them would drastically reduce the property’s value, require millions of dollars in restoration costs and force any future owner to create new plans under far more restrictive development rules under the HCR.
HAH Urges City To Scrutinize the Permits
When the City’s pandemic-related permit tolling period ended in February 2023, HAH renewed its request that LADBS closely scrutinize the Cedarbrook permits. On February 1, 2023, HAH again wrote to LADBS, urging the Department to scrutinize the permits or, at minimum, refuse any additional permits unless the project fully complied with the new HCR.
The following morning, an LADBS structural engineering official responded: “As far as I know, I believe all the permits related to Cedarbrook are revoked.” The official said he would confirm the status.
That exchange demonstrated that the status of the permits was already under active consideration inside LADBS months before the decisive events of July 2023 (below). HAH then continued monitoring the permit records and the bankruptcy docket.
On July 28, 2023, HAH once again wrote to LADBS and urged the City to review all existing permits, citing both the previously identified permitting violations and the absence of meaningful construction. What happened next remains an open question in the Cedarbrook story.
July 31, 2023: The Permit Crisis Is Revealed
On July 31, 2023, the debtor filed an emergency status report in bankruptcy court. The filing revealed that, following a July 27 court hearing, the Cedarbrook team had learned that the City was threatening to expire the project’s critical 2018 building permits. The City formally confirmed that position on Friday, July 28—the same day HAH sent its reminder to LADBS to scrutinize the permits.
The record does not establish whether HAH’s communications prompted the City’s decisions in any respect. The timing is striking, but the City may already have been conducting its own internal reviews. What is certain is that HAH had been urging permit termination since 2021, renewed that request when pandemic tolling ended and again contacted LADBS on the very day the City confirmed its intention to act.
The debtor’s lawyers reacted immediately.
According to a July 31, 2023 status report filed in court, they opened negotiations with the City and prepared litigation seeking an injunction. By late afternoon on July 31, the debtor reported that the immediate threat had “abated” and that negotiations concerning the permits were continuing.
The report went further; it stated that the City had agreed not to proceed with permit expiration and had agreed to issue supplemental permits extending the building, retaining-wall and grading permits. The debtor was also asking the City to confirm that the property possessed vested rights exempting it from more restrictive ordinances enacted after the original permits were issued. In other words, the City appeared to have reversed course within hours.
That was the moment the story changed.
HAH Sounds the Alarm
As soon HAH learned the City maybe capitulating, HAH immediately contacted Council District 5, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, and leaders of the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council. The message was straightforward: the City’s internal discussions with the Cedarbrook team could determine the future of the Franklin Canyon ridgeline, yet the affected community and environmental stakeholders had no seat at the table.
On August 2, HAH advised Council District 5 that LADBS had apparently first decided to expire the permits and then backed away. It warned that, unless the community intervened immediately, the City might allow the project to retain 2018 grandfathered rights and avoid the 2023 version of the HCR which was expanded to now cover the Cedarbrook Site.
On August 3, HAH circulated the specific concessions the Cedarbrook team was seeking:
1. Written confirmation that the City would no longer expire the permits for lack of meaningful construction;
2. Written confirmation that the City would issue supplemental permits extending the building, grading and retaining-wall approvals; and
3. Written confirmation that the property possessed vested rights against subsequently enacted ordinances, including the 2023 HCR and the proposed Wildlife Ordinance.
HAH urged immediate intervention before those requests could be quietly granted.
The environmental agencies responded.
On August 4, 2023, Paul Edelman, Deputy Director of Natural Resources and Planning for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and MRCA, wrote directly to LADBS Chief Binh Phan. Edelman urged the Department to freeze any permit reinstatement, questioned the legality of the retaining walls and grading, and warned that the project would inflict significant biological and scenic damage on highly accessible public parkland.
HAH Appears in Bankruptcy Court
On August 10, 2023, HAH appeared at the Cedarbrook bankruptcy hearing as a representative of Franklin-Coldwater community. Numerous lawyers appeared for the debtor, lenders, brokers, land-use professionals, financiers and creditors. The hearing concerned another $6 million in debtor-in-possession financing intended, in part, to fund “meaningful construction,” obtain supplemental permits and advance plans before additional land-use protections could take effect.
No creditor opposed the financing. HAH did.
HAH told the court that the community opposed pumping more money into the Cedarbrook site and challenged the absence of transparency surrounding the debtor’s negotiations with City officials. HAH also emphasized that the Hillside Construction Regulation had been omitted from the debtor’s presentation and warned that the court was not receiving the complete picture.
Next, HAH asked the debtor’s attorneys to identify the City officials with whom they were negotiating. They refused, arguing that community interference could diminish the value of the bankruptcy estate.
The bankruptcy judge declined to halt the financing. Preserving value for creditors was the court’s principal responsibility. But the judge acknowledged the neighborhood’s concerns and observed that the community had other avenues through which to act. HAH used them.
The Neighborhood Council Takes a Public Position
Following notice, on August 23, 2023, HAH presented the Cedarbrook issue to the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council at a public hearing. During the hearing, the Council voted unanimously to request intervention by Mayor Karen Bass.
The Council’s September 5, 2023 letter described the project as a roughly 78,000-square-foot mega-mansion atop the Franklin Canyon ridgeline and urged the City not to reactivate the permits. The Council emphasized that permits were not intended to remain alive indefinitely and that allowing their revival would give the developer grandfathered rights unavailable to ordinary citizens.
The letter also documented the history as it was then understood: issuance of the principal permits in 2018; reactivation in 2019; substantial grading and habitat loss; cessation of construction in 2020; expiration of pandemic tolling in 2023; and the absence of renewed work on the residence.
Most importantly, the Council insisted that any future development comply with the current (2023) version of the Hillside Construction Regulation.
What had begun as HAH’s effort to uncover an internal permitting dispute had become the official, unanimous position of the community’s elected neighborhood council.
The City Stands Firm
After further review, LADBS did not implement the arrangement described in the debtor’s July 31 report. Instead, the City concluded that the main-house and guest-house permits had expired in March 2020, before the pandemic tolling order took effect. The City entered the expiration into its permit records and took the position that new applications would have to comply with current land-use regulations (i.e., HCR 2023). That determination was critical to the economic premise of the Cedarbrook project.
Without the 2018 permits, the debtor could no longer market the property as a ready-to-complete, grandfathered mega-estate. Any new owner would face the 2023 Hillside Construction Regulation, discretionary review requirements and the other protections enacted after the 2018 permits. The Cedarbrook team responded by attacking both the City and the community advocates who had urged it to enforce the law.
The Developer Sues—and Blames HAH
On December 29, 2023, Treetop filed an emergency motion asking the bankruptcy court to issue an order to show cause against the City of Los Angeles. The debtor claimed that the City had violated the automatic bankruptcy stay by expiring the permits. It sought an order declaring the expiration of permits void, prohibiting further City action and preserving what it characterized as vested development rights.
The motion devoted an entire section to “Steven Weinberg and His Allies,” asserting that HAH, neighborhood representatives and environmental stakeholders had pressured the City to invalidate the permits and that HAH was “interfering” with its marketing efforts simply by urging professionals marketing the property to conduct due diligence before publishing statements the project was “fully permitted”). The debtor cited HAH’s appearance in bankruptcy court, its communications with LADBS and the Neighborhood Council’s letter to Mayor Bass.
The debtor also argued that the City’s action was designed to accomplish the wishes of neighbors who opposed development at the property. HAH made no apology for its involvement.
Communicating community concerns to public officials was not improper interference. It was the core function of a neighborhood representative and community advocacy organization. HAH had raised substantial, documented questions about the permits beginning in 2021. It had acted publicly. It had communicated through official channels. And it had asked the City to apply the same laws to Cedarbrook that applied to everyone else. Indeed, the debtor’s own accusations confirmed how effective that advocacy had become.
The Bankruptcy Court Sides With Treetop
The first major judicial ruling went against the City and the community. On February 7, 2024, the bankruptcy court granted partial summary adjudication in favor of Treetop. The court accepted the “estoppel” argument that the City’s continued inspections, communications and dealings concerning the project had induced substantial reliance by the debtor, its contractors and lenders. The court treated the permits and associated vested rights as protected property of the bankruptcy estate and effectively barred the City from enforcing its expiration determination.
For HAH, the ruling was alarming. If allowed to stand, it threatened to transform time-limited building permits into nearly permanent development rights. It also risked allowing the original Cedarbrook project to escape the more protective regulations enacted while construction sat dormant.
The City appealed directly to the Ninth Circuit. During the appeal, HAH continued alerting environmental agencies and community stakeholders. It also cautioned against a mediated settlement that might restore the permits before the appellate court could rule.
September 24, 2024: The Ninth Circuit Reverses
On September 24, 2024, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit issued its decision. The ruling was direct.
A developer may acquire a vested right by performing substantial work and incurring substantial liabilities in good-faith reliance on a permit. But any vested right can be no greater than the rights actually granted by the permit itself. Here, the Cedarbrook permits expressly stated that they expired two years after issuance.
Accordingly, even assuming Treetop acquired vested rights, those rights were limited by the permits’ express expiration dates. The main-house and guest-house permits expired on March 19 and March 16, 2020, respectively—before the City’s pandemic tolling order took effect. The court reversed the bankruptcy court and remanded the matter.
The decision rejected the central premise on which the Cedarbrook mega-mansion depended: that expenditures, inspections and alleged reliance could transform expired permits into permanent rights immune from later regulation. They could not.
What the Decision Accomplished
The Ninth Circuit ruling did not prohibit all conceivable development at 9650 Cedarbrook. Instead, it accomplished something more fundamental: it eliminated the claim that the original mega-mansion could proceed as a matter of right under permits issued years earlier. Any future proposal must be evaluated under the current legal regime. That includes the expanded 2023 HCR and applicable site-plan, grading, environmental, wildlife and discretionary-review requirements. The distinction is enormous.
Under the old plans, the site was associated with a residence of approximately 75,000 to 78,000 square feet. Under the present Hillside Construction Regulation, the allowable dwelling area has been described as approximately 17,500 square feet, subject to the City’s current review requirements. Whether any project of that reduced scale is financially feasible is a question for the property owner. What matters to the community is that the obsolete permits no longer confer a special entitlement to build the original project.
The Auction That No One Wanted
The economic consequences soon became apparent. Treetop attempted to market and auction the Cedarbrook property through its Chapter 11 plan. But despite what the debtor described as diligent marketing, no qualifying bidder emerged other than Skylark, the stalking-horse lender. The auction was canceled.
The bankruptcy court confirmed a liquidating plan on April 30, 2025. The sale to Skylark closed on May 19, 2025, and the remaining estate assets transferred to a liquidation trust.
The absence of outside bidders was telling. For years, the Cedarbrook team had maintained that the property possessed extraordinary value. In court, it had previously relied on appraisals and opinions placing the value between approximately $80 million and $106 million, depending on the assumed state of completion. But those valuations were tied to the ability to complete the permitted development. Once the Ninth Circuit confirmed that the critical permits had expired, no third party was willing to submit a qualifying bid at the bankruptcy auction.
By September 2025, the property had transferred to Skylark, while the liquidation trust continued evaluating residual claims against the City.
The Role HAH Played
It would be inaccurate to claim that HAH alone terminated the Cedarbrook permits. The final administrative decision belonged to the City of Los Angeles. The legal victory was achieved by the City’s appellate lawyers. The Ninth Circuit’s ruling turned on the language of the permits and California vested-rights law. But it would be equally inaccurate to tell this story without recognizing HAH’s central role.
HAH began documenting Cedarbrook in 2020, when the hillside destruction first became visible.
HAH challenged the legality of the retaining walls, grading, height and permit structure in 2021.
In 2021, HAH actively pushed community leaders and elected officials to expand the HCR to cover Franklin Canyon (and Cedarbrook).
HAH renewed its push for scrutiny when pandemic tolling ended in early 2023.
HAH was monitoring the bankruptcy proceedings when the debtor disclosed the permit crisis on July 31, 2023.
HAH recognized immediately that the permits were the project’s “life blood” and that their loss would subject the property to the newly expanded Hillside Construction Regulation.
HAH alerted Council District 5, MRCA, SMMC, BABCNC and other stakeholders.
HAH appeared in bankruptcy court, opposed additional financing and demanded transparency concerning the debtor’s negotiations with City officials.
HAH developed and circulated the legal analysis concerning meaningful construction and permit abandonment.
HAH presented the matter publicly to the Neighborhood Council, resulting in a unanimous vote and a formal demand to Mayor Bass.
HAH continued advocating after the debtor accused it by name of causing the City’s enforcement action.
And HAH kept the coalition engaged after the bankruptcy court ruled against the City and while the case proceeded to the Ninth Circuit.
Community advocacy does not always produce immediate results. Frequently, it consists of years of document review, unanswered emails, public meetings, court appearances, technical research and the persistent refusal to accept that a powerful developer is entitled to different rules. That is what happened here.
The End of One Project—and the Beginning of Stewardship
The original Cedarbrook mega-mansion is no longer entitled to proceed under its 2018 permits. The Ninth Circuit confirmed that those permits expired in March 2020. The debtor was unable to attract a qualifying outside bidder after the permits were lost. The property ultimately passed to its lender under a liquidating Chapter 11 plan.
The scarred construction site remains. Massive concrete structures, retaining walls, excavations and disturbed hillsides cannot be erased by a court ruling. Questions remain concerning stabilization, restoration, future ownership and what responsibility the present owner and the City may bear for addressing the unfinished site.
But the greatest immediate threat—the revival of a grandfathered, 75,000-plus-square-foot mega-estate on the Franklin Canyon ridgeline—has been defeated. The Cedarbrook saga demonstrates why permits must expire, why public oversight matters and why land-use protections are meaningless unless someone insists that they be enforced. It also demonstrates what a determined community can accomplish.
HAH did not possess the debtor’s financial resources. It did not have 25 lawyers appearing at each hearing. It had no team of lobbyists, bankruptcy professionals, brokers or land-use consultants.
What it had was persistence, information, credibility and a coalition of people and public agencies who understood what was at stake. The Cedarbrook permits were once described as the “life blood” of the project. Today, they are expired. And Franklin Canyon has a future the original plans would have taken away.
Steven L. Weinberg, Founder of Hillsides Against Hadid