California’s Obsession with Densification
Sailing through the California State Legislature is a “landmark package of bills” to overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). For the blissfully uninitiated, CEQA, passed in 1971, is California’s gift to litigators, bureaucrats, and every special interest that ever wanted to stop development projects in their tracks. Morphing from a once reasonable requirement that building permit applicants report on the “significant environmental impact” of their construction project and how they intend to mitigate that impact, CEQA is now a process heavy, bureaucratic beast that delays projects for years and costs developers millions. Of all the ways California’s state legislature and state agencies are trying to elevate prices for everything in the state, CEQA is the worst.
But the bills California’s enlightened legislators are expeditiously moving towards passage are not addressing CEQA’s fundamental flaws. They aren’t restricting the right to litigate under CEQA to district attorneys, which would stop opportunistic lawsuits by extortionate 3rd parties, or requiring the loser to pay legal fees in frivolous lawsuits. Nor are they limiting, across the board, the time periods allowed for permit processing and appeals. These steps would rectify CEQA for everyone, but everyone is not a concern.
Instead, California’s state legislature is exempting favored projects from the excesses of CEQA, specifically those having to do with “water, transportation, clean energy, and housing.” While we may hope that “water” might at least include finally building the badly needed Sites Reservoir, “transportation” means throwing more money at light rail projects, “clean” energy means more utility scale solar, wind, and battery farms, and “housing,” of course, means more high density infill.
Just how dense the state legislature will require housing to get in order to be exempt from CEQA provisions is found in the State Government Code Title 7, Division 1, Chapter 3, Article 10.6 “Housing Elements,” where the “lowest” permissible density is 10 units per acre. That would only be allowable, however, in an “unincorporated area of a nonmetropolitan county.” If the area is incorporated, it’s 15 units per acre. If the site is in a “suburban jurisdiction,” 20 units per acre, and if that suburban jurisdiction is in a “metropolitan county,” 30 units per acre.
This is the vision of the “YIMBY” (Yes In My Backyard) movement, financed by land developers who feed on subsidies and tax incentives, large scale developers who have in-house bureaucracies primed to navigate the Byzantium otherwise known as the California Code. And this is the promise of “infill,” that moral imperative that deems any development outside of existing urban boundaries to be a crime against the planet. But why?
If “greenhouse gas” caused by long commutes is the concern, how does that take into account the fact that people increasingly work from home, or that automotive technology is allegedly – at least according to the California state legislature – becoming earth friendly? How does that account for the reality that in every high density urban area, automotive congestion increases air pollution, and the higher the density, the bigger the problem?
More to the point is the sheer absurdity of claiming California even has sprawling suburbs. The megacities of Los Angeles/San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area are “sprawling” merely because that’s where everybody lives. California’s population grew relatively late compared to the rest of the nation, and most newcomers settled down in a few spots. Contrary to perception, California’s urban density is the highest in America, with just over 94 percent of the population living on only 5 percent of the land. California’s urban areas have an average of nearly 4,800 people per square mile, also the nation’s highest.
The implications of this reveal the misanthropic cruelty of streamlining CEQA merely to further densify California’s urban areas. Forcing development into limited geographic areas, confined within “urban containment boundaries” is a large part of the reason housing is so expensive in California. This politically contrived shortage of available land for building causes the value of eligible land to rise well beyond what it would be worth if land could be developed outside existing urban areas. Moreover, when developers build high density housing that has four or more floors, the cost per square foot increases compared to one and two story wood framed homes. These factors, all the result of political choices, are the reason housing is scarce and overpriced in California.
The greatest irony is that there is no need to limit the land where new housing projects are permitted. For example, if you built 2.5 million new homes on quarter acre lots, with an equal amount of land set aside for streets, parks, schools, and commercial and industrial centers, and if each of these homes were occupied by four people, you could fit a population of ten million people into an area under 2,000 square miles. That ultra low density development would only increase California’s urban footprint from 5.0 to 6.2 percent of its total land. There is plenty of room.
Instead of recognizing this gift, and permitting practical water, energy, and transportation infrastructure to realize it, California’s lawmakers prefer a hyper-regulated housing environment. That favors the wealthy, the politically connected, the subsidy hounds. But it denies private sector builders a chance to make a profit, without subsidies, building homes people want to buy, at a price they can afford.
An edited version of this article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.
Edward Ring is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Forbes, and other media outlets.
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