AUDIO:

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WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is EPIC's climate attorney, Matt Simmons. We're also joined by Colin Fiske, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Transportation priorities, or CRTP. Hey, Colin.

All right. So we are going to do a bit of a legislative round up. So 2023 was a big year in the California legislature, we have taken on the multiple overlapping crises that face our state, one of which is the housing crisis, or, as my friend Brian would tell me to say, the housing affordability crisis. So we don't have affordable housing in the state of California. And there are a myriad of environmental issues that are associated with that affordability crisis.

We also have a pedestrian safety crisis, a lot of people are dying preventable deaths, because of oversized automobiles, because the way that we have designed our street infrastructure, it is at a crisis proportion, and we need to be treating it like a crisis.

And then of course, we also have the climate crisis, this probably needs less of an introduction to environmental listeners of the Econews Report, but we are at 412 something parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere, we need to be at 350 parts per million, we are on track for just wildly depressing fatal all of the above climate scenarios. Yeah. So we we've got to make change, we got to make change quickly. And thankfully, the California legislature is providing some leadership here. And so I'm going to be relying on my experts here, in Matt and Colin, to help break down what the heck is going on over in Sacramento.

Friends did I do a good job in outlining what we are up against?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, I think you did a good job. And I'll just say, we talked about these crises as separate just now, but they are obviously all interlinked and overlapping. Right. And one of the things that I'm hoping we can do more in the future is talk about why these things benefit us in multiple ways.

WHEELER:

That's a really good point, right? Oversized automobiles are not only a threat to pedestrians and those big blunt ends on the stupid F-150s, not only a killer of humans, they're also a prime contributor to our climate crisis. We know in Humboldt County that regular cars and trucks that we all drive around, there are a number one source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the draft climate action plan. So having overly big, dumb cars and trucks that are a risk to pedestrians, that's also a risk to our climate. And so we're, we're seeing, we're seeing deaths immediately. And we're going to see deaths in the future as a result of the climate crisis.

FISKE:

And I would add, since they're parked almost all of the time, they're taking up a lot of space that could be used for housing. So it's all connected.

WHEELER:

It is all connected. All right. So Colin, I want to start with you. And I want to start with the things or thing that you are most excited passed out of the legislature this year. Do you have one or two things? And we can talk about how they might be implemented or the impacts of this legislation here in little old Humboldt County. Or we can expand the geographic scope to the North Coast.

FISKE:

Yeah, so one bill that I'm particularly excited about that passed and is now law is the Daylighting to Save Lives Bill, AB413. And this has made it the law that there should be no parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk. And I think this is important to note, this is a marked or an unmarked crosswalk. So people might not know this, but anytime you've got a sidewalk or a pedestrian path on either side of a street, that's a crosswalk, regardless of whether the street is painted or not. And so what this says is all the local governments and any other agency that has control over their curbside parking, they're going to have to prohibit parking 20 feet upstream from each of those crossings, which allows pedestrians to both be more visible to drivers and to see drivers and cars better. And really is an extremely simple measure that will save a lot of lives. And it's kind of incredible. We didn't already have this as a law. It is.

WHEELER:

Incredible. I was talking with my wife about this. We go for a morning walk every morning. We, we have a cup of tea and we walk around our neighborhood and we're talking about how great this is going to be just on our morning walks. We live in Eureka. There is a street that we often have to cross and I have to step out into traffic because I can't functionally see the cards coming down the road. And so I have to kind of step out and then very bravely put my head around the cars and kind of look down the street and hope that there's something that won't just take my head off. And I've complained to the city of Eureka about this. I've said, Hey, there's this really dangerous intersection where I can't see cars and cars can't see me. This is just a problem waiting to happen. And the city says, well, we don't feel it as a problem because according to all of our rules and regulations, we don't have to restrict parking here.

So immediately I can, I can feel in my own daily life how this could have a beneficial effect because there'll be more clear sight lines between pedestrians and vehicles. So I think that there's this like trope in Humboldt County about people just jumping out in front of cars to perhaps just as you weren't able to see them, automobile driver, they also maybe weren't able to see you and maybe we can do things and change the way that we design roads to make them safer. Is that, is that fair?

FISKE:

I think that's absolutely fair, and I guess one thing I wanted to point out here is that unlike some laws that affect local government, this isn't something that is an option or something that the local governments have to adopt. It's just state law now, although of course our local governments are going to have to implement it, so we're going to have to make sure that they're out there and paint the curves and put up the signs and everything else that's necessary, but it will be state law as of, I guess, January 1st.

SIMMONS:

This feels to me like a good opportunity for some citizens who maybe have had similar experiences to Tom of having to lean out into the road in order to cross the street safely to reach out to their city or county and ask to make sure that they follow this law.

WHEELER:

I think that's a great idea, Matt. Also, there is another resource for folks. If you ever experience something as a pedestrian or as a driver, any sort of a road user, where you feel unsafe, but it wasn't an accident, right? Oftentimes, our data collection, our way that we think about roads is based on accidents. But the feelings of unsafety or being put in an awkward situation or an unsafe situation, those go underreported. We can't really have good feedback mechanisms. There's now a way to report those. And to have governments be able to take this into account. Colin, can you talk very briefly about Street Story and the work of CRTP in promoting Street Story?

FISKE:

Yeah, so StreetStory is an online platform where people can report exactly as you're saying hazardous locations. You can report near misses. You can also report crashes. It should not replace you reporting a collision to law enforcement as well, but it does provide a lot of additional data that otherwise we don't have access to and decision makers don't have access to when they're deciding where to make streets safer. And so you can go to streetstory.berkeley.edu and the reason for that is it was developed by a team at UC Berkeley, but it's a statewide platform. We've been promoting it for a few years now and there's over a thousand reports in Humboldt County already. So join your neighbors and make those reports so that we know where those unsafe spots are.

WHEELER:

I think the city, I should also say to the city of Eureka, thank you as well because the city has embarked on a great program of adding bulb outs to a good number of intersections. I think there's over 130 that are going to be added in the next year. These are a wonderful way to shorten the crossing distance if you're a pedestrian who is needing to cross the street. And also it improves visibility for both drivers and pedestrians. So we are making progress and that's like one of the things that feels really good about doing this sort of work. And one area where I'm really impressed with CRTP is that we are making progress. And I think that CRTP's activism in this space is the reason that we have gone so far so fast in the way that we have.

FISKE:

Thanks Tom. And I should mention too, this new law also addresses bulb outs. So if you do have a bulb out, it only prohibits parking within 15 feet. The idea being that you're more visible as a pedestrian and have more visibility. So again, I guess if you want to preserve some parking, we should build more bulb outs.

WHEELER:

All right. Rob Arkley, you hear that? I'm just, I'm just, I'm poking the hornet's nest at this point, aren't I? All right. So, so Matt, if, if Colin is my transportation policy nerd, you are my housing policy nerd. What are you perhaps most excited about that passed out the California legislature in this last session?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so one of the bills that I'm most excited about, it was nicknamed the Yes in God's Backyard Bill, SB4, Wiener. This comes out of a number of instances where faith-based organizations, churches, mosques, synagogues, were trying to build housing, affordable housing on land that they owned in order to fulfill their faith and provide charity to their congregants and their community, and were met with just ferocious opposition from NIMBYs in their neighborhood. You'd have a church trying to build affordable housing and hundreds of community members would show up and try to stop that from being built in their neighborhood.

And so what SB4 does is it streamlines affordable housing construction on land owned by faith-based organizations in order to allow them to provide this good that they want to provide to their communities. I'm not the most religious person, but one of the things I do like that religion does is this emphasis on charity and providing for others. And this feels to me like an excellent way for faith-based organizations to give back to their communities. A lot of these organizations are seeing decreasing membership levels, and so maybe they have a little more space than they need now. So the idea of using that extra space to develop affordable housing really appeals to me.

WHEELER:

That's wonderful. I grew up and I went to Catholic school K through eight. So I I've spent a lot of time thinking and learning about Jesus. And let me tell you, Jesus, he would be against homelessness if he was around today. So I think that this is, this is really in line too with faith. So fantastic. Do you see any kind of local, local connections for this legislation? You are often at the Spears tip when it comes to housing conversations. Can you see it applying here in Humboldt County?

SIMMONS:

I don't know the name of it, but there's a church right by the Cal Poly Humboldt campus that rents out parking spaces at high rates to Cal Poly students who are driving into campus. Maybe instead of using that space for parking, the church could use it to build some affordable housing so the students could live next to where they're going instead of having to drive to where they're going.

WHEELER:

going. Yeah. Like on union and a or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My former neighbors. Yeah.

SIMMONS:

So it's, I think, obviously this will be a discussion that each faith-based organization has on its own, and like, no one is forcing anyone to do anything here. I just think that it's absolutely nuts to me that we would stand in the way of win-win good development. Yeah.

WHEELER:

Well, I like it Colin and your reflections or we can move on to your next your next legislative

FISKE:

You've said it all. I think if you start looking around yourself for churches and other houses of worship, you may realize there's a lot of them. So hopefully some of them will take advantage of this.

WHEELER:

Right. So Colin, we've talked to earlier in the show about these stupidly large death machine cars that if they hit you, they'll just like cave in your sternum because the point of impact is so high and they have such bad visibility because their, their hood is so deep and long and I'm not a car person. I'm really having a difficulty like even naming parts of a car, but you know what I'm talking about, right? Like the, the, the stereotypical kind of grow dozer or whatever we want to call them. There's new legislation that could address those. Can you talk a little bit about this?

FISKE:

Sure. So AB 251 was passed and signed by the governor. It basically mandates a study. It's a little unfortunate that they didn't take direct action, I think, because there's plenty of evidence already. But regardless, it mandates a study of larger vehicles, including SUVs, pickup trucks, and so forth, looking at their impacts on traffic deaths and injuries, as well as the impact of bigger and heavier vehicles on wear and tear on the roadways. The idea of this is to eventually recommend whether the state should levy an additional fee for extra large vehicles in order to account for the extra damage that they do to citizens and infrastructure. This will be interesting to see. As you were saying, there's already quite a lot of evidence that these bigger vehicles are much more dangerous to pedestrians, especially the raised hoods and big prominent grills that have become popular designs meant to look intimidating, but actually just kill more people. And I should say, this research continues to come out. Just in the past week or two, a new study came out that showed that these big raised hood designs actually make even smaller vehicles, even sedans, more dangerous to pedestrians. So again, hopefully this study will come to the logical conclusion after reviewing the evidence, and we'll recommend that the state take some action.

WHEELER:

What I've never understood is how there hasn't been some sort of a large lawsuit against some of these modification companies where you can get the truck lifts and you can make it that much harder to see pedestrians that much more dangerous because you're going to get hit in your head by their front bumper. It seems like this is like a really obvious lawsuit. Maybe it's happened and I'm just not aware of it, but it seems like there's a design flaw here that is putting people at unnecessary risks. One of the things that I thought was really great about some of the 90s were all of the lawsuits being brought against tobacco companies for these unsafe products. Let's start bringing some lawsuits against automakers for some of their unsafe products that they're putting out to market. These pickup trucks that we see on the road today are just heinous. And this is the Econews Report where we just riff on how cars are ugly and stupid these days.

All right. Well, I think that that's very exciting, Colin. I hope the report really is thorough and is a vehicle for future movement. Matt, let's get back to you in housing. What else has been passed? Just a crazy number of housing bills. And this really speaks to the severity of the housing crisis. I think over 100 housing-related bills passed in this last legislative session alone. So what else do you think is going to be impactful that people should keep an eye on?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so another impactful bill for some background back in 2018, the legislature passed SB 35, which streamlined the application process for affordable housing, the Turner center, which is a housing nonprofit that looks at the statistics related to these projects estimates that 18,000 new affordable deed restricted homes were built from 2018 to 2021 because of that bill. So that bill was coming up for renewal. It was going to sunset unless a new law was passed to renew it. And in the renewal, Scott Wiener added that the law would also apply to the coastal zone. And so when I say coastal zone, you're probably picturing like on the beach, but in many jurisdictions, the coastal zone actually goes quite a bit inland.

The bill also specified that all this new construction would have to be infill construction that was surrounded on at least three sides by existing buildings, and it would still have a lot of the environmental protections that you always have when you're building any new construction. This was a contentious fight in the legislature and among a lot of environmental groups, but the bill ended up passing. And so what we're likely to see is some streamlined affordable housing projects built in the coastal zone throughout California, which I think is great because I think it shouldn't just be rich people who live by the coast. The idea that we would pass a law streamlining affordable housing, but then carve out the coast, which is the coolest, and I mean, coolest in terms of temperature, not in terms of like, yeah, bro, it's so cool to live here. Although also that the coast is, is a really great place to live in California. And so I don't think we should be passing laws that streamline affordable housing for everywhere but the coast.

WHEELER:

Yeah. And this was, as you said, a very contentious bill. I think that time will prove it to be a success and that we will see a lot of infill development in our urban coastal environments. Because again, this bill very much limits that sort of development to already developed areas. And this is not like you can go out to the lost coast and put in a, an apartment in Petrolia or something. That's not how this bill would apply. It would mean easier building for Santa Monica or.

SIMMONS:

All of San Francisco, mostly.

WHEELER:

San Francisco. Right. So really, really great. They're excited to see the ramifications of that. I want to go super nerdy and talk about one that I'm excited about, and that is single stair construction. There are building safety requirements that have meant that apartment buildings have needed to have multiple staircases, redundancies and whatnot. It makes sense on some, on some level. These requirements also, however, increase the cost of construction. They limit the kinds of construction that can be done. The construction techniques generally drive up the price of construction. And we know that also they don't add that much safety.

SIMMONS:

Someone explained this to me once that finally made it click to me is staircases are expensive. They're actually like a large amount of space that the developer can't rent out to anyone. And so if you require a developer to have multiple staircases, they need to develop a lot more land in order to make up the loss revenue on the land that is now a staircase. And so it creates this incentive to create as long of a building as possible.

And so if you have to have two staircases, one on either end of the building, you want to fill in the space between those staircases with as many units, as much space as possible, because you've already dedicated all that space to the staircases. Whereas if you do what's called a point access block, which is a single staircase building with maybe a staircase in the middle, like a spiral staircase in the middle, and then like four units at each end of the building. It's, it's a narrow, I'm not so great at describing like buildings, but it's a narrow, tall building where everyone lives close to the staircase that they use, and it looks more physically architecturally appealing from the outside because it's not this big, long Lego block. It's more of like a traditional building shape.

That is how we used to build buildings before these rules were passed. It's potentially possible that we'll start doing it again because what this bill would do is instruct the state fire marshal to explore strategies to start allowing those buildings to be built.

WHEELER:

All right, AB 835 from Assemblymember Lee. Lee has popped up a number of times in our rankings of introducing good legislation. Don't know much about Assemblymember Lee, but I am, I am suddenly a big fan.

SIMMONS:

Bernie Sanders supporting NIMBY.

WHEELER:

My God, it's my favorite kind of politician.

SIMMONS:

his own social housing bill that was too cool, so they passed the less cool social housing bill this year.

WHEELER:

Well, I feel like it's only fair to trade back to Colin to talk about transportation. Colin, is there anything else that you would like to touch on in this episode? Sure.

FISKE:

I think I'll just mention quickly two bike-related bills. One is SB 712, and so this new law will now make it illegal for landlords to prohibit renters from keeping a bike or a scooter or another kind of micro-mobility device in their apartment. This, for some people, can be really important because, as we know, there's not a lot of safe weather-protected exterior bike storage available in our area. And so this ensures that someone can keep their bike or their scooter in their apartment if they need to have a safe and secure and weather-protected place to have it. That also means that you could maybe rely on your bike or your scooter instead of having to have a car with a parking space and all of that expense. So that's really cool.

And the other one is, there's now a law allowing local governments to put cameras on their parking enforcement vehicles and use those to document and enforce bike lane obstructions. So people parking in bike lanes and that kind of thing. And we don't have a whole lot of parking enforcement in this area, but we do have some. You know, there's little vehicles zipping around Arcata and so forth.

WHEELER:

Nor do we have a lot of bike lanes, but that's going to be

FISKE:

That's true, but I can tell you the ones we do have are often obstructed. This is something I don't, I don't know if any of our local agencies are considering this, but it would be kind of cool to see some action to, you know, get people thinking about bike lanes as a actual lane of travel that they are and not just a place to pull over when you're, when there's no parking right there.

WHEELER:

Matt, let's close this episode by talking about students are pollution, like this really dumb case out of Berkeley that forced a legislative fix to correct CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act to actually do what it's supposed to do and care about environmental impacts and not made up social impacts that are masquerading as environmental impacts. So can you talk about the case, what happened and what this fix has dealt?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so Berkeley has been trying to build student housing and then also affordable housing for unhoused folks on a park called People's Park, which has been the site of a lot of protests over the years and is also a place where a lot of unhoused people currently live in Berkeley. And that has caused just a ton of protests and people being upset by that idea. One of the groups fighting against that housing being built is a bunch of local neighbors who many of them went to Berkeley, were students there, got a great Berkeley education, bought the house next door to the school, and then decided that no one else should ever be able to build a new apartment building in their neighborhood and have been fighting against that ever since.

So in order to stop this project, they filed a CEQA lawsuit, which for those who aren't lawyers is California's bedrock environmental law. It's the law that you file when you think that the state is doing something that will harm the environment or hasn't accurately studied the effects of what they are doing will harm the environment. Right.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so it's the look before you leap. It's the study environmental impacts. And these folks, they claimed that these, these apartments would be overwhelmingly dominated by students because it's gonna be near a university. And don't you know, students are just kind of loud and they are disruptive. And that loudness from students is a form of pollution that needs to be considered in the environmental analysis. And gosh, they didn't do that. Well.

SIMMONS:

So this is so CEQA -- the law says that noise is like one of the things you can consider when considering the environmental impact of The project but the people who wrote that we're thinking about like a giant factory or like jet airplane. Yeah, exactly they were thinking about like actual serious noise and not like maybe someone throwing a party or playing loud music -- and I will just say also this idea that students are uniquely loud -- opens up a really nasty can of worms where it's like what other groups of people have unique characteristics that are bad for the environment. Oh, no, we've become ecofascists all of a sudden

WHEELER:

Let's enshrine our stereotypes into law here.

SIMMONS:

So that idea also is deeply concerning to me. And so this law specifically exempts this idea of student noise being a unique environmental impact. Because just for the record, the school had studied, in their environmental documents, they had studied noise. They had not studied the unique impacts of student noise. And that was the issue that.

WHEELER:

playing djembes and listening to Wagon Wheel on repeat, if my college experiences any bearing.

SIMMONS:

It does just go to show the unique and endless arguments that a NIMBY CEQA plaintiff can make about literally anything. Here locally, we have Rob Arkley doing a very similar thing where he's saying that getting rid of parking lots is gonna lead to an increase in muggings. And it's like, okay, you can just say whatever stuff you want, you can just say whatever stuff you want, and I guess that's enough to get a lawsuit going. And if a judge somewhere thinks it's true, then this housing project that would have been built is delayed or potentially canceled. I personally, Matt Simmons, speaking as myself, definitely support these efforts to rein in that CEQA abuse because it really frustrates me.

WHEELER:

As it should. Yeah, Colin.

FISKE:

point out, too, that I just think it's important that we acknowledge, you know, noise can be a real environmental impact, right? Of course, noise in cities comes overwhelmingly from cars, not from people. If you've ever been to a part of a city without cars, it's pretty quiet, even when people are yelling at each other. But so I think that this just underlines the fact that this is an abuse of a process that's a really important process for us to take seriously, because we should mitigate super loud engines and factories and things, and those do have real impacts. People talking to each other and, like, having a party is not the problem.

WHEELER:

Right. And this is why I say all the time is that Epic uses CEQA daily for our work, right? We use its federal component, NEPA daily for our work. We want to preserve these laws and have them be strong for when they are appropriate, right? When there is that toxic waste, whatever plant that's going to be proposed for your neighborhood, you want CEQA to exist and you want it to have teeth, right? The way that we ensure that happens is that we, we, we cut down on the bogus lawsuits because the more bogus lawsuits that we have, the more that we will have both judges weaken the law and start to create precedent that while applies to that bogus lawsuit, you know, it was decided because students are pollution. It will also apply to non bogus cases. And we also see pressure being placed on the legislature rightly to amend the law, to prevent this sort of abuse in the future, to prevent the Rob Arklays at all of the world from using environmental laws to block environmentally beneficial things as he is trying to do in the city of Eureka by trying to stop affordable housing production. Well, we have just blown through a half hour. I had so much fun talking about this and we have so many laws still left on our cheat sheet to talk about. So maybe we'll do another episode in the future.

SIMMONS:

I think we should do an episode on laws that were vetoed that we wish had passed and also laws that we hope pass in the future.

WHEELER:

do an entire episode about how Governor Newsom is letting us down as an environmental leader by vetoing all these good laws. I still will never forgive him for vetoing SB1 like five years ago or whatever it was. He'll never live that down with me. You hear that, Newsom?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, Rob Arkley and Newsom, both regular listeners of the podcast.

WHEELER:

Anyways, this has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the north coast of California.