California’s perpetual conflict over housing, pitting advocates of state-level pro-development policies against defenders of local government land use authority, has often involved friction between two state laws.
One, the Housing Accountability Act, or HAA, aims to remove barriers to construction, while the older California Environmental Quality Act has been employed to delay or block specific projects.
One tactic used by local authorities to overcome the accountability law’s pro-housing provisions has been indefinitely delaying decisions on whether projects are eligible for CEQA clearance by demanding ever-more data from developers.
Last year, the Legislature, which has been strengthening HAA provisions in recent years, cracked down on CEQA delays by passing Assembly Bill 1633, carried by Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco, where the tactic has often been employed. It decreed that excessive CEQA delays in high-density urban projects violate state law and subject officials to lawsuits.
While AB 1633 gives pro-housing advocates a new legal weapon, its applicability to only specific kinds of projects falls short of a wider overhaul of CEQA that some political figures have supported.
For instance, former Gov. Jerry Brown once described CEQA reform as “the Lord’s work,” but was unwilling to take on the heavy political burden such changes would require. If politicians are unwilling to take on CEQA reform — which would draw opposition from environmental groups, and labor unions which invoke the law to demand agreements with developers — California’s courts may do the job.
This month, a state appellate court delivered a ruling that, if not overturned by the state Supreme Court, would make it much more difficult to use CEQA to stop projects that conform to local zoning laws.
The case involved a corporation, Hilltop Group Inc., that wanted to construct a facility to recycle construction debris on a site adjacent to Interstate 15 in northern San Diego County that had been designated for industrial uses in the county’s general plan.