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Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

The next target should be CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. NIMBYs can endlessly delay new construction by requesting CEQA assessments. I am hugely pro-environment, mind you, but an environmental assessment for a new development should be relatively fast and easy to complete, and it shouldn't prevent new builds wholesale except in the direst cases.

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Exempting infill housing from CEQA is on the YIMBY agenda. That said, CEQA only applies to discretionary decisions, so if permitting residential development is a ministerial decision (i.e. anyone who meets certain criteria is approved), then the CEQA review for it is incorporated into the Housing Element. That is itself a huge step forward.

I don't think that is current law or jurisprudence. There is a bill introduced in this session that will make any project consequent to an adopted general, area, or specific plan be "not a project" under CEQA. But that's not where we are now, which is why cities have to EIR their general plans and then every project has another EIR.

Personally, I think they should just write down that anything inside the boundary of an incorporated city, built on a site that previously had something on it, is not a project.

Yes it is: private projects are only subject to CEQA if permits are discretionary cf https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=21723.

In San Francisco and some neighboring cities, every permit is discretionary either directly or through ambiguity (https://law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk10866/files/medi...), but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Thanks. I was thinking about projects like UC housing. I believe the new bill is meant to exempt public agencies from this problem.

Yeah the UC has the great blessing of not being subject to local zoning and the great curse of being a public project subject to CEQA no matter what.

> NIMBYs can endlessly delay new construction by requesting CEQA assessments.

This is my favorite graph for explaining how I can be pro-environment without necessarily being pro-Environmentalism™ https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...

Here are some of my favourite graphs: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

If only you knew how bad things really are.

Especially infill. There are no endangered animals living in SOMA.

Just wait for the SOMA sewer rat to become a protected species

Some millimeter sized shrimp completely altered expansion plans for an entire UC campus.

https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/MERCED-UC-expansion-pla...

The shrimp were an impediment to a small fraction of the planned build, the build was modified with minimal impact on the project, and an even more aggressive expansion of the campus was completed in the last 5 years without impact.

If anything, that appears to be a successful use of CEQA, where a large and important building project was effectively balanced with the need to protect wildlife without major disruption to the final buildings.

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