In California, Pro-Housing ‘Abundance’ Fans Rewrite an Environmental Landmark

Matt Lewis and Brian Hanlon met in 2017 while advocating for an affordable housing complex in downtown Berkeley. It was a typical California land use debate. “The NIMBYs were losing their you-know-what,” Lewis recalled.

Hanlon told Lewis that he was starting a new organization called California YIMBY — that’s “Yes In My Backyard” — that would be dedicated to ending these arduous, building-by-building fights over housing. One of its main goals would be reforming the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, a 1970 law that gives anyone the power to legally challenge nearly all development projects in the state, from housing to highways to transit.

“I was like, ‘That’s crazy. That’s never going to happen,’” said Lewis, now California YIMBY’s communications director. CEQA had long been described as the “third rail” of California politics. Governor Jerry Brown tried and failed to reform it in 2016, but a coalition of environmentalists, labor groups, and local governments prevented the bill from coming to a vote.

Nearly a decade later, the script has flipped. On Monday, the California state legislature passed Assembly Bill 130, a law that exempts all housing developments within the footprint of existing urban areas from CEQA.

A companion law also passed Monday, Senate Bill 131, offers a much broader menu of CEQA exemptions, including for childcare centers, farmworker housing, park space, high-speed rail stations, and advanced manufacturing facilities. That night, Hanlon and Lewis shed tears of joy.

Both men had worked in environmental policy before turning their focus to housing, yet here they were celebrating the most significant rollback ever of California’s landmark environmental law. It’s indicative of a shift in certain corners of the environmental movement — accelerated by the much-discussed thesis of a certain book — where the focus has gone from stopping things to building things.

“We have to update our priors and realize that some of the things that we put in place to protect the environment in the past are now not actually helpful,” Lewis said. AB 130, spearheaded by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, provides that update for housing.

Backers say that CEQA has been downright counterproductive by blocking new housing in already built-up areas, where residents tend to have lower carbon footprints. “The basic idea was to codify what all of the climate science has been saying for decades, which is that infill urban housing is not just the most important tool in the state of California to reduce climate pollution, but it’s also one of the keys to preserving open lands from sprawl,” Lewis said.

Still, many California environmental groups remain wary of this turn, pointing out that CEQA already has many exemptions for certain kinds of housing and fretting that some of the more granular details in these laws could have serious negative impacts. A coalition of 100 environmental groups called SB 131 “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.”

In particular, their criticism centers on the new CEQA exemption for advanced manufacturing in areas already zoned for industry. The definition of this category is quite broad, including biotechnology, semiconductors, “advanced materials” and “advanced transportation technologies.”

“There are areas of the state where land is zoned industrial just a few hundred feet from homes,” said Melissa Romero, policy advocacy director for California Environmental Voters. “Constituents are going to be pissed when those developments happen near their homes without any review, without any public input, no mitigation.”

State Senator Scott Wiener, the author of SB 131, has said that this CEQA exemption came in response to California receiving relatively little high-tech manufacturing investment from federal policies like the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act. He told CalMatters that the bill’s critics were making “extreme, unfounded, melodramatic statements.”

Advocates like Romero also take issue with the timing of these laws, arriving amid President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging campaign to eliminate environmental protections. One provision in the fine print of AB 130 pauses all building code updates in the state through 2031, including energy efficiency mandates. “The fact that we’re rolling these things back at a time when the federal government is hell-bent on rolling back our health and safety laws is deeply disturbing,” Romero said.

But the traditional defenders of CEQA, including environmental groups and organized labor, had little leverage to alter, let alone stop, these bills. Governor Gavin Newsom added the bills to the state budget, meaning if they didn’t pass, neither would the budget. That produced a rushed process with little time for deliberation or analysis, critics said.

This hardball tactic enabled Newsom to pass the aggressive CEQA reforms that his predecessor, Jerry Brown, could not. Plus, the political narrative has also shifted in favor of these kinds of changes, as Newsom himself acknowledged at a press conference after signing the bills.

“It really is about abundance,” Newsom said. “Getting big stuff done.” He name-checked Ezra Klein, who co-wrote the book Abundance with Derek Thompson. “The world we invented has been competing against us,” Newsom said. “If we can’t address this issue, we’re going to lose trust.”

His remarks echo the thesis of the bestselling book, which makes the case that liberals have gotten in the way of achieving their own goals, like building housing and addressing climate change, through overly restrictive policies like CEQA.

“I don’t know that it caused the governor to have a massive sea change in his thinking,” Lewis said of the book, “but it clearly gave him some talking points and a framework to explain what it was he was trying to do.”

It remains to be seen how much, and how quickly, these bills will affect housing production and other development projects in California. The state has passed numerous laws in recent years to combat a housing shortage estimated at 3.5 million units, which experts say is the primary reason for its high housing costs and homelessness rates.

But aside from a surge in the construction of accessory dwelling units, the Golden State’s housing production has only increased modestly. Between April 2020 and January 2025, about 560,000 homes were completed in California, roughly equivalent to the number of homes Newsom said he wanted the state to build every year. California’s current rate of housing production remains less than half of what it was in the 1980s, when it had a much lower population.

“With the amendments we made to CEQA, we eliminated one of the three or four major barriers to sustainable housing progress in the state of California,” Lewis said. “It’s a really big deal, but I think we need to just temper expectations. We still have to do zoning, we still have to do permit streamlining, we still have to figure out finance.”

Permitting and financing remain major obstacles to building housing in California, Lewis said. But the zoning piece could be well on its way, thanks to previous state laws and a pending bill in the legislature that represents Wiener’s latest attempt to ease restrictions on siting new apartments in areas near transit stations.

That bill, in combination with the new CEQA reforms, will make it “historically, unprecedentedly fast and significantly cheaper to build infill housing up to seven stories around transit stops throughout the state,” Lewis said. “Over the next five to 10 years, you’ll really start to see the change.”