Project Summary
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has been widely cited as a driver of California’s housing shortage and high housing costs, but the magnitude of its effect has proven difficult to confirm empirically. Numerous incremental reforms have had limited and uneven efficacy. In 2025, two laws enacted major CEQA reform for housing supply. This project will explore whether nascent uptake is delivering climate-aligned infill housing, and how this compares to earlier CEQA streamlining provisions. The project will use the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation’s (LCI’s) “CEQAnet” database as the primary data source. It will leverage newly capable AI-assisted extraction methods and will match data to Annual Progress Report (APR) building permit records. In addition to creating the first statewide empirical assessment of these new laws, the project will explore policy implications of the findings.
Findings will be synthesized in a Terner Center research brief targeted at a generalist housing policy audience, mirrored as a UC ITS report, and accompanied by a summary blog with an interactive map. Cleaned code and data will be made available to other researchers. The project team will offer briefings to state agency staff and to the ITS community.
