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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> Assemblyman Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield) noted that environmental standards are not being changed. “We are changing what they apply to,” he said.

Either the environmental review standards are good and needed.. or they are not. This is post-hoc ruling and I am curious how the court will react.

The only thing the opposition needs to do here is run a few pressers with homeless students.

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The environmental review process is broken [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/berkeley-enrollme...

Hogwash. CEQA is doing exactly what it was meant to do. By its very nature it's a conservative ideal that we should be careful about development.

That process slows/stops things you hate, but also things you like.

It was sold as a way to protect the environment but it doesn't help when business as usual is destroying the environment. It was also sold as a process requiring much less time and money than it takes now, but yes you are absolutely right that its fundamentally conservative and fundamentally locks in those with power under the current system. It needs reformed

No, what it does is force development thru sprawl which decimates wild lands. Our cities need to grow upwards, not outwards.

Cities don't need to grow far upwards if they just throw out cars. 3-5 floors are plenty

Tell that to delivery drivers

When talking about "throwing out cars" I suspect what most would mean is re-architecting cities to be less car-dependent.

Walkable cities with well integrated public transit and mixed retail, restaurants/cafes and residential, so that you don't need a car to go and do your grocery shopping, get a coffee or even most regular purchases.

Many (most?) European cities are like this to a greater or lesser degree - you still get deliveries, but you can walk, or ride a bike, or catch a bus/tram/metro to most places you want to go. You don't eliminate cars, but driving a car isn't the default option because it's more convenient not to. But if you need a car for something, well, that's still an option.

> Many (most?) European cities are like this to a greater or lesser degree - you still get deliveries, but you can walk, or ride a bike, or catch a bus/tram/metro to most places you want to go

Yes! Where we lived in Padova, Italy, transportation was a 'right tool for the job' situation. We did have a car, and used it from time to time, but we also walked, biked and took transit, depending on what we needed to do.

Agreed 3-5 is plenty; one of the worst parts about these sorts of overly-onerous regulations is that the regulatory overhead and expense is per project and not per floor or per dwelling. This makes it all the more difficult for 'modest' or 'common-sense' upward development.

I've always loved this article comparing different kinds of growth in the real world:

https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

I'm a 'Montreal' guy, and you sound like one too from your comment, but everyone has different tastes.

Very little of California is 3-5 floors, it's mostly 1-2. This "environmental" law is preventing the construction of 3-5 floor buildings.

Why do you feel development through sprawl would be easier to get through CEQA than building upwards? (As someone currently serving on a Local Agency Formation Commission, I actually think I would have told you the opposite?...)

And that's bad. CEQA has no respect for projects that improve the status quo and is mainly used for concern trolling by NIMBYs - that's why it takes ten years to add a bus lane in SF. Don't need to write an EIR for not changing anything.

The issue was not that the environmental standards are good/needed or not/not. The issue was that the environmental standards are good but that this case was not actually related in any way to the environmental standards review envisioned by the legislature when it originally passed the underlying law that allowed this lawsuit to proceed in the first place.

The legislature simply updated the law to make it clear that these types of lawsuits (i.e., over activities which don't directly relate to construction of new buildings even though they may ultimately lead to new construction) are not intended by the original law, and this new law makes that explicitly clear. (The eventual construction of new buildings required by the enrollment increase would be covered by normal CEQA review processes.)

EDIT: From TTOTFL itself: "This bill would delete the provision requiring the environmental effects relating to changes in enrollment levels be considered in the EIR prepared for the long-range development plan. The bill would provide that enrollment or changes in enrollment, by themselves, do not constitute a project for purposes of CEQA."

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Sure, but lots of things are unnecessary and we can't get rid of them because they are politically dangerous to touch. So we chip away at the ugliness bit by bit. No purity here: you take every yard you can get. And if I have to lie and say "CEQA as it stands is great, but occasionally there are situations where it is a bad fit" just to get people to let me take a step forward, then I'll lie.

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