Insight

The governor has a new infill housing initiative that includes a proposal to use housing as CEQA mitigation. But this play is only partly about housing. It's mostly about getting transportation projects adequately mitigated under SB 743.

With the Capitol Annex project, the Legislature punches another hole in CEQA -- this time to move its own office building along.

Patterns since the beginning of the pandemic suggest that there might be a slight rebalancing of population and housing in California. But persisently high prices seem to show that other factors are at work.

The U.S. Supreme Court's exactions ruling left a lot of things up in the air. Most important: Does California's typical "fair share" methodology for general plan-level exactions meet the court's "rough proportionality" rule?

Recent rulings from the high-profile cities of Berkeley and Beverly Hills got a lot of publicity. But less publicized settlement agreements from Davis and Clovis show just how scared cities are getting about housing litigation.

The state's action on housing has focused on making entitlements easier to get. But housing production hasn't gone up. Maybe there aren't enough developers and planners left in the state to get the job done.

They could simply box in California cities on nexus and proportionality. Or, led by Thomas and Alito, they could throw the bomb and say development is a right and not a privilege

After a review, HCD has told San Francisco it must start reforming its entitlement process by Thanksgiving or else. Will the state start investigating other cities' entitlement processes as well?

Some important bills passed this year. But unless the Legislature is willing to take on CEQA directly, there may not be a whole lot more to do on the land use front to encourage more housing production.

Three recent cases show how far the law can be stretched -- and how project opponents often sue for reasons that have nothing to do with that they're really upset about.

One camp says CEQA litigation stifles housing production and reinforces the status quo. The other camps says CEQA litigation isn't all that frequent and leads to better projects. But what if they're both right?

Not really. It's just nibbling around the edges. And it may not help transportation agencies that have to fully mitigate greenhouse gas emissions increases from their projects.