Greenbelt Alliance

Updated on August 11, 2026, to reflect the proposition name. Originally published on January 16, 2026.

For advocates working at the intersection of environmental protection and climate-smart growth, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has long been a source of both pride and frustration. While it has been a critical tool to protect our natural and working lands, its procedural delays have often been used to stall projects essential to a low-carbon future: dense infill housing and transit-oriented development in our existing communities.

In July 2025, however, at the urging of Governor Newsom, the California legislature passed some of the most impactful changes to CEQA since its inception. Taken together, the two bills (AB 130 and SB 131) provide robust statutory CEQA exemptions for infill housing and housing element rezonings, require the state to map infill areas where exemptions would apply, and narrow the scope of the administrative record, helping to curtail anti-housing litigation.

Despite these monumental changes that address the barriers to critical infill development, California’s business lobby and sprawl developers were left unsatisfied. Now, they are proposing a ballot initiative that would make far more radical changes to the law. After gathering enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, this is now called Proposition 45.

While the rhetoric of the measure (initially called Building an Affordable California Act, or BACA) seems to be aligned with urbanist goals and those of the broader abundance and affordability movements, the actual policy details and mechanics of the initiative—and the progress we’ve already achieved in the legislature last year—suggest that the costs it brings far outweigh any potential benefits.

Below, we outline seven reasons why the measure should be rejected (click to read more):

1. Major Reforms Have Already Been Enacted

For years, a primary objective for California’s urbanists was to stop the abuse of environmental law against projects that genuinely help the environment: dense, transit-oriented housing.
In a landmark shift for the state, that goal has largely been realized. Following years of advocacy by urbanists, the legislature passed a clean statutory CEQA exemption for infill housing. AB 130, which Greenbelt Alliance was proud to support, is already being utilized across California, allowing builders to move forward with climate-friendly housing in high-opportunity areas like Palo Alto or Beverly Hills without the threat of being endlessly delayed by the environmental review process. While there is room for technical refinements, the fundamental issue at hand—the misuse of environmental laws to delay environmentally-friendly housing projects—has largely been addressed.

2. Everything is “Essential”

As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details”, and that’s certainly true for the BACA initiative. While modest on the surface, BACA creates a completely new set of rules for what it calls “essential” projects. So what, exactly, is an “essential project”?

The list is incredibly broad. Under Article 2, Section 21013, “essential projects” include housing, water, transportation, clean energy, transmission, broadband, and healthcare infrastructure. In practice, this definition encompasses a wide range of large-scale developments. For example, new freeways and existing freeway expansions would qualify as “essential transportation” projects; large greenfield sprawl developments would be treated as “essential” housing projects; and new dams and reservoirs would qualify as “essential” water projects. The definition even includes all “related and ancillary infrastructure,” meaning that highway interchanges, utility extensions, and water pipelines that enable sprawl developments also receive streamlined approval. All of these are enormous projects in terms of size and scale, with major potential environmental impacts. Yet, just like an apartment building in an urban area, under BACA, they would qualify for a significantly truncated review process.

In effect, this new CEQA process mirrors the fundamental flaw of its predecessor. While the old system failed to exempt low or no-impact projects from excessive review, the new one errs in the opposite direction, fast-tracking high-risk developments with significant potential for harm.

3. All Timelines Are Not Created Equal

The BACA initiative imposes strict timelines for this new class of projects that it deems “essential”: the environmental review process can take no more than one year. On the surface, a one-year limit on an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) seems reasonable. And for certain projects, like an apartment building on a parking lot in downtown San Francisco, or a townhome development in an LA suburb, it would be.

However, the measure’s definition of “essential” includes highways, dams, large-scale subdivisions, and other major projects. The environmental review required for projects at this scale cannot be done in a single year. Surveying hundreds if not thousands (or even tens of thousands) of acres of undisturbed and undeveloped land for species nesting patterns and habitat, water pollution impacts, and other environmental concerns physically cannot be accomplished within the timeframe laid out in the initiative. By forcing these projects into such a condensed timeline, we will be creating a system that overlooks genuine environmental harm in favor of speed.

For projects with unambiguous environmental benefits, such as housing developments within already urbanized areas, such speed makes sense. Many of the project types considered by this measure do not have the same clear, unambiguous benefits.

4. Restrictive Alternatives

One of CEQA’s most critical tools for preventing environmental harm is its alternative analysis provision, which allows for the identification of better project locations and designs. Currently, CEQA requires agencies to analyze a “reasonable range of alternatives” that could reduce environmental impacts, including different sites, reduced intensity options, and designs that avoid sensitive resources. This is how agencies can say, “this housing should be built downtown on a parking lot instead of on farmland,” or “this highway expansion has an alternative transit solution.”

BACA restricts this to just three options: the proposed project, one alternative designed by the applicant themselves (which doesn’t even need to be at a different location), and “no project.” The applicant’s alternative can be a slightly modified version of their original proposal on the same site. This eliminates the core mechanism for steering projects away from environmentally sensitive locations toward more appropriate sites, exactly the tool needed to prevent sprawl, protect open space, and ensure development happens in the right places.

5. The Evidentiary Standard

Maybe the most radical change incorporated in the ballot measure is to CEQA’s standard of review. Right now, CEQA allows a lead agency (generally a city or county) to use its own discretion to explore project alternatives and negotiate environmental mitigations. BACA proposes to eliminate this by requiring that environmental impacts only be found significant if they violate objective, quantifiable standards already in existing law when the project was proposed, which doesn’t sound inherently unreasonable! 

However, the measure doesn’t actually require jurisdictions to adopt such standards; instead, it exploits their absence. If numerical thresholds don’t already exist for resources like oak woodlands, groundwater, or wildlife corridors, impacts to them essentially can’t be found significant regardless of severity. A genuine objective standards approach would mandate jurisdictions adopt protective thresholds and update them as science improves. This measure rewards weak standards, freezes them at application date, and prevents improvements based on new knowledge.

6. Ballot Box Permanence

Finally, one of the greatest flaws of the measure is its rigidity. Should it pass, BACA would require a 2/3rds vote of the legislature to amend.

California has a long, storied history with ballot box governance, where initiatives become impossible to adjust as new problems arise. The 2/3rds requirement virtually guarantees the law could never be changed, regardless of what issues may arise. An unchangeable measure, with foreseeable negative impacts for the state, may have lasting consequences for generations.

Some of the project types included in this measure, such as clean energy or transmission infrastructure, may benefit from the types of streamlining being considered if careful, targeted changes were made. Rather than a broad, clunky initiative that will be extremely difficult to change, we should advocate for those reforms through the legislative cleanup process already underway.

7. The Costs Are Just Too High

California faces converging affordability crises: insurers fleeing the state, utility rates climbing, and municipal budgets straining under unsustainable costs. All of these issues stem from the same source: decades of sprawling outward, often into fire-prone areas, leaving us with infrastructure we cannot afford to maintain and risks we cannot afford to insure.

BACA will accelerate these failures by trading short-term speed for permanent costs. By gutting CEQA’s alternatives analysis—the primary tool for steering projects away from costly, high-risk locations—this limits agencies to the developer’s preferred site, one alternative the developer designs themselves, and “no project.” It freezes environmental standards at the date of application, rewarding jurisdictions with weak protections. And it requires agencies to approve permits within strict timelines regardless of fiscal consequences, because most cities lack the quantitative standards BACA requires to find fiscal impacts “significant.”

The result: even if we build some things faster today, we’ll be paying the tab forever. Even more homes in fire zones will continue to destabilize our insurance markets. More infrastructure extensions will push up our utility rates. More sprawling subdivisions that generate less revenue than they cost to maintain will ensure even higher taxes. BACA promises affordability through speed but delivers the opposite: cheaper to build, but financially ruinous to sustain.

At a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, and when the federal government is doing all it can to roll back our environmental protections, the last thing we need is to double down on the failed policies we have tried for decades and know do not work.

Proposition 45 will hurt the environment and your wallet.

Greenbelt Alliance strongly opposes Proposition 45 and urges voters to vote NO on 45 this November.

The post Chamber-Backed CEQA Initiative Is A Proposition Californians Can’t Afford: No on Prop 45 appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

The author, Betsy Pfeiffer, was a UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) Fellow and Greenbelt Alliance research collaborator between February and May 2026.

How do we help Californians understand that building homes in existing communities is good for commutes, wallets, and the environment? Over the first half of 2026, I had the opportunity to work with Greenbelt Alliance to identify existing housing and climate narrative strategies and develop guidance to increase impact.

To understand how Greenbelt Alliance can communicate this link more effectively to Californians, I consolidated existing research, recent polling done by EMC Research, and stakeholder input into a best practices playbook for communicating about climate and housing in California.

According to polling from 2025, California voters’ top five issues are cost of living, housing, crime, traffic, and climate change. Local land-use policies that prioritize infill development can address four out of five of those issues, but that same poll also showed that most voters don’t understand that connection. When asked what local governments could do about climate change, only 3% of respondents said housing policy, and a third of all respondents had no answer at all.

California has historically prioritized housing development on undeveloped land outside of existing communities—known as sprawl. These policy choices have normalized long commutes while driving up the cost of living, increasing traffic, and undermining Californians’ health and quality of life. These land use patterns also lead to more Californians living in areas that are vulnerable to wildfire and floods, which fuels insurance pressures that drive up housing costs statewide. In turn, pollution and global warming gases from so many long commutes are contributing to climate change.

While the links between housing and climate change are clear to many of us working in the field, they can be difficult to talk about in a way that resonates with the general public. There is a growing body of research on the most effective ways to communicate about the environment and housing separately, but little guidance exists on how to connect them.

Day-to-Day Life Resonates

The single most consistent finding from the research, the polling, and the advocates I interviewed is that messages rooted in tangible, everyday benefits outperform everything else. Quality-of-life messages combine those top four concerns from the poll—cost of living, housing, affordability, and climate change—by emphasizing that more housing in existing neighborhoods means less time in traffic, less money spent on gas, and less impact on the environment.

Shorter commutes, walkable neighborhoods, and living closer to family are messaging winners.

The Environment Belongs in The Story

Environmental messages poll well in California, and research suggests that pairing them with quality-of-life framings strengthens the narrative, but the right environmental angle varies by audience.

Urban Californians, for example, seem to respond most to framings that treat care for the environment or fighting climate change as broad values, not aligned with specific actions.

When speaking to rural and suburban residents, conservation messages, in contrast, may be more effective. And framing matters—”Protecting open space” earned strong support, but “stopping sprawl” did not. This difference reflects a broader best practice principle to link messages to existing concerns and keep the framing proactive and solutions-oriented.

Developing a positive framing for stories about disaster avoidance is a bigger challenge. Fire and flood hazards are among the most effective ways to connect housing and climate change, but to work as a housing development narrative, these messages need to execute a pivot that can be difficult to pull off. Moving from why “not to build” in certain places to “why to build” in others can be difficult to communicate effectively and simply in a single message. For now, wildfire threats and insurance pressures seem to land most powerfully with rural and suburban Californians, but urban residents are beginning to share those concerns as climate impacts reach more of the state.

The research demonstrates that quality of life framing applies broadly, but a more nuanced approach is needed when talking to urban versus suburban/rural audiences. Additionally, staying safe from fire and flood is a promising narrative for all Californians, but the messaging needs to be refined and tested. Finally, simpler is better: trying to combine all of these into a single message risks diluting the impact of each.

The Big Picture

Greenbelt Alliance and allies have the opportunity to shift the current public perspective on both housing and the environment to emphasize that housing is a climate solution. The quality of life plus environment pairing has strong evidential support, but it has yet to be tested. And while stakeholder input suggests that separating audiences into urban versus suburban/rural is a reasonable starting point, it’s an inference rather than a tested finding. 

Encouragingly, Californians already care about what infill housing can deliver: shorter commutes, lower costs, walkable neighborhoods, land protection, and a healthier climate.

Header Photo: View from Berkeley Hills. By Chris LaBasco Photography

The post Build California Here appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

With more than two decades of advocacy efforts and many twists and turns, the site known as Tesla Park in eastern Alameda County needs protection once again. 

In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom, the Legislature, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation reached a $31 million agreement to protect the Alameda-Tesla Expansion Area from off-highway vehicle (OHV) recreation on the land.

We are now asking our supporters to reach out to legislators to ask them to support establishing Tesla as a State Natural Reserve. We need your urgent help because State Parks plans to release the general plan and Environmental Impact Report by the end of the year. We cannot let Tesla’s irreplaceable resource values be damaged by short-term thinking. Send an email to Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan and Senator McNerney in a few easy steps using this action alert!

Tesla has natural and cultural resources of statewide significance that exceed the statute for Reserve classification, from extraordinary biodiversity to an essential critical linkage wildlife corridor to important historic and prehistoric cultural resources. Learn more here. 

Historic Fight

With the mobilization of a coalition of organizations, led by the Save Tesla Park campaign, Greenbelt Alliance helped fight this battle for Tesla Park—and won. The land has rare ecological value and contains an abundance of highly sensitive natural and cultural resources. Learn more here. 

This agreement was part of the 2021 Natural Resources Budget Trailer Bill AB 155/SB 155, which ended plans to expand the Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation Area (SVRA) into the 3,100-acre Tesla Park and provides resources to reallocate this high-environmental-impact activity to a different, more appropriate location. 

For at least two decades, Tesla Park was at risk of becoming a destructive off-highway vehicle/motorized recreation park as an expansion project for the Carnegie SVRA. In 2019, Governor Newsom vetoed legislation that would have preserved Tesla Park, and in June 2021, threatened to line-item veto a Tesla Park protection item in the budget unless it was removed. Ultimately, the Tesla budget language was passed.

Now, this land will become a new unit of the state park system, under the control of State Parks and the Parks and Recreation Commission. A planning process is currently being conducted to determine the classification of Tesla Park as a unit of the park system and its management and use plan, with $1 million allocated to the planning process. 

Greenbelt Alliance and the coalition to Save Tesla Park are working to have Tesla classified as a State Natural Reserve, which can provide low-intensity public access, education, and enjoyment, including hiking, nature appreciation, cultural resource interpretation and tours,
and ensure that its irreplaceable natural and cultural resources are protected forever.

With information from Friends of Tesla Park.

The post Tell Legislators to Make Tesla Park a Natural Reserve appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.