EDITORIAL:

A hyperactive regulatory state has helped create a housing crisis in California. Despite half-hearted efforts in Sacramento to boost housing production or bring costs down, environmental activists continue to use the courts to delay or scuttle development.

A new report from the law firm Holland &Knight reveals that nearly 48,000 new housing units were targeted with lawsuits in 2020 alone. As Christian Britschgi of Reason magazine noted, that number is about half of the 110,784 annual housing units California has built on average over the past six years.

The main driver of NIMBY lawsuits is the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires governments to study and reduce the environmental impact of new developments. The act essentially gives anyone the ability to contest in court housing and other projects by alleging that officials failed to adequately assess their impacts.

Green activists are behind many of these legal actions.

Mr. Britschgi reports that two-thirds of the lawsuits filed by NIMBY activists in 2020 make the shaky claim that the new residential projects violate state goals for reducing greenhouse gasses and vehicle miles traveled. But that flimsy reed ignores the fact that bloated housing costs force more families to leave California — which has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per capita — and to move to states with higher per capita emissions.

The 50-year-old act has become a tool for green extremists to contest even the most carefully planned projects. The ramifications are real.

“California is losing people,” the report’s author, Jennifer Hernandez, writes, “and the people being expelled are our families, our kids and grandkids, our favorite young teacher, our most compassionate nurse, our lifeline electricians and carpenters, our first responders, and our future caregivers.”

Writing for The Atlantic last year, M. Nolan Gray observed, “Across the Golden State, CEQA lawsuits have imperiled infill housing in Sacramento, solar farms in San Diego and transit in San Francisco. The mere threat of a lawsuit is enough to stop small projects — especially housing — from starting in the first place. Indeed, one of the main effects of CEQA has been to exacerbate the state’s crippling housing-affordability crisis.”

The obvious answer is to repeal the decades-old act. That will never happen. Another approach would be to exempt more projects from the law’s purview. Lawmakers have done this to a limited extent, yet not aggressively enough. Observers might take their blather about “affordable housing” more seriously if they actually took steps to promote the construction of more housing.

The law firm report reveals the great extent to which California’s housing problems are self-inflicted. Nevada Democrats who are quick to take their cues from our neighbor to the west should pay heed.