A hiker who was “barely holding on” after a 100-foot fall from a northern California cliff was rescued in the nick of time, officials say.

Local agencies and a U.S. Coast Guard team in Humboldt County were called to stage the rescue of two hikers near the picturesque and popular Lost Coast Trail, a 25-mile along the California coastline over 200 miles north of San Francisco.

Rescue crews found the hikers along a steep cliff edge in the Big Flat Area, about 10 miles north of an area known as Shelter Cove, according to a news release from U.S. Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Bay.

One of the hikers who took a big fall clung to his hiking poles, about 60 feet above another unstable cliff, for dear life, the Coast Guard said.

“With no winds and limited power, the crew had to make quick decisions regarding fuel and patient delivery,” the agency said. “After jettisoning fuel and coming up with a plan to conduct 160-foot hoist, they were able to successfully extract the injured and bleeding patient from the cliff.”

Hiker’s companion was also rescued

After the dropping the injured hiker for emergency medical services, the Coast Guard returned to extract the hiker’s companion off a game trail.

“Both hoists required intense crew coordination due to the loose cliffside, dead trees, and limited power,” according to the Coast Guard. “The Shelter Cove Fire Ocean Rescue team provided crucial decisions and communication to make the evolution successful.”

Chief Nick Pape of the Shelter Cove Fire Department told SFGate that “below them was absolutely vertical, probably 60 feet to the boulders below.”

He told SFGate that the hikers were far off the designated Lost Coast Trail, popular among backpackers.

“They had no business being where they were,” he said.

The hiker who took the tumble suffered from a dislocated shoulder and unknown injuries that caused bleeding, while their companion was “cliffed out” but otherwise uninjured. Shelter Cove Fire Department did not immediately respond to USA TODAY’s request for a status update on the condition of the injured hiker on Thursday afternoon.

SAN FRANCISCO — A high-speed rail project that goes nowhere with a price tag that has ballooned by around $80 billion. A worst-in-the-nation housing crisis in America’s wealthiest metropolis. A public toilet infamous for its $1.7 million estimated cost.

The so-called Abundance movement has become all the rage on the left as a means to diagnose the ways in which ineffectual liberal governance and overregulation has wrought political disaster for the Democrats — a conversation thrust into the national spotlight as journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tour the country to promote their best-selling book of the same title.

But as much as Klein and Thompson have popularized the Abundance argument nationwide, especially in Washington, its origin story is one rooted in California’s distinctive political culture and policy experiences.

Now some of the state’s most ambitious emerging politicians are hoping to use the book’s success to push California’s Democratic leadership to heed its lessons. Klein will privately gather in San Francisco on Thursday with a select group of lawmakers, including the leaders of the state’s Democratic legislative supermajorities, in a kind of revival meeting called by those hoping he can help spread the gospel to Sacramento.

Abundance is California’s latest ideological export, part of the state’s long tradition of incubating modern political movements before releasing them nationwide. Local political conditions in the Bay Area, on the Central Coast and across Orange County birthed the gay-rights, environmental and anti-tax movements that went on to shape national politics in the late twentieth century.

Abundance reflects a uniquely 21st century California zeitgeist. Today the state’s political dynamics are shaped by deep frustration over Democratic leaders’ inability to build enough housing, provide clean streets, lower the cost of living and instill a sense of safety amid a drug addiction epidemic. Efforts to address those problems haven’t met voters’ demand for results.

“There’s nothing progressive about deep blue cities, the way they’re governed,” said Zack Rosen, who founded Abundant SF, the movement’s first chapter that was started during the depths of the pandemic. “For San Francisco and blue cities to succeed, they have to grow. If a city isn’t growing, it’s dying.”

It is, like much in California, a debate that plays out among Democrats, who have had unrivaled control of state government for the past decade and a half, and now control all of its major cities. Part of that intraparty soul-searching is the Abundance movement’s push to redefine what constitutes liberal values — and sell it to the persuadable center without too deeply alienating the Democrats’ progressive base.

The broader success of the Abundance movement could hinge on its momentum in California, as Democratic officeholders who share its vision of “supply-side progressivism” find their ideas tested in practice.

“This is one of the most important books Democrats can read — wake up,” Gov. Gavin Newsom told Klein during an interview on the governor’s podcast this week. “I mean, we’re being judged here at a different level.’”

It came from California

Klein, an Orange County native, moved back to his home state from Washington shortly before coronavirus hit. It was a contrarian trajectory: at the time, California was bleeding population, as hundreds of thousands of residents loaded moving trucks in search of cheaper housing in Texas, Florida and Idaho.

From his new home in Oakland, and then San Francisco, Klein quickly noticed the ways in which the Bay Area’s cities sputtered despite being home to tremendous wealth. The local press was filled with examples of them, like the time San Francisco set out to build a public toilet in a small park that would cost taxpayers $1.7 million. (The final cost was reduced to around $300,000 after a public uproar.) At the same time, it was unable to provide enough housing for the people who needed to work, live and study there.

“I looked around and it just wasn’t doing well,” Klein told Newsom on his podcast. “People were unhappy, people were leaving … We could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis.”

Klein was hardly the first to draw a direct line between the state’s most pressing problems and its failure to build housing. Those concerns had already emerged in San Francisco as activists with the decade-old YIMBY (or Yes in My Back Yard) movement pushed to challenge local barriers to housing construction. At first they were political outliers, but the pro-housing movement has notched win after win in recent years, electing dozens of its candidates to the Legislature and local offices and passing bills that force cities to approve new housing construction.

As a columnist and podcaster for the New York Times, Klein began exploring these ideas, and the ways in which his fellow liberals were responsible. Castigating the failures of what he called “everything bagel liberalism,” he focused on the idea that well-meaning progressives pile on too many good things — environmental reviews, labor standards, community engagement, preferences for minority contractors — that ultimately undermine their noble ambitions.

“We have not made enough of the things that we need,” Klein said in a recent interview on MSNBC. “And that’s because we have run government badly in the places where we actually can’t blame it on Republicans.”

A writer-podcaster friend, Thompson, was playing with similar ideas in The Atlantic, where he is often credited with coining the popular use of the term “abundance” in a 2022 essay about the inability of American government and liberal institutions to do big things quickly. Together, he and Klein began to cohere around a common argument: that Democrats need to approach problems by planning for an “abundance” of the things people need, rather than regulating from a “scarcity” mindset.

Abundant SF launched the same year, joining forces with the YIMBYs and other factions of the “moderate” coalition in San Francisco. The groups convinced voters to close off a major thoroughfare in Golden Gate Park for pedestrian use; helped elect a new moderate majority to the city’s Board of Supervisors; and took control of the county Democratic Party last year, sweeping 18 out of 24 seats.

Klein came to know a small group of left-leaning elected officials in the Bay Area who are the most vocal champions of that style of politics, including state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland and Congressman Ro Khanna from Silicon Valley.

“It all just made so much sense to me, thinking about it in a way that’s much broader than housing,” Wiener recalled of his first meeting with Klein, in 2022. The two shared coffee at Progressive Grounds, a funky cafe in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, one of the city’s most progressive enclaves known for its hilly streets lined with Craftsman bungalows and Victorians that are home to more dog owners than parents with children.

“San Francisco,” said Wiener, a former city supervisor, “is like the poster child for things taking longer than they need to take.”

Movement building power

Klein and Thompson’s book Abundance was published on March 18. Since then, it has become a focal point of attention across the American left, driving podcast, op-ed and television conversations. Democratic elected officials have rush to associate themselves with the book’s argument, helping to further boost its profile. “A liberalism that builds,” Khanna recently wrote in an endorsement. “Reimagining government instead of slashing it.”

Abundance arrived at a moment when many Democrats are eager to rethink their approach to governance, as they search for ways to rebuild after a disastrous loss to President Donald Trump in 2024.

Klein’s San Francisco homecoming this week has become far more than another occasion to sell books. California leaders aligned with the Abundance effort are hoping to use his presence to make their pro-growth brand of liberalism a stronger force at the state Capitol in Sacramento.

On Thursday, Wiener and Wicks will host a private roundtable with Klein and at least a dozen of their lawmaking colleagues, including some currently carrying legislation designed to cut local and state regulations they argue make it overly difficult to build housing. Among those expected to participate are Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, already an ally of the movement, and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, who’s more wary of easing environmental rules.

“I sent it to the two leaders of my California Assembly and Senate,” Newsom said of Abundance in his interview of Klein. “I said, ‘Guys this is it.’”

But the movement faces strong critics. On the left, the Abundance effort has been pilloried as coastal-effete liberal thinking that may address the concerns of young professionals in big cities but won’t help Democrats regain support among working-class voters elsewhere. On the right, Republicans are skeptical that Democrats can deliver on the movement’s promises when two powerful constituencies — labor unions and environmentalists — are reluctant to peel back hard-fought regulations.

Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host and a potential Republican contender for California governor in 2026, said many of the movement’s ideas align with his own, though he doubts Democrats can make the hard choices when it comes to alienating powerful interests within their party. Hilton released his own book this week: Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State, a rival argument of sorts from the right.

“I think it’s difficult to imagine the Democratic Party, as it’s currently oriented, actually delivering the Abundance agenda,” he said. “They’re so tied to many of the structural and ideological factors that have created scarcity.”

In California, the biggest resistance to enacting an Abundance agenda comes from pillars of the progressive coalition that keeps Democrats in power.

Wiener has proposed legislation this year that would overhaul parts of California’s Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, the landmark protection enacted in the 1970s that is often blamed for stymieing the construction of housing by opening developers up to endless threats of litigation from neighbors, environmentalists and labor unions.

Unions are gearing up to fight the bill, which would exempt many types of urban infill housing projects from CEQA review. The debate is expected to be a slugfest and a crucial test of the Abundance mantra’s resonance.

Rudy Gonzalez, head of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 7,500 unionized workers in the Bay Area, called the movement an effort to scapegoat labor and environmental protections for a housing shortage that’s strongly shaped by factors like high interest rates and soaring construction material costs. He called it the latest effort to rebrand “neoliberalism” that will alienate blue-collar workers.

“They’re perpetuating their insular, circular firing squad of Dem-on-Dem violence when they should be leading the resistance,” to Trump’s policies, Gonzalez said.

Even some players aligned with the Abundance movement in San Francisco have been uncertain how to quantify what it means beyond an expansion of changes to land-use and transportation policy. Klein and Thompson outline, in their book, how overregulation has undermined progressive goals in other areas, such as scientific research and climate change and clean energy.

“It gets very complicated very quickly when you add multiple issues. But I don’t know, it could work,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, a national advocacy group, and an early organizer of the city’s pro-housing activists.

On Wednesday night, at their first sold-out appearance in San Francisco, Klein and Thompson were hosted by Manny Yekutiel, a local Democratic organizer who owns a popular political watering hole in the Mission District. He said their message is landing well with those who live face to face with the city’s contemporary paradox: an ultra-progressive beacon of inclusiveness and innovation where working-class people can’t afford to live.

“There’s a national conversation happening right now. The left is lost,” Yekutiel said. “Maybe this is one way through this, painting a completely different vision.”

By Ben Christopher, CalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

For years California has been stuck in a recurring fight between legislators who want the state to turbocharge new home construction and legislators determined to defend a landmark environmental protection law.

The final showdown in that long-standing battle may have just arrived. 

A new bill by Oakland Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks would exempt most urban housing developments from the 55-year-old California Environmental Quality Act.

If it passes — a big if, even in today’s ascendent pro-building political environment — it would mean no more environmental lawsuits over proposed apartment buildings, no more legislative debates over which projects should be favored with exemptions and no more use of the law by environmental justice advocates, construction unions and anti-development homeowners to wrest concessions from developers or delay them indefinitely.

In short, it would spell the end of California’s Housing-CEQA Wars. 

“If we’re able to get it to the governor’s desk, I think it’s probably one of the most significant changes to CEQA we will have seen since the law’s inception,” said Wicks.

Wicks’ broadside at CEQA (pronounced “see-kwah”) is one of 22 housing bills that she and a bipartisan group of legislators are parading out Thursday as a unified “Fast Track Housing Package.” Wicks teed up the legislative blitz earlier this month when she released a report, based on the findings of the select committee she chaired last year, that identified slow, uncertain and costly regulatory approval processes as among the main culprits behind California’s housing crisis. 

The nearly two dozen bills are a deregulatory barrage meant to blast away at every possible choke point in the housing approval pipeline. 

Most are eye-glazingly deep in the weeds.

There are bills to standardize municipal forms and speed up big city application processes. One bill would assign state and regional regulatory agencies strict timelines to approve or reject projects and another would let developers hire outside reviewers if cities blow the deadlines. Different bills take aim at different institutions identified as obstructionist: the California Coastal Commission, investor-owned utilities and local governments throwing up roadblocks to the construction of duplexes.

Wicks’ bill stands out. It’s simple: No more environmental lawsuits for “infill” housing. It’s also likely to draw the most controversy.

“It’s trying something that legislators have not been willing to try in the past,” said Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor and frequent critic of CEQA. “And the reason they have not been willing to try in the past is because there are a constellation of interest groups that benefit from the status quo.  The question now is whether those interest groups will kill this or there’s a change in the zeitgeist.”

A spokesperson for CEQA Works, a coalition of dozens of environmental, conservation, and preservation advocacy organizations, said the members of the group needed more time to review the new legislation before being interviewed for this story.

A spokesperson for the State Building and Construction Trades Council, which advocates on behalf of tens of thousands of unionized construction workers in California, said the organization was still “digging into” the details of the bill.

What’s the big deal?

The California Environmental Quality Act has been on the books since 1971, but its power as a potential check on development has ebbed and flowed with various court rulings and state legislative sessions. The act doesn’t ban or restrict anything outright. It requires government agencies to study the environmental impact of any decisions they make — including the approval of new housing — and to make those studies public.

In practice, these studies can take years to complete and can be challenged in court, sometimes repeatedly. 

Defenders of how the law applies to new housing argue that CEQA lawsuits are, in fact, relatively rare. Critics counter that the mere threat of litigation is often enough to pare down or entirely dissuade potential development. 

As state lawmakers have come around to the idea that the state’s shortage of homes is the main driver of California’s punishingly high cost of living — and a major political vulnerability for Democrats — CEQA has been a frequent target. 

Until now, attacks on the law have generally come in the form of selective carve-outs, conditioned exemptions and narrow loopholes.

There’s the law that lets apartment developers ignore the act — but only so long as they set aside some of the units at a discount and pay their workers union-level wages.

A spate of bills from two years ago waived the act for most homes, but only if they are reserved exclusively for low-income tenants. 

There was the time a CEQA lawsuit held up a UC Berkeley student housing project over its presumptively noisy future tenants and the Legislature clapped back with a hyper-specific exemption.

Wicks’ new bill is different, in that the exemption is broad and comes with no strings attached. It would apply to any “infill” housing project, a general term for homes in already built-up urban areas, as opposed to fresh subdivisions on the suburban fringes.

That echoes a suggestion from the Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, which made a series of “targeted reform” proposals to the environmental law last year.

“California will never achieve its housing goals as long as CEQA has the potential to turn housing development into something akin to urban warfare—contested block by block, building by building,” the report said. “The Commission recommends that the state exempt all infill housing from CEQA review— without additional conditions or qualifications.” 

Wicks bill defines “infill” broadly as any housing in an urban area that’s either been previously developed or surrounded by developed lots and doesn’t sit on a wetland, a farm field, a hazardous waste site or a conservation area. 

The site also has to be less than 20 acres to qualify for the exemption, but at roughly the size of 15 football fields, that’s not likely to be a limiting factor for most housing projects.

One possible rub: When a housing project varies from what is allowed under local zoning rules and requires special approval — a common requirement even for small housing projects — the exemption would not apply.

Enter another bill in the housing package, Senate Bill 607. Authored by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Wiener, that bill would also exempt those rezonings from CEQA if the project is consistent with the city’s state-mandated housing plan.

“Put the two bills together and it’s really a dramatic raising of the ante in terms of what the pro-housing legislators are willing to put on the table and ask their colleagues to vote for,” said Elmendorf.

An environmental case against the Environmental Quality Act?

Environmental justice advocates regularly use the law to block or extract changes from developments that they argue will negatively affect low-income communities. Developers and lawyers regularly claim that organized labor groups defend the law to preserve it as a hard-nosed labor negotiation tool. Well-to-do homeowners who oppose local development projects for any reason may turn to CEQA to stall a project that otherwise passes muster on paper. 

All these groups have pull in the California capitol. That may be one reason why this kind of bill hasn’t been introduced in recent memory.

Wicks said she thinks California’s Legislature may be ready to take up the cause. The severity of the housing crisis, Democratic electoral losses over the issue of unaffordability, and the urgency to rebuild in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires all have created a “moment” for this argument, she said.  

She, and other supporters of the bill, also insist that the cause of the environment is on their side too. 

“I don’t view building infill housing for our working class communities in need as on par with drilling more oil wells in our communities, yet CEQA is applied in the same way,” she said.

Researchers have found that packing more homes into already-dense urban areas is a good way to cut down carbon emissions. That’s because living closer to shops, schools, jobs and restaurants mean more walking and biking and less driving, and also because downtown apartments, which tend to be smaller, require less energy to heat and cool. 

Even if infill is, in general, more ecologically friendly than sprawl development, that doesn’t mean that a particular project can’t produce a wide array of environmental harms. In a letter to the Little Hoover Commission, the California Environmental Justice Alliance, a nonprofit member of CEQA Works, highlighted the 2007 Miraflores Senior Housing project in Richmond. 

A final environmental impact report for the project “added strategies to mitigate the poor air quality, water quality, and noise impacts” associated with the development and “included plans to preserve the historic character of buildings, added key sustainability strategies, and improved the process for site clean up.” That report was certified by the city in 2009.

Jennifer Hernandez, a land-use attorney and one of the state’s most prolific critics of CEQA, said local permit requirements and public nuisance rules should be up to the task of addressing those problems, no outside litigation required.

“The whole construct of using CEQA to allow the dissenting ‘no’ vote, a community member with resources, to hold up a project for five years is just ridiculous,” she said. “It’s like making the mere act of inhabiting a city for the people who live there a harm to the existing environment.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.