Hernandez relates the current “exclusionary zoning” effects of CEQA lawsuits to past practices of land-use discrimination – like when the City of Milpitas and Santa Clara County used zoning laws and high development fees back in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s to discourage African-American families from moving there after the Ford Motor Company relocated a Richmond-based plant. Then-restrictive zoning – large-lot, single-family only – coupled with discriminatory housing-finance practices of the time, which denied minority borrowers access to veteran’s benefits and other federal financing, kept African-Americans in Richmond and ultimately trimmed them from the ranks of the new factory workforce.
CEQA does the same thing, Hernandez argues. With the legal costs and delays associated with CEQA litigation, higher-density housing and like development in areas clearly desirable to minorities, prices and rents are placed way out of reach for lower-income households.
So, who’s to blame for all this litigation? Hernandez reports:
Using CEQA lawsuits over and over in the same communities, often for non-environmental reasons, remains fiercely defended by an alliance of NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) environmental advocates and building trade union leaders – both of which are backbone supporters of the elected legislators in the two-thirds majority Democratic Party in the (state) Assembly and Senate. This coalition has created an iron curtain of opposition to reforming CEQA lawsuit rules.
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