infill housing

CEQA and infill development

SB 607 is an excellent beginning for reforming CEQA to facilitate residential infill development

The state legislature continues its efforts to facilitate more housing production in California.  Among the most significant bills being considered this session in Sacramento is SB 607, which would provide some substantial changes to how environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) would operate.  Overall, this is a bill that would provide important …

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Making It Work: Administrative Reform of California’s Housing Framework

How recent legislative changes have been the state greater power to enable prohousing policies

This blog post is coauthored by Chris Elmendorf, Eric Biber, Paavo Monkkonen, and Moira O’Neill. As California’s housing crisis swirls through the national news, attention has focused on statewide upzoning bills. Sen. Scott Wiener’s ballyhooed effort to allow 4-5 story buildings near transit was tabled until 2020, but earlier this fall the legislature effectively terminated …

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LA’s Trying to Build Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing

But could we make it easier?

My colleague Jonathan Zasloff rightly points out that one way to harness the benefits of upzoning to alleviate our housing crisis is to promote inclusionary requirements for transit-oriented development.  Los Angeles has adopted just such a program through its Transit-Oriented Communities ordinance, which I’ve written about here. Per the City of Los Angeles’ initial assessment, …

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SB 827 and the Concept of Deregulation

When land-use deregulation gets characterized as regulation, and why

Perhaps the biggest topic in land-use law and housing affordability in California over the past couple of months has been a piece of legislation introduced by State Senator Wiener, SB 827.  Ethan has blogged quite a bit about the bill – the basic concept of the legislation is to eliminate or significantly restrict a number …

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Where Should We Build New Housing In California To Meet 2030 Climate Goals?

New Report From UC Berkeley’s CLEE and Terner Center, Commissioned by Next 10, Released Today

California isn’t building enough housing to meet population growth, while the new housing that does get built is happening too often in the wrong places, like on open space far from jobs. Meanwhile, new climate legislation for 2030 will likely rely on the average Californian reducing his or her driving miles by allowing residents to …

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