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Michael Barnes
TIME Magazine reporters praised Senator Scott Wiener. They got it wrong.
On the cover of the December 4, 2023, print issue of Time Magazine, State Senator Scott Wiener was listed among “the 100 most influential leaders driving business to real climate action.”
Wiener was honored for his recent bill, Senate Bill 253 (SB 253) which, oddly enough, doesn’t require any “real climate action” on the part of businesses other than to file reports with the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
Time Magazine missed the bigger story. There is another side of Wiener’s environmental record that the reporters should have uncovered — Wiener is encouraging development in California’s fragile environments. At the same time, he is driving a wedge between environmental groups and housing advocates, disrupting the coalition for urban infill housing production.
Putting the coastal zone at risk
Last September, the state legislature passed Wiener’s SB 423. The bill drew opposition from dozens of environmental organizations, including Sierra Club California and other groups concerned with the effects of climate change on California’s coast. SB 423 was an extension of an earlier Wiener bill, SB 35, which allowed for streamlined permitting of multi-family housing projects. One of the conditions of the earlier bill was that the projects could not be located in the coastal zone.
Unlike its predecessor, SB 423 does apply in the coastal zone, a move that has created a furor among many Californians because it violates the authority of the Coastal Commission. The Commission was approved in 1972 by a voter-initiated proposition after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spills and the increasing privatization of the coast. Then in 1976, the State Legislature passed the Coastal Act, which made the commission a permanent agency with broad authority to regulate coastal development.
The streamlined development approval processes allowed under SB 423 are blunt instruments compared to the more cautious approach of the Commission. In Sacramento, the environmental groups opposed to the bill took a nuanced “oppose unless amended” position on the bill. If the coastal exemption had been restored, the groups would have dropped their opposition to the bill. But Wiener refused to restore the coastal exemption, so the environmental groups remained opposed.
Here is what Wiener said in a California Planning and Development Review article about environmental groups and their opposition to his bill:
“No one wants to push development into coastal bluffs and wetlands and environmentally sensitive coastal resources. But, when you talk about Santa Monica and Santa Cruz and Los Angeles and all these communities that are urbanized, existing cities that happen to be partially in the Coastal Zone, they should not be excluded from state housing law.”
Weiner’s statement is misleading. Only narrow strips of beach and waterfront in Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles fall under the jurisdiction of the Coastal Commission. This is easily confirmed by looking at maps of the coastal zone. Most of the land in urban coastal cities cannot be “excluded from state housing laws” by the Coastal Commission. Not only is the coastal zone narrow in urban areas, but available land there is also expensive. Typically, only housing for the wealthy is profitable to build in the coastal zone.
Building in high fire hazard zones
Wiener’s plans don’t stop with allowing the degradation of California’s coastal zone. Wiener is now working to permit developers to build in other environmentally risky areas—Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.
Cal Fire (the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) is the state agency charged with “safeguarding California through fire prevention and protection, emergency response, and stewardship of natural resource systems.” The agency produces maps of fire hazard zones.
In the California Planning and Development Review interview, Wiener was dismissive of the fire risks mapped by Cal Fire:
"If CalFire was sitting here, I think they would tell you, ‘No, those maps are designed not to say where you can build and not build, but rather what you have to do if you're building to a higher standard.’ But we have people who are opposed to new housing that will change their hats and the arguments that they make. All of a sudden it’s, ‘No, we don't want any new construction. We don't want state housing law to apply at all in very high or high wildfire severity zones.’”
The problem with building in very high fire severity zones is that although building codes can be toughened to make housing more fire-resistant, that doesn't do much good if residents die in their cars on local roads (as in the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise). Fire safety requires not only tougher building codes, but also adequate evacuation routes, and coordinated planning among Cal Fire and local police, fire, and public works departments. Recent efforts in the state legislature to require more stringent regulation in very high fire severity zones have failed.
California contains approximately 164,000 square miles of land. Much of that land has low fire risk, including the Central Valley, most of the Los Angeles basin, and the desert lands to the east. The Central Valley alone contains 18,000 square miles. The population of the entire state could fit into one-third of the Central Valley at a population density less than that of the city of Salinas.
The housing boom along the I-5 corridor between Sacramento and Auburn is a good example of building in a fire-safe region. There the city of Roseville has been growing rapidly for many years and still has plenty of room to build. The I-10 corridor between Riverside and Palm Springs has been another booming area. Land in high-fire-risk regions is not necessary to house California’s population.
YIMBYs and environmental groups at odds
The alliance of YIMBY and other pro-growth groups on the one hand, and environmental groups like the Bay Area’s Greenbelt Alliance and the Sierra Club on the other hand, was built on their mutual support for urban infill housing and against sprawl. Environmental groups generally support infill housing but are opposed to building in high-fire-risk zones. But now that alliance is beginning to break down.
Due to high interest rates and materials cost in the Bay Area, building urban infill housing is difficult. Given the growing demand due to work-from-home and Millennials seeking single-family homes, developers find demand is growing for suburban projects.
A real environmental leader would protect land in both the very high-fire severity zones and the coastal zone from this development pressure. But as one environmental lobbyist stated regarding Wiener,
“He and Assembly Housing Committee Chair Buffy Wicks said several times over the session that there is ‘nowhere’ in California where we shouldn’t build housing.”
Rather than including the state senator as one of the 100 persons driving business to climate action, Time Magazine should have investigated the ties between Wiener and his real estate allies who are attempting to roll back protections for California’s fragile environments.
That would be a newsworthy story.
ABOUT MICHAEL BARNES
My background: After earning my B.A. and M.A. in economics in the early 1980s, I served for 2.5 years as a budget and economic analyst for the State of Washington in Olympia, WA. I came to Berkeley in 1989 as a Ph.D. student in economics, but my interest in the social sciences faded while my interest in the physical sciences grew, so in 1996 I switched career paths and joined the UC staff.
I retired in 2017 after spending the final 11 years of my UC career as the science editor for the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry. The College is immensely proud that the last three of the eight female winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — Francis Arnold (2018), Jennifer Doudna (2020), and Carolyn Bertozzi (2022) — were all either students, faculty members, or both at the College. I have had the privilege of interviewing and writing about all three.
I served on the Albany City Council from 2012 to 2020, and I stay involved with local govt. issues. Finally, as an avid cyclist, I have cycled or walked in 42 of California’s 58 counties, traveled by car through another 13, and have failed to visit only three.