It's Time to Reform CEQA
My argument that California needs growth
Over the weekend, the Orange County (OC) Register published another op-ed that I wrote on local politics here in California. Read it on the site! It’s good to get web traffic to ensure they consider me in the future.
This piece had to do with the recent case out of Berkeley, where residents have successfully used CEQA to block the University of California from expanding, which will cause 3000 students to lose their admission spots in the university this spring. I know students I have coached who are currently waiting for admission at various University of California schools. Getting into college is such an impactful moment in young people’s lives, and I am incensed that so many are going to be negatively impacted by the pointless crusade of a few wealthy Berkeley residents:
My argument is that this is a bigger problem for California than just the narrow case of Berkeley: California as a state has come to believe on a fundamental level that growth is wrong and we need to stop it:
This absurd turn of events shows a fundamental bias at work, not just in CEQA, but in California more broadly: the belief that growth is inherently destructive and that it should be stifled to protect the status quo. We need to embrace CEQA reform as a first step in rejecting this anti-growth mindset before CEQA destroys our state.
CEQA has become a ubiquitous tool for neighborhood residents to block development of all types because it will negatively impact the community. The Berkeley residents argue new student housing will impact the community in the form of more traffic and noise, less parking, and in some cases, less green space. All of these are real environmental side-effects of new housing, and they are worth taking seriously and trying to mitigate when possible. The problem is that CEQA fails to balance the costs with the enormous environmental benefits of new development. Building new housing in our cities is one of our most effective tools to reduce traffic, improve air quality, and de-carbonize our economy across the whole state.
Urban development empowers residents to live, work and recreate closer together. CEQA often harms the environment because it privileges the desire to avoid trivial local environmental impacts over the desire to prevent catastrophic changes on a much higher level. Infill development that replaces residential, commercial, or parking with new housing is a net benefit to the environment.
For those who missed it, last year’s book club on Golden Gates did a good job talking about this history:
Growth does not automatically lead to economic inclusion. As housing policy researcher Darrell Owens points out, even while California was growing in the first half of the 20th century, Berkeley serves as a great example of how African Americans were purposefully excluded from the city, and thus locked out of economic opportunity:
But without growth, it is impossible to have economic inclusion, and the Berkeley case demonstrates that:
But rather than embracing inclusive growth, post-1970 California has instead adopted scarcity, a mindset that research shows fundamentally undermines inclusion and economic opportunity. Nowhere is this more clearly visible than in the housing market. Despite persistent demand for Californian homes, the state largely stopped building housing around 1970. In 1960, Los Angeles had a population of 2.5 Million but enough zoning capacity to accommodate 10 million people. In 2020, the population had grown to 4 million, but zoning capacity had shrunk to accommodate only 4.3 million people. This scarcity has priced the economic marginalized out of the market. As a result, California now has a housing market where only the affluent can stay. At the same time, thousands of residents leave the state, exporting our housing problems to cities like Spokane, Washington, and Bozeman, Montana.
To counter this instinct, you need to embrace a plan that centers on growth and abundance rather than scarcity. Traditionally in American politics, “economic growth” codes as a right of center value, but increasingly many on the left are also championing growth. Derek Thompson laid this out well at the Atlantic, and Ezra Klein also did in the New York Times. I would recommend those pieces highly.
If you want to do something practical live in California, I recommend using this tool to support Senator Scott Weiner’s bill to reform CEQA by exempting student housing. The legislation is a good bill that will take a small step in undoing this mess. But, unfortunately, it will not become law fast enough to ensure the in time to help.
We need to think bigger, though: we should be exempting all infill development (any project where new housing is replacing an existing structure) from CEQA. I borrowed the idea from Shane Phillips, who articulates it in his book The Affordable City as one of several steps we should take to address the housing supply in our state.
Look forward to more on this topic soon!