The Santa Cruz wharf is closed indefinitely after part of it collapsed. “The Santa Cruz Wharf needed repairs. A court battle followed instead,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. A lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act delayed repairs needed to prevent the collapse.
CEQA is a big impediment to needed renovations and new housing construction in California. CEQA lawsuits have been used to block the building of college dorms in places where housing is scarce and expensive, and to block the operation of a food bank in a supposedly “historic parking lot” (a parking lot that is actually quite ordinary). CEQA has resulted in thousands of lawsuits that did nothing for the environment.
The San Francisco Chronicle explains:
After a tsunami slammed into the California coast in 2011, causing an estimated $15 million in damage to boats and docks in Santa Cruz alone, city leaders embarked on a plan to modernize and retrofit the wharf against future damage. The effort, though, spurred backlash and a lawsuit from residents who wanted to preserve the historic character of the West Coast’s longest pier…
The Santa Cruz wharf was in the midst of a $4 million repair project when its end section broke off and floated away, officials said. The 110-year-old wooden wharf extends just over half a mile into Monterey Bay, where it’s held up by 4,445 Douglas fir piles that weather damage from salty waves, seaborne debris and increasingly severe winter storms….In 2016, the city had proposed another plan: create a below-deck walkway wrapping around the wharf’s western side, creating new space for pedestrians while providing the piles a buffer against incoming waves….
Opponents of the additions, assembled under the name Don’t Morph the Wharf, sued in late 2020, arguing the city hadn’t done a proper environmental review of the plan. The city countered that the new “Westside Walkway” was necessary to mitigate damage from waves during storms, as it would extend past the current wharf and act as a break for waves, preventing them from hitting the wharf and the buildings on it, protecting the pilings on the west side of the wharf and providing additional lateral stability.
But Don’t Morph the Wharf claimed the walkway would obstruct the nesting of coastal birds, while one of the new buildings would require moving windows through which visitors can watch sea lions. A judge ruled in their favor in 2022, and the City Council approved a revised plan this past January that cut the new 40-foot building and walkway….
“The Santa Cruz wharf collapsing into the sea because some jackasses used CEQA to stop renovations is a perfect encapsulation of how broken it is. The status quo is not neutral, and CEQA’s bias is not protecting the environment as much as protecting the environment that existed when it was passed,” notes Jane Natoli.
Critics of CEQA say it drives up housing costs in California by thousands of dollars. In 2018, the California Policy Center said,
There are obvious reasons the median home price in California is $544,900, whereas in the United States it is only $220,100. In California, demand exceeds supply. And supply is constrained because of unwarranted environmental laws such as SB 375 that have made it nearly impossible to build housing outside the “urban service boundary.” These laws have made the value of land inside existing urban areas artificially expensive. Very expensive. Other overreaching environmentalist laws such as CEQA have made it nearly impossible to build housing anywhere. Then there are the government fees attendant to construction, along with the ubiquitous and lengthy permitting delays caused by myriad, indifferent bureaucracies with overlapping and often conflicting requirements. There is a separate fee and a separate permit seemingly for everything: planning, building, impact, schools, parks, transportation, capital improvement, housing, etc. Government fees per home in California often are well over $100,000; in the City of Fremont in 2017, they totaled nearly $160,000 on the $850,000 median value of a single family home.
The California Policy Center was writing about California’s already high home prices in 2018. Today, the median home price in California is much higher, probably about $860,000.
