[GalenErso]

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.

[shuckles]

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.

[jeffbee]

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.

[shuckles]

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.

[jeffbee]

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

[shuckles]

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.

[Lammy]

> 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...

[Macha]

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

[Lammy]

If only you knew how bad things really are.

[klooney]

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

[asdff]

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

[ecf]

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

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

[bb611]

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.