California rolls back CEQA in bipartisan win for abundance agenda
California has been having a rough year: In a short six months it was hit with wildfires, urban unrest, and even some small earthquakes. But this week the Golden State made a decision that should change its luck: It reformed its most powerful environmental regulation, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), to ease the way for new construction in the state.
Some background: After the January wildfires, the rebuilding process all but stopped—a disappointing but not surprising, to anyone familiar with California regulations. Out of almost a thousand applications, only 45 permits were issued to rebuild—and that’s after an order waiving a number of California’s stringent environmental regulations, including CEQA.
CEQA has for years been used by environmentalists, NIMBYs, aggrieved community groups, labor unions, business rivals, and anyone and everyone seeking to stop development. Cities are granted incredible power through CEQA, as Noah DeWitt explains in Pepperdine Law Review; San Francisco and other cities have
“imposed discretionary [CEQA] review [processes] on ‘all residential development projects of five or more units,’” even if the project would be otherwise within the current zoning requirements. In turn, these sorts of actions often have the effect of “prevent[ing] housing construction in . . . communities rather than facilitat[ing] housing construction at the local level.”
Local citizens without any personal interest in a project can sue under CEQA to stop it. Even California’s own courts admit that “CEQA enforcement is built on such private enforcement” by NIMBYs.
Maybe the greatest testament to CEQA’s “effectiveness” is that whenever the California state government has a project of their own in mind, something that they believe must be done, they don’t engage with CEQA—they write an exception. The Sacramento Kings’ new arena? Exception. UC Berkley enrollment? Exception. Remodeling the California state capitol? Exception. Time and again, California’s own behavior has shown that even the legislature that wrote the law no longer believes it is worthwhile.
So, finally, they did something about it.
On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed two reforms to CEQA passed with bipartisan support as part of the state budget. The first exempts from CEQA high-density housing projects when they are not built on particularly environmentally sensitive sites; the second creates nine major new CEQA exemptions: health centers and rural clinics, childcare centers, advanced manufacturing facilities, food banks, farm worker housing, clean water projects, wildfire risk mitigation projects, broadband, and parks.
While—of course—NIMBYs and environmental groups were opposed, the CEQA reforms had support from a broad coalition of groups, and politicians. Everyone can recognize that without reforms like this, California’s housing and homelessness problems can never be solved. Nor can California build the critical infrastructure necessary to keep its economy competitive in the future. And without critical wildlife risk mitigation, the horrific fires of earlier this year will only return.
Reforms like these, broadly recognized by nearly everyone as absolutely necessary, are the only way to keep America competitive, and to build the abundant economy we need for years to come.
