As recent scoping plans by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the new federal climate change package put forth much stricter mitigation measures, a new report shows environmental law has been so frequently used to stop housing production that three-quarters of the population can’t afford to own a home here.
The Center for Jobs & Economy Report, Anti-Housing CEQA Lawsuits Filed in 2020 Challenge Nearly 50% of California’s Annual Housing Production, was authored by Jennifer Hernandez, a partner at Holland & Knight.
The proposed CARB scoping plan includes new impact models for greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for Natural Working Lands (NWL), which includes developed lands in urban and suburban areas.
“The short story is that neither the Legislature nor any state agency has established any clear, transparent standard for how much GHG and/or VMT is acceptable for a project – e.g., a housing project – and how much is ‘significant’ and thus requires ‘all feasible mitigation,” Hernandez said in an email response to the Northern California Record.
“Changing these standards to make them more stringent also means that even implementation of already-approved Housing Elements (required every eight years of every city and county by state law to accommodate new housing) is vulnerable to more CEQA lawsuits for not appropriately analyzing/mitigating under the new standards,” Hernandez said.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) was signed in 1970 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan with the intent of incorporating environmental impacts in development decisions.
But the law has led to extensive litigation to block all forms of development, including affordable housing throughout the state.
Hernandez noted the release of the 2020 dataset in the report found that 47,999 housing units were the basis of CEQA litigation filed in just that year.
A modest CEQA reform bill also was shelved earlier this month.
The report also examines the impact of CEQA litigation on low-income communities, and the intersection of the CARB plan with many of the California laws that have been passed to encourage housing production.
Robust CEQA reform finally needs to incorporate civil rights, Hernandez said.
“Restoring civil rights, not just the slice of civil rights more recently recognized as ‘environmental justice,’ to the top priority for our elected leaders,” Hernandez said.