Key points:
- CEQA law has become a housing villain in California.
- Governor Newsom pushed through reforms to fix CEQA’s flaws.
- New laws exempt most urban housing projects from CEQA review.
For over fifty years, the California Environmental Quality Act—CEQA—stood as a pillar of the state’s environmental identity. But what began as a well-intentioned law to protect the natural world from shortsighted development became, over time, a tool to block the very progress it once promised to guide.
As Jeremy B. White’s thorough Politico article notes, CEQA morphed from green icon to housing villain—a shift that has finally, and belatedly, forced California’s leaders to act.
The turning point wasn’t a white paper or a roundtable or even another sky-high housing cost report. It was a dorm at People’s Park in Berkeley—a project to house students and low-income residents on a site long associated with activism and counterculture.
As readers may recall, the legal argument that delayed the project was that student noise posed an environmental impact worthy of review.
The lawsuit was absurd on its face and illuminating in its consequence.
As former Newsom housing adviser Jason Elliott told Politico, “That Berkeley thing… was a clarifying moment for a lot of people of how far afield we had come from the purpose of the original law.”
The reforms Governor Gavin Newsom pushed through this year—backed by legislative leaders like Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener—are among the most consequential in recent California history.
They don’t eliminate CEQA.
But they finally begin to excise its most cynical and obstructive misuses, particularly in the housing context. Most urban housing projects, day care centers, clinics, and certain manufacturing hubs are now exempt from CEQA’s notoriously unpredictable and delay-prone review process.
These changes, long overdue, reflect a political reality that was unthinkable even five years ago: it is now riskier for Democrats to protect CEQA than to reform it.
As Politico puts it: “For Newsom and other Democratic lawmakers, a new calculus emerged from the disastrous 2024 election: It is riskier not to act on cost-drivers like CEQA than to antagonize powerful allies.”
That sentence alone captures the political sea change we are living through.
For decades, environmental groups, NIMBY homeowners, and powerful construction unions formed a blockade against any attempt to modernize CEQA. They framed the law as a cornerstone of California’s progressive identity.
In reality, it had become a shield for exclusion, a sledgehammer for special interests, and a bottleneck that left our most vulnerable communities waiting endlessly for housing, services, and infrastructure.
Despite a lot of convulsions, the tragedy of CEQA’s fall is not that it was reformed, but that it took this long.
The warning signs were clear for decades. CEQA lawsuits had become tools to block everything from food banks in Alameda to bike lanes in San Francisco. Labor unions—particularly the State Building and Construction Trades Council—used the threat of CEQA litigation as leverage to extract union concessions from developers.
Private businesses used it to kneecap competitors. Well-organized homeowner groups used it to keep apartment dwellers out of wealthy, white neighborhoods. And yet, the law’s defenders clung to a romanticized vision of environmentalism that no longer matched reality.
To be clear, CEQA was never just about protecting rivers or trees. It was also about process—and in theory, about democratic accountability. But the process became the product.
As CEQA expanded through judicial rulings, it became a tool of delay rather than deliberation. It rewarded obstruction, not community input. As Nick Yost, one of CEQA’s original defenders, finally admitted this year: “It’s one thing to say you should have an intelligent decision by a local government. It’s another thing to just delay or completely block needed housing.”
For years, reformers tried and failed to fix CEQA. Jerry Brown called it “the Lord’s work” and got nowhere. A 2016 proposal to waive CEQA for low-income housing projects didn’t get a single vote in the Legislature. As former Governor Gray Davis said bluntly, “There was nothing happening in California to reduce the cost of housing—just the opposite.”
That’s what makes this year’s reforms so momentous. They were not the product of a sudden realization, but of a slow political build—years of organizing, campaigning, and electing new lawmakers with a different understanding of the crisis.
Leaders like Wicks and Wiener fought hard to reframe housing production as a progressive cause, not a corporate one. They partnered with groups like YIMBY Action and Abundant Housing to build a new narrative grounded in equity, affordability, and climate resilience. They gave voice to the young, urban, and often multiracial Californians who had been priced out and pushed out by a system built for delay.
Newsom’s leadership was decisive.
In May, he tied CEQA reform to the state budget and issued a clear ultimatum: no CEQA streamlining, no budget. It was the kind of political brinksmanship that once seemed impossible in Sacramento. But it worked. And in doing so, Newsom did more than rewrite a law—he signaled a new chapter in California governance.
Where Ronald Reagan once championed clean air and water, Newsom is now championing abundance and access. It is, in many ways, a generational shift.
This new politics is not without backlash. Labor leaders and environmentalists have raised valid concerns about CEQA reform’s implications for worker protections and environmental safeguards. Lorena Gonzalez warned that “undermining environmental standards… that give us leverage to get worker standards” is a dangerous path.
Environmental advocates like Kim Delfino fear a rollback of hard-won protections. These voices matter. But they must now contend with the deeper crisis: California is functionally unaffordable. Housing delays are not an abstraction—they are the difference between shelter and homelessness, between generational mobility and generational poverty.
But CEQA’s problems weren’t theoretical—they were painfully real. Every lawsuit that delayed an affordable housing project was a missed opportunity to house families. Every CEQA challenge against a shelter or transit line was a cost borne not by lawyers or lobbyists, but by those at the margins—students, single parents, low-income workers, and the unhoused.
That’s what makes the new reforms, while imperfect, morally urgent. Yes, there are still “big, big headwinds,” as Ben Metcalf of the Terner Center notes. High interest rates, construction costs, and restrictive zoning remain formidable obstacles. But without CEQA reform, none of those other challenges would matter. We would remain stuck in a policy cul-de-sac, forever pointing fingers and filing lawsuits.
The question now is whether reform will deliver results. Critics argue that developers are being given too much without clear guarantees of affordability. They’re right to be skeptical. But this is not the end of the fight—it is the beginning of a new phase. Policymakers must now pair CEQA reform with zoning reform, tenant protections, and real investment in affordable housing.
As Wicks and Wiener have acknowledged, the work ahead will take years. The goal is not a quick fix, but a structural transformation of how California builds, grows, and welcomes.
The real risk now is not that we went too far—but that we stop here. CEQA reform has opened a door. Whether we walk through it depends on the political courage and public imagination of the next generation. For once, the politics may finally be aligned with the problem. And for the millions of Californians waiting for a place to call home, that’s a long-overdue start.
From article: “As readers may recall, the legal argument that delayed the project was that student noise posed an environmental impact worthy of review.”
And yet, that same argument (“noise”) was used to support Megadorms in the city of Davis, due to complaints about noise in “mini-dorms” (houses in neighborhoods).
So in the eyes of development activists, “noise” is a useful tool either way.
From article: “As Politico puts it: “For Newsom and other Democratic lawmakers, a new calculus emerged from the disastrous 2024 election: It is riskier not to act on cost-drivers like CEQA than to antagonize powerful allies.”
(It would be useful/interesting if you provided an actual link to the Politico article you’re selectively citing.) It may be true that the YIMBY shills will target Democratic legislators who don’t do what they demand. But the primary reason Newsom seems to be doing this is to disassociate himself from California regulations, in regard to his presidential ambitions. Neither of these reasons serve the public, and are a sign of a sick political system which limits actual choices.
From article: “For over fifty years, the California Environmental Quality Act—CEQA—stood as a pillar of the state’s environmental identity. But what began as a well-intentioned law to protect the natural world from shortsighted development became, over time, a tool to block the very progress it once promised to guide.”
CEQA does not just address threats to the natural environment – it discloses impacts on the man-made environment, as well.
But it is true that there are natural components within most cities – even places like San Francisco (which has a remaining creek in the Presidio). There’s at least one other creek which was paved over (and is now underground).
Of course, San Francisco bay itself was filled in to accommodate city expansion. At one time, there was a plan to fill in a lot more of the bay for development.
Many of the natural hills in San Francisco were cut down (reduced) to accommodate development (and to obtain fill for the bay). For that matter, there was a brick factory mining one of the hills at one time (which is now a park).
Davis itself has a creek/riparian corridor running through it.
Apparently, CEQA disclosure will no longer apply in regard to development around such areas. I guess they can just put a creek in a culvert, and call it a day?
I find this whole article and premise highly offensive. Mainly in how the left has lost their way in environmental and character concerns and has become a brainwashed tool of the development industry.
I am first and foremost an environmentalist. I am not against growth, but I am against brutalist crap, dismissal of both human and natural character, the NIMBY-as-pejorative storyline, and poor city planning.
I oppose Measure J because it’s a terrible law, but I want to see good city planning and an urban limit line replace it, not an ongoing fight between one group of Davis citizens vs. developers & brutalist-housing-advocates.
The issue of People’s Park I find particularly offensive. Offensive in that I find modern progressivism towards build-baby-build mentality offensive. The People’s Park protests was largely about protesting development back then, and the park is a historic location that could be a very special civic park in the ongoing densification of Berkeley. But in the end, the University wins, fifty years later, making it no win at all, just a delay. And the University brilliantly used the modern advocates against themselves by allowing brutal benign neglect by the university to be enhanced by stupid modern activists letting the park turn into a complete unsightly S-hole. I congratulate the University only a a brilliant jujitsu strategy, if evil.
And the new progressive left that seems to have no regard for history, place nor putting balance with nature first just screams about housing prices, thought this will be the case in California always. If your existence is based on fighting the price of housing in California, you will have a job forever. Housing crisis my arse — welcome to California, forever (pun intended).
The environmentalist, once elevated by the left, is now demonized by both the right and the progressive far left, just as the Jew, once seen as the victim of thousands of years of pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, is now seen by both the far left and the far right as the perpetrator.
So wonderful to be an environmentalist centrist Jew in a far-blue town in 2025 :-| :-| :-|
Anyway, I’m not arguing this point against bigoted far-left progressives who attempt to smear environmentalists with the pejorative ‘NIMBY’ and then deny it is a pejorative because they are self-assigned as morally correct in their own minds. I’m just lamenting the loss of the values I hold dear in our current left-mainstream society, once held dear by the left, now lost in the sea of the brainwashed ‘housing crisis’ cry spread most vehemently by the mighty beacon of the Davis Vanguard.
#sad#
The other fake (implied) claim is that residents could have just launched CEQA lawsuits “for free”. When in reality, it takes funds to hire an attorney (for tens of thousands of dollars) to fight what a city had already approved in opposition to their own constituents (e.g., via a certification of a CEQA report).
Gloat all you want, but I can already see that none of this is going to lower housing costs.
And for those who actually are concerned about that, lower your asking price (whether it’s for rent, or sale) when your property ultimately becomes available.
Pretty simple, really. You can probably even put that stipulation in your will. Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.
And that (especially) goes for the religious organizations in town, who hang onto their vacant tax-free land while they simultaneously and sanctimoniously blame everyone else for what they think is a “problem” – even for their OWN employees. (I heard about THAT, when attending the gathering at the church near the farmer’s market about a year ago.)
That meeting was pure gaslighting horse puckey