For nearly a decade, California’s Yes In My Backyard activists and other pro-development advocates have wanted to overhaul California’s signature environmental law to clear the way for more housing construction.
Now Proposition 45 is on the ballot. Supporters say it would, among other things, overhaul that law, known as the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, to clear the way for — you guessed it — more housing construction.
So why are YIMBYs divided?
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and one of the movement’s most stalwart champions in the Legislature, is for it. So is the bulk of the building industry, including many major for- and non-profit developers.
Bay Area pro-housing advocates Eastbay for Everyone and the Greenbelt Alliance, two typical allies of Wicks, are emphatically against it.
In the uncommitted middle lies the lion’s share of California YIMBYism: Abundant Housing Los Angeles, SPUR, and both California YIMBY and YIMBY Action — the movement’s two flagship advocacy organizations — have all taken neutral positions.
“It’s been a weird campaign so far,” said Ali Sapirman, advocacy manager at the Housing Action Coalition, an urban building industry group that supports the measure. “The housing community has been a little bit fractured.”
Those fissures aren’t over whether more homes should be built across California. Instead, it mostly boils down to a question of where.
“The central question here is how you feel about sprawl,” Max Dubler of California YIMBY wrote in the group’s non-endorsement statement, referring to low-density housing development at the edge of metro areas. Though some exurban growth “will necessarily be part of solving our housing shortage,” he expressed concern about making it easier to build “car-dependent sprawl housing and the freeways and water infrastructure necessary to serve that sprawl.”
To sprawl or not to sprawl
For nearly a decade, the Legislature has been on a tear, passing “streamlining” bills aimed at speeding up the regulatory approval of new construction. Almost all of those laws have only applied to projects in places where homes and other infrastructure already exist.
Prioritizing so-called infill development helped wrangle together a coalition of developers and construction labor unions, but also a diverse swath of Democratic-leaning advocates whose interest in seeing more apartments and condos goes beyond the cause of affordability alone. That includes climate activists who want to see less commuter car traffic; transit, bicycle and pedestrian advocates who want more riders and walkers and urbanists who want Los Angeles to more closely resemble Barcelona.
In breaking from that urban focus, Prop. 45 is driving a wedge inside that coalition.
If passed, the measure would speed up the review process required under CEQA (pronounced “see-kwah”) for all types of housing projects. That includes transit-adjacent downtown condo towers, but also freshly paved subdivisions at the metropolitan fringe.
The measure is “a doubling down on essentially 75 years of land-use patterns that we know haven’t worked,” said Jordan Grimes, legislative director with Greenbelt Alliance, which opposes the measure. “It’s a return to the sprawl era.”
Not everyone in the movement necessarily sees that as a bad thing. Among those who want California to build its way out of its current housing shortage, opinions differ over whether more environmentally-friendly infill development alone is up to the task.
“I’m an ‘all of the above’ person when it comes to housing,” said Wicks, explaining her support of the measure. “I think we need housing of all different types, shapes, and sizes.”
An earlier version of this rift first emerged earlier this decade when a handful of Bay Area tech investors announced plans to build a brand new city on Solano County farmland in 2023 under the banner of California Forever. Some YIMBY commentators applauded the plan as a welcome injection of much-needed supply. Others decried it as sprawl dressed in urbanist clothing.
With Prop. 45, that regional debate is now playing out at a statewide scale.
Housing front and center
Prop. 45 is about much more than housing policy.
CEQA requires public agencies to review the possible environmental consequences of the decisions they make, including the permitting of private projects. For decades industry groups, developers and, more recently, housing supply boosters have said the law makes it too easy for project opponents to jam up worthwhile projects by repeatedly demanding additional analysis.
“The clock is endless and the number of people and entities who can challenge you are also endless,” said Linda Mandolini of Eden Housing, an affordable housing developer.
Prop. 45 would not exempt any projects from environmental review outright. But for projects deemed “essential,” it would narrow the focus of these reviews and require them to wrap up within 365 business days. Any resulting litigation would also face a shot clock; Judges would have 270 business days to resolve them. Such lawsuits would also be made harder to sustain in court. Aside from housing, essential projects include roads, hospitals, schools, clean energy projects, water and broadband infrastructure.
But housing has loomed large in the electoral debate. The Yes on 45 campaign has touted the support of affordable housing developers and housing advocates, while pointing to housing affordability concerns as the initial impetus for the measure.
It’s easy to see why. Environmental challenges to often innocuous-seeming housing projects have regularly generated headlines for years, helping to cement the idea among lawmakers and many voters that CEQA is a major cause of the state’s housing woes.
Environmental justice groups and their allies have spent years fighting against that argument in the Legislature. Though Prop. 45 does not exempt “essential” projects from environmental review outright — it just shortens and hems in the process — these groups have now lined up to oppose it for much the same reason: They reject the premise that CEQA needs fixing.
But for opponents like Grimes, who supported many recent streamlining bills, the argument that the law is holding up desperately needed residential construction is a year out of date. Last year, the governor signed Assembly Bill 130, a Wicks-authored measure that exempted most infill housing from the CEQA.
Since becoming law in July 2025, developers have used it to entitle 17,913 units of housing, according to the Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, a state agency.
“When you look at what’s left to do on urban housing, there are absolutely still barriers,” said Grimes, whose organization applauded last year’s exemption. “CEQA just isn’t one of them.”
The task of the No on 45 campaign, he said, is to convince enough voters that “we’ve actually solved this problem.”
Are we done here?
Many developers and affordable housing advocates, even those working in urban areas, dispute that CEQA is no longer a major obstacle.
Last year’s exemption does not exempt projects larger than 20 acres, which means supersized
urban
redevelopment projects are still subject to the old process.
Prop. 45 also applies shot clocks to other permits issued later in the development process and which regularly slow a project more than environmental review.
And while state laws like last year’s infill carveout may grant certain developers the right to ignore CEQA, there is nothing to stop a deep-pocketed opponent from suing anyway. Putting time limits on those lawsuits could be the difference between a project succeeding and being delayed to death, said Mandolini.
She points to the planned 130-unit affordable housing project that Eden Housing has been trying to and failing to build in the Bay Area suburb of Livermore since 2018 as an example. In 2021, a nonprofit funded by a handful of well-heeled Livermore residents sued the city, arguing that it hadn’t done enough environmental analysis on a housing development that would be built on a former grocery store parking lot behind a row of downtown restaurants. A lower court ruled that the group’s CEQA arguments were “almost utterly without merit.” An appellate court agreed. The state Supreme Court allowed that ruling to stand.
But by then two years had passed.
“Every year you lose in litigation is real money for real projects and another year that 130 families don’t get to live in that housing,” said Mandolini. “It’s a great way to kill a project.”
Even an infill project.
But among some pro-housing supporters of the proposition, the infill versus sprawl debate isn’t much of a debate at all.
“We’re not an urbanist organization,” said Mahdi Manji with the Inner City Law Center, a legal aid provider and housing advocacy group in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. The group supports Prop. 45 and doesn’t mind the concept of more housing far from the city’s core. “To the extent it results in housing that is a little more affordable in Lancaster and Palmdale, a lot of our clients live out in Lancaster and Palmdale.”
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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.