Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
The California housing crisis is a disaster and an emergency. Housing construction per capita has steadily fallen in the past few decades, while home prices, rent, and homelessness rates have all soared. By some estimates, the state is three million units short of housing demand—the equivalent of seven San Franciscos.
One of the major barriers to building more housing has for decades been provisions in the California Environmental Quality Act. Signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in the 1970s, the CEQA has been called “the law that ate California.” It essentially allows anybody with a lawyer to stop any project they don’t like, for any reason.
But this week, Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills to defang the CEQA. Housing reform advocates are calling it one of the most important legislative breakthroughs in modern state history. It could make it easier to build downtown housing and other urban development projects such as health clinics and childcare facilities. As Newsom wrote, “I just enacted the most game-changing housing reforms in recent California history. We’re urgently embracing an abundance agenda by tearing down the barriers that have delayed new affordable housing and infrastructure for decades.”
Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks wrote the bill to encourage more high-density housing projects, while State Senator Scott Wiener wrote the bill to exempt several types of projects from environmental review. Wicks and Wiener are today’s guests. We talk about the long road to breakthrough, the art of political persuasion, and the future of abundance in California.
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Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Buffy Wicks and Scott Weiner
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Summary
In the following transcript, Derek discusses the California housing crises with state senator Scott Wiener and assemblywoman Buffy Wicks.
Derek Thompson: I want to start big-picture here before we dive head-and-shoulders into the details of this legislation. California and housing, this is a crisis that is infamous. Everybody knows what it means in the big picture, but I want to know, in your direct experience, in your conversations with constituents, what does the California housing crisis look and feel like on the ground?
Scott Wiener: Well, it looks and feels very real and raw on the ground. It’s about talking to people who are really unhappy that their kids have left San Francisco and that they’re not going to be able to see their grandkids very often because there’s just no path for them to be able to have housing that they can afford that makes sense for a family. It is about people who have lost their housing and now feel like they need to leave because there’s no way for them to afford something now that they’ve lost their housing. It’s about small business owners telling me that they’re really struggling to find workers for retail or in hospitality because they can’t pay enough for someone to be able to afford housing. It manifests in so many ways, and it’s just incredibly harmful. [It] does deep damage to any community when housing costs are through the roof.
Thompson: Buffy, there have been other legislative efforts to confront this problem, the lack of housing construction throughout California. In the last eight years, the legislature has passed more than 100 housing bills, but you’re still far, far behind your state-level goals. Why, if you’ve passed almost 150 bills, is California still so far behind in meeting its housing needs?
Buffy Wicks: Yeah, first and foremost, this crisis is decades in the making. This is decades and decades of making it very difficult to build housing in California, and so turning the aircraft carrier around takes a minute, takes a beat. We’ve had some successes. ADUs I know are discussed often in accessory to dwelling units. We’ve done a lot more local enforcement and ensuring that locals are actually following state law. The attorney general has the Housing Accountability Task Force, the governor has sued cities. There’s been a real, I think, sea change politically that the policy is now just catching up to.
And I think the biggest illustration obviously is what happened this week where the crisis has metastasized to such a level that finally politicians like us are, I think, acting with courage in a way that we haven’t had the ability to do so before or the desire, or we were running into the politics of this for such a long time. And I think we finally, with the passage of this bill, which I know we’ll get to, really called to question the efficacy of CEQA and what it’s been doing vis-a-vis our housing crisis, and pushed through to, I think, a new level of recognition as an elected body to say, “This crisis is here, it is present, it is concerning all of our constituents, and it’s time that we actually act in a bold way, in a bold manner to solve that problem.” Some of the stuff we’ve been doing has been good, but it’s really been nibbling around the edges until I think really this week was a breakthrough moment.
Thompson: Scott, the centerpiece of these bills is a rollback of CEQA. And what I’d like you to do is to give me an example of how CEQA works well. We’re going to get to Buffy to give examples of how CEQA can be abused, and I think those examples are often more famous, more infamous among people who are following this debate. But I want to be clear on this call that this is not some kind of effort to destroy environmental regulations in the state of California. This is a law that does good things that has been abused. Why don’t you give me a little bit of texture on what CEQA is and how you’ve seen it used well?
Wiener: Yes, CEQA has the word environment in it, and so people assume it’s a purely environmental law, and it’s not. It is a law that in part helps with environmental protection. For example, if you’re going to put a chemical plant in a community, doing an assessment there about what the environmental impacts might be so they can be mitigated. And so there are various ways in which CEQA can have strong environmental benefits, and that’s why some people will say, “Hey, we should just repeal CEQA.” I don’t believe that. There is a piece of it that is very important.
Unfortunately, over the decades, over the last 50 plus years since it was enacted, frankly through court rulings, it’s been expanded profoundly to apply in situations where no one would’ve thought an environmental law would have applied. And so just in recent years, we’ve seen CEQA used to try to kill a food bank in Alameda, to try to kill a childcare center in Napa. We saw recently the oil industry sued the city of Los Angeles under CEQA after the city council passed an ordinance to phase out oil extraction. Literally a fossil fuel company’s using a, quote, unquote, “environmental law” to try to pump more oil.
We saw CEQA be used in San Francisco to try to block, and successfully block for a while, our bike network. Trying to make it easier and safer to ride a bike. We’ve seen CEQA used to block transit-oriented development right by a train station. And we’ve seen it used to try to stop a library renovation or a park renovation. It can make it harder for someone to weatherize their windows because historic preservation gets looped in to CEQA. I’ve in the past referred to CEQA as the law that swallowed California. And that’s not because that there aren’t good parts to CEQA, there are, but it has just grown into this Frankenstein monster that applies in way too many contexts and undermines climate action.
Wicks: Scott’s absolutely correct, but the reality of the matter is CEQA is used in the same way for oil drilling and fracking as it is for multifamily housing on a transit line. And so the fact that you have a law that can be weaponized in such a way for two very different circumstances is the reason why I think we need the reforms that we now are pushing for and succeeded in getting.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks
Producer: Devon Baroldi