Newsom Blasts CEQA After UC Berkeley Ruling

A day after an appeals court judge stalled a plan by UC Berkeley to build student housing, California Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted CEQA, the far-reaching — and widely hated — environmental law that underpinned the arguments against the high-profile project.

“California cannot afford to be held hostage by NIMBYs who weaponize CEQA to block student and affordable housing,” the governor said in a statement issued over the weekend. “This law needs to change.”

Newsom, who first won election partly on a promise to build 3.5 million homes, has consistently positioned himself as a pro-housing advocate and in recent years has signed dozens of laws intended to promote construction and chip away at California’s housing affordability crisis, which stems largely from a lack of supply.

CEQA represents an even bigger target. The environmental statute, which was signed into law by a then-governor Ronald Reagan in 1970, was designed to reposition environmental concerns as a top state priority by requiring all state agencies, including city planning commissions, to analyze potential environmental impacts before approving projects.

Yet while the law has been extremely successful in some respects — environmental and citizen groups point to its impact on protecting public health, reducing carbon emissions and preserving habitats — for years critics have complained that the law was widely abused as a catch-all to stop or delay projects opponents happened to dislike. CEQA has come under increasing scrutiny as a factor in the state’s housing crisis because of its associated delays and additional red tape; in September, one report authored by a Holland & Knight attorney found that the law was being used to challenge more than half of the state’s new housing projects.

CEQA lawsuits are “making housing too scarce — and too expensive,” that report argued. “The result: CEQA has indeed become a population control [statute]. … California is losing people, and the people being expelled are our families, our kids and grandkids.”

Newsom’s withering comments came after a hard blow for the state’s flagship university and thousands of its students. On Friday — after a battle over UC Berkeley’s plan to transform the city’s historic People’s Park into a development with about 1,100 student beds and 125 lower income beds had been raging for months — a state appellate court ruled that the university could not proceed with the plan.

The legal opposition came from two nonprofits who argued, citing CEQA, that the student housing would bring additional noise, among other disruptions. UC Berkeley has said it will now take the fight to the state’s Supreme Court.

The case amounts to a major flashpoint in California’s ongoing — and escalating — battles over housing policy and NIMBYism. A further ruling could bring major implications for the state’s signature environmental law; at the same time, Newsom and some state legislators are likely to continue pushing for serious reform to help address the state’s housing imbalance.

“Our CEQA process is clearly broken,” the governor added in his recent comments, “when a few wealthy Berkeley homeowners can block desperately needed student housing for years and even decades.”