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 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 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.
In 2020, nearly 50 percent of housing proposals had CEQA lawsuits filed against them, according to the report.
The report noted that California has built an average of about 110,000 new homes annually in the past six years, or only about one-third of the state’s current goal. Production is additionally expected to decline next year due to inflation and interest-rate hikes.
According to Salzman, petitioners in CEQA lawsuits can ask the court to have their legal fees paid.
“And they get paid by the builder or the developer, so you can imagine that just incentivizes more of these suits,” he said.
Other issues contributing to the housing crisis, Salzman said, are the promotion of rent control, inclusionary zoning, and land-use laws that discourage the construction of single-family homes.
“All those things are leading to a net reduction in the number of homes and an increase in the price of those homes that are being built,” he said.
Two recent bills aimed to address the shortage—Senate Bill 9 and Senate Bill 10, which are now law—allow, respectively, two units of housing on single lots and multi-family buildings up to 10 units in so-called transit-rich areas.
Salzman said while he likes to see attempts to resolve the issue, he doesn’t think the state should get involved.
“I think what we need is for governments, at all levels, to just get out of the way,” he said. “Let private investors using their own money and their own land meet the market demand for increased housing.”
Salzman said the state should unleash its vacant land that is subject to CEQA lawsuits and that is open to litigation by the federal Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, since it’s another way parties can sue to block housing construction.
“This is what’s keeping millions of acres of undeveloped land in California off the table,” he said.
