In this episode, I'm joined by two of California's leading housing champions, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and Senator Scott Wiener, to discuss their bills to reform the state's notorious environmental review law, CEQA. We explore how a well-intentioned 1970s environmental protection has become a tool for NIMBYs, unions, and even oil companies to delay or kill housing projects — and why the politics have finally shifted enough to make progress possible.
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Text transcript:
A conversation with Asm. Buffy Wicks and Sen. Scott Wiener.
David Roberts
Okay. All right, everyone. Hello, this is Volts for June 25, 2025, the fight to build faster in California. I'm your host, David Roberts. California has become the poster child for the US housing crisis: it is over 3 million units short of housing demand at this point, and that number is growing by about 100,000 a year. It is also in danger of becoming the poster child for larger blue state governance challenges. One reason California is so far short of the housing it needs is that it is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to build anything there, and one reason for that is the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, signed into law in 1970.
That law — at least the way that law has been interpreted and expanded since its passage — effectively gives anyone who can afford a lawyer the ability to delay any project they oppose for years. It has been used to block or delay affordable housing, student housing, bike lanes, and high-speed rail, along with lots of plain old apartment buildings.
This year, real CEQA reform is on the table for the first time in many, many years. In the State Assembly, Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks is sponsoring AB609, which would exempt infill housing from CEQA review. In the State Senate, San Francisco's Scott Wiener is sponsoring SB607, which would follow that with a number of additional reforms.
This topic is, to say the least, controversial among the state's various interest groups. I cannot wait to get into it! I am happy to have Assemblymember Wicks and Senator Wiener here with me today to discuss why this reform is needed, how they have assembled a coalition to support it, and what they hope for California's housing future.
With no further ado, Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, Senator Scott Wiener, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Thanks for having us.
Senator Scott Wiener
Yeah, thank you.
David Roberts
Excited for this. I've been trying to set this up for a while. I know you two are very busy in general, but particularly right now, so I appreciate you taking the time. So, let's start with you, Assemblymember Wicks.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
You can just call me Buffy, by the way. Makes it easier.
David Roberts
Thank goodness. So many syllables. Anybody who follows this, anybody who follows California's housing policy, is painfully, and I use the word painfully advisedly, aware of CEQA and has no doubt been involved in many fights over it. But we have listeners outside of California, so maybe let's just start with a couple of minutes on what is the law and how has it come to be what it is?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, so you know, this law was passed in 1970. It's become a bit of a sacred cow here in California politics. And it was designed really to protect the environment by ensuring that new projects considered environmental impacts and mitigation, which is a very lofty and important goal, especially at that time when we had like orange skies and very, very limited environmental protections. And so, I think the original genesis of it is one that is very noble. You know, it was to stop harmful development. Right. But the statute's breadth and, you know, depth of it has expanded over years and has really allowed it to become essentially, you know, a blunt instrument to stop, in this case, housing production.
But many other things too. Renewable energy projects, public transportation, climate resiliency projects, all kinds of other things. You know, CEQA is required on all projects, even those, you know, aligned with state and local plans. You have to undergo a pretty lengthy environmental review process at the general plan level for individual projects, for special plans. There's a lot of analysis that goes into our projects. And over time, there's been essentially a cottage industry that's formed around CEQA litigation with law firms that specialize in CEQA challenges to stop projects.
David Roberts
And those challenges are tantamount to saying, "You didn't review enough, you didn't review properly, you didn't follow the letter of the CEQA law." That's what those lawsuits are all about.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, and the result, the effect is that there are years and years and years of delay on many projects. In some projects, you know, you'll have a plot of land that is perfect for development, say it's transit-oriented housing or a place for multifamily housing, and there'll be a lawsuit that's so involved that the developer will finally just throw in the towel and give up. And then that land won't be bought by another developer to develop it out to a project because they know what they're going to face is years and years of lawsuits.
And so, this is the reality of the millions of homes shy where we need to be here in California.
David Roberts
Yes, and it's not just necessarily the lawsuits, it's also just the threat of the lawsuits. Sort of like preemptive defensiveness against the threat of lawsuits. Maybe Senator Wiener — or I guess I'll call you Scott now.
Senator Scott Wiener
Scott is great.
David Roberts
Maybe you could go into a little bit of detail about what are the groups that are filing these CEQA lawsuits and what are they typically using them for?
Senator Scott Wiener
Yeah, so, and I want to just add the last point you made is incredibly important because sometimes the folks who just reflexively defend CEQA, "CEQA can do no wrong. You know, very little needs to be changed about it." What they will point to is, "Oh, only a tiny percentage of projects get sued in court under CEQA. So therefore, there's not a problem." But what you said is absolutely spot on: it's not just about the actual lawsuits. If you know that X opponent of the project has the ability to hire a lawyer or has a lawyer, you're going to be very conservative and err on the side of more and more environmental review to protect yourself from a lawsuit.
So, it really distorts the entire system, even for projects that never end up in court. And what we've seen is, and just to be clear, there's a chunk of CEQA that is absolutely about the environment. You know, when you talk about building some massive warehouse facility in an area that's going to have mega, mega impacts on the community, or putting a big chemical plant somewhere or something that could lead to toxics. But a lot of CEQA has nothing to do with the environment. And so, we see it play out as really all about leverage.
And that's why it's so hard to change CEQA, because everyone who is using the law to exercise leverage to get what they want on a project doesn't want to give that up. So, for example, recently, maybe a year or two ago, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance to phase out oil extraction in LA. That passed, and the oil industry filed a CEQA lawsuit against the city of LA, saying that the city had not engaged in sufficient environmental review — so using CEQA to try to stop the phasing out of oil extraction. We saw recently in Napa, north of San Francisco, where they only have one childcare slot for every 10 children who need it.
There was a proposed childcare center supported by the city, by the county, broad support. There were neighbors who didn't like it because they didn't want a childcare center nearby. They used CEQA and there was a lawsuit. Ultimately, it was resolved, but it might have inflicted a mortal wound on that childcare center in terms of cost and delay. We saw recently a CEQA lawsuit against a food bank in the city of Alameda in the East Bay, a CEQA lawsuit against a Planned Parenthood health care center in San Mateo County. And the list could go on and on and on about CEQA lawsuits that literally have nothing to do with the environment and that are stopping us or slowing down our ability to create things that we need, like childcare centers, like health centers, like food banks, like moving away from fossil fuels.
David Roberts
This wasn't included in your list of anecdotes, but we should say that often, unions, trade unions will file CEQA lawsuits against projects as leverage to push those projects to offer better labor agreements, basically.
Senator Scott Wiener
You see, the building trades that will use to try to get project labor agreements on a project, the hotel workers union has used it to try to have better wages and working conditions for hotel workers. And in a lot of these cases with labor, at times, their goals are goals that I support. I want better wages and working conditions for workers. My view is we should just legislate that as the standards and not do it through CEQA. They're doing it through CEQA because that's the way they can do it. There is another way. My view is, let's just set up good rules and not have every single project be sort of this bespoke, unpredictable process where CEQA can kill a project or delay it.
David Roberts
Right. It seems like a law that is sporadically and inconsistently enforced via lawsuits is not the best way to solve the problem of labor standards.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
No, and also, I think another group that obviously, famously uses CEQA are NIMBY groups. Right. And I have in my district, I represent UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley was trying to build housing on People's Park, a park that obviously has historic importance but has become, you know, essentially an open-air drug market. They tried for decades and decades and decades. You know, the local neighborhood group, homeowner groups used CEQA to say that by building housing there, the student noise would have an environmental impact.
David Roberts
Yes, I remember that one. The noise of students being pollution under CEQA.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
So, we had to do a bill that passed with flying colors off the floor of both houses to basically say that student noise couldn't be considered an environmental impact. Now, we are building 1,200 units of housing and housing for our unhoused on that land. But it required literally legislation from the state to ensure that.
David Roberts
That's about as close as you're going to get NIMBYs to come to stating their core philosophy, which is just that people basically are pollution.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
That was basically the argument. Yeah.
David Roberts
So, before we get into your bills to reform CEQA, maybe we could just talk a little bit about — this is not the first go at reforming CEQA. It's been a problem for a while and there have been these sort of fitful efforts at reform, but they haven't really amounted to anything. Scott, maybe you can talk a little bit about that. These sort of like exemptions here for this and that.
Senator Scott Wiener
To be clear, there has been good work. And actually, Buffy and I have been part of that work. It's happened in two ways. What we've basically done is we have taken categories of projects and said we're either going to just create an exemption, so it's simply exempt from CEQA, or do something called ministerial approval, which means there's no discretion about whether to approve the project or not approve the project. And that means that it's not just exempt from CEQA. It's not considered a "project" for purposes of CEQA. So it's like, literally as if CEQA didn't exist for that project.
And so, we've done that for big categories of housing, whether accessory dwelling units or duplexes or certain apartment buildings, or commercial conversions to apartment buildings, which Buffy did that law. We've also done exemptions for, I authored an exemption for student on-campus student housing. We did one for certain kinds of public transportation and bike and pedestrian projects. There's been a series of these exemptions. And to be clear, exemptions are extremely powerful. It just knocks an entire category out of CEQA. But what that means is that for everything left behind, which is an awful lot of projects, including some kinds of housing or childcare centers or advanced manufacturing or semiconductor plants — the CHIPS Act basically almost entirely skipped over California because it's too hard to set up shop here.
It's been a legislative failure that we've not been able to muster the ability to fix CEQA itself. And so, we get accused of, "Oh, you're Swiss-cheesing CEQA by doing exemptions." The answer is, "Yes, okay, let's fix CEQA itself, which is what we're trying to do with SB 607."
David Roberts
And one other thing I wanted to mention, also before we get into the laws, is this is a dynamic. Because one of the things I want to talk about later, maybe a little bit, is how this has become politically possible. But one of the dynamics that's going on, and Buffy, maybe you could say a little bit about this, is there's been a series of state laws trying to get housing going. Like, this has been a long fight in California trying to get housing going. And at this point now, you've got kind of a weird situation where you've got state laws telling cities they have to do things, and cities basically using CEQA to tie their own hands.
Doesn't seem like a stable legal situation when you have these conflicting laws, basically.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, we're sort of coming to a head on it, you know, and it again sort of manifests itself in the current housing crisis that we are in. You know, we've done a lot of good work over the past seven, eight years trying to expedite streamlining. And you know, Scott and I have worked a lot on these bills together to require, bring about more accountability, really more enforcement around state law to ensure that our local municipalities are actually adhering to their regional housing allocation numbers — RHNA is what we call it here in California — and putting some teeth on that enforcement.
We're doing a lot towards that end with some of the exemptions that Scott just laid out. Yet, CEQA remains a loophole or a delay that can derail those very same projects. So, that's really the challenge, which is why the reforms around CEQA are so critical. And I would argue, like I view our housing and transit policy as our environmental policy. Right. So, from an environmental point of view, we need infill housing. We should be incentivizing infill housing. We should be incentivizing our public transportation, not making it harder to do those things. You know, not weaponizing things like CEQA to stop that type of housing and that type of transit.
Which is why, you know, Scott and I are working on his bill and my bill and, you know, the reforms that we're doing in this body of work.
David Roberts
Well, talk about 609 then, AB609.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
So, AB609 is my baby for the year, my biggest lift. I've got two girls, a four-year-old and an eight-year-old, who I love dearly. And I have AB609, which is like my third child.
David Roberts
Third child, notoriously the most difficult.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, totally. I mean, my 4 and 8-year-old do give it a run for its money. But essentially, what this bill does is it says, "If this is infill housing that's environmentally friendly" — so we have something here called the Cortese list, which is a list of, you know, industrial lands and others that you can't build on — but if it's environmentally friendly housing and it's infill, so there's already a footprint there; no CEQA, just no CEQA for housing. Whether it's, you know, market rate, missing middle, you know, low income, affordable, whatever it is, no CEQA.
David Roberts
So, this is like a categorical exemption, rather than a —
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
It's a pretty big, yeah, carve out here on this, and with the idea being that, in fact, we should be bending over backwards to make it easier to build this type of housing. And as mentioned, there's been so many delays. CEQA gets so weaponized for infill housing and often infill housing because it is on a current footprint, which means there are neighbors who object to having housing, multifamily housing in their community, and they use CEQA to stop that housing. So this basically, you know, if we get it passed, which I'm cautiously optimistic, though I choose to live in a constant state of fear and paranoia until it gets signed into law.
It'll be one of the biggest reforms on CEQA, if we're able to get it done this year, that will, fingers crossed, jumpstart the housing that we need. And again, with the idea around — you know, I believe we should have more protections on our open spaces. Part of why we love California so much is that we have this beautiful open space. We should be very mindful of the environmental impacts on that type of housing. But if you're talking about housing on our current footprint, you know, you look at the example on Stevenson Street in San Francisco. It's literally in downtown San Francisco.
It's a massive housing project right next to a BART stop. You know, CEQA lawsuits are, that was on a parking lot, you know, are being used to stop that housing that would then be exempt from that hurdle.
David Roberts
Yes, and we should say, like the housing that gets blocked this way, it doesn't disappear, it just goes out into the hinterland —
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
That's exactly right.
David Roberts
where it takes much more sensitive land. Is it clear legally what is and isn't infill?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
We have definitions of what that is in the bill. And there's, you know, we're using definitions that have been used in other government code, but it has to have parcels on 75% of it. So it's a pretty clear definition of infill that I think we're pretty comfortable with here in California.
David Roberts
And what about people who worry that you've basically like is too broad a brush here that you're going to inadvertently exempt some stuff that needs review? Do you think that the environmental friendliness checklist — whatever, I forgot the name for it — but you think that's enough to sort of vouchsafe environmental quality?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
I think so. And I also think, you know, if we're not building projects like 469 Stevenson, which is 500 units of housing on a BART stop, we're going to have to build it somewhere. So to your point, it's going to go out into our open spaces where we're going to then have to build more freeways and more sprawl. And 41% of our greenhouse gas comes out of our exhaust pipes. Right. So those are our choices here. So I think the adverse is the issue, right, that I would fully support this type of housing development versus the alternative in terms of what's better for the environment.
David Roberts
Okay, that's 609. Big exemption for all, basically all infill housing that fits these basic requirements, which is most of it. The other bill is SB607. That's yours, Scott, your baby. This one is a little bit more — it's funny, it's so technical and freighted with everything. But on the other hand, if you actually, like, read what it does, it's incredibly wonky and technical. It does several things. But there's one main thing I want to focus on, which is about how high a hurdle you have to cross to file a lawsuit, basically. Like what it takes to get in the door for a lawsuit.
Right now, the standard is a fair argument. Is there a fair argument that there might be an environmental impact? And I think anybody listening to this will just be like, "Well, I can make up a fair argument for anything." So, there's effectively no barrier at all. If you can get anyone to write down an argument, you can get a lawsuit going, basically. So, it's at this point trivially easy to file these lawsuits. So, what would the bill make the new standard, and what effect would that have?
Senator Scott Wiener
Yeah, there are actually five pieces to the bill, and any one of those pieces, if it were a bill by itself, would be a big bill. So, we make it easier — right now, there is this gotcha provision in CEQA where if there's a CEQA lawsuit after an environmental impact report, they look at the administrative record, which is right now defined so broadly that you can overturn an environmental impact report in court if they neglected to include some tangential email from some employee three times removed who wasn't involved in the decision. So, we narrow the administrative record to be only what the decision maker actually saw, which makes a lot of sense and is very exciting for a lot of cities that get tormented by this.
There's also a provision if you almost qualify for a CEQA exemption but barely miss it. Right now, you have to do an environmental impact report as if the exemption didn't exist. The bill would say, in that case, you only have the impact report would only apply to the piece that you missed, not to everything. So it'd be much narrower. And there are a couple of other things as well. But the piece you're referring to has to do with the legal standard to defend a CEQA decision in court. So right now, when a city, someone comes forward with a project or if it's a public project, the city makes an initial decision, first of all, is this exempt from CEQA entirely?
And if it is exempt, then, boom, you're done. If it's not exempt, then the city has to determine, is there a significant environmental impact or is there no significant environmental impact from this project? If the city decides there is a significant impact, then they have to do an environmental impact report, an EIR. If the city decides that there is not, right at the outset, there's just not a significant environmental impact, then they issue what's called a negative declaration. It's a declaration saying there's no environmental impact, and then that's the end of it. Right now, if you get sued in court, if you do a full environmental impact report and you get sued, the legal standard to defend it is, "Was there substantial evidence? Was there some credible, good evidence supporting the environmental review that the city did?"
And as long as that good, reasonable, credible evidence exists, even if someone disagrees with it, then the city wins, the environmental impact report is upheld. However, if the city issues a negative declaration, in other words, says at the very beginning, we are just determining there's no significant environmental impact, it's almost impossible to defend it in court because the standard is different. It's what you mentioned, a fair argument. Can anyone make a fair argument that there actually was a significant environmental impact? And so, for example, if you, as the city or the proponent of the project, if you have 10 Nobel laureates in the area saying, "There's no environmental impact," and then the opponent finds a community college student who took a semester course in the area who submits a declaration saying, "There is." Then that negative declaration is now overturned in court because someone made a "fair argument."
So, what that means in reality is that cities that will say, "Hey, I don't think there's an environmental impact, we should do a negative declaration." They have to look around, and if they see that there is an opponent out there who might sue, they're going to say, "You know what? We're going to do an environmental impact report, which will take years and a lot of money, because we can't defend this in court, because it's impossible to defend in court." So, what our bill does is it says, "Regardless of what the city's determination was, whether they said that there was no environmental impact, so therefore a negative declaration or an environmental impact report, it's the same standard."
Was there reasonable, credible, "substantial" evidence to support the city's decision? And, like the other changes, it's a significant change in CEQA, and it's a good change.
David Roberts
And so the effect would be that cities would be more inclined to do these negative declarations because suing against them would be much harder?
Senator Scott Wiener
Right. They would still have to have substantial evidence. And I understand that there are environmentalists and other folks who might say, "Well, you're going to, you have some cities that are bad actors and they're just going to say everything is no environmental impact." But if they can't show substantial evidence, if they're just making it up, they're going to lose in court. It's not like it's impossible to defeat that decision. They still have to come forward and show what their evidence is. And if it's bogus, the city's not going to win.
David Roberts
What do you say to people to give them confidence that serious environmental threats, that CEQA is still going to apply, that this is not going to be used to smuggle serious environmental threats, sort of under the wire?
Senator Scott Wiener
I mean, a couple of things. First of all, outside of CEQA, California has very strong environmental laws, like it's protecting clean air and clean water, endangered species. We have really strong statutes. We have strong agencies that issue strong regulations. We have all sorts of regulations they have to comply with. And again, they still will have CEQA, but cities will still have the ability, if they can show that they have evidence, to not go through a full environmental impact report. So, CEQA will still provide protection. It will not be, it'll be much harder to abuse it. But for real environmental harms, people will still be able to use it in addition to all the other laws that California has.
David Roberts
So, you think all these five changes this law would make. The intent is basically to make it more difficult to do these sort of defensive or frivolous lawsuits.
Senator Scott Wiener
Yeah, and I should also mention, we also, of course, have building codes and other just rules that people have to follow. But yes, it will cut down on frivolous lawsuits. But I think we also, beyond that, when we talk about the concept of abundance, which has been a good topic of discussion, and I think there is a lot of work happening around abundance before the word abundance was even coined, just making it easier for people and for government to deliver good things that make people's lives better, whether that's childcare or public transportation or housing or, you know, advanced manufacturing for jobs, et cetera.
We made it so hard that we're strangling ourselves. And so, when we talk about abundance, one of the things that we want is government capacity, the ability of government to deliver good things and to be able to give permits for other people to do that without having to go through an unending process and litigation. And so, part of this, and this is part of the conflict, is having some level of trust in government and public officials to do their jobs and make these decisions. We elect people to do their job, and let's have some level of trust that they're going to do it in the public interest.
And this goes into — there was a great book that came out earlier this year that got overshadowed a little bit by Abundance, and that is Why Nothing Works.
David Roberts
Why Nothing Works, yeah.
Senator Scott Wiener
That was an amazing book and a great history of progressives. How there was a reaction to the sort of centralized, top-down New Deal with some of the abuses by people like Robert Moses, tearing down neighborhoods. And so, the reaction was decentralization, infinite process, so that no one's in charge, no one can make decisions, and everything gets decided in court. And that definitely ended the era of top-down, centralized progressive governance. But it also was the beginning of the housing crisis. It was the beginning of people losing faith in government's ability to do anything. Which gave us the grift of Donald Trump where he said, "Everything is broken, you're being screwed, and I'm going to fix everything."
David Roberts
I'm not sure if you want to get into this or not, but one of the other, the other side of the abundance critique, is that another effect of that situation is to set up this kind of ecosystem of nonprofit groups who sort of are sustained by these dysfunctions or sustained by these lawsuits. They sort of, you know, have built their funding model around stopping things from happening. That's sort of how they show their members or their donors that they're doing things by stopping things.
Senator Scott Wiener
Well, I'll give you an example, and sometimes it's actually really good intentions. So, for example, on this bill, I was talking to a major environmental leader in California, someone who I adore, who I think like is just walks on water, and we partner with them all the time on important environmental legislation. This is someone who is, I think, a little more open-minded about some of these issues. They talked about how CEQA is often used, particularly around clean energy, where they go through an EIR on the clean energy. So, it's clean energy, which we need, and it has to go through an environmental impact report, so it's delayed and it's more expensive. And then they get something called advanced mitigation funding, which they then use, for example, to do habitat restoration somewhere else or something.
And that, if you limit CEQA, it gets harder to do that. My response to that is, we should just, like, have a fee or something that generates those funds.
David Roberts
Doing that via courts is just not the most efficient way to accomplish it.
Senator Scott Wiener
Right. And I said to her, "I want you to have that funding. That funding is important. Let's figure out a different way to do it that doesn't tie up things like clean energy in ways that are not beneficial to climate action."
David Roberts
Right, right. Well, I want to get into a little bit how the politics of this have changed, like why reforms of this scale seem to be possible now when they weren't all that long ago. Buffy, maybe you could talk about the union side of things. Sort of like, you know, as we said earlier, they can get good working conditions with the threat of CEQA lawsuits.
And that's very rational. Like, you know, from the outside point of view, political economy point of view, like, that's a power they have. It makes all the sense in the world for them to try to preserve that power, even though it's not great for the larger public good. So, what are you telling them? What are they telling you? What's their current disposition toward all this?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Sure. So, yeah, I mean, I think the unions are using the tools in their toolbox. Right. CEQA is the tool in their toolbox for leverage. And that's why they use it. That's why everyone uses it. That's why the NIMBYs use it. It's why, you know, I mean, everyone uses the tool that's available to them. And this blunt force instrument, which then the effect of that is, you know, the obvious deficit of housing that we have. And when I talk to the unions, my message is like, "Wage theft is a problem. We have to address wage theft."
Right. We need stronger enforcement. And you look at the construction industry in particular, there's a lot of nefarious actors out there. As some of my friends in the carpenters say, "It's a crime scene in a lot of these places." And I think that is accurate. Right. You know, the wages need to be higher. Like, all those are very valid conversations that need to be addressed. But right now, everyone's using CEQA for that. You know, the California Environmental Quality Act. Right. As labor law, essentially.
David Roberts
And, I'd rather us go through the front door on the labor conversation, say, "Actually, let's pass wage theft protections. Let's think about what a residential wage rate can be," you know, all those different tools in the toolbox that we do with any other type of labor law. We should have that within the confines of labor law.
But why wouldn't they say — and sort of similarly to, like, what they might say to Scott, the environmentalists might say to Scott, like, "Okay, show us that funding, show us that other legislation, and then we'll back off on CEQA." Do you know what I mean?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, totally. And I think I will also say the unions are not all monolithic on this. I think you've had unions like the carpenters, who I think are way more willing to come to the table and negotiate on what this can look like and what it means. And you have unions who are more, I think, committed to using CEQA in its current status quo, you know, because it's the tool that has worked for them. And I get that. Right. Like, again, if it's the thing that's working for you, you don't want to get it taken away.
But again, the impact is that a lot of the members of those unions can't afford the roof over their head. And so, we have to reimagine how we're doing this here. I would say, just on the question of politics, to me, I'm a Democrat because I believe in government, and I think government can and should deliver for people. And so, as a Democrat, I think it's important that our government is delivering for people. And when you look at the housing crisis in California and the fact that we have almost 200,000 folks experiencing homelessness every single night, and the fact that, you know, we are two-thirds of the state legislature and every statewide office, like, we have to own the fact that, like, we need to fix this.
And the good news is, we are now in positions of power to fix it, and we should do that. That is what we are going to do. But we have to, I think, recognize and granted, it's taken us decades and decades to get to this point, and those were decisions made long before I was in office or Scott was in office. Right. But we have to fix it.
David Roberts
One of the ways that previous efforts at reform have worked around unions is by offering these exemptions to CEQA, they tie them to labor standards, basically. And this is, you know, getting back to the abundance thing. This is what the abundance people call "everything bagel liberalism," which is you have a policy where you're trying to get housing and you attach all these other goals to it, all of which might be laudable in their own right, but you end up with a policy that's sort of unwieldy and nothing gets built. And we should say your exemption for infill housing 609 has no such requirements. It is a plain bagel.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
It is a very plain bagel right now. Yes. And I introduced it that way very intentionally because I essentially just wanted to rip off the band-aid and see where everyone came out, you know.
David Roberts
And I'm assuming that unions are upset about it and still opposing, like they haven't changed, they haven't come around on this, basically?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Building trades are opposed to the bill. I am in conversation with the carpenter's union on what that could look like. I'm getting other pressures too, to say, "Okay, well if we're going to give this exemption, then we need to have it have a certain amount be affordable housing." Right. 15% of a project or whatever it is.
David Roberts
Classic bagel topping.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yes, and so then there's all these other things that come into play, or we have to do mitigation around, you know, environmental mitigations on certain projects, or we have to do this or we have to do that.
So, all that incoming, I sort of introduced the plainest, cleanest version and then sort of seeing, "Okay, who's going to come out of the woodwork with concerns?" Some of which are very valid, some of which we can address, you know. But my response on, you know, like the inclusionary zoning, which is the percent requirement for affordable in a project, is cities can do that already. They have that in their toolbox. This bill does not touch. Should there be a certain amount of inclusionary? Some of my colleagues are going to push very strongly to have inclusionary in the bill, but you have to look at what's feasible.
David Roberts
Let me actually put a marker here because I think that's actually important. City-level inclusionary zoning codes are not affected by this.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Exactly.
David Roberts
They can all still do all the toppings on the bagel they want at the local level.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Exactly right. They can still have height requirements.
David Roberts
You're not prohibiting that.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Right. This doesn't touch zoning. This doesn't touch height. This doesn't touch, you know, inclusionary. Cities can still do that. What this bill does is it says, "CEQA no longer applies to these projects." Which, by the way, CEQA has already been done on the general plan. When the cities are putting together their planning, they're saying, "We're going to have a zone for this amount of housing here. And this is what it's going to look like. This is what's going to be available to be built out." They do CEQA on that on the general plan. They do CEQA on the special plans.
So, it's already been done. It's just saying, "You don't have to do CEQA on this specific project."
David Roberts
Right. Me, this is just my naivete, but why aren't unions swayed by the prospect of lots more construction work, lots more building? It seems like ipso facto, that would be a good thing for the trades.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question. You know, it's what they've used successfully to fight for the things that they believe in, which again, I share those values. But it means that everyone's then fighting, using CEQA to stop the housing that they don't want in their neighborhood or whatever. And so, because it's such a blunt force instrument, there needs to be reforms around it. But it's just the tool that has been useful for them. I mean, it's how they're getting their project labor agreements done. It's how they're able to get the projects they need.
So, I understand the desire, but I think we have to go about labor law in a different way than utilizing CEQA for that process.
David Roberts
Scott, maybe you can flesh out a little bit more how the politics of this have changed. Why is this proving possible now? I don't want us to get over our skis here. It's not written, not done, and signed yet. But like, why is it seemingly — why is it possible now when it wasn't even quite recently?
Senator Scott Wiener
The politics have shifted dramatically, first around housing, but then around other needs as well. I was elected in 2016. Buffy was elected two years later in 2018. And right before I was elected is when there started to be some work happening in the legislature around housing to say "We can't just let cities do whatever they want" because it became a race to the bottom and it gave us this massive housing deficit. I want to be clear. I think it's important not to demonize cities. And I don't just say that because I'm a former local elected official.
I think that there are cities that try really hard, and cities that don't. There are a lot of local elected officials that get it, but feel paralyzed and they don't know what to do. So, around a decade ago is when the work really started to say, "Let's rebalance this, not to get rid of local control, but to have stronger statewide standards to make sure we're meeting our needs, like, around housing." It was hard at first, but I think one of the reasons why the politics shifted is because the housing disaster that had been playing out in places like San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Monica, and some other places for years or decades started spreading everywhere.
And to the point where even in the Inland Empire and Central Valley, which historically have been the most affordable parts of the state, people were getting priced out. And so, for our colleagues and others, they started seeing firsthand what happens when you don't build enough housing in terms of homelessness, working-class families being pushed out. And so, it really built momentum. We also assembled an amazing coalition, yes, of housing advocates, but also of environmentalists like AARP and Habitat for Humanity, the UC Students Association. Buffy played an instrumental role in working with the carpenter's union to come in an incredibly positive way.
And that was a game changer. They brought other unions with them, like the laborers, operating engineers. So, we built this coalition and then as we started passing more housing laws, we started focusing on other things and said, "Hey, let's make it easier to do this, that or the other thing as well." And you know, we have more and more colleagues that just totally get it. We also have big city mayors that have been supportive. Governor Newsom has been an incredible ally on this work around CEQA, around housing. He's been just terrific. So, it's been just a growing movement and it's working.
David Roberts
I mean, obviously, local city governments are not a monolith either. But are they coming around on this, or do they still largely want this tool in their toolbox?
Senator Scott Wiener
On CEQA, they have — on my CEQA bill, one of our co-sponsors and probably the lead co-sponsor of the bill is the RCRC, the Rural Counties of California. They're one of the lead local government groups. They represent all the rural counties, which is most counties in California. And we have the support from all of the local government groups, the League of Cities, the Association of Counties, because they understand cities and counties, how CEQA ties them up in a knot. And in another bill that I'm doing this year, Senate Bill 79 that upzones for more density around high-quality public transportation, where we have a lot of local government opposition, we now have the city of San Diego supporting it.
We're actively working with another large city that shall remain nameless. And various small — Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Culver City have all endorsed the bill and a whole bunch of city council members around the state. So, we're seeing a shift at the local level too.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
And I think what you'll see, I have cities in my district who have been really good pro-housing cities. So, I definitely think it's, you know, cities sometimes take a bad rap and there are definitely bad actors, but there's good actors out there. But also what happens, and I know Scott hears this sometimes too, when you go around California, you have some city council members who are like, "Yes, please keep doing what you're doing because it sort of takes the control out of their hands so that they're not at the tip of the spear at their Tuesday city council meetings, right?" They can kind of say like, "Oh, the state's making us do it." You know, the big bad state.
David Roberts
I can imagine, having experienced local control up close for several years running, that having a little bit less local control might sound appealing to you.
Senator Scott Wiener
In San Francisco, I tell our local elected officials, "Feel free to use me as —" You know, they want to make me, some people in San Francisco make me the boogeyman. San Francisco is going through a big upzoning pursuant to its required, it's a required upzoning. And Mayor Lurie, our new mayor, is doing a great job advocating for it. There was a big hearing on it yesterday and there were all these NIMBYs who came out and they were like, "This is Scott Wiener's upzoning." And I am happy to absorb that. Happy to absorb it.
David Roberts
That is hilarious. I mean, it's true. Well, I did have one other question about opinion on this. I'm sort of wondering specifically — this is slightly orthogonal to the secret thing, but I'm just curious — among people, I think, who are empirically educated on housing issues, let's say the connection between homelessness and lack of housing is obvious and straightforward. But my impression, generally speaking of the general public, I don't know if they make that leap. You know, there's a lot of weird folk theories about what causes homelessness. So I'm just wondering, like, is that argument starting to land?
Is the public starting to make that connection? We need more homes because we've got all these homeless people?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
I think so. I mean, I'd love to know what Scott thinks, but people are starting to connect the dots. I think it's because, and especially in the Bay Area, where we've been at the tip of the spear of the crisis for so long now, that people understand the reason why we have such a crisis of homelessness is because it is too damn expensive to live in California. And it's too expensive because it is too hard to build anything in California. And so, I do think there's a through line there. You also have folks who, you know, are older, who have been in their house for 30 or 40 years, raised their kids, and their kids have gone off to college and now they're coming back and they want to live here and they can't live here anymore and they're going to go somewhere else.
And so, you have folks who maybe would tend to be a little bit more in kind of the NIMBY camp who are saying, "Well, wait a second, I want my kids to come back here." And they can't afford the rent because there are not enough homes. And so, I think the issue has changed a lot over the last, I don't know, 10 or so years because the crisis has metastasized to such a level that it's requiring us to take this kind of political change.
Senator Scott Wiener
Yeah, I totally agree. On homelessness, I think people do get it. Although, you have the debate: is homelessness a housing issue or a mental health issue? And that's a toxic debate. And it is largely a housing issue. And of course, there's a mental health component to it. But I think for me, in my conversations with my constituents, it's about homelessness. But it's also like Buffy said, I had an older couple that came up to me about five years ago at a community meeting to say, "You know what, we always hated your housing work and really didn't want more density in our neighborhood. But now our kids are moving to Chicago with our grandkids and you were right."
For people who will say, "My kid has had three teachers this school year because the teachers keep moving away." Or they just say, "My neighbors, I don't have any working-class neighbors anymore. It's only rich tech people who can afford here." No offense to rich tech people, but it's good to have a mix of different kinds of people and so people see it in different ways that really make it come home for them.
David Roberts
Another, I think, instinctive opinion people have, definitely this is on the left. You hear a lot of this from progressive groups, which is that there's something about housing where the normal laws of supply and demand don't really hold and that when you just require more housing absent other controls, you get gentrification, basically. Like, gentrification is the big — and I should say to steel man this a little bit, like in a situation of severe shortage, it kind of is true that any time you make a decently dense area, a lot of people want to live there and the prices do go up.
So, like, you know, empirically, people see that happen. It's not crazy to think that.
Senator Scott Wiener
This is an issue that I've been dealing with for a long time, actually. My initial entry into true YIMBY politics, I had been doing the work, but my first real public thing was when I published a piece online 10 years ago called "Supply and demand apply to housing. Even in San Francisco." And it sort of went a little viral. So, yeah, you know, it's frustrating because we spent 50 years digging ourselves into a hole, not building very much housing and creating this absolutely massive housing shortage.
And then, we hit a tipping point. And so now, we're starting to dig our way out of it. People have this perception, because we've been talking about this for a while, that an enormous amount of housing is getting built and we're still not building nearly enough housing. It's going to take quite some time to dig ourselves out of the hole. But when you have a massive shortage, that explodes the cost of housing and then you build that first or second tranche to dig out of it, that housing is going to be expensive because you still, you're not going to solve the shortage overnight.
And I also try to remind people, yes, the housing that was built a year ago, you call it luxury housing. Well, it's just expensive. But guess what, the flat that was built in 1942 is also super expensive. And one of the best examples that I really like to talk about is that in 2015, there was a ballot measure in San Francisco to put a moratorium on new housing in the Mission District in San Francisco. Their argument was that housing causes gentrification and that over the last 15 years leading up to then, 8,000 Latino families had left the Mission, which was true.
There was enormous gentrification happening in the Mission. Well, guess what? When you look at actual housing construction, the Mission was one of the lowest production neighborhoods in the city. Almost no new housing had been built for the 15 years leading up to 2015 in the Mission. And people were still being pushed out. So, when you don't build housing, that's what pushes people out. But when people see new housing going up and it looks expensive, they get the opposite perception.
David Roberts
Yes, and one other thing, I don't know why this jumped into my mind, but I read one of these letters in opposition to your Transit-Oriented Development Bill. And of course, Volts listeners will, by the time they hear this podcast, have already heard about Washington's Transit-Oriented Development Bill. So they're very trained up in all those issues. But I read one of these letters in response to your Transit-Oriented Development Bill that was trying to make the argument that somehow building more apartments near the transit stops would reduce transit ridership. I don't remember the causal...
It's one of the craziest paragraphs I've ever read. Some of the arguments you run into from people who are just kind of going off their feelings on this stuff are really, really crazy.
Senator Scott Wiener
Well, what that argument is, is that if you are building anything other than 100% subsidized low-income housing near transit, wealthier people are not going to ride transit. Low-income people are more likely. And yes, low-income people might be more likely to ride. But first of all, as we can see in San Francisco, a lot of middle-class and upper-income people do ride transit. If you provide good transit and people can walk to it, they'll ride it. But second, the idea that that is somehow worse than having it surrounded by single-family homes where only like 10 people are able to actually walk to the transit station is just absurd.
David Roberts
And those people are wealthy too, because no one else can afford those single-family homes.
Senator Scott Wiener
It's called overthinking a problem.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
You also hear from the left the idea of, "Well, I support housing, but only 100% affordable because that's what the need is." And I'm like, "Yes, we need 100% affordable housing, but we're not going to subsidize our way out of this problem." We need a missing middle market rate and an "all of the above strategy," like a yes to 100% affordable, but also the missing middle market rate. Because I have teachers in my district in Oakland, you know, they make too much to qualify for subsidized housing, but they can't afford the current market rate. And so the realtors tell them, "Drive until you qualify, drive east, you know, two hours, buy a house there, spend all that time commuting because you want to teach in the district in which you grew up." And that's the choice they have to make.
David Roberts
So, before we get past this, actually, Buffy, maybe you could talk about where these bills, 607, 609, are in the legislative process, because there's some significance to this. We were discussing whether the governor was going to support these, and it seems he has. So, may you explain, like, what's happening with the bills?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
He announced in May during what's called the "May Revise," when he's going over his budget goals, that he wanted both these bills in the budget to be voted on imminently.
David Roberts
So that just means they become part of this larger bill?
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Exactly. Like, we'll have a housing, what's called, budget trailer bill. So, these would live in that. The nice thing about putting them in the budget is that they go into effect immediately and they have a higher likelihood of success. You know, the governor's basically blessed these bills. So, we're in negotiations now. Separately, we have, you know, I have the bill that's still a policy bill that is sitting over in the Senate. I got it off the floor of the assembly, I think, 67 to 0, which was pretty shocking, actually. Talk about the politics changing on this, which I think, again, just goes to show that there's a real desire to actually kind of fix the problem here.
But, you know, fingers crossed, we got these in the budget here soon and off to the governor's desk.
David Roberts
That means they don't go through the typical committee process, too. Because it's often these committees where these things die.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
We have, you know, mine has gone through Scott and my bill has a little bit of a different place where they are right now. But they've gone through committees in their original houses. So mine went through natural resources and housing. Scott's, yours went through... Remind me, again, the committee.
Senator Scott Wiener
It was environmental quality and local government.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, so they have gone through some committee review process, and then the governor made the announcement that he wanted to see them in the budget. So, we've been, you know, we're both, you know, negotiating on our bills, trying to get them in good places so they can end up in the governor's budget.
David Roberts
And if they're in the budget, the likelihood of passage is high.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Very, very high. Exactly.
David Roberts
You got it. You've got to pass the budget.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
That's exactly right.
David Roberts
Okay, so that seems like a good sign, too, that Newsom's on board. So, I'm sort of curious, you know, Scott, you're talking about this coalition that's sort of been building over years and kind of building success upon success. It's very cool to see, really, that happening across the country in the YIMBY movement. I've sort of been wondering, kind of whether layering the abundance thing on top of the YIMBY thing is like, "Do we want that chocolate on our peanut butter? We're doing so well already." Maybe, don't mess with success. I don't know how you feel about it.
Senator Scott Wiener
No. To me, YIMBYism is a subset of abundance. It's one form of abundance, and it was maybe the more original, high prominence version of it. But abundance is taking YIMBYism and just applying it to a bunch of other areas and also talking about government capacity. So to me, the two dovetail beautifully, and I think it's important to have both.
David Roberts
So, this coalition that's been growing now, and as you say, you're moving from these sort of, in some sense, from kind of what, some pretty piecemeal sort of very focused reforms to bigger, bigger things, structural things, CEQA being the obvious example, the sort of like, underlying structural thing that was affecting everything else. I'm curious if you have Scott or Buffy, sort of like, other targets in mind. There's the, of course, the notorious Prop 13, which is, of course, the ultimate structural, you know, problem for California, as far as I've heard. There's no way to get at that.
But, I just wonder if you have other targets after CEQA, these sort of big things that you're trying to think about moving.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
You know, I did a select committee on permitting reform last year.
David Roberts
Oh, yeah.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
And, you know, it was a bipartisan group. It was bicameral, even though I guess it wasn't supposed to be. I got in trouble for that, but I invited Scott along to be a part of it.
Senator Scott Wiener
Thank you.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Yeah, and we had hearings across the state. We did, I don't know, about 150 stakeholder interviews. And we looked at housing permitting issues, but also renewable energy. You know, I was down in Palm Springs and we did a hearing. We, you know, this is one example, a transmission line 12 years in the making, 11,000 page EIR, 70 permits through 28 agencies for one transmission line.
David Roberts
Good Lord.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
You know, and I remember a part of the panel was the solar industry. And I said, "Why are you guys even operating in California?" And they're like, "We don't know. You know, like, Texas is building twice the amount of solar as we are here." You know, so, renewable energy, climate resiliency, we have to do a lot. We're going to compete with and have to contend with sea level rise. And so, even just building the resources for that and addressing that, fire mitigation, and all the forest work that we need to do, all of that stuff requires CEQA and many other permits.
It's not just CEQA, by the way. There's a whole permitting regime on any of these things that take years and years and years. And so, it's really a larger scale issue that we have to fundamentally address. You can't just go in, Elon Musk DOGE, and take a chainsaw and, like, whatever, all high on ketamine, trying to fix the problem. Like, it's like you have to literally, like, you know, have so many different nuanced conversations and understand the processes and how you can stitch together a better process for this to actually serve your constituents and build the modern California that we need.
David Roberts
Yeah, you'd like your deregulation to be thoughtful, just like your regulation.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Right, exactly. And with environmental goals in mind. I mean, I view this as the right environmental policy to actually do the CEQA reforms that we're talking about. You know, it's not antithetical to it. It's to serve that interest of having the environment work for us in a way that is how we live in California in the year 2025 and beyond.
David Roberts
All right, well, just so I don't miss any, are there other bills up right now that are of interest on the housing front? Scott, you mentioned SB79, which would be the Transit-Oriented Development. Are there other big pieces currently floating around?
Senator Scott Wiener
That's the big housing one for me. We're also doing a bunch of work trying to expand and make permanent a big CEQA exemption we gave to light rail, rapid bus service, bike, and pedestrian. We tried to do a permit streamlining bill on heat pumps this year. It faltered, but we're likely going to try again next year. And then, I have a bill to try to expedite permitting on rail and public transportation projects that have to get a million permits from different jurisdictions and utilities and get tripped up, such as high-speed rail, to try to expedite that permitting process so that it doesn't get gummed up.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
And I've got a bill to make it easier to do solar on fallowed ag land that no longer has water to resource agricultural needs, which is complicated, but we're working on that to see if we can expedite some more solar. And then, you know, coming out of that select committee, we put together a 22 bill package called the Fast Track Housing Package that includes 609 and 607, but also a bunch of other things like, you know, a universal application that cities have to use for housing projects and things like that to make it easier.
Senator Scott Wiener
And speaking of that work, I actually am late for a very, very big coalition meeting on one of those housing bills.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Good luck, Scott.
David Roberts
Well, we'll wrap it up. I really appreciate you two coming on. I really appreciate this work and I appreciate all the work you've done on housing in California. It's so needed and so important right now. So, thanks for taking the time, you guys.
Senator Scott Wiener
Thank you.
Assembly Member Buffy Wicks
Thanks, David.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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