October 26, 2026
By Ali Sapirman
In the past few years, we’ve made significant progress toward making California more affordable. Across the state, however, critical housing projects still stall for years, sometimes until they become infeasible to build, and Californians are deprived of much needed new affordable housing.
The culprit? Permitting and approval systems that are so slow and costly they drive up the price of nearly everything we try to build.
Permitting delays alone add more than $75,000 to the cost of building a new home in California. That is the difference between a family qualifying for a mortgage and being priced out entirely. And housing is just one example — the same layers of delay slow down clean energy projects, hospitals, schools, water systems and the wildfire prevention work that has become a matter of life and safety for entire communities.
Take the Brooklyn Basin project in Oakland. Originally approved in 2006, nearly a decade of litigation delayed groundbreaking on 3,100 units of new housing until 2014. Located on a former industrial site in the heart of Oakland, it’s exactly the kind of climate-friendly housing project state leaders say they want, but families were still forced to wait eight years for it to come online.
Recent state laws to streamline housing don’t help projects like Brooklyn Basin, because they only apply to smaller projects. Prop 45 takes on this problem directly. It puts reasonable timelines on the approval process for essential infrastructure and housing projects for all sizes so that the things Californians need can actually get built in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost.
We should also be clear about what Prop 45 does not do.
Prop 45 does not weaken California’s environmental laws, as it keeps our environmental review process fully intact. What changes is the pace at which projects move through it, not the substance of the review itself. Prop 45 is not an exemption from CEQA. It doesn’t ask Californians to trade away environmental protection for affordability. It asks us to stop pretending that slower is somehow safer or greener.
Prop 45 also does not strip communities of their voice. Local governments keep the authority to approve or deny projects in their jurisdictions. Residents still have the opportunity to weigh in throughout the process. Instead, Prop 45 removes the endless procedural delay that too often has nothing to do with a project’s merits and everything to do with a broken system.
Lastly, Prop 45 is not a narrow ask from a single industry. It is backed by a broad coalition that includes affordable housing advocates, water providers, healthcare professionals, clean energy developers, and small business leaders. That is because the cost of our broken permitting and approval system does not only fall on one sector. It falls on every Californian who pays more in rent, more on their electric bill and more in taxes to cover the cost constraints that come from projects dragging on for years longer than they should.
At the Housing Action Coalition, we see the human cost of this dysfunction every day. We work with developers, architects, and advocates who are building housing in communities across this state. We know that the single greatest obstacle is rarely a lack of will — it is a process that adds years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to projects that should be moving forward for the families waiting on the other end of them. That’s why we support Prop 45.
California does not have to choose between environmental responsibility and affordability. We can, and we should, protect both. But we cannot do it with the current system in place.
Prop 45 is a practical, balanced fix to a problem that is quietly driving up the cost of living for all of us.
Ali Sapirman is the Advocacy and Policy Manager at Housing Action Coalition.