National Review Online
Wednesday, July 02, 2025
‘We have seen this abuse over and over and over again,”
California Governor Gavin Newsom said this week. Such was the
governor’s frustration that he did what few ambitious Democrats are willing to
do: He lectured his progressive allies about the folly of demand-side
economics.
“We have fallen prey to a strategy of delay,” Newsom said
of his state’s housing shortage — a long-term crisis that is only getting worse
as a result of the state’s statutory obstacles to development. “As a result of
that, we have too much demand chasing too little supply,” he observed. “This is
not complicated. It is Econ 101.”
Indeed, it is. This week, Sacramento took a step that may
finally go some way toward relieving the pressure on housing-deprived state
residents: A bipartisan legislative majority passed and Newsom signed two bills
that will at long last roll back the onerous restrictions on development
enshrined in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
The legislation will allow future projects to avoid
compliance with some of CEQA’s burdensome environmental-impact requirements.
Additionally, the law will shield developers from the costly lawsuits routinely
brought against anyone who has a mind to build something in the Golden State.
Environmentalist activists and union organizers are, of
course, fit to be tied. So, too, are the activist lawmakers who cater to them.
“Jeopardizing those whole ecosystems, I think, is a risk that we don’t want to
take,” State Senator Catherine Blakespear warned of the law’s potential
contributions to the globe’s ongoing “extinction crises.”
If human extinction is going to come about, in part, as a
result of legislation that makes it marginally easier for residential projects
in rezoned areas to pass legal muster, our species isn’t nearly as resilient as
we thought.
CEQA was signed into law in 1970 by then-Governor Ronald
Reagan at a time when environmental degradation was a visible and politically
unsustainable phenomenon. By the early ’80s, however, California lawmakers had
already begun discussing reforms to the legislation to address its
unanticipated consequences — among them, making development a financially
prohibitive prospect.
To comply with CEQA, prospective developers were required
to conduct environmental impact reports and secure a clean bill of health from
the state, but it’s not hard to see where that process could be bogged down
given the particulars that developers must account for. They had to evaluate
their project’s effect on local traffic congestion, fire safety and wildfire
evacuation routes, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, water pollution,
“social noise” pollution, biological diversity, and even the cultural impact
for new construction. The law has been used to block the construction of bike
paths and bus lanes and the expansion of the student population at the
University of California, Berkeley.
CEQA has been revised in the past to account for “frivolous lawsuits,” but the problem persisted. A Holland & Knight study of the lawsuits filed under CEQA
between 2010 and 2012 found that the “vast majority” of suits came from
individuals or local associations that had no record of environmental advocacy.
Indeed, the projects that were most frequently challenged were taxpayer-funded
initiatives ostensibly designed to contribute to environmental health —
renewable energy projects and “especially” high-density, multi-unit housing
developments.
“One thing that keeps coming up with CEQA is the fact
that it essentially allows anybody to use a proxy,” the Milken Institute’s Kevin Klowden told a California-based PBS affiliate in
2012. “It’s just that it’s so easy for a competitor or for somebody with some
sort of rival interest to file that lawsuit and create delays and try and
discourage the development and get more favorable terms or get bought off.”
In sum, this legislation became the primary instrument by
which well-connected commercial interests and local residents pulled up the
ladder behind them to prevent an influx of newcomers. It was classic NIMBY-ism,
and more rational California lawmakers realized it needed to change.
Governor Jerry Brown tried to “modernize” CEQA, but he
failed in that effort. “The unions won’t let you because they use it as a
hammer to get project labor agreements,” Brown lamented during a 2016 interview. “The environmentalists like it because
it’s the people’s document that you have to disclose all the impacts. And, of
course, the developers have a problem because ‘impact,’ boy, that’s a big word.
Everything’s an impact.”
The state has experienced significant environmental
improvements in the half-century since CEQA, but much else has contributed to
that achievement. “You don’t hear about massive Stage 1 and Stage 2 smog alerts
in L.A. anymore,” Klowden observed. “That’s great, but that’s not what CEQA
is.”
What CEQA is — or, rather, was — was a farce. It became
the object of contempt and ridicule even in places like the Los Angeles
Times. You could practically hear the paper’s editorial board rubbing their
temples as they searched for the public good in the degree to which CEQA contributed
not just to the sum of human misery in California but to the very environmental problems it was supposed to address.
The reforms of CEQA are just the latest legislative
effort to expedite housing construction in California. Democrats in states like
Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York, where CEQA-like obstacles to new
construction persist, should take note.
“I could certainly see it emboldening other governors,”
Newsom said this week. “‘If they can do it in California, we can do it, too.’”
For once, we hope the governor is right about the example California Democrats
have set.
No comments:
Post a Comment