California’s Environmental Laws Make It Harder to Build Homes, Litigator Says

A new condominium building is being built in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2022. Allison Dinner/Getty Images

California is in a housing crisis and its environmental laws may be partially to blame, a litigator with the libertarian law firm the Pacific Legal Foundation told EpochTV’s California Insider.

The state has tedious property regulations for building and zoning homes, as well as its California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the firm’s Litigation Director Larry Salzman said, which limit land-use decisions based on potentially harmful environmental factors.

“[CEQA] was originally conceived as something to sort of preserve wilderness in an environmentally sensitive habitat,” he said. “But overwhelmingly, 90 plus percent of [CEQA-related] lawsuits are actually attacking building permits in infill development areas.”

As a result, Salzman said, CEQA is mostly being used by some residents to stop new construction in their neighborhoods.

A person stands on a balcony next to new residential units under construction in Los Angeles on Aug. 4, 2022. Mario Tama/Getty Images

A report earlier this year found that despite the state Legislature enacting almost 100 laws to address the state’s housing crisis in the past seven years, actual housing production to resolve a 3.5 million shortfall hasn’t made significant headway.

“The failure of California’s housing policies has made the nation’s largest, most densely populated urban area, and wealthiest state the poorest (by far) in the nation,” stated the report (pdf) by Holland & Knight, a Tampa, Florida-based land-use and environmental law firm. “Notwithstanding the state’s deep blue politics, its communities of color, as well as children, are far more likely to be poor than other population segments.”

The median price of a home in California has risen to $800,000, while the median household income is below $80,000. Californians who could afford to buy a home decreased from 28 percent to 26 percent, the report found.

“Soaring housing costs fed by these supply limits make living in this state unaffordable for a growing share of our population, shutting off prospects for economic mobility as aspirations are replaced with fears about being able to pay the core monthly bills,” the study read.

And CEQA, according to Holland & Knight partner Jennifer Hernandez, has only added to the crisis.