When legislators passed the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970, it was considered a modest regulation, meant to ensure that government agencies considered how public projects could impact the state’s residents, wildlife and natural resources.
Since then, the law’s scope has massively expanded. Today, CEQA (pronounced “see-qwa”) provides an easy path to legally challenge almost any project — public or private, large or small — on environmental grounds.
It’s a favored tool among special interest groups — from NIMBY neighbors looking to stop growth to labor unions trying to negotiate agreements.
But the use of CEQA as a legal cudgel has lead to major delays, escalating costs and, in some cases, has killed projects entirely.
Here’s just a sample of Bay Area projects that have experienced lengthy CEQA challenges:
Keeping the A’s in Oakland
Would the Athletic’s still be in Oakland were it not for CEQA?
Impossible to say. The hurdles were many for the baseball team and Oakland when it came to building a new stadium at the preferred site: Howard Terminal. The plan — which envisioned redeveloping the 55-acre active port with a stadium, up to 3,000 new homes, a hotel, retail and office space — needed to clear multiple local and regional boards.
Years of CEQA lawsuits also tested the team’s patience. In April 2022, two railroad companies and a coalition of unions working at the port filed legal actions challenging the project’s environmental impact reports.
Oakland won its case and a successive appeal, defeating the challenge in March 2023. But by then, the A’s were in the midst of finalizing a deal on a site in Las Vegas.
Less than a month after Oakland finalized approvals on Howard Terminal, the A’s announced the team would leave Oakland. Nevada, notably, doesn’t require any full-scale, project-level environmental reviews like CEQA.
Student ‘pollution’ at UC Berkeley
Should noise from future residents of a housing project be treated as environmental pollution under CEQA?
That’s what a group of opponents argued when they filed a lawsuit challenging a 1,100-bed student housing project that UC Berkeley planned to build at People’s Park. What followed was a three-year legal battle that went to the California Supreme Court. In the end, the court sided with UC Berkeley.
In July 2024, construction finally began — three years after UC Berkeley announced its plans.
495 apartments in downtown San Francisco
On its face, 469 Stevenson St. seemed like an ideal place for new housing: a lot in the middle of San Francisco, just off Market Street behind what is now the downtown IKEA.
In 2021, developer Build Inc. proposed building a 27-story tower with 495 apartments, with 24% of the units set aside at income-restricted rents.
Though the San Francisco Planning Commission initially signed off on the project and its environmental review, the decision was appealed to the Board of Supervisors by a politically influential affordable housing group, TODCO (Tenants and Owners Development Corp.). The group said the environmental review hadn’t sufficiently analyzed the building’s foundations for earthquake risks.
But TODCO had its own interests in the development. Months earlier, TODCO’s president ,John Eberling, had asked Build Inc. to donate a third of the site to be dedicated to a future 100% affordable project. Build Inc. declined.
The Board of Supervisors voted to uphold TODCO’s appeal, effectively killing the project. During their deliberations, supervisors spoke little of TODCO’s concerns over the building’s earthquake risk, and more about their concerns over gentrification.
In April 2023, Build Inc. brought an amended environmental report before the Planning Commission. It OKed the project a second time. This time, Eberling didn’t file an appeal, saying that the tower was unlikely to be build amid the deep financial challenges facing San Francisco’s downtown.
It turned out he was right. In the two years it took Build Inc. to resolve the appeal, interest rates spiked. Today, the lot is still a parking lot.
222 new homes next to the West Oakland BART
In March 2021, the Oakland Planning Commission approved a 222-unit project, which included 16 low-income units, next to the West Oakland BART station.
A group of East Bay trade unions were frustrated that the project’s developer, The Michaels Organization, had declined to offer them no-bid contracts for work on the site. Working through a group called “East Bay Residents for Responsible Development,” the trade unions appealed the planning commission’s decision under CEQA, arguing that the site’s environmental review was inadequate.
In September 2021, the Oakland City Council upheld the unions’ appeal, requiring further studies. The developer came back with those in April 2022, but once again the council delayed the project, citing a concern that workers and nearby residents could be exposed to benzene and lead found on the site. Finally, the council greenlit the project in July 2022 — a year after the initial approval.
Now, it’s unclear when — or if — the project will break ground. Scott Cooper, vice president of development for Michaels, said that nothing will be built at least for the next two years. “They killed the project,” he said in an interview.
These days, the project is surrounded by homeless encampments.
163 units near the BART station in San Lorenzo
In 2019, developer Terry Demmon applied to build 163 apartments and 12,000 square feet of retail in San Lorenzo, a town of about 23,000 in unincorporated Alameda County between San Leandro and Hayward. The lot, just steps from the Bay View BART station, had sat vacant since a Mervyn’s department store closed in 1995.
Shortly after the project was proposed, Demmon got a call from the representative of a group of local sheet metal workers and plumbers, asking that he use union subcontractors on the project. Demmon declined.
Though the Alameda County Planning Commission signed off on the project, the building trade unions — under the name “East Bay Residents for Responsible Development” — filed an appeal via CEQA. They said Demmon hadn’t properly analyzed the impacts of relocating a gas line.
Demmon fought back. Using union labor would have increased costs by around $5 million, he told the East Bay Express.
In the end, Demmon pledged to hire union electrical and sprinkler fitters. Organized plumbers and sheet metal workers also would be hired if their bid was within the lowest 10 percent for the project, the developer said.
In 2023, the developer announced it was putting the project on hold due to rising construction costs.
California high speed rail
California’s high-speed rail project is perhaps the state’s most ambitious clean transportation project — a 776-mile zero-emission bullet train that would whisk riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. The line would help eliminate the need for short-haul flights between the two cities, the likes of which have been banned in many European countries in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.
And yet, from the beginning, it’s been paralyzed with dozens of CEQA lawsuits — from farmers concerned the train would bisect their land to wealthy enclaves like Atherton worried about noise.
CEQA didn’t kill California high-speed rail all by itself. There are plenty of other problems: complex project management, political infighting and the challenge of coordinating with dozens of utilities and landowners for each segment of the route.
But CEQA bogged down the project with extra environmental reviews and lengthy court battles. Beyond having to shell out legal fees to battle CEQA appeals, the rail authority was also forced to alter its route, create new overpasses and redesign stations. Each reconsideration piled on delays and extra costs.