California lawmakers are advancing some of their boldest ideas yet for increasing home building, as residents grow increasingly frustrated with the state’s high cost of living.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D) has proposed requiring cities to allow seven-story apartment buildings near train and major bus stops, and to streamline permitting for housing projects within half a mile of those stops.
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D) is championing a 22-bill permitting overhaul that, among other changes, would exempt most urban housing projects from environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
The Democrat-led legislature has over the past seven years become much more willing to help developers build market-rate housing, Wicks said in an interview, as lawmakers try to increase the housing supply and drive down rents and home prices that are among the highest in the nation.
Now they are poised to take on an environmental law that has historically been a third rail in state politics. Speaker Robert Rivas (D) made Wicks’s exemption bill a top priority. It recently sailed through the Assembly’s Natural Resources and Housing committees without a single “no” vote.
“I couldn’t even have imagined running that [bill] when I first got elected,” Wicks said of her proposal. But the political dynamic in Sacramento has changed as California’s housing crisis has worsened, she said.
“It’s almost requiring more bold action,” she said. “It’s requiring us to take on our sacred cows.”
Some environmentalists say rigorous California Environmental Quality Act review is vital and that any exemptions should target affordable housing for low-income people. But lawmakers seem less open to such arguments this year as they push for more home building.
“There are so many streamlining bills now,” said Jennifer Ganata, legal department co-director at Communities for a Better Environment, a nonprofit that aids low-income communities. “A lot of the legislators are pretty candid about: we have worried too much about the process, we need to worry about progress.”
She argued that the California Environmental Quality Act is more important than ever, particularly for low-income communities, as the Trump administration rolls back federal environmental protections. “It does feel like a time when environmental justice is really being erased at the federal level.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has signed a slew of laws in recent years that seek to override local zoning rules and cut red tape that can hinder housing development. That includes bills that make it easier to build accessory dwelling units statewide, allow homeowners to split single-family lots in two, and speed up permitting for certain kinds of projects.
But many past reforms have been so narrowly targeted, so freighted with eligibility requirements, or so easy for cities to subvert that they have had little impact, home builders and pro-housing leaders say.
They say they are hoping the proposals advancing this year will be different and perhaps inspire lawmakers in other states.
“The permitting reform stuff has really come to a head,” said Jeff Pemstein, associate vice president for advocacy, Western region at the National Association of Home Builders. “And what happens in California tends to spread to the rest of the country, good, bad or otherwise.”
California developers can wait years to get local officials to approve a tentative plan, he said. Projects can get bogged down in years of review and litigation, which both delays construction and drives up home prices.
The permitting package now before the legislature includes bills that would create a uniform, statewide application for housing projects compliant with local laws; allow builders to hire a third party to inspect permitted work if city officials do not make an inspector available within 30 days; and increase penalties for localities that violate state housing laws, among other changes.
Wicks’s proposed exemption to the California Environmental Quality Act is the package’s biggest and potentially most controversial bill, advocates for building more housing say.
Under her bill, cities and counties would still have to complete an Environmental Quality Act review during their regular planning process. But housing projects of fewer than 20 acres proposed on a previously developed urban area would not have to go through a project-level review if they meet local zoning requirements.
Wicks said project-level reviews are duplicative and have been used by opponents to slow or block countless projects for non-environmental reasons. And she said her exemption would help fight climate change because it would encourage denser urban development.
Cities tend to have a lower carbon footprint than sprawling exurbs, in large part because people don’t need to drive as much.
Creating a California Environmental Quality Act exemption for urban infill housing “is the key to our state’s ability to build housing in existing communities in an environmentally friendly way,” Wicks told the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee during a hearing last week.
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the panel praised the bill and unanimously voted to send it on to the Appropriations Committee, which Wicks chairs.
“It boggles my mind how California slows down — every jurisdiction, it almost seems — slows down projects with red tape after red tape in places that are already developed, in places that are intended for housing,” Housing Committee Vice Chair Joe Patterson (R) said. “It drives me nuts.”