We need to strike a balance between encouraging new development and protecting the environment.
One of the many measures you’ll find on the November ballot is Proposition 45. It’s backers claim that its passage will make California a more affordable place to live. Of course, that sounds great. It seems like the cost of living just keeps getting higher, and we’re all getting squeezed in one way or another.
Unfortunately, Prop 45’s backers don’t actually provide any evidence that their measure will bring prices down. They say that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) makes completing projects too expensive, and they say that streamlining approvals for “essential” projects will make these projects less costly, and therefore make life more affordable for Californians.
But again, the backers of the measure don’t offer any meaningful analysis to show how the cost of living will come down, and the arguments they offer are deceptive. For instance, they claim that environmental review under CEQA makes it more expensive to build apartments and causes us to pay more for housing than we should. What they don’t tell you is that over the past decade the California Legislature has passed a number of bills that either reduce environmental review for housing projects or eliminate it altogether. In recent years the City of LA has made many large housing projects completely exempt from CEQA. A 27-story residential tower at 949 S. Hope was declared exempt. So was a 6-story apartment building with 28 units at 6555 Franklin. A 23-story residential tower with 129 units at 1715 Bronson was also declared exempt from CEQA. So it’s hard to understand how Prop 45 will make housing cheaper since many housing projects aren’t even subject to environmental review. They also claim that CEQA lawsuits make it harder to build housing, but two recent studies show that only between 2% and 3% of proposed projects actually face legal challenges.
Also, Prop 45’s backers don’t talk about who pays for clean-up when a project does impact the environment. Who pays to remediate contaminated soil? To remove toxic chemicals from our drinking water? To maintain public services and infrastructure? In most cases California’s taxpayers get to foot the bill. Interesting that Prop 45’s supporters don’t mention that.
What Prop 45 actually does is take power away from ordinary citizens. The measure aggressively shortens timelines for CEQA review, giving members of the public less time to inform themselves about projects being built in their community, and less time to raise concerns. These timelines can only be extended by the project applicant, which gives developers more power over the process.
(Full disclosure: I work with a group that has voted to oppose Prop 45, but I’m writing this post as an individual, and this blog has no connection to the group.)
California is facing a growing number of environmental crises, from increasingly destructive fires, coastal erosion, warming urban areas and declining water resources. This is not the time to undermine CEQA, California’s landmark environmental law. It won’t make California more affordable. It will put California’s citizens at higher risk of increasing environmental damage.
A photo of Hoover Dam from 2018. The white areas above the water’s surface show how far the level had dropped even back then.
The news about the Colorado River just keeps getting worse. We’ve know for years that flows have been declining. Now snowpack in the Rocky Mountains has gotten so low it appears that the Colorado River’s source is drying up.
This is really bad news for Southern California, both for urban water users and for farmers. About one fourth of the water used by urban households in Southern California comes from the Colorado River, and the River supplies pretty much all of the water used for farming in the Imperial Valley.
The outlook is especially bad for the City of LA. Much of our relatively small groundwater resources have become unusable due to industrial contamination. As for the LA Aqueduct, deliveries have been declining over the last few decades to reduce environmental damage in the Eastern Sierras, where the aqueduct originates. And even deliveries from the State Water Project have become less reliable.
There are seven states that rely on water from the Colorado River, and they’re divided into two groups:
Upper Basin States: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico
Lower Basin States: California, Nevada, Arizona
These two groups have been arguing for years over how to reduce their consumption, and have not yet reached an agreement. It looks increasingly likely that the Federal government will intervene, imposing restrictions in order to maintain water levels at Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. If the levels continue to fall, it could mean the dams will no longer be able to generate hydropower.
As all of LA’s water resources continue to decline, we can expect to pay higher prices for water, even as mandatory restrictions reduce our water use. There’s no easy fix. Much of the LA area’s growth was made possible by importing water from hundreds of miles away. Growth advocates did not foresee a future where snowpacks in the Sierras and the Rockies would decline substantially over decades. This is a structural problem that we currently have no solution for.
This story in the LA Times has more details on the impacts of a shrinking Colorado River.
Marathon Oil Refinery in Wilmington where a fire broke out in 2020. While no one was injured, it took over a day to put out the fire.
Over the past decade, it’s become popular to bash the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). First it was claimed that CEQA was a major reason for the lack of affordable housing in California, but a study by the Rose Foundation found that only 2% of approved projects faced CEQA lawsuits. Then lawmakers in Sacramento began claiming that CEQA was holding back all kinds of projects, not just housing. The result was State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 131, which made a vaguely defined category of “advanced manufacturing projects” exempt from environmental review. As I wrote earlier, this category could include a number of projects that produce toxic waste, including the production of organic fertilizer, semiconductors and lithium ion batteries. There was heavy opposition to this bill from environmental groups, but Gov. Gavin Newsom strongarmed the legislature into approving it.
Now the California Chamber of Commerce has proposed a ballot measure that would substantially rewrite CEQA, making major changes to accelerate the approval of “essential” projects. The measure is called the Building an Affordable California Act (BACA), and they’ve already gathered enough signatures to put it on the November 2026 ballot. As you may have guessed by the title, the Chamber is arguing that CEQA makes the approval of projects too time-consuming and costly, and that Californians are paying more for housing, water and electricity as a result. While the Chamber’s web site features commentary by CEO Jennifer Barrera citing six projects that have been delayed by CEQA, I couldn’t find any actual research or data on their site to support their assertion that CEQA has played a significant role in raising the cost of living for Californians. The Chamber makes a point of saying that BACA would still leave Federal environmental laws in place, but they don’t mention that the Trump administration has been aggressively pushing to roll back enforcement of those laws and to rewrite environmental regulations. And while the Chamber makes unsubstantiated claims about higher costs for housing and utilities, they don’t talk about the huge cost of cleaning up toxic sites. Some readers may remember the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a toxic waste dump that leaked contaminants into the surrounding communities. Tens of millions of your tax dollars have already gone into cleaning up this site, and the job isn’t over.
An analysis on Legal Planet says that BACA would create a new CEQA process for “essential” projects, laying out shorter timeframes for environmental review. It could also limit the kind of environmental impacts that the project applicant would be required to analyze. Legal Planet’s post gives a list of projects that would likely qualify for streamlined review under BACA, including freeways, dams, and possibly data centers. And since the Chamber talks about speeding up energy projects, my guess is that nuclear reactors would also probably qualify for the shorter review process.
But all these people who keep telling us how bad CEQA is don’t often talk about the good things CEQA does. A community in Fontana filed a CEQA lawsuit over the approval of a logistics center that would have brought a huge increase in diesel truck traffic and made the area’s poor air quality even worse. They achieved a settlement requiring the project proponent to take concrete steps to reduce air pollution. In 2018 the City of Arvin approved a permit allowing an oil company to drill four wells in a residential community. Residents filed a CEQA lawsuit and stopped the drilling. Think for a moment about how you’d react if a company wanted to build a large logistics center or start drilling oil wells in your neighborhood. Would you consider filing a lawsuit to protect the environment you live in?
Residents have been fighting to stop a proposed 56,000 sq. ft. distribution center which would sit within 300 feet of Hillside Elementary in Lincoln Heights.
Now the crisis at the GKN Aerospace facility in Garden Grove has brought new attention to how environmental hazards can impact nearby communities. When the temperature of a chemical storage tank began to rise unexpectedly, fears that the tank might explode led to the evacuation of an estimated 50,000 people in the area. While a catastrophe was averted, it was a stark reminder of the dangers that can arise from planning decisions that put residential buildings near industrial uses. In a story related to the GKN Aerospace situation, the Daily News reported that nearly two million Californians live within a three-mile radius of a facility that uses the same chemical that caused the crisis in Garden Grove. The LA Times also followed up with a story examining the risks involved in rolling back environmental regulations. In that story, the authors reminded readers of other recent events: the damage done to surrounding communities by lead contaminants from the Exide battery plant in Vernon; the risks to students at Jordan High School due to toxic waste from S&W Atlas Iron & Metal in Watts; the rupture of an oil line in East LA that sent over 2,000 gallons of crude into the LA River; the recent fire at tire recycling center in South Gate. The Times story also points out that the push to build more housing quickly has led to the approval of projects in areas at high risk of fire.
The point here is that while Gavin Newsom and Scott Wiener and the folks at the California Chamber go around bashing CEQA, they don’t talk about the risks we face when we cut corners on environmental review. And, as the situation in Garden Grove showed, there are very real risks to public health and safety when we don’t properly examine a project’s impacts on communities. Aside from a frightening crisis like a chemical tank overheating to the point where it could explode, there are less dramatic but still very real threats to the air we breathe and the water we drink. If we don’t examine potential problems when we build chemical plants, or data centers, or logistics hubs, we will end up creating more risks to our health and safety.
Fortunately, people are pushing back against the California Chamber’s efforts to undermine CEQA. Led by the Planning & Conservation League, scores of public health and environmental groups have come together to fight BACA. They’ve created a web site where you can learn about their efforts and find out how to join if you want to get involved.
Bottom line, CEQA is about giving people a voice about what gets built in their community. It gives you a chance to inform yourself about a project’s impacts, and to speak about your concerns. Elected officials like Scott Wiener and Gavin Newsom have been working hard to take power away from communities and to give it to corporations. The California Chamber’s measure is another aggressive attempt to silence Californians who care about their communities.
Last year Gov. Gavin Newsom strongarmed the State legislature into gutting the California Environmental Quality Act. Newsom told the legislature that he wouldn’t sign off on the State’s $321 billion spending plan unless they approved his “reforms”.
Many legislators were worried that the bill Newsom was pushing for, SB 131, would create a slew of exemptions from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). While exemptions had already been created for housing and transit projects, SB 131 would allow exemptions for “advanced manufacturing” projects. These legislators were concerned because approval of the bill involved removing language from the State’s Public Resources Code that defined what could be considered an “advanced manufacturing” project. People in leadership said, don’t worry, we’ll fix this before the end of the session.
But of course, nothing got fixed. The definitions weren’t clarified. While there’s a push now in the legislature to clarify the definitions, it will be an uphill battle because well-financed business interests prefer the lack of clarity.
What kinds of “advanced manufacturing” projects might now be exempt from environmental review now that SB 131 has passed? Here’s a partial list from the web site Legal Planet.
aerospace manufacturing animal feed and organic fertilizer plastic bottle manufacturing semiconductor fabrication lithium ion batteries lithium recovery and processing rare earth materials production
Among the most concerning would be last four on the list. Making semiconductors involves the use of toxic materials such as arsenic and antimony, as well as toxic chemicals like sulfuric acid and hydrofluoric acid. Lithium processing involves the production of significant toxic waste, and many rare earth minerals are themselves toxic.
Would you be okay with one of these “advanced manufacturing” projects being approved in your neighborhood? If not, you might want to to contact your representatives in the State Assembly and the State Senate.
Graph from California Legislature’s report “Recent Legislative Actions to Increase Housing Production in California”
As has become usual over the past several years, the California legislature is considering a number of bills that would override local planning control and weaken environmental review for new development projects. Two of the most controversial bills are SB 79 and SB 607. SB 79, from State Senator Scott Wiener, would remove local zoning restrictions for housing projects proposed on sites near transit. SB 607, also from Senator Wiener, along with principal co-author Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, would essentially gut the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), giving local agencies broad latitude in deciding what level of environmental review was needed for a project, if any. (On May 19, both bills were placed in the Senate Appropriations Committee suspense file, which generally means a bill is on hold, but both are scheduled to be heard again by the Committee today, May 23.)
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that, while these bills have a long list of supporters, they’ve also generated major pushback from both individuals and established organizations. SB 79 is opposed by Public Counsel, the Public Interest Law Project, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, and numerous California cities. SB 607 is opposed by a number of environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club California and Friends of the LA River. (Full disclosure: I work with a group that has sent letters opposing both bills, United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles.)
This has turned into a routine. Every new session, state legislators present a number of bills designed to allow developers to build bigger and faster, with little or no environmental review. The legislators claim it’s the only way to solve the housing crisis. What’s unusual about this year is that Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante. As the efforts of citizens and organizations opposed to these bills seem to be having an impact on legislators, Newsom has come forward to say that he’s going to use the budget process to achieve the goal of speeding up new development. Like Wiener, Wicks and many others, Newsom sees the housing affordability crisis purely as a matter of supply and demand. They believe that housing prices will go down if they erase local planning authority and let developers build with little or no environmental review. It’s the classic supply-side economics argument. Unleash the free market, and it will solve your problems.
Unfortunately, the legislature has been unleashing the free market for years now, and it doesn’t seem to working. Take a look at the graph above. This is taken from a report produced by the State Senate and State Assembly Housing Committees. The report is titled….
California’s Housing Crisis: More Construction Is Needed to Meet the State’s Housing Needs
The paper was produced by the State Senate and Assembly Housing Committees. It argues that California has failed to produce enough housing for decades, and that lawmakers in Sacramento have been reversing this trend with the many bills that have been passed in recent years. They cite reforms to density bonus law, reforms to the Surplus Lands Act, faster approval timelines, and increases in “by-right” approvals. (When a project is approved “by-right”, it means an application is approved automatically, with no public hearings and no environmental review.) The text emphasizes large increases in the percentage of Low-Income and Very Low-Income units completed, and says there’s been a 61.5% overall increase in affordable housing production. That’s great, but the report doesn’t give numbers for rent-stabilized units lost during the same period, or the number of affordable units that converted to market-rate when their covenant expired, which means we don’t know if there’s really been a net gain.
And in spite of the report’s claims about increased housing production, the graph seems to show the opposite. By my count, the report lists 98 bills that were intended to spur housing growth over the last two decades. Things really kicked into high gear in 2017, when Sacramento passed 15 pieces of legislation related to housing. Looking at the lists compiled in the report, it appears that from 2017 through 2024 the Legislature approved a startling 87 bills to jump start housing. Based on the number of bills, if you accept the arguments that Wiener and friends are making, you’d expect housing production to go through the roof. But if we look at the chart above, you can see that the number of units permitted since 2017 is well below the number permitted during the first decade of this century. While it looks like there’s been a slight increase in multi-family units produced over that period, there’s been a huge drop in the number of single-family homes produced. The numbers look even worse if we go back to the 80s. The quantities of both multi-family and single-family homes produced in that decade are far higher than the quantities produced since 2017.
Which brings us to the question, What has this onslaught of legislation actually accomplished? Wiener and his pals have spent years pushing bills to override local zoning restrictions, and they’ve also been busy hacking away at the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). They argue that loosening local zoning and sidelining CEQA will spur new housing growth. But look at the numbers. Wiener and friends started their assault on local zoning and CEQA back in 2017. While the text of the report seems to be telling us that their campaign has been a resounding success, the graph the authors lead off with tells a different story. Housing production since 2017 is well below what it was in the 2000s, and it’s WAY below what it was in the 1980s. And it’s important to point out that in both of these earlier periods, local zoning was more restrictive than it is now, and CEQA was in full force. No doubt some will argue that the pandemic held down new construction, but California’s own housing dashboard shows that the number of permits issued actually increased during the crisis. (See slide 8 on the housing data dashboard.)
Newsom, Wiener, Wicks and their cohorts keep telling us that local zoning and environmental review are two of the biggest roadblocks to new housing. But given the numbers that we see in the Legislature’s own report, it seems these folks have no idea what they’re talking about. The graph they lead off with tells the story. California was producing more new housing before the Legislature began its attack on local zoning and environmental review.
Would you want these diesel trucks driving through your neighborhood?
How would you like to have hundreds of diesel trucks driving up and down your street, spewing diesel exhaust, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Residents living on Redondo Beach Boulevard in the Harbor Gateway area have been trying for years to stop a massive distribution center from being built right across the street from their homes, but it seems that no one at LA City Hall is listening.
Back in 2018 I posted about the LA City Planning Commission’s approval of this toxic project directly across the street from residents’ homes in the Harbor Gateway community. Developer Prologis had filed an application to build a 300,000+ sq.ft. warehouse which would generate hundreds of diesel truck trips every day, and would operate all night long. The LA Department of City Planning had allowed Prologis to slide by with low-level environmental review that didn’t begin to address the impacts. Thankfully the State’s then-Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, stepped in to let the City know that they weren’t doing enough to protect the residents’ health. The people who had been fighting the project were overjoyed, but it turns out the reprieve was only temporary.
Apartments right across the street from the proposed distribution center.
The Prologis distribution center is back, and will be heard again by the City Planning Commission on Thursday, May 8. Given the CPC’s record of approving pretty much everything that comes before them, it’s likely the project will again be given the green light. The folks at LA City Hall do not seem to care that the residents are already subject to vehicle exhaust from the nearby 110 Freeway. Nor do they seem to care that the area ranks in the top 5% for pollution burden and vulnerability according to the California Environmental Protection Agency’s screening tool. And apparently it makes no difference that, in addition to the residential buildings, the project site is surrounded by a public park, an LAUSD school, nursing homes, and two churches. This project will bring the trucks already travelling the freeway right into the neighborhood, and air pollution has been shown to have serious health impacts on children, adults and seniors.
Area residents will be showing up at the CPC meeting to voice their opposition. If you can make it down to City Hall, they’d appreciate your support. The meeting starts at 8:30 am, but it’s hard to say exactly what time the item will be taken up by the Commissioners.
If you can’t make it down, you can also submit comments to the following e-mail address.
cpc@lacity.org
Be sure to identify the project in the subject line.
Following up on my recent posts about funding for parks in the City of LA, I wanted to offer an update on a recent action by the LA City Council. Because of the budget crisis that the City is currently facing, the Council is looking for ways to generate more revenue. Last week they approved a report from the Budget & Finance Committee which asks City departments to report back on a number of possible options, including a bond measure to raise funds for both the LA Fire Department and the Department of Recreation & Parks (RAP). They’re also looking at increasing the base funding formula for RAP in the City Charter. (It’s actually worth reading the whole report. Some of the options are interesting. Some are bound to be controversial.)
Park advocate Ron Bitzer, who serves as a volunteer on the City Park Advisory Board in North Hollywood, also sees a possible opportunity emerging as the City tries to rebuild after the recent fires. Bitzer has written an open letter to Steve Soboroff, who was selected to lead the recovery effort, where he argues that planning for more parks, and creating funding streams, should be part of the process.
In general, I think we should be making sure that open space, green space, and the urban forest are integrated into all of LA’s planning efforts. In recent years both our local and State government have worked to fast-track project approvals, in large part arguing that we just need to build housing as fast as possible. Unfortunately, this has led to the removal of more trees and the loss of more permeable surface area, which will make LA even hotter and drier. Instead of just rushing to build as much as possible, we should be planning to build healthy, sustainable communities.
UPDATE: This post was originally written prior to the LA City Council meeting on Feburary 21. The item about expediting projects for the Olympics was continued, and will now be heard on Friday, February 28. PLEASE NOTE: This meeting will be held at Van Nuys City Hall, 14410 Sylvan St. Van Nuys. You can also call your councilmember to express your views.
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When the politicians at LA City Hall first approved hosting the 2028 Olympics, they said LA wouldn’t need to build new sports venues or new infrastructure. A post on the LA28 web site says that “The LA28 Games are designed to fit the city as-is [….]”. The talk was that this would be a “no-build” Olympics. The post goes on to say….
As a global leader in sports, entertainment and technology, LA is built to host large-scale, sustainable, global events that benefit everyone and will be the first-ever Games to not build permanent infrastructure. [Emphasis added.]
Well, anybody who believed that obviously hadn’t spent much time around City Hall. Now the LA City Council apparently wants to build a whole lot of new stuff, and they want to be able to build temporary and permanent venues, training facilities, broadcast and media centers, transit infrastructure, and other projects that could be associated with the Olympics or the Paralympics without having to receive planning approvals, obey zoning regulations, observe height restrictions or setback requirements, or any other regulations that could delay construction. You can read the language from the motion yourself. (Council File 15-0989-S47)
This is just crazy. But tomorrow, Friday, February 21, the City Council will likely approve this motion directing City departments to prepare an ordinance to make this crazy idea a reality. If the ordinance is approved, you can bet we’ll see a barrage of new projects being justified because they’re supposedly associated with the Olympics or the Paralympics. These projects will be approved with no public engagement and no environmental review. In other words, once they’re proposed, they’re approved. And don’t be surprised if they use this to greenlight Frank McCourt’s Dodger Gondola project.
In other words, this has gone from being the “no-build” Olympics to being the “no-plan” Olympics. It was pretty clear even before this that our elected officials were in over their heads. Now it seems they’re trying to dig themselves out by eliminating planning, eliminating environmental review, and cutting the public out of the process.
If you have something you’d like to say to the City Council about this, the best thing to do would be to show up at City Hall before 10:00 am tomorrow, Friday, February 21. (You can’t call in anymore, because Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson doesn’t want you to.) If you can’t make it down there, I suggest you call your council office when they open tomorrow morning and let them know how you feel.
No surprise that after a major disaster like LA’s fires there are a lot of people playing the blame game. Politicians are pointing fingers, TV personalities are airing their theories and social media is abuzz with angry people who have suddenly become experts on firefighting.
If you’d like to hear a real scientist give fact-based information about the circumstances that led to these fires, I urge you to listen to this interview where Adam Conover talks to climate scientist Daniel Swain. Swain works at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and aside from his climate expertise, he has a deep understanding of the tactics firefighters use when faced with conflagrations like what we saw in Altadena and Palisades.
The interview last about 90 minutes, but it’s well worth the time. Swain talks about the limited options firefighters actually have when fighting wind-driven fires on this scale. More importantly, he explains the role climate change played in creating the conditions that led to these holocausts.
As we should know by now, there are numerous areas in LA that are prone to fires. Many of these areas have burned repeatedly, because fire is a natural part of the ecology. As climate change continues to alter weather patterns, and LA continues to grow hotter and drier, we should expect more frequent and more intense fires.
As LA struggles to deal with the massive devastation of the recent fires (which are still not completely contained), I wanted to repost this article from The Lever, which argues that developers and real estate interests pushed back against efforts to limit development in fire prone areas. You have to sign up to read it, but it’s free, and it’s an interesting read.
It reminded me of the debate over SB 610, recently introduced in the California Legislature by State Senator Scott Wiener, which would have radically changed the approach to fire hazard rankings in California. Opponents saw it as an attempt to allow new development in areas where wildfire risk is high. The bill was not approved, but supporters have said they’ll try again.
As I said in my previous post, I believe we need careful review of new projects in areas where there’s a risk of fire. The fires that burned across LA this month resulted in lost lives, lost homes and lost businesses. We need to do everything we can to make sure a disaster like this doesn’t happen again.
