California

Will this bill be the end of California’s housing vs environment wars?

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2 months ago

March 26, 2025

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Will this bill be the end of California’s housing vs environment wars?

By Ben Christopher, CalMatters

New housing construction in a neighborhood in Elk Grove on July 8, 2022. Photo by Rahul Lal, 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.

“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.”
Buffy Wicks, Assemblymember, Democrat, Oakland

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.

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California

Democrats warn GOP is weakening filibuster as Senate moves to nullify California’s electric vehicle mandate | CNN Politics

Published

3 hours ago

May 22, 2025

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Democrats warn GOP is weakening filibuster as Senate moves to nullify California’s electric vehicle mandate | CNN Politics

CNN
—

The Republican-led Senate moved Wednesday to overturn key Biden-era waivers allowing California to set its own vehicle emissions, a major blow to that state’s effort to regulate pollution from cars and trucks that could have broad environmental impacts for the rest of the country.

And they will do it bypassing the 60-vote threshold typically needed to approve such a measure, infuriating Democrats who warned Republicans — despite their promises not to — were weakening the legislative filibuster. Republican leaders denied that was their intent and vowed to preserve the filibuster forever.

Republicans were livid when at the end of former President Joe Biden’s term, the Environmental Protection Agency greenlit California’s plan to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, shifting the state towards electric vehicles. Republicans say the California plan will hurt the US economy and impact the rest of the country because other states follow its emissions rules.

In response, they readied action under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to claw back agency rules without needing 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

Tensions have built for weeks as Senate Republicans deliberated behind closed doors about whether to push the measure through despite a finding from the House’s Government Accountability Office that the CRA could not be used to nullify the California emissions waiver. Senate Republicans don’t believe the GAO has the authority to determine that.

The Senate parliamentarian — the neutral arbiter of Senate procedure — deferred to the GAO viewpoint. Despite that, the Senate took a series of votes to put it on a track to pass these CRAs in the coming days.

California has for many years set its own emission standards separate from the federal government. For decades, federal law has granted California the authority to do so, but the waiver has become a partisan football in recent years. President Donald Trump revoked that authority during his first term in 2019, before Biden reinstated it in 2022.

In one of the Biden administration’s last major actions on climate, the EPA in 2024 finalized California’s waiver – effectively greenlighting the state’s plan to phase out sales of new gas vehicles by 2035, the first regulation of its kind in the US.

California’s vehicle regulations matter a great deal to the auto industry because close to 20 other states and the District of Columbia have adopted them. And they have a big impact on climate policy; emissions from vehicles are one of the largest sources of planet-warming pollution in the US.

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso called California’s efforts a “fantasyland” that will hurt ranchers and farmers in his home state of Wyoming.

“California’s EV mandates ban the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks. They threaten the freedom of every American to choose what they drive,” he said on the floor. “EVs currently make up 7 percent of the U.S. market. Even in California, they account for only 20 percent of vehicle sales. And sales are stalling. Yet California’s radical mandates require 35 percent of all vehicle sales to be electric by 2026 – 6 months from now. By 2035, it jumps to 100 percent.”

Senate Democrats have argued that not accepting the parliamentarian’s guidance sets a dangerous precedent, and they are particularly concerned that the GOP may do it again as she sets some of the perimeters of what will be allowed in the massive tax, spending cuts and immigration reconciliation bill moving through Congress now.

“It’s going nuclear, plain and simple. It’s overruling the parliamentarian. And second, what goes around comes around,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the so-called nuclear option, which is when the majority party changes Senate rules on a party line vote instead of 67-vote supermajority typically required to make a change.

Democrats insist that the Californian regulations were created as “waivers” under the Clean Air Act, meaning that they are not considered “rules” that can be overturned through the CRA. The GAO — which weighed in on the issue when that chamber passed these CRAs recently with bipartisan support — agreed.

However, Senate Republicans insist that they are not defying the parliamentarian and have said that Democrats’ concern for weakening the filibuster is hypocritical, coming from the party that has expressed opposition to the filibuster’s role in recent years.

“The only people that have attempted to get rid of the legislative filibuster – the Democrats – every single one up there that’s popping off and spouting off has voted, literally, to get rid of the legislative filibuster,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday.

“This is a novel and narrow issue that deals with the Government Accountability Office and whether or not they ought to be able to determine what is a rule and what isn’t, or whether the administration and the Congress ought to be able to make that decision,” he added.

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, echoed Schumer’s concerns in a statement ahead of Wednesday’s vote.

“If Senate Republicans force a vote on the California Clean Air Act Waivers, they set a precedent that will allow Congress to overturn nearly any agency decision nationwide,” he warned. “I urge my colleagues to reject this gross overreach.”

“By opening this door, Republicans threaten to destroy our permitting and regulatory system, leading to higher energy costs for Americans and making it impossible for new developments to come online. Indeed, nearly every major and minor project the federal government touches could be stalled, creating significant uncertainty if not complete chaos. That is not what the American people want, and it cannot be what Senate Republicans want, either,” continued Heinrich.

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California

18% of California student loans are delinquent

Published

19 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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18% of California student loans are delinquent

Despite the financial stress of Golden State life, Californians are relatively good at paying bills compared with the rest of the nation.

Take student loans. In the first quarter of 2025, 18% of California student loans were late.

That may seem like a stunningly high rate of skipped payments, but it’s the 10th lowest delinquency rate among the states and the District of Columbia. And across the nation, 23% of student loans were delinquent.

That’s what was found by my trusty spreadsheet’s review of bill-payment data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The research, from 2003 to the first quarter of 2025, examines debt levels and payments drawn from individuals with credit histories.

The latest report was the first since student-loan repayment reprieves ended. That means late payments on many educational loans were once again being reported to credit bureaus. This provides a window into the scope of this education-linked financial challenge.

Student loans are roughly 5% of all California debts. These borrowings equal $4,660 per capita of the $87,620 total consumer borrowings statewide.

Nationally, it’s a bigger hurdle: student loans run $5,470 per capita – or 9% of Americans’ $62,490 per capita debts.

The ability to pay varies wildly. Mississippi was the worst at student-loan repayment, with 45% of these debts in arrears, followed by Alabama, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, all at 34%.

The best at making payments lived in Illinois and Massachusetts, with 14% delinquency, followed by Connecticut, Virginia and New Hampshire were next at 15%.

Bigger picture

To start 2025, only 1.9% of all California consumer debts were 90 days or more past due.

Yes, skipped bills increased from 1.6% at year-end 2024. And it’s California’s highest level of tardy bills since the second quarter of 2020, when coronavirus lockdowns severely impacted the economy.

However, this level of delinquency is significantly lower than the 3.6% average lateness since 2003.

Nationally, 2.9% of bills were late in the first quarter, up from 1.9% at year’s end. Like California, the rate is still historically low. American tardiness has averaged 3.8% during the last 22 years.

California’s economy also has its challenges. Job creation has slowed to a crawl. The state remains unaffordable for the masses. The Trump administration’s “America First” thinking collides with California’s globally oriented business climate. Consumer confidence is also down.

That monetary angst can be found in the slowdown in Californians taking on new debts.

In the first quarter, total borrowings increased at an annual rate of only 0.8%. That’s well below the 3.3% growth pace since 2003.

It’s a similar picture across the nation. Borrowings are up 1% in a year vs. a 3.3% average growth.

Home sweet home

The New York Fed tells us Californians are getting better with home loans, which are 81% of all consumer debts statewide.

Just 0.56% of mortgage balances were 90 days or more late to start 2025. That’s down from 0.58% at year’s end. Although we’ll note that the late mortgage level in the fourth quarter of 2024 was the highest since the second quarter of 2020.

And lateness is historically low – below the average 2.8% late home loans since 2003.

Equally noteworthy is that California’s improvement rate comes as more Americans fail to make timely payments on mortgages, which are 70% of all U.S. consumer debts.

In the first quarter, 0.9% of U.S. home loans were late – the worst payment pace in five years. That’s up from 0.6% at year’s end, but this is still comfortably below the 2.6% historical norm.

There is a rising level of deeply troubled homeowners.

California had 15 new foreclosures per 1,000 consumers in the first quarter. That’s the highest since the first quarter of 2020 and up from 12 at year’s end. But to be fair, it’s also nowhere near the 88 per 1,000 average since 2003.

Same story nationally with 21 U.S. foreclosure starts per 1,000 consumers – up from 14 at year’s end but off the 70 historic pace.

Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at jlansner@scng.com

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This Northern California city is the top U.S. destination among homebuyers looking to relocate

Published

2 days ago

May 20, 2025

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This Northern California city is the top U.S. destination among homebuyers looking to relocate

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A “For Sale” sign in front of a home in Sacramento, California, US, on Monday, July 3, 2023. The Mortgage Bankers Association is scheduled to release mortgage applications figures on July 6. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

SAN FRANCISCO – New figures show that nationwide, Sacramento was the most searched-for destination among homebuyers looking to relocate, while San Francisco was home to one of the top cities that homebuyers were looking to leave.

Migration trends identified by residential real estate brokerage Redfin also showed that California was the top state homebuyers searched to leave.

The top states people searched to relocate to included Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina.

The analysis covered the period from February to April of this year and was based on a sample of some 2 million Redfin users who searched for homes across more than 100 major U.S. metro areas, the company said. Those included in the dataset viewed at least 10 homes for sale in a three-month period.

Year-over-year declines

Redfin’s latest figures also show a year-over-year decline in home prices in six of the nine Bay Area counties.

By the numbers:

Alameda County saw the biggest drop of 4.3% with a median home price of $1,167,500.

Contra Costa County saw a similar decline at 4.2%, though its median home price was much lower at $829,000.

Solano (-1.6%), Napa (-1.1%), San Mateo (-0.89%), and Marin (-0.4%) counties also saw year-over-year declines, though there were large differences in their median prices.

Solano County had a median of $575,500.

Napa County’s median was $920,000.

San Mateo County had a median of $1,665,000.

Marin County’s median was $1,543,750.

Year-over-year increases

San Francisco saw the Bay Area’s biggest increase from a year ago at 3.9%, with a median of $1,455,000.

Santa Clara County’s increase was 3.6%. The county also had the highest median home price in the Bay Area at $1,750,000.

Compare that with Sonoma County, with the lowest median in the Bay Area of $828,353. The county saw an increase of 1.4% last month from a year ago.

Dig deeper:

Other notable findings showed that Sunnyvale was the city with the fastest growing sales price in all of California, with home prices up almost 30% compared to last year.

Sunnyvale’s median price was $2.3 million last month, according to Redfin.

Berkeley had the fourth-fastest sales growth, up almost 20%, putting the median at almost $1.6 million.

Danville also made the top 10 list of California metros that saw a jump in sales prices.

In seventh place, the Contra Costa County city had a 15% spike in the sale price compared to last year. It also saw a nearly 15% decline in the number of homes sold.

Danville’s median price was $2.3 million.

Bay Area cities identified as ‘most competitive’

The Bay Area took every slot in Redfin’s list of top 10 “most competitive” cities in the state.

SEE ALSO: Homebuyers need to make more than $400K in this Bay Area region to afford the ‘typical’ home, analysis finds

The real estate company compiled its list based on the most homes that received multiple offers, often with waived contingencies. Redfin then scored the cities on a 0 to 100 scale.

The metros deemed “most competitive” fell in the 90-100 range.

Top 10 Most Competitive Cities in California

1. Santa Clara
2. Sunnyvale
3. Alameda
4. Daly City
5. Livermore
6. Mountain View
7. Berkeley
8. Danville
9. Castro Valley
10. San Ramon

(Source: Redfin)

State Farm Insurance one step closer to raising rates

A court ruling on Tuesday clears the way for State Farm Insurance to move forward with significant rate increases for homeowners and renters. Homeowners would see an average 17% hike, while renters and condo owners would see prices increase an average of 15%. We spoke to industry expert Karl Susman for his analysis on the situation.

Real EstateSan FranciscoSacramento CountyNewsInstanewsSunnyvaleBerkeleyDanville

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