How California voters can reform misused environmental law to boost needed projects

California voters will decide the fate of a proposal that speeds up approvals for certain projects and changes how the state’s bedrock environmental law can be applied to them. Below, an affordable housing advocate says the law’s historic misuse has delayed projects California can no longer wait for. The opposing view: An environmental justice advocate says Prop. 45 empowers bad actors and shifts costs onto taxpayers.

Members of the California Council for Affordable Housing spend their days trying to do something that should be simple: build homes for veterans, seniors and working families who have been priced out of the communities they call home. Instead, we spend far too much time navigating an outdated project approval and permitting process that is too slow, too unpredictable and disconnected from its original purpose. 

The result is fewer affordable homes, higher costs and more Californians wondering if they’ll ever afford a place to live. 

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Voters who agree should support Proposition 45, a statewide ballot measure that modernizes California’s broken project approval process under the California Environmental Quality Act for essential projects, like affordable housing, while maintaining California’s environmental, worker and tribal protections. It brings greater certainty and accountability to a system that too often drives up costs through years of unnecessary and avoidable delay.

Let me be clear: I believe in strong environmental review. California should carefully evaluate the impacts of new development. Communities deserve a voice. Developers should be required to address legitimate concerns about air quality, water resources, traffic, wildlife and public health before construction begins. 

Those protections matter. Prop. 45 preserves them all and strikes a commonsense balance.

Too often, I’ve watched CEQA (pronounced see-kwah) used to delay or stop affordable housing that was never an environmental threat to begin with.

Almost a decade ago, a nonprofit builder set out to build a 100% affordable apartment community in Redlands for veterans, families with special needs and working families. The project included 80 affordable units with onsite support services for people who had served their country and simply needed a safe, stable place to call home. 

It was exactly the kind of project Californians across the political spectrum say they want to see more of.

Yet opponents sued to stop it — not over drinking water, endangered habitat or environmental impact, but over “aesthetics and noise.” The lawsuit was tossed out in 2018, but it triggered a wave of costly delays that added $21 million to the project — a 70% increase, or roughly $266,000 per affordable home. That’s $21 million that could have housed more families and veterans elsewhere.

Liberty Lane Apartments opened in April, some nine years after its permits were first approved.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example. Research shows that 87% of CEQA lawsuits target infill housing, which are homes built in urban areas near jobs and transit instead of open space. Many of the groups bringing these lawsuits often have little history of environmental advocacy. CEQA gets invoked, but the environment is rarely what’s actually at stake.

Every delay carries a real human cost, and the people filing these lawsuits rarely pay it. 

The cost falls on the veteran waiting for supportive housing; the senior trying to remain in the community where they raised their family; or the teacher, nurse or first responder commuting farther every year because they can’t afford to live where they work.

Ultimately, it falls on taxpayers who end up paying millions more for the grants and tax credits that fund the exact same project.

Permitting delays alone add more than $75,000 to the cost of a typical new home in California. In a state short millions of homes to meet demand, we cannot afford a project approval process that makes it harder, slower and more expensive to build the homes Californians need.

Housing isn’t the only thing paying the price. The same broken process delays clean drinking water projects, transportation improvements, schools, healthcare facilities, clean energy infrastructure and other essential projects that can lower living costs and improve quality of life.

Prop. 45 does not eliminate CEQA. Every project must still comply with the state’s strongest-in-the-nation environmental laws. Cities and counties still decide what gets approved in their communities, and Californians will continue to have a voice in the process.

Prop. 45 modernizes California’s project approval process by establishing clear, enforceable timelines and creating a faster, more predictable process for resolving legal challenges. 

Prop. 45 won’t solve every challenge contributing to California’s housing crisis, but it addresses one of the biggest: a broken project approval process that drives up costs, delays essential projects and leaves Californians paying the price.

California has a choice: We can continue accepting a broken status quo, or we can update our project approval process while preserving the strong protections Californians value.

Our state doesn’t have to choose between protecting the environment and building the homes and essential infrastructure our communities need. Prop. 45 enables us to do both.