Budget battles are upon us in Sacramento, and one of the concessions being demanded by the Republican minority is reform of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
On its face, this effort may be a cynical attempt to reduce the power of environmentalists. That said, no one can deny that CEQA imposes enormous additional costs on new housing and infrastructure projects by creating an uncertain and onerous approvals process.
What a streamlined CEQA review process could look like vs. the existing process.
In the newfound belt-tightening spirit of “doing more with less,” even some liberals are willing to consider regulatory reform as a form of economic stimulus. Dan Rosenfeld, LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’ deputy for economic development, made such a remark at ULI’s Urban Marketplace forum earlier this month. Indeed, regulatory reform is one of the few tools available to localities that does not involve the direct expenditure of tax dollars.
In his latest book, Triumph of the City, urban economist Ed Glaeser criticizes CEQA, pointing out that it is prejudicial against new development, since it only considers the impacts of a given project against a “no-build” alternative.
This is unrealistic, Glaeser points out, because new growth pressures demand a release valve; if denied in one place, a developer will inevitably decamp to a more receptive city or region.
In Glaeser’s view, since its enactment in 1970, CEQA has displaced new growth away from the greenest possible locales in the U.S.—namely, coastal California, where per-capita energy use is relatively low—out to areas with more extreme climates, such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Dallas, that are intrinsically less green.
For urban infill projects, CEQA’s point of reference for assessing greenhouse gas impacts, for example, should therefore be not a no-build alternative, but a base case scenario in which the same project is instead built in a car-dependent, less temperate environment. Such a scenario would be equally hypothetical—and more reflective of the real world.