--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello, my name's Sean Rameswaram, my host today, Explained, along with Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: And I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I can still remember the first time I heard about NIMBYs. You know, not-in-my-backyard types.
--:-- Noelle King: Ah, cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apartments, yeah. Apartments are good for society, but don't put them behind my backyard and block my view. Put them somewhere else.
--:-- Noelle King: All right, boys, let's pack it up!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I also remember when I started hearing about YIMBYs. Yes, in my backyard types.
--:-- Noelle King: Oh, cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apartments, yes. Apartments are good for society. Please put them behind my backyard and block my view.
--:-- Noelle King: You know what? You can build them on top of me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I can even remember when it seemed like the Yimbies won. Because that kind of just happened.
--:-- Noelle King: The best evidence is out in California.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we're heading there, at least spiritually, on the show today.
--:-- [Support for Today Explained]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Hi, I'm Henry Grabar, and I'm a staff writer at Slate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And though you live in Boston, we're here to talk to you about California. Why you?
--:-- Henry Grabar: Well, I think if you're interested in housing politics, as I am, California looms pretty large for the rest of the country, both as a cautionary tale about what not to do, and then from time to time, like in this instance, as an example of how reform is possible.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ooh, which reform are you talking about specifically for those not in the know?
--:-- Henry Grabar: I am talking about the latest round of California housing reforms, which were reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act in such a way that reformers hope will be a very big deal in terms of permitting the state to build more homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. And it's my assumption that to talk about the reforms, we first have to talk about the act. So let's talk about the California Environmental Quality Act. What's its story?
--:-- Henry Grabar: So the California Environmental Quality Act, which, by the way, everybody in California calls it CEQA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, CEQA.
--:-- Henry Grabar: So CEQA is passed, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1970. Richard Nixon creates the Environmental Protection Agency.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We can make 1972 the best year ever for environmental progress.
--:-- Henry Grabar: The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. It is part of a bipartisan push in the United States to protect the environment in a systemic way that goes beyond just the creation of national parks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, here we're talking about cleaning the air, cleaning the water, regulating industrial pollution.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And in the context of California, there's a particular focus on forcing the government to reckon with its own actions in terms of the types of projects that it takes on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're talking about interstate highways, dams, nuclear power plants. All those kinds of things are in the crosshairs when CEQA is passed in 1970.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Just a couple of heavyweight Republicans passing landmark environmental legislation. Politics used to be pretty different, huh?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How big a deal is this law once it's signed?
--:-- Henry Grabar: Well, I think there's some ambiguity right at the start about what exactly this law is going to apply to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then there's a big court case that happens in 1972 in the California Supreme Court where the court decides that this law applies to basically any project that requires any kind of government oversight.
--:-- Henry Grabar: So basically anything that you want to do. And in particular, this case concerns housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so when the Supreme Court decides is from now on, all housing in California is subject to environmental review under CEQA.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And this is just a bombshell. I mean, nobody's really prepared for this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In San Francisco, the city decides to halt new building permits until they can figure out what this means.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And Los Angeles has these disclaimers saying that they can't be liable if these building permits are later found to be unconstitutional.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it is a big surprise for the development industry and city planners in California.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And over the years, does it come to be regarded as a good thing or a bad thing or both or what?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that depends on whom you're speaking to.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Environmentalists in California think of this as part of what they consider the state's really agenda setting on environmental issues for the entire nation, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's true that CEQA has helped the state preserve a number of its natural treasures.
--:-- Henry Grabar: But the flip side of this is that housing production in California has slowed to a crawl.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the consequences of that have become very apparent to anybody who lives in or visits California
--:-- Henry Grabar: It's apparent in the number of people who leave the state every year citing affordability issues and sort of fan out across the Mountain West and the Sun Belt
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More people are moving out of California than any other state in the country, according to a new study by PODs.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Your governor, Newsom, this year was nominated as the number one real estate agent for the state of Florida.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Only 16 percent of Californians can afford to buy a home.
--:-- Henry Grabar: It is apparent in the large numbers of homeless people who live on the streets and in their cars in California cities because they can't find a place to live.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so CEQA has also begun to be seen as part of the problem, as part of the reason that it's so difficult to build new housing in the state.
--:-- Henry Grabar: So when does a movement to reform this landmark piece of legislation get underway?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been going on for at least a decade.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Governor Jerry Brown, who was Newsom's predecessor, talked about it, couldn't get it done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's certainly been one of those issues that's always discussed in Sacramento as, well, if we really want to make it easier to build housing, we could remove this very strict and powerful law that governs the creation of any type of new housing that anybody would want to build.
--:-- Henry Grabar: But Moonbeam Jerry Brown doesn't get it done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's his successor, Gavin Newsom.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And it wasn't easy. I mean, Newsom's been in office for almost a decade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he and a number of sort of YIMBY-affiliated legislators have chipped away at the California housing problem with all of these little bills that they've done several that are focused on ADUs or accessory dwelling units, right, like backyard cottages or granny flats.
--:-- Henry Grabar: They've done bills focused on transit-oriented development and on affordable housing and on student housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But CEQA has remained the kind of elephant in the room that no one was willing to take on until now.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And then also I would say that there's been a kind of changing sense within the environmental movement and within the labor movement about what CEQA does and the extent to which it might be curtailing the creation of new housing in the state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And who's mad about changes to CEQA?
--:-- Henry Grabar: Who's mad? Well, obviously a number of environmental groups are upset.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the other group that's been upset, and I think this will come as a surprise to people who are not versed in California politics, is labor unions.
--:-- Henry Grabar: The State Building and Construction Trades Council was ultimately neutral on this bill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say that if you allow projects to go forward without CEQA review, you get rid of this moment of negotiation that compels these builders to employ union labor and to create these safer, highly paid jobs in construction in California cities.
--:-- Henry Grabar: It occurs to me that Gavin Newsom has maybe grand ambitions beyond running one of the biggest economies in the world, the most populous state in the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does this have anything to do with his ambitions for maybe holding national office?
--:-- Henry Grabar: I don't know, the White House?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think what he can say and what he will say as he talks about this achievement is that California has recognized the severity of their housing crisis and they are willing to take steps previously considered unthinkable to fix it, right?
--:-- Henry Grabar: He thinks of this as part of his track record as a problem solver who is willing to negotiate and get things done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was too urgent, too important. to allow the process to unfold as it has for the last generation.
--:-- Henry Grabar: But deregulating, freeing up development, letting industry do industry, these are things that you hear Republicans saying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Gavin Newsom tacking to the middle because these problems that they're having in California around housing are not just California problems.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Yes, I hear you on that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I've seen the framing of this reform as being a kind of setback for the environmental movement.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And I think in this case, there's a plausible case to be made.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And many pro-housing groups have made this case, that it reflects a different understanding of environmentalism.
--:-- Henry Grabar: What we have done here is made absolutely needed housing easier to build. at the same time advancing, not derailing our environmental goals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a very straightforward and intuitive bill.
--:-- Henry Grabar: If it's good for the environment for a housing project to get built, then those projects should be exempt from CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that environmentalism in the 21st century is no longer merely about can we save this tree from being chopped down, But also, are we living sustainable lifestyles in a larger sense?
--:-- Henry Grabar: And, you know, the largest contributor to emissions in this country is transportation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so if you block housing from being built in an urban neighborhood in a large city, those people still need houses, right?
--:-- Henry Grabar: And so they might go and they might live 40 miles inland and drive 40 miles every day to go to work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or they might leave California altogether and move to a place like Dallas or Orlando where they'll drive 40 miles pretty much wherever they live.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And so maybe this sequel reform reflects a new understanding about environmentalism and one that suggests that California actually is a pretty sustainable place to live.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the bill essentially recognizes housing that is close to existing infrastructure, that is close to jobs and public transit, results in lower greenhouse gas emissions and is good for the environment because it means people are driving shorter distances or perhaps not even driving at all.
--:-- Henry Grabar: Dense housing is green housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I'm happy to say that this week, California finally internalized that truth.
--:-- Henry Grabar: And across the U.S., we are seeing a very hard time building enough housing to accommodate their populations, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so in that context I think if these places these other places start to reform their development policies now then they will wind up like California in the years to come
--:-- Henry Grabar: In a bad way
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In a bad way
--:-- Henry Grabar: Not like palm trees and surf but like million houses and people living in vans
--:-- [Support for Today Explained]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The last time he was on the show, he was talking about parking because he's the author of Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Hi, I'm Marina Balotnikova, and I'm an editor who sometimes writes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She's an editor who sometimes writes, and her most recent writing was about housing, a subject we've covered plenty in years past, but we asked her for an update on the crisis.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: So housing is a lot more expensive in the United States today than it was several decades ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the average, I thought this was kind of stunning, the average monthly mortgage payment is in 2024 was over $2,500, which is, you know, far and away above the $1,400 payment that was average just three years earlier.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And we heard about this CEQA law in California from 1970 that really slowed development in that state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But from what you're saying, it sounds like there's a host of other factors that are leading to this crisis.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Yeah, there are the housing crisis that is at the root of so many of our national problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not just a technical policy failure, but a logical end point of our of that cherished American ideal.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And what I mean by that is think about if you think about how the United States builds housing since the end of World War Two, our housing supply has been built overwhelmingly in the form of suburbs and sprawling single-family homes radiating ever outward from city centers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So instead of building cities up with density, which had been the normal pattern before, we largely kind of just built out and out.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And the problem with that is you can only sprawl so much before it doesn't work anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Either you run out of land because you hit a mountain or an ocean or a literal physical barrier, or you get so far from the city center that it doesn't make sense for people to live there anymore.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: So we've built out suburbs really far in all of the really desirable parts of the country, like the Northeast, California, and increasingly in the Sunbelt too, which has been celebrated for a long time for being relatively affordable compared to the coasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These suburbs are getting really expensive.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: They're also low density, so in theory, they ought to have room for plenty more people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's impossible to do.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: It's illegal to do in most of the United States, because, you know, unfortunately, I have to use the Z word, which is zoning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But zoning is just a fancy way of saying it.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: You know, local rules on what kinds of things can be built where.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zoning has made it so that the overwhelming majority of residential land in the United States cannot contain anything besides a detached single-family home.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Apartments are banned, duplexes are banned, triple-deckers are banned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's little capacity to incrementally densify in the communities that already exist.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And some listeners might be thinking, well, wait a minute, I see these, you know, big fancy apartment buildings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some people know them as gentrification buildings going up all around me.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: What do you mean it's illegal to build them?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's true that we're building them.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: They're going up on a really small share of residential land.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most Americans live on suburbs
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Most of that land you can you know you can intensify beyond a single family home
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so the suburban dream offered Americans this implicit bargain will freeze our communities in amber
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: They never have to change never have to become more dense
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And instead we can accommodate population growth by sprawling out forever
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: That been the engine of housing construction
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it is I think I think it fair to say that it it failing us
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: You mentioned suburbs like in the Northeast and California, which I'm guessing are a little older in some cases, at least, than those in the Sunbelt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did like Sunbelt suburbs learn anything from from the mistakes that were maybe made in California or the Northeast?
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: This housing crisis in California keeps getting even worse.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Massachusetts is, has, was, and will continue to do a terrible job of building housing.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: There's no two ways about it. It is practically impossible to buy a home unless you are essentially wealthy these days.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the coastal suburbs in California and the Northeast are much older and belong to metro areas that built out much earlier than the Sun Belt.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: You know, Phoenix and Las Vegas, these are places that grew from just desert towns to massive metropolises since World War II.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And part of the big spark for the story I wrote was that I encountered the leading urban economists, Ed Glazer and Joe Giorco.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: They write about the collapse in housing construction in the Sunbelt over the last few decades.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That happened on the coast long ago.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And what the researchers find now is that the same pattern is sort of repeating itself in the Sun Belt, where cities like Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami had really, really high rates of housing growth in the early 2000s, the 90s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it has since plummeted to rates almost as low as coastal cities that are barely building anything like Los Angeles.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And it really surprised them because the Sun Belt is celebrated for being friendly to building stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The fundamentals of housing in that region are not so different from the coasts in the sense that it has been population and housing growth in the Sun Belt has been overwhelmingly driven by suburban sprawl since the end of World War II.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we talked about reforming CEQA in California, which sounds like a very California solution because most states don't have a CEQA.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: What do we need to see in other states to really get to the heart of this crisis?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so major, you know, comprehensive reforms to zoning to make it easier to build different types of housing, higher densities of housing.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: So during the pandemic austin had a huge run-up in rents because so many people were moving there and pretty quickly the city responded with changes to make it easier to build housing it also made it easier to build taller buildings and the result has been that in the last few years it permitted new homes faster than almost anywhere else and rents are down perhaps over 20 percent since mid-2023, and that's huge.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's the difference between paying $2,000 a month for an apartment versus $1,400 a month.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: And for a lot of people, that's the difference between being able to stay in Austin and being priced out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Similar things are happening in other places.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Minneapolis famously ended all single-family exclusive zoning in 2018.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Montana has made it a lot easier to build apartments and ADUs.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Oregon has made it a lot easier to build duplexes, triplexes, other multifamily housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we're seeing the contours of a major shift in how housing in America gets regulated and built.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Does that mean that the Yimbys have won and the Nimbys have at long last lost?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes and no.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: We've seen a remarkably fast change in consensus on housing policy across cities and states both blue and red in the last several years and that's a really promising sign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It hasn't yet translated into relief in housing prices because there's such a large gap to make up.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: I think the the momentum of the last several years has been remarkable and more than anyone in the Yembe movement could have expected five years ago or so.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's reason to be optimistic.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Our colleague Marina Balotnikova making her Today Explained debut iconic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Marina's with Vox's future perfect section.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: They're all about making the world work better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This episode was made in collaboration with them.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: It was produced by Devin Schwartz, fact-checked by Laura Bullard-Mixed, by Patrick Boyd, and edited by Miranda Kennedy, who's still in the club.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's that, you ask?
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Who else works here?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, let's just say Peter Balanon-Rosen, Andrea Kristen's daughter, Gabrielle Burbay, Denise Guerra, Rebecca Ibarra, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, and Noelle King from the Apple Store.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Our supervising editor is Amina Alsadi, and our deputy executive producer is Jolie Myers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and listen to music by Justin Bieber.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Swag!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: The show is a part of Fox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can listen to Today Explained without the ads by signing up at vox.com slash members.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Now, that means you get less of the ads Noelle and I make just for you, but also none of the other ads, which maybe you don't want to hear anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Think about it.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Bye.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a JQ thing.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: JQ says bye like that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can hear her on Sundays on Explained It To Me in this very feed.
--:-- Marina Balotnikova: Without the ads if you go to Vox.com slash members.
