A group of California elected officials wants to encourage more homes in urban areas by restricting how the state’s landmark environmental law is used to block or slow down construction.
Critics say the California Environmental Quality Act is often used to prevent new housing, even if its authors had power plants and other large-scale industrial projects in mind when they passed it in 1970. A bill filed in March in the state legislature would exempt housing projects from the act if they are within city boundaries or near built-up areas. Besides encouraging growth in these areas, advocates say the bill would be good for the environment because it would lessen the need for construction in outlying, less developed areas.
The intent is to address the Golden State’s need to build 300,000 homes annually; in recent years the state has only been meeting a third of that demand, according to a report by the advocacy group California YIMBY. The name is short for Yes in My Backyard. The statewide shortfall was made worse by the recent Los Angeles wildfires that destroyed an estimated 11,000 single-family homes.
"It is too damn hard to build anything in California,” state assembly member Buffy Wicks of Oakland, a bill co-sponsor, said in a statement in March. “If we’re serious about making California more affordable, sustainable and resilient, we have to make it easier to build housing.”
The bill is part of a package of more than 20 pieces of legislation Wicks and others in the assembly introduced last month to cut red tape and make it easier to obtain permits to build housing.
To be exempt from the environmental law, a housing project would have to be less than 20 acres in size and provide at least 15 homes per acre in urban areas, 10 in suburbs and five in rural areas. While detached single-family home construction might be unlikely at those densities, they could accommodate townhouses and condos for homeowners.
The development would also have to be in accord with either a city’s plan for growth or its legal code that controls where homes are allowed. A city should have already considered the environmental impact of new development in the growth plan or as it wrote its code, according to a fact sheet California YIMBY prepared about the bill.
Housing not exempt at some sites
Housing would not be exempt from the state law if it’s on environmentally sensitive or hazardous sites.
The law requires many developers to complete an environmental impact assessment, an in-depth study of potential negative impacts from development. Completing a study can take as long as a year. If a study finds no significant problems from new housing, opponents can appeal through the courts. Lawsuits in some cases have dragged on for as long as four years, said Scott Weiner, another state assembly member who helped write Wicks’ bill.
“The law has in practice allowed basically anyone who can hire a lawyer to use [it] to obstruct projects they do not like for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment,” he said in a statement.
Among the law’s defenders are environmental justice groups, who have cited instances in which developers tried to build housing on land that had issues such as lead in the soil or proximity to polluting factories or highways.
Liam Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for the California Environmental Justice Alliance, declined to comment on the bill while his group reviews it. CEQA Works, a coalition of 200 environmental and conservation groups that support the 1970 law, said it wouldn’t comment yet for the same reason.
California can look to Washington state for inspiration. It amended its own state environmental law in 2023 to prevent it from being used to block new housing within urban areas. Residential development is exempt from the law as long as it complies with the local or regional plan for growth.
An independent state agency, the Little Hoover Commission, called for a reform like the one Wicks’ bill proposes in a 2024 report.
“As long as lengthy review and the threat of litigation discourages homebuilding within California’s cities, housing development will only continue to be pushed further from urban centers and into greenfield areas— exactly the kind of development that state government otherwise seeks to discourage,” the report said.