For decades, California policymakers have simultaneously declared the state is in a climate crisis and a housing crisis.
In response, Sacramento has promoted its own state-developed environmental protection laws while at the same time encouraging current and future residents to own their own home.
Here’s the problem: Our own environmental laws are blocking the very housing we say we want and know that we need.
The main law involved here is the comprehensive California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), described by the state as requiring that “state and local agencies disclose and evaluate the significant environmental impacts of proposed projects and adopt all feasible mitigation measures to reduce or eliminate those impacts.”
The most frequent target of CEQA challenges is housing, especially apartment buildings, the type of dense and transit-friendly homes that state climate policy claims to encourage. But the data is different: CEQA lawsuits filed in 2020 targeted about 48,000 housing units, nearly half of California’s housing production that year.
Here’s the problem: The incentives are lopsided.
A CEQA suit can be filed for as little as a few hundred dollars. Challengers who lose pay nothing toward the other side’s legal bills, while those who prevail on even one issue get their attorneys’ fees paid – plus a bonus – that just drives housing costs up higher. Also, there is no limit on how many times a project can be sued, and the people suing don’t have to disclose who they are.
For example, a group formed recently with a name like “Friends of Sustainable Neighborhoods” can file suit without producing its members or backers, and a judge, city or even a family whose home construction is being blocked is not entitled to know who is behind it.
Even worse, to stop a project does not require winning in court. Roughly 200 CEQA lawsuits are filed each year, and trial court cases typically last 18 to 36 months. Appeals can add years more. Lenders and grant agencies generally won’t fund a project while litigation is pending. A CEQA lawsuit doesn’t need to have legal merit. It only needs to last long enough for housing applicants and funders to run out of money or decide enough is enough.
Here’s how the lack of transparency has nothing to do with the environment. In one notorious case, a student-housing company run by USC alumni filed a CEQA suit to block a competitor’s project, then eight more against the rival’s other California developments. The company’s operators even described themselves as “the al- Qaida of CEQA.” It took a federal racketeering lawsuit to stop them.
The human cost is real.
In Berkeley, a family’s plan to build a single home on an existing lot, backed by neighbors and the city council, was tied up for 11 years. The family won, but raised their kids elsewhere, and the house was never built. In Los Angeles County, a couple spent more than $100,000 on permits and studies for a modest 1,436-square-foot house, then abandoned it when they could not navigate the CEQA gauntlet. In Hollywood, tenants of a finished apartment tower were evicted after a judge ruled, years later, that a historic study of a demolished restaurant fell short.
Even state lawmakers can’t escape the law they refuse to fix. When the Legislature wanted to replace the Capitol’s office annex, it passed a special statute limiting court challenges. An appellate court blocked the project anyway. Rather than navigate the law the way they demand of you, lawmakers just exempted their own building from CEQA entirely.
Additionally, sports stadiums and corporate headquarters have received similar fast-track treatment. Housing, schools, and water projects? Not a chance. For the political and the powerful, it seems to be CEQA reform for me, but not for thee.
There is a better way. And this November, voters can make it a reality.
Proposition 45 would set enforceable deadlines for environmental review, require CEQA lawsuits against essential projects to be resolved within 270 days, direct courts to apply CEQA as written, and limit remedies to fixing the specific CEQA flaw rather than scrapping the whole project. It creates no new exemptions, preserves public comment, leaves every approval decision with local governments, and even still lets anyone sue – but deadlines and transparent compliance requirements would be mandatory.
Every public survey finds overwhelming support for these reforms, but also for the stated goals of CEQA. But a law meant to protect the environment is now the state’s foremost anonymous weapon to block housing and infrastructure. It’s time to let our people thrive, live closer to work, drive less, and afford to stay. It’s time for California to take charge of its future.
Jeff Montejano is CEO of the Building Industry of Southern California