Progress By 1,000 Cuts? Housing Legislation Snips Away at California’s Red Tape

When it comes to building California out of its housing shortage, some lawmakers say the devil is most often in the details.

To begin untangling what they describe as a knotted web of regulation, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, on Thursday announced an ambitious and wide-ranging package of more than 20 bills from over a dozen authors. Together, the package seeks to surgically remove red tape at nearly every stage of the permitting journey, from application through construction.

The goal, Wicks said, is “clearer rules when it comes to housing, faster timelines and fewer bureaucratic hoops.”

The package, which includes at least one Republican-authored bill, is mostly technical in nature: cleaning up or extending prior legislation, expanding existing law to additional agencies and closing loopholes. However, it also includes several proposals that touch on third-rail topics in California, including bills to streamline or exempt certain housing projects from environmental or Coastal Commission review.

“This bill package represents iteration,” Wicks said of the overall vision. “Taking a deep dive into the weeds and trying to understand what have been the hurdles? Why has this been so hard? Why is it so difficult to actually permit housing and entitle housing and get it up and running?”

Wicks led that deep dive last year, when she helmed an Assembly Select Committee that invited practitioners, experts and others to share their experiences and describe the barriers that come with building new housing, transit and clean energy projects.

Wicks’ report on the committee’s findings, released earlier this month, outlined a goal: that permitting — any “decision point” where a government must give permission for a new project to proceed — should be timely, transparent and consistently applied.

But, perhaps above all, the report noted, it should result in actually getting the project built.

“We’ve become victims in California of making the process the objective; the process is sacred,” said Matt Regan, a policy lead at the business-oriented Bay Area Council, which helped facilitate the hearings, tours and interviews that informed the committee’s white paper. “What [Wicks is] saying is maybe, the end product is more important.”

Republican Asm. Josh Hoover, of Folsom, said there’s a lot in the package with which people in his party can agree. Hoover pins some of the blame for California’s spiraling home costs on an “anti-housing majority” that overregulated the industry into gridlock and said this bill package is a welcome retreat from that trend.

“So, I’ve actually really appreciated the work Asm. Wicks is doing because she really is pushing back against a lot of that,” he said. “The only way we’re actually going to build the homes that we need in California is by reforming a lot of these things and getting rid of a lot of these barriers.”

Third-rail politics

While many of the bills in the package are more narrowly focused on the minutiae of the state’s permitting labyrinths, others take aim at issues long seen as sacrosanct.

One of Wicks’ own bills, AB 609, would exempt infill housing projects, if they’re consistent with local regulations, from review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Another bill, SB 607 from Democratic San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, removes what proponents describe as duplicative work that’s currently required under CEQA.

The landmark 1970 environmental regulation, pronounced sea-kwah in the state’s housing parlance, requires developers to study potential negative impacts for all kinds of projects.

But in the half-century since its passage, it’s become a lightning rod in the housing debate — fiercely defended by those who say it has very little impact on development and blasted by those who claim it’s been hijacked and distorted to NIMBYists’ ends.

Regan described Wicks’ bill as a “blanket exemption” from the hotly-debated law that gives infill development — housing built within existing urban areas — a “fighting chance to get through the process.”

A representative of the California Environmental Justice Alliance, which supports robust CEQA protections, said the organization was still digesting the bill package and deferred comment to a later date.

Debates over those two bills, however, will likely be rivaled by discussions over a separate yet equally contentious subject within California housing politics: the Coastal Commission. AB 357 by Asm. David Alvarez, D-Chula Vista, would allow public colleges and universities to forgo commission approval before building student or faculty and staff housing on its properties.

Alvarez anticipates there’ll be pushback but said the proposal was “the minimum” policymakers could do to address rising student housing costs.

“Nobody’s saying that you don’t have to go through a process, you do,” Alvarez said of his bill. “Go through the regular process that everybody else goes through, but not the additional process of review by the Coastal Commission.”

There will likely be dissent from both state and local governments, too, over bills that impact them, Wicks said, but she welcomed it. “We’re gonna have some really important conversations this year that may touch on some third-rail politics in California,” Wicks said, “but I think it’s time that we have them.”

Improving the process

The bulk of the bills are less likely to draw the same kind of attention and are focused on reforming the state’s byzantine permitting processes, which vary from city to city and agency to agency.

AB 1294, from San Francisco Democratic Asm. Matt Haney seeks to smooth some of that variability by requiring the state’s housing department to craft a simplified, universal application, making it easier for developers to operate in a wider range of jurisdictions.

“We have far too complex of a system for folks who want to build new homes in California,” Haney said. “There are still many cities and counties across the state that ask you for all sorts of things up front that cost huge sums of money, take a ton of time and make it very complex and complicated to build new homes.”

A spokesperson for the League of California Cities declined to comment, saying the organization is “still reviewing the bill package in its totality and considering its potential impact on local governments.”

Fifteen of the bills aim to improve two other crucial steps in the permitting process: the entitlement and post-entitlement phases, when government agencies give developers the green light to move forward with a proposed project and then supply them with the permits to actually begin building.

Within that cadre, there are two bills — AB 920 and SB 489 — that require either larger cities or state agencies, respectively, to post certain information online.

Others — such as AB 1007 and AB 1026 — shorten the time it takes to approve or deny housing applications or building permits for local governments or investor-owned utilities, respectively.

Corey Smith, executive director of the pro-housing lobbying group, Housing Action Coalition, which is sponsoring AB 1026, described the bill as a “good governance measure” aimed at “getting parity across the board for permit reviews.”

AB 557 expedites factory-built housing by allowing the state, which already conducts building inspections on modular homes, to also oversee installations.

All told, Dan Dunmoyer, president and CEO of the California Building Industry Association, which is sponsoring at least seven bills in the package, said most are not “rock-the-world” bills.

“We are chipping away at all the different layers that local governments in the state and others have added,” he said. “There isn’t an omnibus fix-it bill, but there are a collection of measures to, in fact, improve the overarching process.”

KQED housing reporter Adhiti Bandlamudi contributed to this report.