OAKLAND — For years, this lot just south of the West Oakland BART station has sat vacant, surrounded by RVs and broken-down vehicles.
This was supposed to be housing — a 222-unit tower with 16 apartments set aside for low-income renters. But soon after Oakland’s planning commission signed off on the project, the decision was appealed. A coalition of trade unions, using the California Environmental Quality Act, demanded that the developer conduct more studies to assess the soil’s contamination levels — a process that could hold up construction for months.
The developer, Scott Cooper, said the unions offered to drop the appeal — if he agreed to use more expensive union subcontractors. He declined.
The appeal proceeded. Ten months later, Cooper finally won — but in that time, interest rates spiked, making the project financially unappealing.
“They killed it,” Cooper said. “Right now, the project should be complete.”
The California Environmental Quality Act, better known as CEQA, passed in 1970. It was meant to require governments to study any environmental harm a development might cause and take steps to lessen it. But over time, critics say, the law has become a powerful tool for obstruction, letting almost anyone file lawsuits or appeals that can hinder construction of critical public infrastructure and housing — including projects that would help advance the state’s environmental goals.
Each year, 200 CEQA lawsuits are filed in California. Most of these target housing. That total doesn’t include cases that don’t make it to court, like the West Oakland tower. They can still delay a project with lengthy studies and additional government approvals.
In recent years, legislators have poked holes in CEQA, adding exemptions for certain types of affordable housing. But this year, lawmakers are proposing the most sweeping reforms yet.
A bill by Oakland Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, AB 609, would exempt most housing built in existing neighborhoods from required environmental reviews. Another, SB 607, proposed by San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener, would raise the famously low bar for those looking to challenge such environmental reviews.
“It’s been politically fraught to engage on CEQA in a really meaningful way, because there’s been interest groups that like to keep it exactly the way it is,” Wicks said. “The result of the status quo is that it is too damn hard to build anything in California.”
Wicks and Wiener see an opening where they didn’t before.
Democrats view the November election as a wake-up call. Some within the party say its focus on process and coalition-building has come at the expense of meaningful action, especially on housing, for which the state is 2 million units short.
“We have to show that Democrats can get things done,” Wiener said.
But to overhaul CEQA, Democrats may risk crossing some of the core members of their coalition — groups like trade unions and environmentalists that have been stalwart defenders of the law.
“People say, ‘Nothing gets built,’” said Jennifer Ganetta, legal director for Communities for a Better Environment, one of the many environmental groups that has lined up to oppose the bills. “But what about the projects that are built, and they’re better because we had CEQA?”
Trade unions are especially resistant to reform — they often use CEQA as a cudgel to extract concessions from developers. As a result of their intervention, nearly every CEQA exemption bill passed so far has come with a major provision: to get the exemption, a developer must hire union-affiliated workers, or pay their laborers higher wages and provide health benefits.
Developers say that increases their costs significantly. Few have taken advantage of the exemptions, a report by the pro-housing group YIMBY Law found.
For Cooper’s project in West Oakland, using union labor would have increased building costs by around $10 million. “If we’re in a housing crisis, shouldn’t we want to build as much housing as possible for as cheap as possible?” he asked.
But solving the housing crisis shouldn’t come at the expense of workers, the trades argue.
“We’ve made projects better because of our members exercising the laws as they were designed,” said John Dalrymple, a representative for a coalition of Bay Area trade unions. “None of these projects were stopped because of our interventions.”
Wicks’ bill may be heading for a showdown in Sacramento with the unions as early as this week: Unlike previous CEQA reform bills, hers does not currently include a prevailing wage provision.
The trades are likely to negotiate for one, and their significant influence in the Legislature suggests they’ll get it.
During the last two election cycles, the State Building and Construction Trades Council and its affiliated unions donated over $24 million to lawmakers in the two chambers. In the last election cycle, the trade unions’ political action committees donated $8 million to California legislative candidates — more than any other groups, including Uber, the oil and gas companies and law enforcement unions.
But certain factors have aligned this year that could undermine the union’s power. The Legislature saw enormous turnover, welcoming more new members than at any time in the last 10 years. Wicks has also ascended in rank — this year, she was appointed chair of the powerful Assembly Appropriations Committee — the place where legislators decide if a bill lives or dies.
Wicks is relatively independent from the trades, compared to some of her Democratic peers. The associated unions donated just 8% of her total campaign chest in the last two election cycles, whereas they made up 25% of donations to other Bay Area lawmakers, including newly elected Sen. Jesse Arreguín of Berkeley and Assemblymember Liz Ortega of Hayward.
The State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents hundreds of thousands of construction workers, declined to state a position on Wicks’ or Wiener’s bills. The Nor Cal Carpenters Union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For now, lawmakers are working to ensure the trade unions don’t feel isolated. When asked whether he worries the trades could block his CEQA bill, Wiener said they’re “major stakeholders” who will continue to “have a seat at the table.”
Beyond the trades, Wiener and Wicks are also meeting resistance from advocates for the environment and local control, who say that the proposed reforms would give community groups fewer opportunities to raise concerns about a project and result in less transparent environmental review.
“CEQA has lots of things that keep it from being too burdensome,” said Stuart Flashman, who has brought several CEQA lawsuits on behalf of environmental groups.
The result of the interest groups’ intervention may be another CEQA exemption bill that Democrats weigh down with provisions to appease all of them.
Robert Selna, a land use attorney who represents developers in environmental cases, worries that won’t be enough to spur more housing.
“You can do everything you want around the edges of CEQA,” Selna said. “But CEQA reform is necessary in order to solve the housing crisis.”