Opinion: Despite noble intentions, California’s environmental law is hurting Latinos
Latinos in California face significant disparities in income, homeownership and education compared with their counterparts in other states with substantial Latino populations such as Texas and Florida.
Our state’s housing crisis is a big part of the explanation, and one cause of the crisis is the perversion of a well-intentioned 1970 law, the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA. It has evolved into the most potent legal tactic to stifle housing development, contributing to high costs and limited affordability. Even when a proposed development can overcome the legal barriers, the homes finally approved are unaffordable to working families because a complex web of regulatory environmental mandates and fees add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of each new home or apartment.
The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, blocks housing and climate-friendly infrastructure. But the governor’s recent reform falls woefully short.
This is an obstacle to upward mobility for all Californians, especially young people — which in this state means especially Latinos, who are 40% of the population and make up more than half of residents under 18. CEQA needs to be reformed to put the American dream back within reach for young Californians.
The value of homeownership is profound, providing both housing and the long-term stability of being part of a neighborhood and school community, not to mention generational wealth and a nest egg. However, California is a hard place to achieve that dream. In 2022, only 46% of Latino households here owned their homes, compared with 51% nationwide. Rates were 59% in Texas, 55% in Florida and more than 70% in New Mexico.
A court is considering whether noisy college students are environmental impacts, akin to pollution, that should be addressed under CEQA.
With median California home prices soaring past $900,000 in April, California’s housing policy choices have made homeownership a distant dream for most younger residents and for most hard-working Latino families, many of whom do not inherit wealth from their parents’ home equity and who are not on a path to pass along appreciated home equity to their children.
CEQA, intended as a progressive environmental policy, now clearly undermines the economic potential of California’s Latino population. This process began in the 1970s, when a largely white, upper-class environmentalist movement emerged as a dominant political force. CEQA was enacted to minimize environmental harm from public works projects such infrastructure, but a 1972 court ruling expanded it to cover home building. After thousands of subsequent CEQA lawsuits, it now even applies to home remodeling.
This law has strayed far from its intended purpose and needs to be reined in. Virtually anyone — even those with no direct interest in the project or the environment — can sue to block housing for any reason. Cases can be filed anonymously. Sometimes one real estate company even sues to block another’s project for competitive reasons.
The state government’s Little Hoover Commission has urged the Legislature to exempt all infill housing from CEQA, which would allow more homes to be built on underutilized lots in areas that already have many homes. The commission also called for an end to anonymous CEQA lawsuits, a ban on lawsuits filed for non-environmental reasons, and the clarification and expedition of the CEQA process.
Although California’s Legislature has enacted almost 200 laws since 2017 intended to boost housing supplies and reduce bureaucratic costs and delays, lawmakers have not reined in CEQA abuse. They also never authorized most of CEQA’s judicial mission creep. In its current interpretation, the law has come to be biased against changes to private views, against temporary construction noise during daytime hours and against common urban species such as seagulls and robins. Housing policies designed to overcome these CEQA obstacles, such as prioritizing infill high-density housing near transit, are economically infeasible in almost all of California while more affordable homes, in areas where Latino homeownership is actually increasing, continue to be pummeled by anti-development advocates.
The upside-down mindset of current environmental policy ends up being anti-people and anti-environment. The California Air Resources Board, whose policies are enforced via CEQA, counts jobs and people who move out of a city or county as “greenhouse gas emission reductions” — even when these jobs and people relocate to states and even countries with far more lax environmental standards. California’s lost jobs and population would most likely increase global greenhouse gas emissions. So much for California’s climate change “leadership.”
Agencies and advocates promoting this “de-growth” agenda through CEQA share the “no growth” dogma of the environmentalists of the 1970s, which then and now really means “no growth of ‘those people.’” The intention is racist, and the effect is racist. The housing crisis hits Black and Latino Californians hardest, as even CARB and the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Office now expressly acknowledge.
California cannot address its housing and homelessness crisis without building millions of new homes that are actually affordable to California’s working families — and doing so much faster, without the counterproductive legal barriers that add delays and costs.
CEQA reform is key to this. A good start would be an immediate moratorium on CEQA lawsuits based on any theory not expressly authorized by a statute or regulation. The governor simply needs to direct agencies, and urge the courts, to follow the law and reject those claims.
Today’s far more diverse Legislature ought to be able to do more as well, serving all Californians better than the sea of white male leaders and judges who have for so long been captured by NIMBY environmentalists.
It’s time we admit the failures of CEQA’s expansion and start making the policy changes needed to restore the American dream of homeownership for a younger, more diverse California.
Soledad Ursúa is an elected board member of the Venice Neighborhood Council. Jennifer Hernandez is a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight. Ursúa is the lead author of, and Hernandez is a contributor to, the recent report “El Futuro es Latino.”
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