Bypass of Environmental Law Proposed for Downtown San Francisco

As we’ve said a few times before: the future always arrives first in California, for better or for worse.

Traffic jams on the freeways at 3 p.m. in a city built around the automobile? Not good. Artificial intelligence? We’ll put that down as a “maybe” at this point.

On the positive side of the ledger, the Golden State was the first place in the U.S. to enact meaningful environmental protection regulations, long before anyone imagined “atmospheric rivers” of rain or spreading wildfires due to climate change.

But that may be about to change in downtown San Francisco, where real estate developers have a more immediate priority: jump-starting the city out of its—okay, we’ll only say it once—”doom loop.”

We often get our first inkling about new CRE projects in California when a developer posts a notice that it has begun a CEQA review, also known as the California Environmental Quality Act. Nothing gets built in the Golden State without a CEQA review, which can last more than a year or longer.

A state legislator who represents San Francisco has proposed a bill that would allow most projects in the downtown to bypass CEQA reviews for up to a decade.

Sen. Scott Weiner wants to clear the way for the demolition of downtown buildings, including dozens of empty office buildings in a city with a 35% office vacancy rate, for adaptive reuse projects that will build new housing and a wide variety of “reimagined” uses for downtown property, including college campuses.

One example is the half-empty Westfield Centre, the largest downtown mall, now in receivership. The receiver says he’s committed to reviving the mall, but Mayor London Breed has suggested converting it into a new soccer stadium.

CEQA is California’s signature environmental law, enacted in 1970 a few months after the first Earth Day. Initially intended as a tool for residents to oppose freeway expansions, the California Supreme Court broadened the law in 1972 to apply it to almost every building project in the state.

The law has morphed into a tool that developers can use against each other to slow or kill competing projects.

Weiner, who authored 2017 legislation that accelerated construction of affordable housing in cities that were not meeting state-mandated targets for new housing, wants to exempt about 150 blocks of downtown San Francisco from CEQA reviews.

He told the New York Times that adding dense housing near jobs and public transit should be a core mission of the environmental movement. Weiner said infill housing will cut down on hours-long car commutes and prevent additional sprawl, he said.

Opponents are lining up against the measure, calling it “a giveaway to developers.”

Over at the Westfield Centre, the new managers are bringing in more security guards to deal with a more immediate threat: store safety issues including a guy who ran through the mall last year threatening the dwindling number of shoppers with a machete.