I think I know what fills me with particular glee this week at the news that the city of La Cañada Flintridge last week abandoned its efforts to block low-income housing in the heart of town at the former Christian Science church property on Foothill Boulevard.

It’s the news, as reported by our Jonathan Lansner, that LCF’s neighboring city Pasadena is tied with San Francisco as the second-toughest city in the nation in which to find rental housing of any kind. We’re only No. 2 to New York, and if you’ve ever tried to find an apartment in that burg ...

And if you’ve ever tried to rent an apartment in La Cañada , you’d be in an even shakier boat, weirdly. It’s a crazy comparison, the most sylvan uniformly upscale suburb on God’s green Earth, and Gotham. Because the number of multi-family units — condos, townhouses, heaven help us apartments — is vanishingly small in La Cañada Flintridge, though a few exist. Versus quite a number of such listings in NYC. But the availability at any given time is similar: tough to find.

Anyway, good for developers Garret Weyand, Alexandra Hack and Jonathan Curtis of Cedar Street Partners for sticking this out with their argument that they had the right to build the complex regardless of zoning under the “builder’s remedy” provision of the state’s 35-year-old “Anti-NIMBY Law.”

As our Jeff Collins reports: “The builder’s remedy allows construction that includes low-income housing virtually anywhere in a city or county that fails to adopt housing development plans on time. La Cañada Flintridge’s housing element plan didn’t win state approval until more than two years after Southern California’s October 2021 due date.”

Still, City Hall fought for years to deny approval for the proposed five-story apartment — and hotel! — building at the former First Church of Christ Scientist at 600 Foothill.

Never has the city seen a hotel, so far as I know.

The development will have 80 apartments, at least 16 of which would be for low-income households; 14 hotel rooms; 7,300 square feet of office space.

And if, yes, such housing would be mighty unusual in a city where when you Google, as I just did, rental housing there, you see $17,000-a-month homes, so be it. And if five stories is unusual in LCF, well, that part of Foothill is very commercial — it’s not like they’re building a skyscraper abutting Descanso Gardens. It will fit in just fine.

And the small, tranquil city will be all the better for it. Southern Californians are in this lack-of-affordable-housing quagmire together. We’re not going to get out of this situation in which our children are not able to live here where they grew up without getting creative, which is what the Cedar Street developers are doing. And while doing so will upset some traditionally single-family norms, from LCF to San Marino, from Bradbury to the Whittier hills, change is coming.

“The city and community will need to chart a pathway forward that integrates the 600 Foothill project as reasonably as possible,” Mayor Mike Davitt said. “We hope going forward the developer will work with us to minimize any detrimental impacts on the city.” I am quite sure that it will.

Wednesday at random

Never have I known a person more elegant than Elsie Sadler. And just to sit in the pew behind her on a Sunday at All Saints, where she headed the Vestry for what seemed like forever, was to witness pure grace. After being evacuated from Monte Cedro in Altadena during the Eaton fire, Elsie died last month at 97 at her daughter Peggy Buchanan’s home in La Quinta. Reading some biographical information Peggy sent over, I never would have guessed: Born Elsie Rose Cory to British immigrants to Waukegan, Illinois, Elsie grew up with a single mother who worked full time as a nursing assistant. Her father left the family when she was a toddler. But she married a lawyer she met as a scholarship student at Monmouth College, and they ended up in South Pasadena in 1965. Here, she once served on nine different nonprofit boards at one time! In 2009, with Susan Long, she founded the fabulous Pasadena Festival of Women Authors, and in 2011 was named the Pasadena Star-News/Rose Magazine Woman of the Year. Peggy writes: “When asked if she was ever bored with life, she answered, ‘Not at all!’ She loved to read, to watch Rachel Maddow, and to see her family and friends. She never forgot a name.” And I will never, ever forget Elsie.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com