California Dismantles Landmark Environmental Law to Tackle Housing Crisis

Now for NY and NYC to kill SEQRA and CEQR...

None of these moves will fix blue state's inability to build, but they'll help and move us in the right direction.

'California lawmakers on Monday night rolled back one of the most stringent environmental laws in the country, after Gov. Gavin Newsom muscled through the effort in a dramatic move to combat the state’s affordability crisis.

The Democratic governor—widely viewed as a 2028 presidential contender—made passage of two bills addressing an acute housing shortage a condition of his signing the 2025-2026 budget. A cornerstone of the legislation reigns in the California Environmental Quality Act, which for more than a half-century has been used by opponents to block almost any kind of development project.

The abuses of the law have spread so widely that opponents used it to block some bicycle-lane expansions when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor, he said during a signing ceremony at the Sacramento capital. Democratic leaders of the Assembly and Senate, who had steered the bills to bipartisan passage earlier Monday, flanked him.

“We have seen this abuse over and over and over again,” the governor said. “We have fallen prey to a strategy of delay. As a result of that, we have too much demand chasing too little supply. This is not complicated, it is Econ 101.”

Some environmentalists and other defenders of the longstanding law were furious, and warned that developers will now go unchecked. “Who needs Trump when we have a wolf in sheep clothing negotiating backroom deals while he and his oligarch donors score big,” one critic wrote on X.'