The Future of Sustainability Includes Housing
Saving CA's Environment from its Environmental Laws
According to the New York Times, California Just Rolled Back Its Landmark Environmental Law. No. Not even close to correct. California fixed its environmental laws to protect the environment better. It’s a great week for anyone who cares about sustainability and housing affordability.
At issue are two bills CA Governor Newsom signed last Monday reforming the California Environmental Quality (CEQA), a 1970s law approved by Ronald Regan. Over decades, CEQA bloated far beyond what most people consider environmental protections into an albatross around the neck of housing, especially in the most environmentally sound places.
With a stroke of his pen (and a lot of political pressure on the legislature), Newsom re-centered CEQA on its original intent.
California’s environmental laws needed reform to ensure development occurs in the most sustainable places. A report by environmental law firm Holland & Knight found that 80% of all environmental lawsuits against housing in California occur against infill housing, built in areas that are already urban. According to the report, environmental “litigation abuse is primarily the domain of Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) opponents and special interests such as competitors and labor unions seeking non-environmental outcomes.”
When litigants block infill housing, the outcome is more unsustainable sprawl development on open space or farmland far from jobs—or in other states entirely, where the environmental impacts of development are much worse than housing on the temperate, transit-rich California coast. CEQA doesn’t account for global impacts of the absence of development, so it often fails to accurately consider the true cost-benefit of new housing.
A helpful summary of what happened, courtesy of California YIMBY Policy Manager
:
This one hits close to home. CEQA abuse radicalized me into housing advocacy.1
My personal housing journey started in early 2011, when a developer proposed to build 315 apartment homes on an old rock quarry next to the freeway in my hometown, Lafayette, California. The site sits across the street from our local highschool, less than a mile from regional public transit and a half mile from our downtown. It’s an unimpressive hillside, located in a prime location for more homes—homes which the city had zoned to allow on the site since even before its incorporation, in the 1950s.
Fast-forward nine years and the project still had not been approved, undergoing a Byzantine approval process that illustrates the absurdities of CA’s housing process.2
CEQA took center stage. A small group of wealthy neighbors sued in 2015 to block it under the California Environmental Quality Act. The anti-housing litigants raised such pressing environmental concerns such as “will allow more crime to be committed” and “property values will be destroyed.”3
Coupled with a referendum, that first lawsuit caused five years of delay. In 2021 the project got bogged down in a second CEQA lawsuit, which lasted two years and delayed the project just long enough to get stuck in rising interest rates.4 The developer has finally started site clearance, but it’s unclear when the housing will ever get built.
CEQA enabled obstructionism like this because it ballooned far beyond its original intent. When first passed, CEQA was supposed to provide a process for public input on major public infrastructure projects, things like oil refineries or freeways.
As CA courts interpreted the bill, they stretched its meaning to cover such classic environmental issues as historic districts, noise, “aesthetics,” and recreation. These are all important topics, but they aren’t standard sustainability issues. And it’s not good for the environment that someone upset about a totally unrelated thing could tie up good housing projects in years of costly litigation—or kill a project entirely with just the threat.
It’s important that CEQA continues to regulate environmentally risky projects. The new reforms strike a balance by focusing exclusively on narrow exemptions for sustainable development and infrastructure while leaving in place the traditional environmental review process for projects with more risk, like suburban sprawl or major oil infrastructure.
Yet some of CEQA’s strongest defenders never acknowledged the need for reform, and as a result they overplayed their hand. As YIMBY Law Director
wrote in a post earlier this week:For better or worse, public policy (and definitely public narrative) are driven by anecdotes and viral news stories. The anti-social Berkeley NIMBYs who successfully argued that students are pollution, and CEQA requires UC Berkeley to do an Environmental Impact Report before they can increase student enrollment, or (also in Berkeley) argued that the sound of students laughing and talking is an environmental impact that needs study and mitigation, or the disaster in SF around the proposal to build housing at 469 Stevenson Street [a parking lot] anger the public and discredit Environmental Review not just in CA but around the whole country.
CEQA made building housing on a parking lot next to a train station in the most expensive city in the country harder than building suburban sprawl on open space in the desert. Given the baggage, it’s amazing that meaningfully reforming the California Environmental Quality Act took more than four decades.
I’d like to say these reforms mean we’ve nearly solved California’s housing shortage. We’re nowhere close. Fixing housing will require fully fixing zoning, pre- and post-entitlement permitting, fees, the urban planning profession, federal mortgage lending standards, Prop 13 and the tax structure, and more.
But the housing movement showed this week that big coalitions between housers, labor unions, enviros, and others can change paradigms that seem untouchable. City by city, state by state, we can restore a lawful planning process that once again allows growth in the places that need it.
The housing movement triumphs one day. The next, we keep working to solve the root causes of America’s vast shortage of homes in sustainable communities.
To my amazing readers, I’m on vacation for the next two weeks. I’m scheduling some light-hearted articles in advance, namely an urbanist summer reading list next week and an exploration of my year in mushrooms for the week after (some long-awaited mushroom foraging content).
Upon my return, I’ll return to form with an article about Who Speaks for the YIMBY Movement, followed by another about Who Speaks for the Abundance Movement (it’s very different!
I was also radicalized by the rabble rousing of YIMBY legends Sonja Trauss and
and the reporting of fine folks like Connor Dougherty. Sonja sued Lafayette and fought against the NIMBYs to support the housing in Lafayette, and Connor told her story (as did many others).A book by NYT reporter Connor Dougherty, The Golden Gates, describes the first six years of that process of that process, 2011 to 2017 or so. The latter part of the tale was well reported by local and regional media.
Quotes from Golden Gates, an expose on California’s housing issues by NYT reporter Connor Dougherty.
The details are too convoluted to get into here but Lafayette’s website has a good summary.
That cartoon alone was worth it 😁
This was great. Looking forward to the Who Speaks articles, I am intrigued! Enjoy your vacay.