A major new piece of housing and climate legislation was introduced in California this month, and it’s been a long time coming. AB 68 (Ward) finally sets forth a powerful template for where the state should encourage new housing and where it should avoid planning for more, based on climate and environmental hazards. It represents the culmination of a long-sought alliance between major housing advocates like California YIMBY and conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy.
So where should the state build more housing, according to AB 68? It defines those places in the following “climate smart” ways:
- In a high or moderate income area, as defined by state affordable housing tax credit maps, to prioritize more housing in high-opportunity and well-resourced areas and minimize displacement of low-income renters
- Within 1/2 mile of major transit or an area where residents drive below-average distances on a per capita average, in order to reduce overall driving miles in the state
- Within a mile of a cluster of at least six types of locations like restaurants, bars, coffee shops, supermarkets, parks and hardware stores, among others, to ensure rural and exurban infill areas aren’t left out, as well as places without access to transit.
If a housing development is proposed in these areas, the project gets “ministerial” approval (i.e. exempt from environmental review), and a local government cannot limit the development beyond any of the following:
- Setback greater than four feet from any side
- Height limit less than 50 feet
- Maximum lot coverage of less than 60 percent
- Minimum parking requirement
- Floor area ratios (i.e. the building’s total floor area in relation to the size of the lot/parcel, indicating overall density) less than 1.0. to 1.5, depending on criteria met
There are additional requirements to protect existing affordable housing and ensure consistency with SB 375 plans, among others.
And where should planning for denser development in the state be limited? AB 68 describes these “climate risk lands” as within high-severity wildfire and flood zones, or having a sea level rise risk according to the latest science. They also must be not currently zoned for housing or have existing urbanized communities on them.
In these areas, local governments cannot increase existing housing densities or allow subdivisions, and they cannot approve any extension of water or sewer services, unless certain exceptions can be met, such as an approved housing element and a statement of housing necessity, among other conditions.
In short, AB 68 finally provides the much-needed, legislatively endorsed map for where the state should grow and where it should avoid putting more people into harm’s way. If successful, AB 68 will arguably be the single biggest climate bill that the state has passed in over a decade, given the centrality of land use and housing to meeting our climate goals. The fight to pass it will not be easy, but AB 68 has a powerful coalition to support it, along with a well-conceived solution to the state’s urgent and related challenges of climate and housing.
LA Metro Rail — the sprawling network of light rail and subway lines criss-crossing Los Angeles County since the first line opened in 1993 — is facing an existential challenge. Just like other transit agencies around the country, ridership since the pandemic has plummeted, still around just two-thirds of its pre-COVID peak.
What can be done to fix it? In my new Los Angeles Times op-ed today, I offer a number of fixes. Most of it involves building more apartments and compact housing within walking distance of the Metro Rail stations, which would ensure the system isn’t reliant just on white collar office workers who are unlikely to return to work full time.
But the agency also needs to address its crime and personal safety issues, which can be partly helped by having more riders. State leaders should consider these needs if they decide to take action to rescue LA Metro and other California transit agencies facing a “fiscal cliff” as federal COVID funds expire.
I’ve been documenting Metro Rail since before the publication of my book Railtown (UC Press) in 2014. And there’s no doubt that the ridership and fiscal crisis the system now faces is the greatest in its three-decade history. Hopefully these recommendations can help the region make the most of this multi-billion dollar investment, fulfilling the economic, environmental and quality-of-life promise of rail in Los Angeles.
California and other jurisdictions have been moving to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as a climate solution. Yet some pro-sprawl interests question whether this is necessary, given the advent of electric vehicles. It’s fair to ask: if all vehicles are “zero emission,” do we really need to care any more about how much driving we do, in terms of the climate impact?
The answer is unequivocally yes, and here are the top five reasons:
- Gas cars will be with us for a long time. As the California Air Resources Board noted in the 2022 scoping plan appendix, even with a goal to have only zero-emission vehicles sold in the state by 2035, approximately 30 percent of light-duty vehicles on the road in 2045 will still burn fossil fuels. The less of that we burn through reduced driving, the better.
- Clean electricity generation still has a carbon cost. Even if we move to 100% electric vehicles, that energy has to come from somewhere. And if it’s large-scale solar or wind facilities, they come with their own energy inputs to manufacture, as well as land use impacts to deploy. For example, some studies conservatively estimate it takes 10 acres of solar panels to generate one megawatt of electricity, an hour of which could potentially power about 3,500 driving miles collectively. Using that land for electricity and not food production, carbon sequestration, or open space comes with significant climate costs.
- Low-VMT development patterns reduce carbon pollution from buildings. As CARB noted, infill development (as opposed to sprawl served by publicly-subsidized highways) uses an estimated 10 to 20 percent less residential energy, due to smaller unit types, sizes, and locations — not to mention reduced water use from less outdoor irrigation requirements, which come with their own energy footprint to ship and treat the water.
- Reducing sprawl and VMT preserves open space and working lands as a carbon sink. To achieve carbon neutrality by mid century or sooner, we’re going to need to bury carbon. Natural and working lands are a key part of that equation, as they provide opportunities to bury carbon in soils through natural processes. Developing these lands instead for high VMT sprawl can permanently foreclose that opportunity.
- Electric vehicles come with their own carbon footprint and pollution costs. While dramatically better for the environment than fossil fuel-powered cars, EVs still require significant energy to manufacture, and their use on the road can create particulate matter pollution through wear on the tires and brakes and by kicking up particulate matter from the road. They also require large-scale mining of lithium, graphite and other minerals, which creates local environmental and energy impacts.
I could also mention non-climate reasons for wanting to reduce VMT, such as the equity benefits of building more housing closer to jobs and services in order to reduce transportation costs that disproportionately hurt low-income residents. But I’ll stick with the climate benefits for now.
Overall, we do need to electrify 100% of our transportation modes from a climate perspective. But we also need to simultaneously reduce the demand for transportation by building better and smarter communities in walkable, affordable, and transit-friendly areas.
Without that reduced driving, our climate goals will be much harder to achieve.
Tonight on State of the Bay, we’ll talk to Emeryville Mayor John Bauters about how his city is able to meet its housing requirements, as well as about his priorities as chair of the Bay Area Air Quality Board and the Alameda County Transportation Commission.
We’ll also host a debate on whether San Francisco should ban e-collars for dogs. Are they abusive, or do they actually give dogs more freedom? We’ll hear the arguments for and against e-collars with Ren Volpe of Shock Free SF and Founder/CEO of GoDogPro.com and Michael Ellis of Michael Ellis School for Dog Trainers.
Finally, State of the Bay’s guest host Sarah Ladipo Manyika talks about her new book Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora.
What would you like to ask our guests? Post a comment here, tweet us @StateofBay, send an email to stateofthebay@kalw.org or leave a voicemail at (415) 580-0718.
Tune in tonight at 6pm PT on KALW 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live. You can also call 866-798-TALK with questions during the show.
California made history this year when Governor Newsom signed a long-sought reform to deregulate local parking requirements on infill projects (as I blogged about back in September). But could one provision of the new law undermine its effect on the ground?
The issue is a provision in AB 2097 (Subdivision 65863.2(f), for anyone following along at home) that ostensibly exempts from this law any local requirements for electric vehicle charging installations in multifamily dwellings or commercial properties or to allow accessibility to persons with disabilities. In other words, if a local government required not just parking (which would now be illegal under the new state law) but also parking specifically for EVs and those with disabilities, what happens to that second part of the requirement?
The implications are significant. A city with such an EV or disability-access requirement on the books could potentially argue that developers will still need to provide some minimum parking that has these features. In fact, they could use the requirements as a backdoor parking mandate where none otherwise now exists. While most people support EV charging and disabilities access requirements for parking spots, doing so in the context of this legislation would clearly contradict the intent and plain language of the law.
When AB 2097 passed, it specifically deregulated parking mandates that typically come from local zoning codes, which have traditionally required developers to build a certain number of parking spaces for each housing unit and/or each 1,000 square feet of building area. EV and ADA parking requirements, however, usually come from a different section of local requirements, namely the building codes. Often these require that a certain percentage of any parking spots meet the additional standards of offering electric vehicle charging and/or accessibility. Crucially, building codes do not usually require that developers build any amount of parking—just that when they do, the parking meets certain standards.
In response, AB 2097 specifically preserved these building-code percentage standards in order to ensure that any parking provided at least advances sustainability and accessibility goals. But the provision was not meant to provide an easy out for local governments to circumvent the law’s fundamental goal of ending parking mandates near transit. Otherwise, cities could simply mandate a minimum number of parking spaces that must include electric vehicle charging (a percentage of which would by law also be handicap-accessible), and then AB 2097 would cease to have any effect at all.
So take a city that requires 30% of all required parking to have an EV charger. In that instance, they might argue that AB 2097 in fact only bans 70% of the parking mandate. Following that logic, if the city mandated 100% of spaces must include EV charging, then AB 2097 would effectively ban zero percent of parking mandates. That outcome would completely negate the purpose and impact of the new law.
The effect could be detrimental to infill projects. Imagine a small-lot developer who wouldn’t otherwise build any parking spots on a site under AB 2097. If cities now insisted that the developer provide EV charging and disabilities access, the developer would have to build parking where none was contemplated. That means providing two discrete accessible paths of travel from the street: one from the sidewalk and one from a parking facility that wouldn’t otherwise be there. This outcome would likely lead to developers continuing to orient buildings around parking spots rather than pedestrian, bicycle and transit access.
Instead, the only defensible read of the provision is that if a city requires a certain percentage of parking spots to have EV charging and be accessible to those with disabilities, those percentages should still apply: but only if the developer decides to build any parking at all. If the developer opts out of on-site parking, then a percent of zero is zero. If the developer wants to provide only half the parking that would have been locally required under the old regime, then the number of EV and disabilities-accessible spots should be halved.
Ultimately, the point of AB 2097 was to reduce dependence on automobiles, enhance access to buildings by non-vehicle modes, and lower the cost of building all types of housing near transit. If there’s parking, then open it to EVs, those with disabilities, and other local requirements. But if none exists, local governments shouldn’t force requirements that run afoul of the law.
We’ll see if cities with these requirements try to exploit this provision. If so, it may take some state agency guidance to make this point, or worst case clean-up legislation to clarify. Otherwise, one of California’s most important climate and land use bills could face some unfortunate headwinds on implementation.
It took a decade, but the California legislature has finally delivered to the governor one of the most critical climate and equity bills in the country. No, it’s not mandating carbon neutrality or increasing renewable energy. It’s finally ending local mandates that all new housing and infill projects must include car storage, even if they’re located within half-mile of transit.
AB 2097 (Friedman) builds on work dating back to 2011 (I blogged about then-Assm. Skinner’s failed attempt) to finally end parking requirements for projects near transit and with a percentage of affordable units. Otherwise, too many local governments have not gotten the memo that California’s climate and equity goals require more housing near transit and reduced need for residents to drive vehicles. Instead, many cities and counties still rely on outdated boilerplate planning requirements that require developers to build parking spots, even if residents don’t want or need them. The spots can run anywhere between $30,000 and $90,000 each to build, increasing the cost of housing and making it less affordable as a result.
So why would the state want to allow locals to mandate car storage? In the past, powerful anti-housing local governments resisted such a state override. But cities and counties have mostly lost that fight. Instead the entrenched interests are those that insist that eliminating these requirements will somehow harm the provision of affordable housing. And if it sounds counter-intuitive to you that making housing cheaper and not mandating car storage hurts affordability, it’s because it is.
Here’s the problem: in California, building new housing requires navigating an incredibly complex soup of state and local requirements. Some advocates for affordable housing use this byzantine system to extract concessions from developers. So if someone proposes relaxing one of these requirements, no matter how nonsensical or counter-productive to the environment and affordability it may be, these advocates will only support doing so if they can extract a concession for more affordable housing in the process.
An example is the state’s density bonus program, in which developers can add more density and reduce parking on a project beyond what the local governments allow, but only if they provide more subsidized affordable units. These advocates therefore worry that ending local parking requirements statewide will eliminate this incentive to build more affordable units.
While that might sound right in theory, in practice it’s not correct at all. Developers make money on increased density — more units on the same parcel. The parking reductions are only valuable in that they allow greater density to be built on the same limited parcel. Basically, developers only request the reduction in parking spaces if it means they can squeeze in extra units.
We’ve seen this in practice. As Mott Smith from USC and Michael Manville at UCLA have documented in multiple years and cities, including in the Los Angeles Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) program, the evidence conclusively shows that reduced parking requirements lead to more affordable housing and does not undermine density bonus programs. Most prominently, in 2019, San Diego abolished parking requirements near transit for all housing projects (which is precisely what AB 2097 would accomplish statewide), and the results were decisive: overall housing units increased 24%, density bonus units increased five-fold, and deed-restricted affordable units via density bonuses increased six-fold.
The evidence is clear. California is behind on meeting its 2030 climate goals, and much of the culprit is due to rising transportation emissions from more driving. We also face a brutal housing shortage, leading to a mass exodus of residents to high-polluting states, pervasive homelessness, and stark income inequalities. AB 2097 would knit a solution to both problems, by making housing more affordable and reducing the need to own a car right near existing transit hubs.
After a decade of waiting, the state’s residents need this crucial reform to abolish car storage mandates. Let’s hope Governor Newsom does the right thing and signs AB 2097.
When California state agencies and other local leaders build or approve projects that increase overall driving miles, state law requires them to mitigate those impacts. A new report from CLEE describes how these agencies can reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by investing in offsite options like bike lanes, bus-only lanes, transit passes, and other measures that can effectively and efficiently reduce a corresponding amount of VMT.
Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), government agencies and developers are required to mitigate (where feasible) the significant environmental impacts of new projects subject to discretionary approval, including impacts to transportation.
Senate Bill 743, originally enacted in 2013, called for a new transportation impact measure that promotes greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction and multimodal transportation. In 2018 state leaders updated the CEQA guidelines to recommend VMT as the preferred impact measurement. VMT focuses on total vehicle trip-miles generated by a new project regardless of where they occur or how much traffic they cause.
Mitigating VMT impacts of new projects has the potential to shift California’s development patterns in a more sustainable, transit-oriented direction. It also creates the opportunity—and potentially the need—to conduct mitigation at locations other than the development site when onsite mitigation is not possible or practical. Such offsite mitigation can address the regional and statewide nature of VMT impacts in the most efficient and cost-effective locations, particularly when mitigation might prove difficult at the site of a suburban or exurban development.
If properly conducted, offsite mitigation could maximize flexible and locally appropriate transit, active transportation, and density investments. But to carry it out, state and local government leaders will need new frameworks to track mitigation obligations, plan investments, and facilitate transactions. CLEE and others have previously proposed “bank” and “exchange” programs to manage these capacities.
CLEE’s new report, Implementing SB 743: Design Considerations for Vehicle Miles Traveled Bank and Exchange Programs advances these proposals with a set of strategies for state agencies like Caltrans (the state agency most likely to be responsible for VMT-inducing projects) and local governments to develop bank and exchange programs that build on their existing environmental mitigation efforts. In addition to analyzing the legal and programmatic setting for VMT mitigation banks and exchanges, the report offers a set of recommendations for policymakers including:
- A state-level program for state agencies to manage mitigation and select locally appropriate investments, likely based on collaboration between Caltrans and other state transportation and land use agencies
- Regional-level programs for local and regional agencies to manage mitigation flexibly and efficiently within appropriate geographic limitations—likely managed by Metropolitan Planning Organizations or Regional Transportation Planning Agencies, but potentially run by large cities or counties in some cases
- Frameworks for analyzing the “additionality” of VMT mitigation investments to ensure that bank and exchange program funds support VMT reductions beyond those that would have occurred anyway
- Strategies for defining equity in the context of VMT mitigation and integrating equity into the decision-making of a bank or exchange program
Cities and counties around the state, from San José to San Diego, are in the process of developing their own approaches that could become, or could integrate into, VMT banks and exchanges. Caltrans and local government leaders will require significant time and resources to develop programs that fit the nature of the VMT-inducing projects they oversee and the needs and priorities of the areas they represent—and many questions remain, from prioritizing different mitigation investments to ensuring those investments are made in an equitable fashion. The strategies outlined in the report should help inform these decisions and advance the VMT reduction efforts initiated by the legislature nearly a decade ago.
This post was originally co-authored by Ted Lamm and Katie Segal on Legal Planet.
It’s another double shot today of me hosting shows on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco Bay Area. First, at 10am PT, I’ll be guest hosting Your Call’s One Planet Series, where we’ll discuss the viability of carbon capture technology in combating climate change. Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide from polluting sources and storing it deep in the ground.
The just-passed (but not yet signed) Inflation Reduction Act includes a change in a crucial tax credit for the carbon capture industry—increasing the government subsidy for capturing CO2 from polluting sources from $50 to $85 per metric ton.
Some environmentalists call these carbon capture subsidies a handout to the oil industry and a distraction from urgently needed actions. How effective is this technology? Joining us to discuss are:
Tony Briscoe, environmental reporter with the Los Angeles Times
Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
Then we’ll cover the socio-environmental impacts of lithium mining to produce electric vehicles. Joining us will be Jennifer Krill, executive director of Earthworks, a nonprofit organization committed to protecting communities from the adverse impacts of oil and gas and mineral extraction.
Second, later today on State of the Bay at 6pm PT, we’ll cover the latest in San Francisco’s housing saga, as the state threatens to take over land use planning for the City. Plus we’ll discuss the rise of autoimmune disorders and learn about California’s youth governor’s race, covered in a new documentary.
Tune in at 91.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area or stream live at 10am PT for Your Call and then again at 6pm PT for State of the Bay. What comments or questions do you have for our guests? Call 866-798-TALK to join the conversation!
Californians would greatly benefit from fast, electrified high speed rail. But the system currently under construction is badly behind schedule and lacks funding to finish. It’s a warning to the rest of the country about our ability to build big, climate-friendly infrastructure.
Vox.com produced a video describing the challenges, featuring some words from yours truly:
The “explainer” channel Cheddar tackled why Los Angeles lost its vast streetcar network and debunks the conspiracy theory that General Motors destroyed it, featuring an interview with me:
