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54 Env't L. 221 (2024)
Just Look at the Map: Bounding Environmental Review of Housing Development in California

handle is hein.journals/envlnw54 and id is 237 raw text is: JUST LOOK AT THE MAP: BOUNDING ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW OF HOUSING DEVELOPMENT IN CALIFORNIA BY ERIC BIBER, CHRISTOPHER ELMENDORF, NICHOLAS MARANTZ, & MOIRA O'NEILL* California faces a dire housing crisis. California's land-use regulatory system remains a key driver of this crisis. State law grants local governments broad power to craft their own regulations on how to review and approve housing development. Though state law may limit a locality's ability to outright deny some types of housing development, local governments can and do use creative ways to stall approvals or functionally deny housing by making it infeasible to develop. One such strategy is to demand more intensive environmental review of new housing projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) than what state law requires. More intensive environmental review can create substantial delay and uncertainty, increasing the costs for the construction of new housing. Although the state has made many efforts to streamline the process of both local land-use regulation and CEQA review, delays and uncertainty remain. We propose that the state address this ongoing problem by (1) issuing an authoritative map of urban infill priority areas (IPAs) where new housing is expected to provide net social and environmental benefits, and (2) limiting the scope of environmental review, within the IPAs, to environmental impacts identified by the city or members of the public within a brief temporal window and demonstrated by the proponent of environmental review to be significant. In effect, the law would presume no impact from new *Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley; Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis; Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning & Public Policy, Uni- versity of California, Irvine; Associate Professor of Law, General Faculty, University of Virginia School of Law. Thanks to Sarah Joffe for helpful research assistance, and to Na- talie Kuffel for helpful comments. Disclosure: Professor Elmendorf provided volunteer le- gal advice to the author and sponsors of a bill mentioned in this paper (Assembly Bill 1633 (AB 1633), ch. 768, 2023-2024 Leg. Sess. (Cal. 2023)). [221]