But think in terms of the state of California’s average human footprint. It is almost certain that someone in Berkeley—a city with good public transportation, a temperate climate with minimal heating and cooling costs—will have less of an environmental impact than if they lived elsewhere in California.
If UC Berkeley admits more students to campus, or if the City of Berkeley approves a housing project or revamps its bylaws or master plan to allow more people to live in Berkeley, it will be a statewide environmental win. But CEQA is pretending that if these people didn’t live in Berkeley, they wouldn’t be living on planet Earth, where they’d be driving or littering or making noise or setting wildfires or bulldozing habitats.
So what should be the next step?
The legislature should review CEQA. Or the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, which writes the CEQA guidelines, should rethink what counts as environmental impact, especially in urban areas. That would make sense, especially if the governor is serious about promoting downtown housing because state environmental laws discourage these very projects.
The state should also give project backers the opportunity to sue a city for demanding excessive environmental reviews or CEQA certification of a study for too long, just as detractors can challenge a city for doing too little. This is a particular problem for housing.
The State Housing Responsibility Act does not allow cities to reject or reduce most projects that meet applicable standards. But it’s unclear whether this or any other law provides a remedy if the city tries to freeze the project with additional “environmental” requirements instead of outright denying it.
What should be excluded from CEQA?
Local impacts associated with population growth in urban areas should not be a CEQA concern. Most of the things revealed in the Berkeley case – noise, traffic, garbage – are all things that city elected officials have an incentive to take care of. We don’t need a state environmental law to do this.
As far as housing prices are concerned, local officials are not handling this problem well, because the burden of price increases falls mainly on people who do not yet live and vote in the city. But the solution to high housing prices and displacement is not to make CEQA an even more formidable barrier to development.