NIMBYs overplayed their hand

CA's successful CEQA reform is backlash against NIMBY overreach.

After a decade of attempts, on Monday CA lawmakers finally passed a significant reform to the CA Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The reforms exempt several kinds of politically popular projects from CEQA review - including housing and daycares. CEQA is a 50 year old law, what changed? Why is it politically possible now to exempt most infill housing from CEQA review, when a few years ago, enviro orgs like the Sierra Club and labor org.s like the Building Trades successfully shut down similar attempts?

Obviously it’s the rise of the YIMBYs. Thousands of pro-housing and anti-red tape Californians, organized by YIMBY Action and CA YIMBY and also in independent local pro-housing org.s called and emailed their legislators to support this legislation.

But that’s not an answer, it’s a fact that begs the question - why are so many Californians now motivated to mobilize against CEQA review? A few years ago, other Californians, organized by the Sierra Club, would have been emailing and calling to oppose CEQA reform - and they would have been successful.

For better or worse, public policy (and definitely public narrative) are driven by anecdotes and viral news stories. The anti-social Berkeley NIMBYs who successfully argued that students are pollution, and CEQA requires UC Berkeley to do an Environmental Impact Report before they can increase student enrollment, or (also in Berkeley) argued that the sound of students laughing and talking is an environmental impact that needs study and mitigation, or the disaster in SF around the proposal to build housing at 469 Stevenson Street anger the public and discredit Environmental Review not just in CA but around the whole country.

In the context of rising housing costs and declining public services of all kinds, the general public is turning against allowing baroque and narrow concerns of small numbers of individuals to interfere with creating necessary public infrastructure.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the Enviro-NIMBY coalition has no movement discipline, and no greater civic consciousness. It’s a collection of individuals who are not civically engaged at the city or regional scale, only in the hyper local scale and sometimes only in response to a very particular proposed project. This geographic and temporal localism makes it hard for them to organize a large, persistent movement that could exert some judgement over what issues to pursue.

They’re also independently resourced which is a blessing and a curse. Retired suburban lawyers are the lifeblood of the NIMBY-CEQA obstruction machine, working for themselves, for free, suing their cities when their cities approve housing. Here on the pro-housing side, we have to raise money from foundations and individuals (could be you) to file lawsuits to force cities to approve housing. A silver lining to being relatively under resourced is that we are more centrally resourced, so decisions about what lawsuits to pursue are made by organizing professionals, with an eye to the larger public narrative.

If Environmental groups had more movement discipline, they might have been able to better preserve CEQA review in California. But it’s not too late - in CA and in the US, there is still plenty of red tape, and years of public organizing and political controversy to go before we settle on a new equilibrium of public input. People who genuinely care about the environment should work within their own coalitions to be smart about what kinds of infrastructure to fight and what kinds of reasons to cite.

For example, the Sierra Club’s policy on offshore wind turbines is embarrassing, and will ultimately be counter-productive:

5. OFFSHORE WIND DEVELOPMENT It is likely that offshore development of wind will be an important component of reversing global warming. The Club hopes to work toward a reasonable balance between environmental and aesthetic concerns and the need for clean energy.

Sorry, what? Environmental concerns on the one hand, and need for clean energy on the other? And why are “aesthetic concerns” mentioned at all? If “environmental concerns” are contraposed with “reversing global warming” (and are not the same thing) then in this document “the environment” merely means “the immediate area surrounding each of our members” and the Sierra Club is just a big giant neighborhood association, committed to local prettification.

YIMBYs can use the infuriating excesses of the NIMBY-enviro movement instrumentally to attract members and win real environmental reforms, and we will. But also legacy enviro organizations can be allies more directly by being strategic and pro-social in the ways they use the existing public input process. Hopefully the reforms in CA act as a wakeup call to the legacy enviros. YIMBYs can do it alone, but we will go faster together.