Papers

California faces a dire housing crisis. California’s land-use regulatory system remains a key driver of this crisis. State law grants local governments broad power to craft their own regulations on how to review and approve housing development. Though state law may limit a locality’s ability to outright deny some types of housing development, local governments can and do use creative ways to stall approvals or functionally deny housing by making it infeasible to develop. One such strategy is to demand more intensive environmental review of new housing projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) than what state law requires. More intensive environmental review can create substantial delay and uncertainty, increasing the costs for the construction of new housing. Although the state has made many efforts to streamline the process of both local land-use regulation and CEQA review, delays and uncertainty remain.
We propose that the state address this ongoing problem by (1) issuing an authoritative map of urban “infill priority areas” (IPAs) where new housing is expected to provide net social and environmental benefits, and (2) limiting the scope of environmental review, within the IPAs, to environmental impacts identified by the city or members of the public within a brief temporal window and demonstrated by the proponent of environmental review to be significant. In effect, the law would presume no impact from new housing within an IPA unless significant impacts are quickly and unambiguously identified. We also propose enforcement mechanisms. New infill housing reduces carbon emissions, exposure to wildfire risk, and threats to habitat. Environmental review should be calibrated accordingly.

California’s legislature has passed several laws that intervene in local land-use regulation in order to increase desperately needed housing production—particularly affordable housing production. Some of these new laws expand local reporting requirements concerning zoning and planning laws, and the application of those laws apply to proposed housing development. This emphasis on measurement requires the state to develop a housing data strategy to support both enforcement of existing law and effective policymaking in the future. Our Comprehensive Assessment of Land Use Entitlements Study (CALES) predates, but aligns with and supports, this state-led effort to improve local reporting. For the cities that it covers, CALES provides verified and cleaned data indicating how cities apply local and state law. In this symposium contribution, we use the CALES data to illustrate the importance of collecting a range of precise objective data on how cities apply law, and then offer a simple but sufficiently comprehensive measurement of regulation that can help identify when a local land use regime may be operating to exclude affordable housing.

California has endured devastating fire seasons over the past few years, with billions of dollars of damages, thousands of homes lost, and dozens dead. A key driver of the state’s fire crisis is the increase in development of housing in the wildland-urban interface, where ecosystems and landscapes are more likely to burn. Wildland-urban interface development can put people and property in harm’s way and can increase the risk of ignitions of fires. Wildland-urban interface development can also make it harder to restore fire to the landscape, a critical step to reducing fire hazards in California. But current law in California appears to do little to deter development in these high fire hazard areas. Direct regulation of land-use is generally undertaken by local governments that may have incentives to allow greater wildland-urban interface development. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires review and mitigation of the environmental impacts of new development projects, may not provide an adequate response to wildland-urban interface development. In particular, a recent California Supreme Court case limited the scope of CEQA review to the impacts caused by a project on the environment, rather than the impacts of the environment on a project––much of the potential harm posed by fire to wildland-urban interface development falls in the latter category. To understand how well CEQA is addressing wildland-urban interface development, we analyzed data on environmental review for housing projects in three large exurban counties and additional cities with substantial wildland-urban interface areas. We found that in San Diego County, significant amounts of development are being approved using streamlined CEQA review processes, and that most of the housing development in the County is occurring in the wildland-urban interface. Our results indicate that CEQA and local land-use regulation may not be adequately addressing wildland-urban interface development in California. However, any policy response must also recognize the dire housing shortage in the state. Balancing the goals of reducing fire risk and increasing housing production suggests that increased housing development in low fire hazard urban infill areas, and a regional-level planning structure to properly plan for fire hazards, may be appropriate policy responses.

Housing costs in major coastal metropolitan areas nationwide have skyrocketed, impacting people, the economy, and the environment. Landuse regulation, controlled primarily at the local level, plays a major role in determining housing production. In response to this mounting housing crisis, scholars, policymakers, and commentators are debating whether greater state involvement in local land-use decision-making is the best path forward.
We argue here that there are good reasons to believe that continuing on the current path—with local control of land-use regulation as it is— will lead to persistent underproduction of housing. The benefits of housing production are primarily regional, including improved job markets, increased socioeconomic mobility, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. But the costs associated with producing more housing are often local, felt at the neighborhood level. Local governments whose voters are impacted by the local negative impacts of housing and will usually have less incentive to consider those regional, and national, benefits and approve housing. Recent political science, planning, economics, and legal research shows that smaller local jurisdictions tend to produce less housing, and when political institutions decentralize control over housing to the sublocal (e.g., neighborhood) scale, less housing is approved.
A central theory in academic research in land-use regulation and local government law has been the idea that competition among highly fragmented local governments can produce more efficient outcomes in public services and land-use regulation, even if there may be significant inequities across local jurisdictions in outcomes. Our analysis shows that this theory no longer accurately describes how fragmented local governance affects economic efficiency. Indeed, our analysis makes clear that fragmented local governance is both inequitable and inefficient, at least in the context of land-use regulation. Our analysis also raises questions about local government law scholarship contending that increased local governmental power can effectively address the dysfunctions of metropolitan areas in the United States.
We present a range of policy proposals to address the problems we identify. First, greater state intervention in local land-use regulation is necessary. While a greater state role need not (and probably should not) entirely displace local control, it is essential to ensure that the larger-scale benefits of housing are appropriately considered. Second, we note that the highly fragmented local land-use regulatory system imposes challenges for housing production, in part, because variation among local regulatory practices creates barriers to entry for new housing across jurisdictions. Accordingly, we advocate for a state role to increase the standardization of local land-use regulatory tools as a key step to help advance greater housing production, even where local control is maintained.

California has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to address climate change. But in California, the sector that produces the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions is transportation, and reducing those emissions depends on reducing total vehicle miles traveled (VMT). And that, in turn requires rebuilding urban and suburban areas in California to become less car-centered and more oriented around mass-transit and walkable neighborhoods: transit-oriented infill development (TOD). Critiques of the transition from sprawl to TOD raise concerns that TOD is pushing low-income communities out of our urban core and into to exurban areas. A key question is the role of local versus state control over land use in addressing the dual challenges of climate change and the state’s housing crisis. To address this debate, we built a first-of-its-kind data set that examines entitlement, or the local approval process to obtain a building permit, in relationship to present day zoning as well as historical discriminatory land use policy. We find that local government choices about zoning reflect past racial discrimination around land use, directing dense TOD almost entirely into neighborhoods that were subject to those discriminatory practices.