California Dems finally beat back the NIMBYS

This is, as a Delaware poet once said, a big fuckin’ deal:

California lawmakers on Monday sent Gov. Gavin Newsom two bills to roll back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis.

For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they disliked.

The changes, which were written by Democrats but had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, would allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that have discouraged construction in the state.

Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took them to task for the vote.

But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.

“We’ve got to get out of our own damn way,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said last week.

Discussions about changing the environmental law have repeatedly surfaced at the State Capitol over the past decade, only to be thwarted by opposition from environmentalists and local governments. This year was different.

Mr. Newsom threatened to reject the state budget unless lawmakers rolled back CEQA, which is pronounced SEE-kwa. Democrats were also aware that voters nationwide had blamed the party last year for rising prices.

To call CEQA “environmental legislation,” as the headline does, is at best incomplete. It was frequently used as a barrier against building infill housing that is clearly a net positive for the environment, for reasons that had nothing to do with environmentalism. And even to the extent that it has genuine environmentalist purposes, it was a 70s-style aesthetic/pastoral environmentalism that did not put nearly enough emphasis on climate change. It also came to represent one of the worst traits of late-20th-century liberalism — the idea that lawsuits and courts are better forums for policy than democratically accountable legislatures.

This is a major win and hopefully a harbinger of a west coast liberalism more dedicated to increasing state capacity than creating arbitrary veto points for wealthy property owners and work for lawyers.