A couple of years later, government agencies in California were reviewing more than four thousand environmental impact statements annually—four times more than the entire federal government was generating under the facially similar National Environmental Policy Act. CEQA became a potent weapon against the construction of new homes. “Between 1972 and 1975, twenty-nine thousand proposed homes in the Bay Area—roughly a fifth of the region’s total housing production at the time—were subject to environmental litigation,” Anbinder writes.
