California faces a dire housing crisis. California’s land-use regulatory system remains a key driver of this crisis. State law grants local governments broad power to craft their own regulations on how to review and approve housing development. Though state law may limit a locality’s ability to outright deny some types of housing development, local governments can and do use creative ways to stall approvals or functionally deny housing by making it infeasible to develop. One such strategy is to demand more intensive environmental review of new housing projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) than what state law requires. More intensive environmental review can create substantial delay and uncertainty, increasing the costs for the construction of new housing. Although the state has made many efforts to streamline the process of both local land-use regulation and CEQA review, delays and uncertainty remain.
We propose that the state address this ongoing problem by (1) issuing an authoritative map of urban “infill priority areas” (IPAs) where new housing is expected to provide net social and environmental benefits, and (2) limiting the scope of environmental review, within the IPAs, to environmental impacts identified by the city or members of the public within a brief temporal window and demonstrated by the proponent of environmental review to be significant. In effect, the law would presume no impact from new housing within an IPA unless significant impacts are quickly and unambiguously identified. We also propose enforcement mechanisms. New infill housing reduces carbon emissions, exposure to wildfire risk, and threats to habitat. Environmental review should be calibrated accordingly.