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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC. And I'm joined by Colin Fiske, Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. And I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Jen Kalt, Director of Humboldt Baykeeper. And also my friend and colleague, Caroline Griffith, Executive Director of the North Coast Environmental Center. So today, we are going to talk about development that environmentalists are in favor of. I think that we often get a broad critique that all we know how to do is say no. We are certainly very good at saying no to things like oil and gas development, clear cuts in our national forests, polluting Humboldt Bay, things of that nature. We sometimes want to say yes. And so that's what we're going to talk about today is trying to figure out when do we say yes -- how we say yes, and the threats that saying no might pose on certain things.

Jen, you have been working on land use issues in Humboldt County for the longest amongst us. You were part of the old general plan fight. And this is something that our groups have consistently said across many years is we are in favor of certain kinds of development and against other kinds of development, specifically on housing. What sort of housing is kind of bad for our community? And why do we maybe don't want to see rural subdivisions?

JEN KALT:

Basically, the worst kind of development is that type of development that takes up a whole bunch of open space, whether it's the woods or farmlands. It is often located in watersheds that are already beyond carrying capacity in terms of water diversions. And it creates a lot more driving and just the developed footprint of humans, lots and lots of humans. And that is not to say that everybody should live in cities. Nobody would ever in a million years say that. But we live in a society where most people do live in cities, whether it's a little city like Arcata or Eureka, or it's a big city like Chicago or New York. Most people in the United States live in cities now. By way of background, I came to the general plan update process thinking, how can Humboldt County have an open space district like some of the magnificent ones in the Bay Area? And really, the bottom line is we can do better development in cities and existing communities, whether it's incorporated or McKinleyville or whatever, and do a better job of getting people closer to where they work, live, play, go to school, and all the other things.

WHEELER:

You kind of said what we are in favor of, but Caroline, do you want to be more explicit? What sort of development would the NEC and the rest of the North Coast environmental community like to see in Humboldt County?

CAROLINE GRIFFITH:

Well, we have a lot of spaces within our already developed communities that have been impacted by other things. They've already had development on them and perhaps don't now, whether that is places that are now parking lots that used to be buildings. We have a number of just empty lots in Eureka. Places that are close to services have already been largely developed. So we're not talking about taking a pristine ecosystem and building on it and that are close enough into where people want to be that they can walk. There can be transit. In many cases, we already have access to transit in those locations. So these are places that provide just a very like livable, walkable, I think Jen already said all those key words: climate friendly, people friendly.

And granted, this isn't for everyone. There are definitely like folks who are concerned that we're trying to push everybody into cities, which is definitely not something that's happening. But we already have enough folks who are living in these communities that we can accommodate them by developing on these spaces that we already have. So for example, in Eureka, we have parking lots that the city has been putting out for bid for low income and very low income housing. And that is definitely the sort of development that we can get behind at the NEC.

WHEELER:

We also have other examples in other jurisdictions across Humboldt County. We have the McKinleyville Town Center concept, which seeks to actually create a kind of a downtown for McKinleyville and to have denser housing in that downtown to give it some life, give it some feel. In Arcata, we have the Arcata Gateway Project, which would up-zone, it would increase the density allowed in a relatively poorly utilized area of the city that has some residential housing, some industrial development, some light commercial. So it would allow for denser development of this area right near the Arcata Plaza.

So Colin, I'm going to turn to you as my housing law nerd expert. I think that that's often a role that you have to play, nerd law expert. It's not just that we should want to build housing in our communities because we don't want to see our neighbors go unhoused. We don't want to see the price of rent skyrocket like it has in so many other coastal California jurisdictions. We are also obligated under California law to plan for housing production. So we are in some part forced to make a choice how we are going to develop that housing. Can you tell us about the regional housing needs allocation and how we figure out where we're going to put people?

COLIN FISKE:

Yeah, so I want to start out by saying that I do think actually the primary reason that we should be building more housing is what you said first, that folks need housing. There are folks who are on the street because there's not housing affordable to them available, and there's also folks being priced out by rents increasing. And so I think that is the primary reason we should do it.

But there is, as you said, also a legal reason, a legal mandate. Every eight years, I believe, the state allocates a certain number of housing units to regions, in this case to Humboldt County, and divides them into different income categories and says, you have to plan for how you're going to produce this much housing over this eight-year period. And then the county in each of the cities figures out a way to divide up in the manner that they see fit which jurisdiction is going to take responsibility for how many units of each income category. And then they're responsible for planning for it and doing everything in their power to make sure it happens.

And so, yeah, given that we have both a moral obligation and a state mandate to produce this housing, we have the option of, are we going to put it in these walkable areas that are already developed and near people's jobs and schools and services and so forth, or are we going to put it out in the woods and fields and sprawl out as we've sometimes done in the past?

WHEELER:

And so in Humboldt County, approximately 50% of our housing allocation is going to our urban areas, primarily going towards Eureka and Arcata. The other 50% is allocated towards county lands. This doesn't mean that we don't have urban areas on county property or county land. McKinleyville is the largest unincorporated community in California, but it also could mean that the county could try to relieve its housing demand by just opening up more what is now functionally green space, farms, fields, forests, to development. And that has historically kind of been Humboldt County's approach, which is let's just allow easy subdivisions in Dows Prairie, outside of McKinleyville, in Loleta, some of these other areas. Let's make it easy to build on what are called resource lands. And that's not what we want to do, right? That's the antithesis of what we want. Jen, I'm going to ask you a question.

KALT:

And we should explain what affordable housing means, because a lot of people don't realize there's actually a definition of that? It's not just like, oh, well, can people afford it? Obviously, a subdivision on Dows Prairie is not affordable to most people, but I think Caroline can speak to what we mean when we say affordable housing.

GRIFFITH:

Yeah. And really, like there are specific definitions of low income and very low income housing. And I've noticed because I do attend a lot of Eureka City Council meetings, which is where there has just recently been quite a ruckus over some development plans. And obviously a misconception, not just a misconception, but taking that word and twisting it to vilify people who they conceive as fitting into that category. But low income housing means to qualify for low income housing, you have to make 80% of area median income. And in Humboldt County, our area media income is $54,752 a year. So just with some napkin math, if somebody worked, it was such an 80% of that is $43,800 a year. If somebody worked 40 hours a week, that's $21 an hour. I mean, that is $5.50 more than the minimum wage. So, not super high up there. It's a lot of us nonprofit workers potentially in that category where we would qualify for low income housing.

WHEELER:

Yeah. Not to throw my own organization under the bus because we pay what we can, but for the majority of the time I've worked at EPIC, I would have qualified for low income housing. And a lot of folks in our community would qualify for low income housing. You know, your barista, the person serving you likely at, at, at a restaurant, these folks all would qualify. So if you think of a bell curve, right. Where the average median income is the very tip of the bell curve. You're not that far off if you're 80% of that, right. You're still grabbing a very significant chunk of the population of this county for low income housing.

KALT:

Lots of health care workers too and teachers and I mean there's a lot of people who we just don't value their time enough obviously but it's all based on the concept that people shouldn't spend more than a third of their income on housing. So as it stands today 23%, of Humboldt County residents could afford to buy a median priced home in this county.

WHEELER:

Well, it's kind of shocking. This is all a result, let's go back to the fact that we have prohibited the building of housing supply to meet the demand. So this is all because of exclusionary zoning. It's all because we've said, hey, as a community, we have a preference for single family homes over things like apartments. And it's because of folks who make it more difficult to build multifamily housing units in their communities. And we'll get into the lawsuit from Citizens for a Better Eureka in just a moment here.

So we have a need for housing, it's socially necessary. We have laws that demand that we plan for housing construction, yet we still often fail to do so. I think that that recent news out of Eureka can help to explain why that is the case. Colin, do you want to tell us what is going on in the city of Eureka? What is the city's unique way that they are trying to get low income housing, which can often be difficult to construct because of kind of market dynamics, how they are trying to incentivize housing for folks who are most vulnerable to housing prices?

FISKE:

Sure, so several years ago the city of Eureka realized that some of the best places and really some of the only places left in the city that were really underutilized and appropriate for building denser affordable housing were city-owned properties, and particularly a number of city-owned parking lots which were underutilized. And so they set about in response to that state mandate that we talked about earlier, they set about planning for how they could release these properties and encourage developers to build affordable housing on these sites.

Three of those lots they did release a couple of years ago to a developer called Linc Housing, which is a non-profit affordable housing developer, and they are in the process of seeking funding to develop housing on those sites. But more recently they've tried to release the rest of them and they've encountered a lawsuit from basically backed by Security National and some other business owners downtown who are claiming that somehow this sort of environmentally friendly mode of development actually has environmental impacts, which is I think kind of an abuse of the legal system frankly.

WHEELER:

So I want to point this out. So the city of Eureka passed its housing element in 2019. Folks then didn't object to this. We released a couple of parking lots for housing development that has so far been very successful. We are getting more housing from those parking lots than the city had anticipated. So that's great. But there was a couple of years later, an uproar amongst downtown, Old Town business owners concerned about the loss of parking on their businesses. The city then went out of its way to address their concerns, swapped property with somebody else in the city so that the parking lots could conceivably stay as parking lots. And that is part of the reason why the city just last year had to amend its housing element to find new areas for release for development.

And it's only because the city went out of its way to try to appease these folks to try to reduce the amount of parking lost that it gave Rob Arkley Security National Citizens for a Better Eureka. It only gave them the opportunity to file a lawsuit because they did this because the city made some sort of a change. Otherwise, this whole group would have been barred under the statute of limitations from ever filing this lawsuit. So I just want to point out a bit of the hypocrisy. And now what the lawsuit seeks to do is they seek to prohibit the release of any other city owned land, which now includes these properties outside of downtown/Old Town that were swapped for parking. They seek to even prohibit these from being developed as housing under their lawsuit.

So it's, I feel like Alannis Morisette would have put this in her song. Had she known about it back in like 96 or whatever it was. Isn't it ironic? That's, that's the reference there in case folks don't know. All right. So that and the charges and different policies that the city of Ohio It has worked under are substantial. They take a lot of input on these things. You know, as they know that they are paying so much attention to

FISKE:

I thought Alanis Morissette had a song, Isn't It Frivolous? Ah yes, isn't it.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So let's, let's talk about this lawsuit. So it is using the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, as we're probably going to call it over and over and over again. Caroline, can you tell us like, what, what is CEQA about? What are we trying to protect here? What does it mandate?

GRIFFITH:

Oh, this is a good test. Well, it's...

WHEELER:

I'm happy to do that too.

GRIFFITH:

No, it's great. Yeah, as the lawyer who deals with it more, you might be able to fill in the gaps. But really, it seeks to analyze the impacts, the environmental impacts of a project. So this can be impacts to species on that property, whether those are animals or plants, impacts to water quality. You know, a lot of the things that you think about when you think of environmental impacts, right, fits into that. And how much will will trees be cut down? Will animals be displaced from their homes? There are certain things that aren't as much covered in there as many of us would like to, such as greenhouse gas emissions and things like that. But one of the things that makes this this lawsuit like fit into Collins proposed Alanis Morrisette Isn't This Frivolous, is that the impacts that they're really claiming need to be analyzed have more to do with the impacts to humans than they do to the environment and the impact to certain specific humans, to the environment and the impact to certain specific humans, then the impact to specific plants scratches the whole balance of it.

WHEELER:

We're talking about housing and how infill development can be a smart climate strategy for our communities. Yeah, tell us about those. So give us kind of the best version of their argument.

GRIFFITH:

Yeah, that by building housing on these parking lots, businesses will be impacted to the point that they will have to move to other locations, which will then necessitate their employees driving more to those locations. Also impacts to public safety, which is, to the best of my knowledge, not something that is included in this law.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so another way of saying it or thinking about it is that if employees have to park further away from the business, then they're going to have to walk a longer distance to get to work and they will have a greater chance of being accosted, harassed, whatever, threatened with violence by, I think we're supposed to read into this, unhoused individuals and that that is some sort of an environmental impact. Colin, as my law nerd again, I'm going to drive you into the conversation, is being asked for change by somebody who lacks housing, is that an environmental impact?

FISKE:

It's not, nor is it harassment or accostment. They are of several kinds.

WHEELER:

We go, all right. So just to be clear, isn't it frivolous? One of their basis of their argument is not a cognizable impact under the California Environmental Quality Act. It is just NIMBY nonsense. Colin, let's talk about some more NIMBY nonsense here. And I think some way that we know that this lawsuit is frivolous is that one of their complaints is that the city failed to consider something that they are legally prohibited from considering. Can you tell us about level of service and changes to state law?

FISKE:

Sure. So level of service is just a fancy way that traffic engineers use to try to quantify congestion or vehicular delay. For a long time CEQA did consider vehicular delay an environmental impact, which is pretty wild, but 2013, a state law prohibited that from being considered. There are a lot of reasons, but the big reasons are that when you try to mitigate for delay, you build more vehicular capacity and in the long run you actually create more impacts, more emissions, more driving and so forth. And seeing the evidence and the research over the decades, the state passed a new law that said actually that's not an environmental impact and can't be considered one. And yet much of the argument in this lawsuit is based on the idea that these projects will somehow cause vehicular delay and that that needs to be considered under CEQA. I would like to point out that not only is that not an impact under CEQA, but also the argument that these projects will even create any significant delay is also bogus in my opinion.

WHEELER:

Agreed. So we have a lawsuit. I think that we already talked about some of the consequences of this lawsuit, but I just want to make clear that 245, if not more, housing units are at risk because of this lawsuit. I've been saying this a lot to folks that I think it's a frivolous lawsuit. I think ultimately in the end Citizens for a Better Eureka is going to lose, but I think that there is a strong chance that it takes many years for them to lose and that the delay in creating this housing is going to be felt by folks in our community. 245 units is a huge amount of housing in Eureka. That is more than we've produced over a 10-year period in the last 10 years that we measured this. It is an amount that could actually meaningfully affect housing prices within my fair city. It's a lot. And so I say 245 plus because as we know from the previous example where the city did release three parking lots, the developer came in above what the city was mandating. This is a minimum of 245 spots that could be impacted, but it could be somewhere north of 300.

FISKE:

I think it's important just to note too that housing units doesn't equate to people. Some of those units will likely be two or three bedroom units or maybe even more. So that's more than 235 people that could be housed that we're talking about.

WHEELER:

Thank you, Colin. That's a great point. Yeah, Caroline. Well said.

GRIFFITH:

And I just can't help but think that we are in this situation currently because for decades there was not enough housing being produced. And this is another one of those situations where we've reached a crisis point because the necessary work wasn't being done. And so now here we are needing to make this happen. And just how disappointing it is that even if a lawsuit like this does not have any merit, it can still really slow down a process and put us even that much further behind.

WHEELER:

There are some other consequences here. I think that we are seeing renewed attack on the California Environmental Quality Act in Sacramento because of the abuse of the law by groups like Citizens for a Better Eureka. So the number one category of CEQA lawsuits that's now being brought. Can anyone venture a guess of what type of lawsuit that is?

FISKE:

This is anti-affordable housing.

WHEELER:

Anti-housing lawsuits. Ding, ding, ding, ding. 25% of all CEQA lawsuits are now being brought to stop housing production. If you think that Eureka's example here doesn't match other communities, you'd be wrong. This is a repeating pattern across the entire state. This is actually a step that's even more shocking to me. So of anti-housing lawsuits, what percent challenge infill projects, the kind of projects that we would want to see, and what percent, on the other hand, would challenge open space or green field projects?

KALT:

Guessing 95% challenge infill development.

WHEELER:

Jen, you went a little bit high. It's 87%, 87% challenge infill projects. And I think that we can kind of like see a reason why, right? Because when you're building around other people, there's a larger pool of people who could potentially get mad at you for what you're doing, who might have settled expectations and are relying on kind of an expectation that the status quo is going to persist, that there's always gonna be that parking lot that they use or whatever.

87% of lawsuits are against infill development projects. The remainder, some 13% are against greenfield projects. So greenfield projects, that's the kind of sprawl that I think everybody, or just about everybody, if you're not a member of HUM CPR, are opposed to in Humboldt County. So we are already seeing attacks on CEQA and our groups have routinely used this law to actually go after bad developments. This is a frequent tool that we use to stop stuff that is objectionable.

I know the North Coast Environmental Center, for example, has gone against using CEQA, really destructive canvas projects way out in the middle of nowhere that would impact Golden Eagle habitat. And coincidentally, I've run into the attorney who is also representing Security National and Citizens for a Better Eureka on the other side. So defending CEQA in that sense. Epic, we're using CEQA on Richardson Grove. We're using CEQA on timber harvest plans, even though technically those are outside of the law. Principles of CEQA flow into the Forest Practice Act and rules. Well in.

FISKE:

Also, environmental advocates use it not only to stop projects, but to improve them and make them better projects.

WHEELER:

Talk about how we were able to use CEQA to make a housing project better.

FISKE:

A number of our organizations engaged in that process with the McKay subdivision in the suburbs of Eureka and I would say didn't come out exactly as as we would have liked but managed to get major improvements because of CEQA including all electric development and money going towards bike and pedestrian improvements to offset some of the impacts of that project. You know that's the kind of way that I think CEQA is intended to be used unfortunately as you're saying often is abused.

WHEELER:

If I sound like I'm passionate about this subject, it's because I am. I, I like to think of myself both as pro housing and pro environment. I think that those two circles pretty well dang overlap, right? There's not, not a ton of area in that Venn diagram that is exposed on either side. I think that being in favor of infill development is an environmental position. So not only is a lawsuit like this threatening really important housing production in the city that I live. I'm a Eurekan. It is also threatening one of the most foundational of California laws, the national environmental policy act, the federal equivalent to CEQA was in fact modeled on CEQA. CEQA came first. This is how important this law is. It is the cornerstone for other States like mini NEPA's. Washington state has a similar law based on California CEQA. So it is concerning that folks who are rich enough to pay for a lawsuit are able to just fight housing production.

KALT:

I just want to make clear too that it's a case by case situation. I mean, not every housing project in infill is going to be without true environmental impacts. There are contaminated sites. There's various issues that come up. And so what we're seeing recently is a whole bunch of exemptions to CEQA for the types of infill projects that we're talking about supporting. And then there's a long list of things that it can't impact. If you are going to build on or near a wetland, a contaminated site, an archaeological site, you don't qualify for the CEQA exemption. People need to just think critically when someone's saying, we need to just streamline these laws so we can have it all. There are very important reasons to keep these protections in place with some sensible provisions for redeveloping shopping malls. For example, there's a number of shopping malls that are just more than half vacant and they've already impacted the environment. They cut the trees down, they paved the whole place. And let's reuse those sites. There are no environmental impacts anymore because we've already impacted the site. So we need to think about all that. Thank you.

WHEELER:

Jen, one thing that I learned from you and I've really taken away from our conversations together is the role that development on impacted sites can have in cleaning up really gross toxic areas. So can you talk about kind of Baykeeper's philosophy on how you think about site development around Humboldt Bay for areas that might have dioxin or other site contaminants, which could leach into Humboldt Bay with sea level rise or with time? I mean...

KALT:

Basically, in short, Baykeeper has been tracking all these contaminated sites. The bay is already impacted by dioxins and other pollutants like PCBs. The way our legal system works is if you were the polluter who caused that problem and you go bankrupt, like say the former owners of the pulp mill, you get to just walk away and leave that mess for somebody else. In those situations, one of the only ways to get the site cleaned up is to have somebody who wants to develop it and has the funding and the wherewithal to actually do a real cleanup of the site first. Otherwise, if you're just putting something else in the contaminated site without considering the contamination, you're basically just stirring it up, you're discharging more, you're mobilizing pollutants potentially harming your employees who are doing the construction and the people who might live on that site. This all just needs to be taken into consideration.

WHEELER:

It's also relevant when we're talking about Eureka because at least one of the sites we know has contamination issues which would presumably be cleaned up as a result of project development. The society is going to have to do it because folks like Baykeeper will ensure that they're going to have to do this. If the site doesn't get developed, if it remains as a gravel parking lot, this is the C to F street development, that site does not get cleaned up, folks. Those contaminants continue to remain in the soil and can leach into Humboldt Bay. So development is not a dirty word necessarily. The environmental movement is more complex and is deeper thinkers than I think the folks in the comment section might realize.

KALT:

Just to be clear, that C to F waterfront parcel has no evidence of past contamination. There's been some buildings there that have been demolished and removed. There's no evidence it was ever a contaminated site.

FISKE:

I guess I was just going to say, you're talking about development being a dirty word, and I think part of that comes from the history of developers being primarily big for-profit companies that are building these kinds of sprawly subdivisions that we all don't like. But I wanted to point out that there are other kinds of developers. There are non-profit affordable housing developers, there are tribal housing developers, cooperative housing developers, and I do think that we should be really targeting those kinds of socially conscious, mission-driven folks to the extent that we can, because we want that in our community. And so I just want to point out that there are alternatives to the for-profit greedy developer that folks might have in their heads.

WHEELER:

I will say that like, if a developer wants to make their return on investment on a renewable energy project that is like well cited that it won't pose significant concerns for an area, I'd much rather have those rapacious capitalists make money off of renewables than another coal-fired power plant or whatever. Yeah, we live within a flawed and broken system which is called capitalism. Anyways, now that I have my anti-capitalism rant out of the way, I think that we can end this show. This has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again on the same channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.