Just Look at the Map: Bounding Environmental Review of Housing Development in California
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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)).
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Just Look at the Map: Bounding Environmental Review of Housing Development in California
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