After a decade of legal and political wrangling, the fight over a Lafayette apartment project that jumpstarted a national pro-housing movement may finally be coming to a close, marking a symbolic victory for advocates fed up with the Bay Area’s unhospitable housing market.

Over objections from neighbors who sued to halt the project, a California appellate court last month ruled the 315-unit Terraces of Lafayette complex planned for the heart of that East Bay suburb meets state environmental requirements and building can begin.

The ruling is the likely culmination of a series of protracted skirmishes that helped galvanize a growing YIMBY — or “Yes In My Backyard” — movement, a new generation of outspoken and sometimes litigious pro-housing activists. The controversy and the YIMBY coalition it ignited have spurred California officials to crack down on growth-averse cities blamed for exacerbating a deepening housing affordability crisis.

“The folks who initially objected to this project, and have been fighting it ever since, poked a sleeping bear,” said Matt Regan, a housing policy expert with the Bay Area Council business association.

One of the early YIMBY advocates, Sonja Trauss, hardly knew what she was doing when she sued Lafayette seven years ago to force the city to approve the Terraces apartment complex. Trauss, then in her mid-30s, had only recently quit her job as a math teacher to dedicate herself to haranguing Bay Area cities into permitting more housing — the denser, the better.

Up until that point, Trauss and her fellow millennial activists — most of whom had little background in housing policy but were united in feeling priced out of the region — had been gaining attention mainly for showing up to city meetings to voice loud support for proposed developments and square off with older homeowners bent on killing the projects.

But when Trauss learned about a compromise plan to downsize Terraces of Lafayette from hundreds of apartments to 44 single-family homes, she saw a new opportunity. Without a lawyer, she wrote and filed a petition arguing the move violated a then-little-known state housing law called the Housing Accountability Act.

She was confident the optics of suing an exclusive bedroom community to allow apartments would stir controversy.

“Even just the name Lafayette, even if you don’t know anything, it sounds like what it is,” said Trauss, who didn’t live in the city. “If it had been called Danville, it just wouldn’t have been as good.”

Local media couldn’t resist the story, and neither could the New York Times. And with the Terraces fight lifted to the national stage, a flood of enthusiasm poured in for the YIMBY cause.

While Trauss’ suit ultimately failed — though the apartment plans would eventually resurface — she and her allies harnessed the new energy to create multiple nonprofit advocacy groups, including YIMBY Action, which now has chapters across 17 states.

“I spent the last six years giving the same speech: You have an address, you have an opinion and you have a hearing to go to and give that opinion,” Trauss said.

At home in California, the YIMBY nonprofits would go on to sue more jurisdictions — often successfully — including Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Altos, Huntington Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes and most recently Santa Clara County, which advocates have accused of imposing illegal zoning restrictions near Stanford University.

They’ve also become political power players, cultivating allies in lawmakers and regulators in Sacramento, sponsoring a raft of state legislation to compel cities to approve more housing and raising millions of dollars in funding — including from tech millionaires like Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.

“There are now political consequences when cities ignore their housing obligations,” said Regan with Bay Area Council.

Still, the YIMBY argument that much more housing of all kinds and affordability levels is needed as soon as possible has yet to convince everyone. That’s especially true for some neighborhood groups and low-income tenant advocates, who view the YIMBYs as an extension of corporate development interests hungry to upend the character of local communities and further gentrification.

Michael Griffiths, president of Save Lafayette, the neighborhood group that sued to stop the Terraces project, echoed those sentiments. He described Trauss and company as “ill-informed” and “out-of-order” outsiders who “show up and create problems” for cities.

Griffiths, who takes issue with the notion the Bay Area is grappling with a housing “crisis,” said the YIMBYs, city officials and courts who backed the project are ignoring the wildfire risks and increased pollution that would come with building on the 22-acre site at Pleasant Hill and Dear Hill roads just off Highway 24.

Save Lafayette will “follow the legal process through its proper protocol” to challenge the appellate court decision, Griffiths said, though he declined to give specifics of what that could look like.

Trauss, who is no longer part of the battle, said it’s time to start building.

“The people involved with Save Lafayette should be ashamed of themselves,” she said in a statement when the ruling against the group was announced. “They have denied housing for more than 700 middle-income people for the last 10 years while they fought this project.”

Dennis O’Brien, the Terraces developer — who expects the project and its 63 below-market units could be completed by 2026 — calls Trauss a friend despite being on the opposite side of her initial lawsuit a half-decade ago. O’Brien credits the YIMBYs with reframing the state’s housing debates and convincing lawmakers to act, adding some of the reforms have been key to moving the Terraces project forward.

“Sonja and her generation have stood up for the fact they could not find affordable housing in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” he said, “and decided to do something about it.”

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