![]() ![]() The upshot is that general plans, adopted decades ago to maximize the discretion of local officials, will now have exact the opposite effect, compelling city councils and county commissions to approve housing they never actually planned for. ![]() This incentivized cities and counties to make their general plans even more general, so city elders could approve-or deny-pretty much anything.īut the Legislature has now decided that if the total number of units in a density-bonus project is allowed by the general plan, the project can go forward regardless of whether the site’s zoning is much more restrictive, as it usually is. Back in the 1970s, California courts started ruling in favor of NIMBYs who argued that a city could not approve projects if zoning codes were inconsistent with the general plan. Local density limits are found not only in municipal zoning codes, but also in a city’s “general plan.” In keeping with the name, general plans are vaguer and less specific than zoning codes. Bear with me now-if your eyes are glazing over, you can bet legislators’ eyes were glassy too. This past August, the Legislature enacted statewide “unzoning” by making a little-noticed change to those calculations. For example, if a city code allows up 40 dwellings on a site, and the bonus is 25 percent, the owner of the site could build up to 50 units. It says that if the developer a project sets aside a share of the units for affordable housing, the developer can make the project a little bigger than the local government would otherwise allow. (NRDC still lined up against it.) If a proposed density-bonus project is shown to have serious environmental impacts, the city or county is now powerless to deny it.Īs the environmentalists waged their battle against infill housing and symbolic CEQA tweaks, the Legislature was tinkering with another, hugely powerful statute called the Density Bonus Law, first enacted in 1979. Gavin Newsom proposed minor changes to CEQA litigation procedures last May, changes a top NRDC lawyer acknowledged were inconsequential and would likely be ignored by the courts. The greens also exploded in fury when Gov. Scott Wiener’s SB 423 requires cities that aren’t making enough progress toward their state-mandated housing targets to approve certain infill projects “as of right.” This means that the city can’t make design changes or impose ad-hoc fees and other demands if the project meets applicable, objective standards.Ī complementary bill- AB 1633, introduced by Assemblymember Phil Ting-prevents cities from using a California Environmental Quality Act review as a pretext to stall infill housing, a problem I’ve previously written about for Mother Jones.Įnvironmental groups said these measures would rip the heart out of CEQA, even though the bills only apply to infill projects in cities-not on farmland or in the wilds. This year, the California legislature passed two hugely important infill housing bills-over fierce opposition from dozens of environmental groups. ![]() You might suppose, then, that groups like the Sierra Club and NRDC would enthusiastically support bills that pressure cities to approve denser “infill” housing, and that they’d fight like mad against bills that grease the wheels for sprawl. This mantra dates to the 1990s, when the Sierra Club labeled sprawl “ the dark side of the American Dream” and the Natural Resources Defense Council teamed up with the American Planning Association to forge a “ smart growth alliance.” If you ask any environmentalist about housing, they’ll tell you that states like California need to allow a lot more of it in urban areas, especially near transit, and to put the brakes on exurban sprawl, especially in environmentally sensitive areas. That’s the lesson of recent legislative sessions in California, culminating in the blockbuster housing bills of 2023. They invented the legal theories and mustered the facts to stop countless dams, mines, timber sales, and other harmful projects.īut somewhere along the line, environmentalists stopped treating litigation as a tool and started behaving as if it’s an end in itself-an end to be preserved even at a steep cost to the environment. In the fables of environmentalism, lawyers are heroes. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. ![]()
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