In 1970, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) was passed to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony to fulfill the social and economic requirements of present and future generations.” It was signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan. Modeled on the National Environmental Policy Act, CEQA requires that state and local agencies disclose and evaluate development projects’ significant environmental impacts and adopt measures to reduce or eliminate those impacts.
For the last 55 years, CEQA has promoted governmental transparency and defended environmental and public health. Now, we are seeing these essential protections targeted.
On June 30 of this year, the California Legislature passed the state budget, including a bill touted as “CEQA reform,” aka rollbacks. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the bill was “a comprehensive streamlining package that breaks down long-standing development barriers” by exempting a significant portion of urban development projects from environmental review.
Fox News headlined, “California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom took a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook.”
The SLO Tribune breathlessly reported: “CEQA’s ability to delay or obstruct development has been significantly diminished.”
CEQA has been the scapegoat for everything from land prices to wildfires. The specter of CEQA litigation paralyzing the wheels of progress is a widely circulated trope, despite the fact that an analysis of 54,000 projects under CEQA review found that “just 0.7 percent faced litigation—an average of less than 100 proposed housing developments per year.”
The stated goal of the current CEQA rollbacks is to fix the shortage of affordable housing. California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) assessment determines housing needs at various levels of affordability for every city and county. It’s worth contemplating the chart tracking SLO County’s progress in meeting these housing needs in its 2025 RHNA status report.
At the bottom (very low-income, e.g., barista, farmworker, child care employee), the county is exactly 1 percent of the way toward meeting that need, having permitted seven units in the last five years. At the top (above-moderate income), the county is 83 percent of the way there, with 1,132 units permitted over the same period. CEQA didn’t have anything to do with that outcome, but the extreme deference of the county Board of Supervisors to the Homebuilders Association certainly did.
As we go to press, due to serious concerns raised in legislative committees about the overreach of the recent CEQA rollbacks, amendments are being drafted that constitute emergency triage to clean up the mess made by CEQA “reformers.” Those amendments are focused on the bill’s exemption of “advanced manufacturing facilities” from review, which will mean no protection from toxic byproducts for environmental justice communities adjacent to industrially zoned land. The bill’s definition of “natural and protected lands” does not include habitat for species protected under the Endangered Species Acts and California’s Native Plant Protection Act.
All of which leads us to a couple of thoughts about the importance and role of environmental review:
Thought No. 1: In 2019, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) opened roughly 850,000 acres of Central California to federal oil and gas leasing without adequate environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. Three years later, a court ordered the BLM to fix that mistake. The bureau must now thoroughly evaluate the environmental, public health, and land use conflicts such leases would have on schools, communities, and wildlife in the vicinity and near watersheds and protected areas, and whether oil and gas extraction activities should be allowed in those areas based on those impacts.
Thought No. 2: In 2014, a water emergency declaration got the Cambria Community Services District a free pass to build a desalination plant with no environmental analysis. Almost immediately after its hurried construction, the evaporation basin sprung leaks and started flooding. Ten years later, Cambria is trying to figure out where to dump toxic brine because they can’t use the defective evaporation basin, and it would cost a fortune to truck the stuff to a disposal site. They also need to find a way to mitigate a decade of impacts their desal plant has caused to San Simeon Creek, water wells, and environmentally sensitive habitat for steelhead and the California red-legged frog.
That’s what happens when you build without the benefit of the environmental review that would have identified problems before they happened. Perhaps it would be a good idea to disclose and evaluate significant environmental impacts and adopt measures to reduce or eliminate those impacts in advance.
There ought to be a law. … Oh wait! CEQA. Δ
Gianna Patchen is chapter coordinator for the Santa Lucia Chapter of the Sierra Club. Andrew Christie served as chapter director from 2004 to 2023. Send comments in response to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 17-27, 2025.
As people live under bridges, on park benches, and their cars, you want to quibble about “environmental review?” America needs as much housing as possible. I’d be curious to know if the ideologue who wrote this article has ever found herself in dire straits or unable to find housing. She probably sleeps real well at night in a comfortable bed in a comfortable house. Sierra Club, go back under the rock you crawled out from. Your group works hand in hand with developers and against the interests of the American people. Your role is to exert maximum pressure to slow development and keep housing at unnecessary and artificially high prices, you could care less about the “environment.” The public sees your grift.
The Sierra Club has an image problem. It’s overwhelmingly run by wealthy white property owners who talk down on attempts to make dense infill housing a more achievable goal in a state where the median home price is 10x the median family income. They distort the truth about any sort of CEQA reform to maintain the value of their member’s single-family piggy bank homes. Notably, this article doesn’t offer a solution, just thoughts, contemplations, and an appeal to continue with the norm which clearly is not working. While we sit around in development paralysis hemming and hawing about the absolute best most perfect way to build new housing, people are on the streets dying from exposure.
Carson:
Word up. These wealthy, white, liberals are NIMBYs or, as Chris Hedges describes them, people who like the poor, just not the smell of them. The city council aides and abets the misery and squalor the working and underclass live in by actually giving the Sierra Club any deference.
I’m very concerned the environment, but let’s put people first. People need a place to live. It’s just going to get worse as our economy crashes, interest rates go up, housing supply dwindles as it is bought up in swathes using algorithms owned by hedge funds and private capital. This is ridiculous.
America’s wealth used to be measured by its industrial output, but since these same wealthy, white, aged liberals decided to burn every generation after them by shipping our factories overseas, we have no productive capacity to base our wealth on. Instead, all speculative activity is based on housing. Hence the classic 100 year old, wooden shack selling for $1,000,000 in SLO. Further, the dollar has been destroyed. Thank you again, Boomers. You really did a number on the rest of us. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
(They still refuse to admit any culpability, instead continue to blame the opposition party of both stripes. It’s as if our country collapsed by chance rather than was driven into the ground by their self serving, generational decisions. They thought of no one but themselves)
While CEQA has served an important role, it’s misleading to suggest it isn’t a barrier to housing. The often-cited claim that only “0.7%” of CEQA-reviewed projects face litigation includes tens of thousands of routine actions, like grading permits or sidewalk repairs, not the larger housing developments we urgently need. In reality, multi-unit and mixed-income projects face much higher risk, and the threat of CEQA lawsuits alone often deters developers from proposing them at all. In a county like San Luis Obispo, with a well-documented and growing housing shortage, we can’t afford to let procedural tools be used to block thoughtful, compliant development. CEQA is too often misused by groups with non-environmental motives to delay or kill projects that already meet local planning standards. And contrary to some claims, research consistently shows that any increase in housing supply, not just deed-restricted affordable units, helps reduce pressure on rents and improves access across the board. If we’re serious about equity and livability, we must prioritize building housing, not just protecting process.