Green Machine

How California NIMBYS and city councils use environmental laws to kill climate-friendly development

- CHRIS ELMENDORF

IN THE LATE '60s and early '70s, when runaway development with little study or oversight led to the draining of the Everglades, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire, to name but a few catastrophes, the National Environmental Policy Act and its state-level counterparts, like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), were passed to "create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony." These laws demanded that the environmental impacts of proposed projects be thoroughly studied, discussed with the public, and mitigated where feasible.

Sounds totally reasonable, right? But as policymakers grapple with climate change and a national housing crisis, there's a growing recognition that, as law professors J.B. Ruhl and Jim Salzman put it, the Green New Deal is an awkward fit with the old green laws. City councils and county commissions are using these laws to delay, indefinitely, almost any housing or green-energy project that they or their supporters happen to dislike.

Consider an infamous example from San Francisco. Environmentally, the project at 469 Stevenson Street was about as good as they come. It was located smack in the middle of downtown, a block from commuter rail, in a priority development area designated by the regional climate and housing plan. It would have replaced a Nordstrom's valet parking lot with some 500 new homes-73 of them designated for low-income residents, plus funds for additional low-income units elsewhere. Most of the community groups from the surrounding area welcomed replacing asphalt with apartments. In accordance with CEQA, the developer had conducted a 1,000-page environmental impact report, which found that the project's only "significant" impact would be a less than I percent increase in shadows on nearby plazas. The city's planning commission approved the project.