Economic Development Now

The California Supreme Court ruled in March that the University of California, Berkeley must cut its undergraduate enrollment by nearly 3,000 for the 2022–23 school year. The ruling came only three weeks before the university had planned to mail acceptance letters, forcing it to send 5,000 fewer offers. The university had been sued by Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, a local anti-density group, under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods successfully argued that the university had insufficiently assessed the environmental impact of increasing its enrollment. However, the group’s leader publicly stated that he sued because higher enrollment would increase the city’s density and displayed little concern for the importance of environmental audits. Urban density is in fact quite beneficial for the environment as it diminishes car traffic, but many groups oppose projects to densify their areas out of concern over home values.

This opposition is often referred to as NIMBYism (NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard”), and NIMBY groups have increasingly exploited environmental review acts such as CEQA to block development. The California court decision was eventually overridden by the legislature but has set a precedent that environmental review laws can be used to stop new infrastructure. This precedent was confirmed when Minneapolis’s landmark pro-density Minneapolis 2040 plan was blocked by the courts in June under an analogous state law.

The federal government passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1970, which requires agencies to conduct an environmental review before acting. Twenty states and localities have since passed similar environmental review laws. While these laws are well-intentioned, they are frequently misused to stop environmentally beneficial developments, according to Katie Rose Quandt of Truthout. For example, construction of a federally approved wind farm in Massachusetts is currently being blocked under NEPA. Wind power development is one of the most cost-effective and rapidly deployable climate change mitigation strategies. Quandt also reports that neighborhood block associations in wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods tried to block a bus route on 14th Street under a state environmental review law. The route was established to significantly alleviate congestion—a major contributor to poor air quality—but was delayed under the guise of environmentalism.

Quandt suggests that changes to state and federal laws to prevent their misuse can potentially alleviate the impacts of NIMBYism through environmental review laws. California implemented a public transportation exemption to CEQA in 2020, and a proposed bill in the legislature that would do the same for university housing has attracted the support of many student groups. These exemptions allow the laws to be used in the way they were intended without stopping the development of environmentally beneficial infrastructure.