usc bedrosian center november 18, 2014. oh, let me say one other thing. this is joint with the lusk...

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CEQA AND INFILL DEVELOPMENT:

SHOULD THERE BE A SAFE HAVEN?

EVENT TRANSCRIPTION

USC Bedrosian Center

November 18, 2014

Transcript: CEQA and Infill Development: Should there be a safe haven? USC Bedrosian Center and USC Lusk for Real Estate November 18, 2014 Disclaimer: Please note that the text below may contain transcription errors. >> Raphael Bostic: My name is Raphael Bostic. I am a professor at the Price School of Public Policy and the director of the Bedrosian Center. And I'd like to welcome you to what is an experiment that seems to have worked. So, this is part of a series that my center is doing with other research centers in the Price School where we're trying to intersect policy expertise, issues around specific policies with governance challenges. And as you all know we have a pretty robust and wellknown real estate program. And if there is one real estate issue that faces governance issues perhaps more than other it's CEQA. And so this seemed like a natural thing to do and an opportunity for us to really showcase some of the areas in which USC is trying to create leadership and be solution oriented. So, when I first came to L.A. and USC, I was asked to be active in the real estate program. And there were two things that people came to me with that I heard as the big issues of the day. The first was that it takes way too long to get anything built. And the second is that we were developing in such a sprawling pattern, that we were facing an unsustainable approach to development. And today's panel is actually, you know, a long time coming, but a reaction and a response to both of those in terms of in field development as a strategy for solving how we think about the sprawling patterns of development and getting more density and using our urban spaces more intensively. And then the CEQA challenge, which as we'll talk about a lot through the course of today has made it, made an already difficult process extremely, extremely difficult. And so finding solutions to both of these issues is something that I think is really important for us as a region, for us as professionals in the field, and actually for the nation because it can provide a model for how we move forward to develop in a sensible, compact, high quality of life way in all of our urban places. So, I'm very excited to be here, and I'm very excited to see all of you here for this. Just two other things as introductory remarks, and then I'll shut up and let the people who you came to hear talk. The first is that I'm really, I really think it is very important that we, in the academic space, become a locus for problem solving and solution promoting. So, this conversation that we're going to have today, and it is designed to be a conversation is really going to be forward looking and trying to put forth ideas around solutions that we can then take out and hopefully get as many people to understand, embrace, and promote as possible. And then the second thing is I'm really excited to do this here on campus and in Southern California because I have as one of my soapbox issues the idea that the Southern California voice in policy spaces has not been as loud, as robust, and as coherent as it could be. So, we need to do a whole lot more of these things moving forward. And I am happy that we are taking a big step in that direction. So, as you listen, I hope that you hear things around solutions that strike you as reasonable and that make sense. And if they don't I hope you'll lay in when we open this us. And when we do questions we will, I will ask two things. The first that it actually be a question, and then the second is that you ask a question in a respectful way. But that's, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me first introduce our panelists, and then we can get into other conversation. To my far left or your far right is Mott

Transcript: CEQA and Infill Development: Should there be a safe haven?

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Smith. Oh, let me say one other thing. This is joint with the Lusk Center for Real Estate, which is a great partner for the Bedrosian Center and a great leader in the field. Richard Green is here as its director. And I also want to give a great thanks to the Urban Land Institute in Los Angeles. They have been a tremendous program and have helped us put this together. So, this is a great day and a great program. And let's move to it. So, first to your right, your extreme right, my far left is Mott Smith. He's a principal with Civic Enterprise Associates. I'm trying to make you a plural. You're a big guy. You get lots done. And he has been with USC as a friend and a graduate for, [inaudible] been here as long as I have. So, it's great to have you here. ^M00:05:39 We have, next to me is Ethan Elkind. He is the Associate Director of the Climate Change and Business Program, which is a joint program with, between UC Berkeley Law and UCLA Law. He is as Ann, who you will meet in a moment and noted as a rock star in the field, has books and lots of things, is very much sought after and it's a real pleasure to have you with is. To my immediate right, left for you guys, is Ann Sewill. Ann is the Vice President for Housing and Economic Development at the California Community Foundation. Ann has a long history of being a thought leader in housing both here in Los Angeles and nationwide. She spent a little time in Washington and survived to tell about it. So, Ann, thank you. And fourth we have Rick Cole who is presently the Deputy Mayor for Budget and Innovation for the City of Los Angeles in the Garcetti administration. But Rick has been a leader in the public for many, many years in many cities including Ventura and others. So, a tremendous [inaudible] with us as well. So, that's our panel. But I thought we would do is start with the basics. So, what is CEQA? Why are we here? And why do we think it's a problem? I just want to do this to make sure that we're all on the same page as we start talking more intensely about specific solutions and details. I thought Ethan, maybe you'd kick us off? >> Ethan Elkind: Sure. Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So, I can talk a little bit about what CEQA is. And I think before we talk about what CEQA is we have to think about CEQA is. And CEQA came about in the late '60s. And it came during an era where leading up to that point you had governments, government agencies essentially having a lot of freedom to do what they wanted to do, and people pushed back against that because there were some negative things that happened. So, we can think of freeway expansion as a great example of that. And I worked out at an environmental law center, but, you know, environmental lawyers like myself have to acknowledge that with the advent of so many environmental laws like CEQA and Endangered Species Act, which have had tremendously positive effects on society, it also had the effect of slowing and stopping a lot of things. And a good example, the 105 freeway. I came in from LAX this morning. And in the old days, that freeway would have been pushed through right away. But it happened to be proposed right after CEQA was enacted and its national counterpart NEPA. And it took decades to get the freeway built. And today it probably wouldn't get build. But as a consequence to CEQA and the mitigation measures, you have a rail transit line down the middle and an express lane right next to it. And so CEQA came about in part to put a check on such an unfettered agency and government actions. And a lot of CEQA proponents like to note that it



was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. I think, sometimes I think they like to say that just because it gives it this sort of bipartisan sheen. But the reality is is that I don't think Reagan really knew what he was signing when he signed it [laughter]. Nothing against our former governor. I don't think anyone really knew what was happening when it was passed because it was supposed to apply just to government agencies. And it's got an E in it, right? So, it's a California Environmental Quality Act, but I really think that E is extremely misleading because it's essentially just a public process. And that process is if you are a government entity and you're proposing something, you now have to, or you're a private, well, I'll get into the private part in a second. But if you're a government entity, you now have to start to study the potential effects, the impacts that this project is going to have, and the key here is you have to mitigate if feasible. So, those mitigation measures become very important. But the reason why I said Governor Reagan didn't know what he was signing is that it was only supposed to apply to government projects, public projects, and with a court decision in the early '70s, it was expanded dramatically to essentially cover all private projects as well because private projects have to get, in most cases, have to get some sort of government approval. And that was the hook through which it now applies to everything. And since then it has been expanded through court decisions and amendments. So, the law is now massive. And as an environmental lawyer, it does employ many of the people in my profession. So, that's either a positive or a negative depending on your perspective. ^M00:10:02 In terms of infill development, if I could just briefly touch on that part of it, people quickly realized, I shouldn't say quickly, but I would say definitely by the '90s at least realized that this is stopping a lot of development in our downtown core areas where we need to see more development in part to meet our environmental goals but also just to meet market demand, which has been emerging recently in heavy amounts for that kind of urban connected living. So there have been a lot of efforts to try to streamline CEQA. You'll hear a lot about CEQA reform, and that part of this manifested itself as CEQA exemptions essentially for infill projects. And there's a bunch of them that have been on the books, all the exemptions, almost all of them except for one have really been so complicated. The list of criteria that you have to have as an infill project to qualify have basically made it impossible to qualify. And meanwhile they've tried to come up with what we would call tearing or master planning where you could do a big, master CEQA document for a neighborhood. And then if you're a project that's consistent with that, then you would basically don't have to go through the CEQA process, but many developers you'll talk to say that they are so concerned about getting sued that it's not really bulletproof enough. So, a lot of this quest has been the quest for the bulletproof CEQA exemption. And there is one exception to that. There's a categorical CEQA exemption that does get used quite frequently, but not in hostile jurisdictions. If there's a lead agency that's afraid to kind of use that exemption, they get push back. SO, this sort of leads up today to SB743, which I think will be a topic of the discussion. And looking at what the Governor's Office of Planning and Research is doing now because I believe they've finally hit on an area that is a major impediment under CEQA, which is transportation impacts. And I think that this is finally something that will have some legs.



>> Raphael Bostic: So, before we get to SB 743, could you talk a little bit about the specific process, like how CEQA binds development? Because that will then give us some natural transition to sort of how the reforms sort of take those binds off. >> Ethan Elkind: Sure. And Mott, I'd love to hear your take on this too as an actual developer. But I can just speak just high level. So, if you have a project, there is what's required to be an initial study where they would look at the range of impacts. If it looks like it's not going to have any significant impacts on the environment, then you get a pass. Or if it's not going to have many significant impacts, if you do some simple mitigation measures you basically do those mitigation measures and you get a pass. But if there are some areas of unavoidable impact that would require further study, you get kicked out into what is called an EIR, an Environmental Impact Report. And these things can be the size of multiple phone books if it's a big project. They can take years. And it is open to public comment so that, you know, there's a draft report that's open to comment. And there's always a threat of litigation hanging over that because you have so many areas to study. So you'd look at visual impacts, aesthetics. You'd look at parking, traffic, which we'll get into, traffic impacts. You look at the cumulative impacts it would have over an area around the project area. So, archeological impacts. So, go on and on down the list. It's real easy to find some area where there's been a deficient analysis. And because land use is so particular to that context, there's always new facts. So, it's easy to go to the courts and say, you know, we need to essentially expand an area of CEQA review or take into account new information. So, it's a constantly expanding, evolving area. And for a lot of developers, they complain that there's so much leverage then given to any project opponents. Some who may not necessarily care about the environment. We've seen some horror stories of competitors, economic competitors using CEQA and sometimes as Mott can speak to you have some attorneys because it's a selfenforcing statute meaning that the private lawyers out there can essentially become private Attorney Generals and file a case and then get attorney's fees, which I think is ultimately a good thing in general as a principle because we can't, the Attorney General's Office can't be everywhere all at once. But this puts a lot of pressure on projects. It creates a lot of leverage, a lot of delay, which is time and money. And then I don't know if you Mott wanted to add to that as a developer. >> Mott Smith: Sure. Just out of curiosity, how many people in the room have been through a CEQA process? OK. So, quite a few of you, but not everybody. All right. In super simple terms, CEQA is an obligation of the government agency that's approving your project. However, in practice it becomes the developer's responsibility to see to it that CEQA is complied with. And the legal term for this is as the developer I become the real party in interest even though I'm not technically really a party to the CEQA process. What this means is a government action, over which I have no direct control, I assume complete liability for as a developer. And in many cities including Los Angeles, when I file my application to get a project approved, I actually sign something that says I will indemnify the city for all of its legal costs. So, in practice what this means is that there is this law which was set up with good intent, I would argue really malformed for the urban environment and relying on some very old, kind of 1970's ideas that we can all get



along, and we can all live in harmony with no impact on each other. CEQA does not really treat, it doesn't recognize there are winners and losers in quite the way I think it needs to in urban environments. And if you're always sprawling, as Jerry Brown says, cows don't sue. You know, you can move out very far away and deal with your impacts simply by having nobody around you to impact, which is one of the, I would argue one of the causes of sprawl. ^M00:15:50 So, I'm going to quickly, Raphael just say two things. My personal experience with what this means policy wise. Personally, as a developer, I'm going to tell you everything about my business. I've got one business partner. We split everything 50/50. Our typical deal with our investors is they get have the profits, and my partner and I then get half the profits that we then split 50/50. A good deal for us has a 20% margin. So, that means that if I am doing $2 million of business every year, basically $400,000 of that is 20% margin. Half to my investors. Half to my partner and me. That means $200,000 to my partner and me, $100,000 for him, $100,000 for me. Not a huge salary, but good enough. So, I need reliably $2 million of business every year just to pay my mortgage and buy shoes and all that other good stuff. The way CEQA works because it is not fundamentally concerned with the environment, it's fundamentally concerned with process, if somebody finds a flaw in the process and raises a challenge and it's the lowest standard in the court system for challenging things, to go from a quick mitigated negative declaration review, that's a relatively quick process, to force me to do an EIR, which is the multimillion dollar, multiyear thing, is as simple as making a fair argument to the court that doesn't cost the petitioner or the person challenging you anything. As a result, a oneyear delay in a project causes me to lose half of my salary. It cuts my compensation in half. A twoyear delay in my project causes my compensation to drop by twothirds. And so you can see why the treat of this would make me panic. It would mean that I have to go for bigger projects that accommodate that risk. I have to go for luxury projects whose margins are bigger and can compensate me for that risk. And it means that if I am purely economically driven, I am probably going to go out to the suburbs where cows aren't going to sue me and try to do projects out there. And so it puts, the way CEQA works now, it puts an absolutely tremendous weapon in the hands of anybody who cares to use it because you don't have to have any standing to cause my project to delay one, two, three years. And the results of this are there is a cottage industry in San Diego and Los Angeles and San Francisco of community groups who file CEQA suits and collect settlement payments. I've got a PowerPoint here with tax returns for many of these groups where they're collecting, you know, $250,000 payments, $500,000 payments, $700,000 payments, just to not pose a project. And just to put a wrapper on this, as Ethan said, people bring these lawsuits as private Attorneys' General with all the protections afforded to somebody who is looking out for the interests of the people of California. But when they sign one of these confidential settlement agreements, they are doing it just as an individual saying, "I'm going to drop my lawsuit." And it's a real corruption of the law, and it really has impact on my ability to develop middle income house, my ability to develop small scale projects, the sort of incremental stuff we want to see in our cities, and it's a strong incentive to sprawl. And so that's, you know, my personal experience translated into the policy outcome, which is its, the way it works now,



one of the great reasons why we're undersupplied for lower and middle income housing in our cities, oversupplied in luxury housing, and there's continued pressure to not follow state policy under SB 375 and AB 32 and to continue to sprawl just because the legal risks are so much lower. >> Raphael Bostic: So, that sounds awful [laughter]. >> Mott Smith: I tried to sugar coat it a little. >> Raphael Bostic: Yeah. So, you didn't make us, make me feel any, anything good about this law and the reg and its impact on the marketplace. If something was that awful I would have figured everybody would kind of get it and then move on, if it had such obvious negative and broad based impacts. So, I guess the next question is why isn't that happening? And maybe Rick and Ann, do one of you want to offer reflections on the challenges that we've seen in terms of taking this thing which, well, I should ask two questions. One, do you agree that it has the impact? Because, you know, Mott is a very powerful and compelling advocate, but he could be wrong. And if so, then why have we not seen meaningful reform to squeeze out some of the things and some of these negative impacts? And either of you can go. >> Ann Sewill: I'm happy to start. OK. Is this working? Thanks [inaudible]. So, I am tempted to join Mott in the nobody knows the trouble I've seen story because in my time as a nonprofit developer I've developed thousands of units, and I have accumulated my share of stories like the planning commissioner from another city who was also the slumlord next door who held our affordable housing project up for several hundred thousand dollars in mitigations that were easily just transferred to his, you know, apartment building in cash. And, you know, stories like that, which we all can enjoy wallowing in. But, you know, let's talk about what also has happened or hasn't happened because of CEQA. You know, I think Ethan you mentioned the Century Freeway as we know it here, which took out 7,000 affordable housing units and would have just said, "Gee, that's too bad," were it not for CEQA and for Judge Pregerson who required that they be replaces so, you know, it actually sometimes slows bad things happening as well as slowing good things happening. In the Cornfield Arroyo Seco plan in the City of Los Angeles a couple of years ago after two years of, you know, the affordable housing advocates negotiating with the city, previous administration, previous planning commission, you know, it was really public council saying, OK, I'll dust off the CEQA, you know, handbook that brought everybody to the table to negotiate what turned out to be, you know, a really, you know, a brand new set of tools that were really creative for both market rate developers and affordable developers in that neighborhood. So, I think it, you know, in some cases can be used to protect the public good, and that's what's good about it. What's bad about it is the fact that it can so easily be hijacked for private gain. So, I guess would you add something to that? ^M00:22:43



>> Rick Cole: Right. Well, I think, first of all, let me say I am speaking here individually based upon my experience over 30 years in the public sector, not as an official spokesperson for the Garcetti administration, just so that's clear as people Twitter out my comments [laughter]. Or tweet out my comments. But I would say there's a larger framework, which I think particularly for the young people in the audience is helpful to keep in mind. Democracy is not perfect. Churchill famously said it's in fact the worse form of government ever invented except for all the others. And we often have the impulse that we can make up for the imperfections of democracy by passing a law. And that the law will protect us from doing stupid things to ourselves. The only way to protect ourselves from doing stupid things from ourselves is to stop doing stupid things to ourselves. Passing a law to make it really difficult to do anything is not a good way to protect ourselves from doing stupid things. But as to why CEQA persists unreformed, I think there are two reasons. The people who control the process in Sacramento are developers who everyone hates and environmentalists who everyone love. And they're equally at fault for the gridlock over CEQA reform. The developers would like to sweep CEQA away and be allowed to develop anything, anytime, anywhere. And quite naturally people are suspicious of that stance. And the environmentalists say anything we can do to slow down development is a good thing. So, why should we come to the table and try to reform? And it's that polarization which keeps things from happening in Washington. We see that. The democrats and republicans refuse to do the people's business. And in Sacramento, no one has the guts to stand up to their contributors who are developers, or to their endorsers who are environmentalists. So, the democratic majority, which has run this state now for some time, refuses to do anything except my exceptions for stadiums because the environmentalists don't really care that much about stadiums, and the developers really do. So, that's a winwin for them. But in terms of stopping sprawl, promoting infill development, and doing the things that they say they want to do, they don't have the guts to do it. And I think there's no one to blame except us for not stepping in and asking the developers to be reasonable and the environmentalists to be reasonable and to ask the legislators to do the people's business instead of allowing this gridlock between two very powerful special interests who are standing up for themselves and not for the public good. ^M00:26:08 >> Raphael Bostic: Well, thank you guys because this is a perfect tee up to sort of the next step. All right. So, we clearly have leadership challenges. Right? That's why I'm here actually as the governance part of this that, you know, you need the institutions to be able to deliver on things and to get things done. Do the people's business. And then you have these competing interests who are distrustful and skeptical about the motives and interests of the others, so we get stuck. And I think the stadiums issue is actually instructive because that is actually how we got here and that the stadium development issue is not an issue where the two interests really naturally conflict. And so the next thing to do is to look for other areas, other product types or types of development where there may not be conflict, which gets us to the infill option. >> Rick Cole: And if I could just add, SB 375 is an example, and that's the planning bill that requires regional sustainability plans that passed after AB, whatever it is.



>> Ann Sewill: AB32. >> Rick Cole: AB32, the climate action bill at the state level to really implement that through the planning world. It's the best and only comprehensive planning bill that has passed the state legislature in 40 years. It's a good bill. And it represented the exact opposite of the gridlock with CEQA. The BIA and the League of California Cities and the League of Conservation Voters. So, developers, cities, and environmentalists sat down, and they made a great compromise. Not a perfect bill. Legislators don't create perfect bills. But when people sit down and work through these things, there are solutions. But on CEQA reform, neither side has been willing to be reasonable. And the result is we're not getting anything out of it. And the other pieces of course is legislative leadership. Jerry Brown as the ability and the understanding to push this through. We'll see if it's part of his second term agenda. It certainly should be. He tried to do this when he was Mayor of Oakland. And if you look up SB 1889 from 2004, it's a model for how we might move forward with CEQA reform in the state. It didn't pass. It wasn't signed by the Governor, but it's the sort of thing that now that he is the Governor could be a model as is SB 375. There are ways for pragmatic people to sit down and to work out a better way of doing things. The law itself is quite short although it's lengthened over time. The handbook for interpreting it is more than 1,000 pages. Right? This is a law. And to make sense of the law, there's a book of more than 1,000 pages to understand all the complexities of the law. That is legalese and bureaucracy gone crazy. And it needs to be paired back so that we can have airports, have high speed rail, have urban transit systems, build infill development, continue to be competitive in the global marketplace and protect our local quality of life. Those are the real ends we should keep in mind, not the means that CEQA has grown into. >> Mott Smith: So, I'd love to expand on something that Rick said. I think, I agree that the fundamental dialectic is between environmentalists and the sprawl developers. But there is emerging in Sacramento more, there are more interest groups coming out. There are, for instance, the Infill Builders, a group Ethan and I are both affiliated with that actually like the idea of doing responsible development and feel that some level of planning is appropriate. ^M00:30:16 There are young environmentalists who have gone past the legalistic view of environmentalism who actually think infill is a good strategy. And these groups convened a working conversation last year involving a whole bunch of stakeholders in CEQA to talk about reform. And I was actually amazed at the gridlock that happened in that room because in that room there were affordable housing advocates, social justice advocates, environmental justice advocates, labor advocates, all of whom admitted in the room that they had no particular love of the textbook version of CEQA. However, they all viewed it as one of the only, if not the only tool they had to get their agenda's heard. And this was true across the board. And we, the term that we came up is the off label uses of CEQA that they sort of raise a stink about the spotted owl because they want to negotiate better wages for workers. Or they raise a stink about water because they want



to advocate for affordable housing. And so there's no, there's no question that hearing those voices and incorporating those issues into the conversation, I actually, it's way beyond environmentalists and developers. I think that, those voices need to be incorporated into the conversation if we're going to actually get to a solution. >> Raphael Bostic: So, two thoughts on that. One, you talked about the interest groups with nuance and subgroupings that I don't think many people do. So, I don't know that many people make a distinction between a developer and an infill developer. And so while you think you're different, I'm not sure anybody else does. And I think that's one of the challenges. >> Mott Smith: Well, what we advocate for is different. >> Raphael Bostic: But, somewhat. So, we could talk more about that a little later. But the other thing that all of you are talking about is power. Right? And on college campuses, we actually don't talk about power, raw power enough. But in some sense what you are all saying is that CEQA has become [inaudible] interest more or less power over a host of things that may or may not have anything to do with the development at hand. And we see that again and again. So, to step back to where we are talking SB [inaudible] is a reform proposal [inaudible] infill development. And thinking differently about how CEQA should apply in an infill context, would one of you want to speak a little to that and whether you think it's actually meaningful or not? Because there's an ongoing debate right now as to whether it's a big deal or is this another one of the window dressing around the edge things. So, I'm curious as to your thoughts on that. >> Ethan Elkind: Well, since we're at USC I can make a Trojan pun, and I actually think SB 743 is a Trojan horse, not for infill actually but for what we would call a sprawl project. But I'll get into that in a second. So, just briefly about SB 743, we talked about sports stadium. This has been the big push where you saw it with the proposed NFL stadium in downtown L.A., which is obviously not materializing and then the Sacramento Kings arena. And basically a meaningful CEQA reform was attached at the last minute to this Sacramento Kings arena bill last year, which it wasn't a free pass. These sports stadium don't get free passes. They have pretty, pretty substantial greenhouse gas reduction requirements from these projects. But in exchange for that they get expedited CEQA review. But SB 743 basically gives infill projects a pass, to some extent, on looking at transportation impacts. So, under CEQA now there is a traffic study that has to be done. And almost always in a perverse way penalizes infill projects in particular because in that immediate project area, you're going to be generating a lot of traffic. And that's the area of study. Whereas if you've got an outlying project, you just add an extra lane of traffic and no real transportation impacts there even though you've just built a project that is going out maybe 10,000 more people on the roads at long distances having to drive into jobs. So, if you look at the overall regional impact, it doesn't make sense to penalize an infill project on this and put out a traffic study that is going to be easy pickings for opponents to pick apart. So, SB 743, which was the bill, the Sacramento Kings arena bill essentially required the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, OPR, to come up with an alternative metric. So, not looking at those traffic impacts, but looking at, and as the statute directed, looking at metric length vehicle miles



traveled. So, what's the overall driving that's going to be caused by this project. And if you have an infill project, sure, a lot more traffic in that immediate area potentially, but a lot of people could be walking, biking. If they are driving they are probably not driving that far compared to an outlying project where people would have to drive to get anywhere and have to drive long distances. ^M00:35:23 And so the Trojan horse piece of it is that the way OPR has proposed to implement SB 743 is essentially to give infill projects a pass if they're located within a half mile of a transit stop with the idea of that, by definition if you're close to transit you're going to have less driving caused by the project. And a lot of people are focused on the infill piece of it because it's not really clear what kinds of infill projects. And they also provide this benefit for any project that is built in an area with under the regional average of vehicle miles traveled. So, it's potentially a very large area depending on how you define it. But what people aren't so focused on is that for most infill projects they won't have to do a transportation analysis. But an outlying project now has to suddenly mitigate for all that driving that it's causing. And how do you mitigate it when you're putting a lot more cars on the road? You can't just widen a street. So, the list of a suggested mitigation measures that OPR has proposed includes a lot of pretty dramatic things that could really change the culture of sprawl, as I would call it, in California. So, for example, requiring a mixed use type of outline project. So, no longer just a big subdivision of just housing out in the hinterlands. You now may need to work in some commercial, work in some retail. So, almost like a little minicity where people within that area don't have to drive for everything or transit passes. All sorts of different things that could help reduce driving from that area, or at the end of the day, it may be just a lot harder to build a project in outlying areas. So, that's actually where I think the real effect of SB 743 could be. But we've got hung up because we're very focused on trying to promote infill. And I think the way OPR has written the guidelines is actually very friendly to infill. There's concern it isn't friendly enough. But at the very least we know it's better than the status quo, which is really bad when it comes to these traffic studies and the effects that it has. >> Mott Smith: And Raphael, can I clarify the traffic study issue? >> Raphael Bostic: [Multiple Speakers] hold up. Hold up. >> Mott Smith: Sure. >> Rick Cole: At the risk of muddying the water a little bit, I think one of the fundamental things that makes, that distorts this discussion is the focus in California planning on not planning. I remember as a council member being on the short end of a vote and proposing in exasperation that we simply rename the planning commission the reacting commission. It failed to get a second [laughter]. But projects are not the way to plan cities. It's fundamentally flawed to think of creating a great city just as a collection of individual incremental decisions. And, in fact, we



should have very clear understanding of what we want and expect in a neighborhood on a particular street in a particular area. And then it should be extremely easy to build it and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to build something else. And the project focus in California has two really corrosive flaws besides the CEQA process. The first fundamental flaw is that that's not the way you build great places. Great places for 5,000 years have been built in harmony with the climate and harmony with the topography and harmony with the history and culture of a place. And so when you go to an island in Greece, or when you go to a Mexican village, or when you go to an English country town, or when you go to central Paris, there's a coherence. There's a, there is a coherence not only at the macro scale but at the micro scale. That was done with coding. And we obliterated that 60 years ago. And so it's a terrible way to build cities is one building, one project, one megathing at a time. The second thing is it's fundamentally corrupting because someone, as and the economics that Mott laid out, are someone is going to make a great deal of money or not depending on the decisions of public authorities. And in a society in which a lot of money is sluicing around we have both legal and illegal corruption. The legal corruption is, in order, you have to pay to play, you have to make campaign contributions. You have to hire politically connected bagged men and women. You have to hire lobbyists and facilitators and expeditors and, you know, all of that. And then the illegal contribution, which we see occasionally, is people actually pass, you know, envelopes of cash to building inspectors and planning people and commissioners and council members. That's not as big a problem as the legal corruption, which is pervasive. So, we stopped planning in California, and we react. Developers come in and say, "On this place I want to build this. It doesn't actually fit the rules, but the rules are from 40 years ago, and nobody cares about those rules anyway. So, let's just approve my project. The neighbors say, "I don't care what the zoning says. It's a single family neighborhood. It's always been a single family neighborhood. I will die if you change it. And so I'll sue you to kingdom come." And we have this incredible battle project by project by project by project, and we think that's planning. ^M00:40:58 But it's, so fixing CEQA is important. But CEQA is more of a symptom. The real underlying problem is we just don't do planning anymore. We don't do coding. And we simply do reacting to individual developers proposing individual projects. >> Raphael Bostic: So [inaudible]. So, Rick, I want to, given that, do you think that this effort in SB 743 is going to make any difference? I mean, is it meaningful? Or is this merely just, you know, something that is just biting around the edges, and we won't see any big changes in terms of how infill development plays out? >> Rick Cole: Well, you know, I think to quote a coach from a different school in Los Angeles, you ought not to let the perfect by the enemy of the good. Some break in this monolith of CEQA gridlock in and of itself is probably a positive. And we ought not to overplay it or overhype it. Neither however should we say, "Oh, well it isn't, it isn't the be all and the end all. I think if it's the first step, and we recognize it's the first step, and we continue to push the envelope, it



moves us in the right direction. But, again, fundamentally, we've got to invest actually in planning and coding our cities. It's a hard thing to say to local governments who are strapped right now. But it is, if we want to make great places and we want to compete in the global economy, we have to make better places because the rest of the world is making better places. Berlin is making a better place. Singapore is making a better place. Tokyo is making a better place. Paris is making a better place. For God's sake, Shenzhen is making a better place. And, you know, Shenzhen has grown from a village of 30,000 people to a metropolis of 14 million people in 35 years. And it's not that bad. I mean it's got some really terrible parts of it because it's kind of like Dickens, you know, it's where 40% of the world's electronics are built and 90% of the world's toys come from this city and its surroundings. But it's remarkable how good a job they're doing from scratch in 35 years to build a city of 14 million. We've got a city of four million that we're having a really hard time figuring out how to put one foot in front of the other. So, I think we have to do planning. And I don't mean ten years of slogging through text but genuinely coding for what we want, and then make it really easy for developers to build it. And then make it really hard for someone to come in and put the Staples Center on top of it, right? But, you know, make it, and if we really need a Staples Center then it's worth going through all the brain damage of environmental impact reports, etcetera. But for bread and butter, housing, offices, stores, this should not be complicated. This should be pretty simple. And it's not. It's just not. >> Raphael Bostic: So just a, two reactions. One is China has been able to make significant moves because they just declare things, and people have to do it. Right? So, the notion that there's a public dialogue and debate is absent. And so they just make it happen. Singapore it was amazing that they talk about it as home ownership. But you can wake up one day and have an envelope slipped under your door that says, "You're moving tomorrow because we're tearing this building down. And you move." All right. So, it's just very, very different than what we have here. And then the second thing is, when I was in China it was the first time I had ever seen a pollution storm that, where the air actually attacked you [laughter]. And that is. >> Rick Cole: Yeah. I mean, we're getting far field in CEQA here. But, again, London looked like that 150 years ago, and now it looks very different. Again, I cited Paris and Berlin. Certainly not examples where the government comes and kicks your door in the middle of the night. It is possible in a democratic system. It's possible in an authoritarian system. If you want to build great places, we have 5,000 years of knowing how to build great places, and we have 60 years of amnesia taught in our academic institutions to this day. And we got to change the paradigm. We've got to return to some timeless ways of building. And we've got to make it really easy. You know, the row houses of Baltimore is a really simple, effective way of housing a ton of people at humane densities. ^M00:45:56 And, you know, it worked 150 years ago when we had this same kind of affordable housing problem because we had people pouring into American cities from all over the world, and we just stamped out, you know, in New York and the Bronx, in Baltimore, in Chicago, we stamped



out a human scale habitation that to this day is treasured, and we can't seem to do it today without, you know, an Environmental Impact Report and a lawsuit. >> Raphael Bostic: So, I don't disagree that we're not having it done. I don't think it's because we don't have plans. We do have plans. We do. But what we don't have is the will to actually enforce them. And. >> Rick Cole: Well, actually I would agree with you except it's, what we have are plans. I've read these plans. Trust me. I've made some of these plans. Trust me. And the vast majority of California general plans have a chapter that says, "This will be a lovely place to live and work and play with mix of uses and pedestrian transit oriented development." And then you flip to the back, and it's the same old crap. It's the same parking ratios. It's the same turning ratios. It's the same fire regulations. It's the same stuff that we built sprawl with except it's now have this chapter about how it's all going to lead to nirvana. And that's not a plan. That's a fantasy. The plan is in the back. And unless you change the parking ratios and the turning ratios and all that, that's what planning is [multiple speakers]. And we don't do that. >> Raphael Bostic: So, I want to bring you back for our next session, which will be on how do we do effective planning because I think there's some conceptualization on this, but I do think that there is, there are real issues on the ground. And when I first came here and people talked about buy right [inaudible], buy right doesn't mean buy right. You can't do just those things. And so we need, there's a lot to explore here. But I want to go to the other side of the table and ask do you agree that, from what Rick is saying, this is kind of not that important? You know? It's a first step. We shouldn't expect to see major changes in outcomes on the ground, but by starting to melt the iceberg it's a meaningful thing that we should celebrate. Do you guys agree with that? >> Ethan Elkind: I'll go first. I do agree with a lot of what Rick said. I mean, we shouldn't assume that this is going to be the thing that ends, you know, all the challenges of CEQA. This is just one part of CEQA when it comes to infill. And beyond that, as Rick described, there's a larger context here. It's easy to assume that CEQA is the root of all evil when it comes to our development patterns in California. But like Rick really described pretty vividly how planning is really the first step in all of this. That if you're not, if you don't have a project that's compliant with the zoning, or there's an area that has really restrictive zoning, you're not even going to get to the point as a project developer, as a CEQA attorney where there's anything to be even discussed there. That's just off the table. So, our land use planning is a big factor that prevents a lot of smart development and encourages a lot of bad development. You also have things like Prop 13, which encourages local governments to green light a lot of retail uses over housing because they get the sales tax revenue, and they can't get the property tax revenue. And likewise, you might have a lot of commercial property owners that have very little incentive to sell because of Prop 13. They have low commercial tax, property tax bases. So, there's a lot of different factors here. CEQA is, I think is one of the top five impediments I would say to infill development. But it's not the only one. And this particular reform is one aspect of CEQA. Now,



it's a big arrow in the quiver of project opponents that is being removed by taking the traffic study out. But it's definitely not going to solve the whole problem. >> Mott Smith: Yeah. I think SB 743 does two things that are important. One is, and nobody said this yet, but it has to be said that before SB 743, delaying cars by a few more seconds of intersections was considered an environmental impact under California's Natural Resources Protection Law. Now increasing the number of cars driving on the road and the miles they are driving is considered an environmental impact under California's Natural Resources law. That is huge. We've actually aligned the law with common sense about the environment. Driving fewer miles is better for the environment. So, that's big. The other thing which it does is it tries to create a safe haven, your terms, for infill as a way of dealing with some of the friction, the barriers that Rick talked about. ^M00:50:42 Now, I'd like to introduce a concept, and I wonder if it's OK Raphael if I invite Ann to respond to what I am about to say. But and then I'm going to credit Chris Redfearn for this paradigm, which is we haven't talked about winners and losers. And one of the reasons why, you know, Paris is Paris is because at the time Houseman was doing his thing, human rights didn't mean very much. And it was easy to remake a city at any human cost. At the time that we were building the row houses in Baltimore, these were being built on green fields at the time. And there was not political human cost. There were no losers in that transaction. The beauty of sprawl, something we never talk about is that sprawl in, looked at through the current lens doesn't have any losers. It's fantastic. I can go someplace where nobody is going to bother me, and I'm not going to bother them. It's wonderful. That's the American suburban dream. The problem is we can't, we can't say we're going to be conflict free and say we care about the health of the Earth at the same time. That's the realization that we suddenly have. And it means we've got to come back to the city. And there are no green fields in Los Angeles anymore. Now that [inaudible] and Porter Ranch are built. And so we can't really do what Rick is talking about, as much as I would love to, without it impacting people, without it impacting, you know, at the high end without it impacting business competitors who might use CEQA as a way of holding onto their turf or, and again this is why I'm really interested in Ann's thoughts on this, without it impacting low income people who tend to have the smallest voice in any urban transaction. And so this is why I believe we have not been able to unite the knot of CEQA. It's because we have not sorted out the power dynamics, and we have not sorted out how we are going to take care of the existing incumbents, whether they're powerful incumbents or weak incumbents. >> Ann Sewill: We didn't rehearse this at all. So, we, in my work in affordable housing, one of the things that we've thought about a lot in the last couple of years is the opportunities and the challenges created by the big, the $40 billion that we are collectively spending to expand the transit system in L.A. County. And we're building something like 75 new stations in the City of L.A. and another 25 or 30, you know, countywide on top of the hundred that we already have. And this is a great opportunity that is going to change our neighborhoods. And the first time that



we at the foundation gathered a lot of the representatives of community groups that we work with and we fund in South L.A. and Boyle Heights and Pacoima together, one of them said, "Nothing good has ever come to my neighborhood from federal transportation policy." And we all kind of stopped and thought about that and said, "Yeah, you probably have a point. Your neighborhood was cut in half by the 10 freeway, you know. You've been more and more squeezed out of, you know, just the neighborhoods right around here." The impact that you're seeing already from the expo line is that your neighborhood is changing rapidly. Car ownership is going up. People are being forced away. The core transit riders can't live next to transit anymore. So, how do we address that? And one of the things we've actually been working with Marlon Boarnet and with some others, a study he's advising on with the Center for Neighborhood Technologies that actually led to the cap in trade money being used for affordable housing as part of the sustainable communities plan is looking at the relationship between income and vehicle miles traveled and proximity to transit. And logically if you make more than $100,000 a year, you know, Mott's example here in this city. >> Mott Smith: The developer hasn't been sued. >> Ann Sewill: The developer hasn't been sued, and you live right next to a transit stop, you probably would take that transit to and from work, but you're not necessarily going to take it to and from the doctor, the grocery store, church, whatever, you know, the YMCA. You're going to drive your car for a lot of your nonwork trips. If you're a low income person, you're going to take that for 60% of your trips. So, if you let low income people live in reasonably proportion next to transit, you're going to increase your ridership, you're going to reduce your vehicle miles traveled. ^M00:55:17 So, the concern that I have when Mott and the infill builders start talking about proximity drives vehicle miles traveled or when SCAG talks about we're going to drive 60% to 80% of all new development next to transit, and that will meet our greenhouse gas emissions goals is I'm always, you know, with all my friends, who are not that many people and were not the people with envelopes of cash in city hall, are always saying only to the extent that you remember that income matters and that keeping spaces for low income people near transit is really what's going to drive that reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. >> Raphael Bostic: So, do you think that when we think about SB 743 as sort of CEQA relief, should there be an income component to that? Should there be? >> Ann Sewill: Yes. I do. I mean, I think anytime you, I've looked at the VMT calculator. And I think you cannot pretend that it's income neutral, that I am going to live next to transit and take it as much as, you know, somebody who earns $25,000 a year. The average Metro rider, train or bus, makes around $25,000 a year. So, that's just, I mean just to give you a sense, the median income in L.A. County, the median wage is, you know, the household income is under $40,000.



Now people double up so you have a higher income. So, yeah, you have to kind of assume that income is going to matter a lot in how people respond to the opportunity of transit right next to them. >> Raphael Bostic: So, just a note for any of you out there who are thinking about making comments on SB 743, I think the public comment period on the guidelines is open now. I think it closes on Friday. So, if you hear things you should jot them down maybe and pen a letter to get that out. I should also say this is being recorded. So, if people are not, that you know, have not been able to be here that want to become informed or follow this, you should let them know. We'll get a link out. But this is important. What do you guys think about the income set aside? I mean when thinking about safe haven, I'm wondering is there a way we can describe the type of the element both in terms of its scale, activity, and character. >> Rick Cole: Is that a decision that will be made in Sacramento? I mean, you know, it's an important issue, and I agree with Ann about the policy implications. But setting an arbitrary set of numbers or formulas in Sacramento that will apply in Redding, Temecula, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chula Vista, and for that matter Delano. I mean, you know, at a certain point we have to begin to put responsibility back on decision makers in local communities. And if they're making bad decisions, instead of suing them you vote them out. I know it's an old fashioned notion, but I think that to say the only way to stop people from doing stupid things is to sue them, it is to give up on democracy. If people do stupid things, they need to be removed from office and replaced with people who will make smarter decisions. But having one plaintiff or a series of plaintiffs, you know, relying on the courts to deliver social goods is, I think, just not the way to run a railroad. >> Ann Sewill: And I would agree with that, but I also think that we have a responsibility to educate ourselves and to pretend that one car driven by, that all is equal when there's information that says that it isn't is something that we have a responsibility to look at. >> Raphael Bostic: But I actually think it's even, I'm troubled by that because what is often neglected, what isn't always in the private good, and, you know, there are lots of theories like the [inaudible] hypothesis which would suggest that many social goals aren't going to be achieved if we require each local jurisdiction to do it because none of them will. Right? The antidiscrimination actions in this country, if we had wanted to have all of the local governments do that, we would not be, I wouldn't be sitting here today. Right? So, there are going to be a set of things because of the power dynamic that we can't rely on local. ^M00:59:57 And, you know part of the debate in public policy is, you know, what is in that sect, right? And in this case, you know, we have to think, you know, what's, what is the power of the voice for [multiple speakers] income people.



>> Rick Cole: Sure. On principle I totally agree with you. But, again, the question is the means. >> Raphael Bostic: Oh, I agree with that. >> Rick Cole: And we actually have a state policy, which I think should be set at the state level, which apportions out to each community a fair set of their share of affordable housing. That should have teeth. And how people get to it is my point. Set the goal at the state level, and then let local communities figure out how to achieve it. But don't let them off the hook and say, "Oh, well, you know, you couldn't achieve it." They have to develop their affordable housing goals. And it makes a lot more sense where there is transit, to put it next to transit. >> Mott Smith: Yeah, so, I, the one thing that I would challenge Ann, there is very little that I would challenge Ann on because I have got enormous respect for her views on this, is the notion that we should make it more difficult for market rate housing. That it's a zero sum game. That market rate housing means the loss of affordable housing. I think in fact the most dangerous thing is that we exclusively pursue affordable housing at the expense of market rate housing. And then we end up with sort of the silver lake type gentrification everywhere we go where every hipster that moves in is taking over the apartment that was owned by a lower income family because we haven't built the housing for that hipster, the new housing for the hipster. So, and I understand I am referring to hipsters as though they are a specific animal class [laughter]. And I shaved my handlebar mustache today. But in all seriousness, I think preservation of the existing housing that is the de facto affordable housing is, should be an absolute paramount goal. I think producing new affordable housing should be second to preserving the existing housing. And I think producing substantial amounts of easy to build market rate housing that take the pressure off the unrestricted low income housing stock needs to be the third goal. >> Raphael Bostic: All right. Thank you. This conversation has gone way over time. I'm getting yelled at by my staff. So, we need to open this up to the floor. And I'd like to entertain any questions or questions, we'll start here Richard? >> Speaker 1: Could it be the reason CEQA survives is not because of interest group politics but because the people of California really like it? And I can't help but think about how when I drive through Beverlywood there are signs complaining about more developments in Century City. Which if you bought in Beverlywood in the last 40 years, you should probably know there's going to be more development in Century City. So, you know, it's just, it gives [inaudible], it makes it very easy to do. And most people wanted, like NIMBYs. That's the first question. Is it that people just like it? The second is, I couldn't help when I heard Rick's comments about Shenzhen and L.A., I think, no I'd rather live in L.A., do you consider [inaudible] consider Houston to be a successful city? A city with rapid employment growth and very low housing prices?



>> Mott Smith: The first one I would argue NIMBYs are in interest group and aren't necessarily reflective of the people of California. And I think about Jeffrey Canada's book, "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun," about, at least his anecdotal story of growing up in New York City where when he was a kid everybody in his neighborhood sort of knew the pecking order and knew who would win every fight because they were fought with fists. And so people didn't actually fight very much. But when guns showed up suddenly a little fouryearold could kill, you know, a 30yearold champion boxer. And it mean that every fight actually had to be fought and really change the dynamics. And I would argue CEQA is kind of like a gun because anybody can use it against anybody else. And I think when you're in that low trust environment that's created by that, it's kind of hard to lay down your weapons. And I think that's the situation we're in. >> Ethan Elkind: And if I could just add to that, the line I have heard is that everybody hates CEQA until they use it to stop a project they don't like, and then they're suddenly a big CEQA fan. So, I think there's some of that dynamic. I think some if too is that we don't have a really good sense of data here. I mean this conversation is very anecdotally driven. We don't have a good tally of what are the benefits that CEQA brings and the negatives. And I think for folks in Sacramento it can be, it's such a technical type of statute. And the way that it's implemented is technical. And it's hard to kind of get your hands around it. And then in terms of Houston, I was in Houston a long time ago. I can't comment on how it's been developing recently. But when I drove through it, I couldn't believe how ridiculous it was to have these multiple skylines without any real zoning there. But I think it does point to the need for more housing in general in California, particularly in coastal California. The inland areas still have a lot of economic challenges. But it's a supply and demand issue. Our housing costs are way too high. And it's really crippling our middle class in particular in California leading to that stratification. A lot of businesses won't locate here because they have to pay their employees so much because they can't afford a home. ^M01:05:22 For the people who want to stay here, it's, they are getting squeezed doubling up in rental units. I mean obviously we're concerned about low income people, but we have a real middle class problem in California. And so we should have been on a fast track to boosting housing across the state. We're really far behind, and it's really hurting our economic competitiveness. So, in that sense, not that I want to move to Houston, but, you know, I hope that we in California can do a much better job in producing housing. >> Speaker 2: Fantastic answer. >> Rick Cole: Just for the record I'd rather live in Los Angeles than Shenzhen also [laughter]. But it has been my experience that when you talk to people outside of a public hearing, which is that place in American society where no one listens, that people are actually much more rational and much more interested in the common good than when you have a project lined up and you have three minutes to be either for it or against it. And it has been my experience in Pasadena,



Ventura, West Hollywood, Azusa, and Los Angeles, that when you engage a wide range of stakeholders in a discussion about how to build great places, the people are more sensible, less emotional, and more inclusive than they are when there's a project being shoved down their throat next door. And that's why I think we should do planning instead of project by project slugging or fighting or gun fighting or whatever. If you ask people, the answers you get depend a lot on the questions you ask. And if you ask people do you want a toxic waste dump next door to you, the answer is pretty obvious. But if you ask people, do you think there should be a toxic waste dump somewhere? Then they say, well, I guess there should be. And then you begin to enter into a discussion about, well, it's got to go somewhere, and we got to put it somewhere. And then you plan for it, and you mitigate for it, and you do all that. That's the process that we're shortcircuiting. That's why we have, I think, such a rash of NIMBYs is if we, if nobody is involved in deciding these things until it shows up proposed in your backyard, you're going to be reactive. And we do way too much reactive than proactive. And that really was my point about Shenzhen, not that it's a model of Los Angeles, but they're very intentional about what they're doing. Why can't we be intentional about what we're doing? We should make Los Angeles a beautiful, affordable, prosperous, safe, and successful city and expect that the current way we do planning is going to produce that is to roll the dice. And that's not a, that maybe works for Las Vegas, but it's not a good model for Los Angeles. We should be intentional about what we want. And then we should insist that that's what we get. And frankly if you look at some other cities in Southern California they've done a better job of that. And we should learn from that. >> John Gibbons: There's a fundamental question I want to ask, and then I'll [inaudible]. Ethan, I guess the question I have is why, the big change in CEQA was when it went from government decisions about government projects to government decisions about all projects. And I certainly remember the days when CEQA was formed. That's when I decided to be a planner. And there were crazy things being proposed. Good people were proposing crazy things. Freeways crisscrossing neighborhoods, freeways cross Santa Monica Bay and wiping out Santa Monica pier and going through [inaudible] Canyon or whatever. These were, this was the kind of progressive modern world that CEQA, you know, ran up against. And so I, you know, CEQA may have saved Ocean Park in Santa Monica from being Miami Beach, but it is now used to save, you know, one building from being built on Ocean Park that has a roof that may be five to ten feet taller than the other. So, let's put it in context. So, the question I have Ethan is, can the, can reform roll back [inaudible] decision [inaudible] decision that broadened the scope of CEQA? And then one last comment just to reinforce Mott's and not to disagree with Ann's, but the fact in the situation here is that development has the least impact, direct impact on displacement and any form of displacement of economic diversity that we have in our neighborhoods. It is the progressive, incremental change in housing, in the rental housing stock, which is [inaudible] fundamental nature predominantly [inaudible] as market rates dries up. And it is a challenge to. >> Raphael Bostic: John, I got to. >> John Gibbons: Okay. Let me just finish this one comment.



>> Raphael Bostic: OK. ^M01:10:49 >> John Gibbons: It is a challenge to the housing advocates to move beyond affordable housing production and funding at affordable housing formulas. It's Mott's analogy of the gun. CEQA becomes the solution, the lowest common denominator solution for everybody who is struggling to protect [inaudible]. But back to my question. >> Ethan Elkind: So, very quickly. Yes, we could, the legislature could over, basically change the language so that court decision that allowed CEQA to apply to private projects as well could be overturned. And that's not going to happen just politically. And I don't know if we want that to happen. And you mentioned good planners making crazy decisions. I don't know if we want to go back to that world. What I would like to see just as sort of a proposal is that we develop a class of projects that we recognize are essentially bringing an environmental good. And we've done that to some extent with the sports stadium and also $100 million projects. These kind of crazy streamlining where if you have, if you meet a certain greenhouse gas threshold you get this favored treatment. And I don't understand why we don't have that for a broad class of projects that we feel are environmentally critical in the state and align with our state environmental goals particularly on greenhouse gas emissions. So, that would mean infill projects. That could mean a number of transit projects. It could mean high speed rail. And put those projects in whole different category because they don't belong in the sort of traditional CEQA purview in my opinion. >> Raphael Bostic: Well, thank you Ethan. That'll have to be, I think, the last word. We're right at 1:30. And I think it ends on the right tone. The impetus for this session was really to ask the question, you know, what should be the things that we should make easy to do. And we've had sort of a wideranging conversation that touches on a lot of the reasons why it's hard, but it has also lifted up some things for us to think about moving forward. I think about this issue of infill. In San Jose, I think there has been a CEQA challenge for bike lanes, 30 miles of bike lanes has been held up for four years. And you would think that these are things that should align pretty easily and pretty straightforward. So, finding ways to make the sensible the possible I think is where we want to get to [multiple speakers]. And that's really important. A couple thank yous. First, I want to thank Donna Jean Ward and Aubrey Hicks who are my staff members who put this put together. Please [applause]. ^M01:13:20 [ Applause ] ^M01:13:25 >> Raphael Bostic: Jeremy and Justine. Please stand up. Wave your hands so everybody knows who you are.



^M01:13:31 [ Applause ] ^M01:13:35 So, we're a small group, but we actually get a lot done. So, thank you all. I want to thank the Lusk Center and particular Sonia Savoulian and Richard Green for their support of this activity. I want to think Chris Redfearn because he's another professor with us. And he's the one who made us all sit down and start talking about doing this. So, thank you Chris. ^M01:13:54 [ Applause ] ^M01:13:58 I'd like to thank Gail Goldberg and the Urban Land Institute. They're a great partner for these things. And last but certainly not least, I want to thank this panel. You guys have been great. Really thoughtful talking to each other rather than at each other. This has been a wonderful conversation. So please join me in thanking them. ^M01:14:15 [ Applause ] ^M01:14:20 And so the last thing I want to say is make sure you are on all of our mailing lists. I want you to know the things we are doing. Lots of things have come out of this. We will do this again in the not too distant future. So, thank you. And have a great day. ^M01:14:33



usc bedrosian center november 18, 2014. oh, let me say one other thing. this is joint with the lusk...

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