XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics
XPost: ca.environment, alt.politics.republicans
BERKELEY, California — The revolution is now a fortified construction
site.
Just blocks from UC Berkeley, steel boxes and concertina wire ring the
storied People’s Park. Behind them: the skeletal frame of a student dormitory, rising where protesters once clashed in one of the nation’s
most famously progressive cities.
Neighbors and activists fought the campus housing complex at every turn — including through a novel legal argument: Excessive noise from its
boisterous young tenants should be considered an environmental impact
under the landmark California Environmental Quality Act.
The project took six years to break ground — and became a symbol of how
state legislation Ronald Reagan signed in 1970 to protect air and water
and check rampant development was being used to block desperately needed
new homes. It also helped hasten the law’s slide — from a pillar of California’s climate leadership to a cautionary tale about the ruling party’s inability to tackle a perpetual housing shortage — that culminated last month in a major rollback.
“That Berkeley thing,” said Jason Elliott, a top housing adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023, when Newsom championed a bill to advance the
project, “was a clarifying moment for a lot of people of how far afield we had come from the purpose of the original law.”
More than half a century ago, when Republicans were still running the
state, Reagan brought CEQA (pronounced “see-kwa”) into the world as a shield against unintended consequences: a project that befouled waterways
or drove species toward extinction. But the law’s reach expanded through a series of court rulings until it applied to developments of all kinds,
becoming a handy tool for almost anyone to challenge a proposed project by demanding more analysis and remediation.
CEQA has long been a bogeyman for Republicans and developers, a symbol of regulatory excess and government dysfunction — and an expensive one at
that. But antipathy steadily grew on the left as home prices squeezed
urban progressives and forced middle- and working-class families into two-
hour commutes or out of the state entirely. The cost of a mid-priced
dwelling in California has nearly doubled over the last decade, to around $800,000, more than twice the national average.
The ultimate tipping point arrived last November, when California voters
showed their disillusionment with the stewards of the status quo by
ousting down-ballot Democrats and delivering President Donald Trump’s across-the-board gains compared to four years earlier. As Trump toured Los Angeles wildfire damage in January, he assailed red tape for stalling rebuilding, and Newsom waived environmental rules to speed the area’s recovery.
This summer, Newsom and like-minded legislators did what was unthinkable
just a few years ago: They scaled the law back dramatically, exempting
most urban housing developments, along with day cares, manufacturing hubs
and clinics. In doing so, they overcame a once-inviolable alliance of construction unions, environmentalists and homeowners that for decades had fought the smallest changes by casting the law as a vital protection
aligned with Democrats’ core values on climate and labor.
“If we can’t address this issue, we’re going to lose trust, and that’s just the truth,” Newsom conceded to news reporters last month, going out
of his way to thank the leaders of the ascendant Abundance movement
focused on boosting production and rejecting a scarcity mindset.
CEQA still lives. It will still generate reviews and lawsuits, and Newsom
said he would never have supported a bill “to eliminate the core tenets”
of the law. But his decisive support for paring it back says something essential about the long arc of California politics: where the state has
been and where its leaders hope to take it now.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/18/california-ceqa-environmental- law-housing-00448276
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