Matt Mahan

Yeah, so I mean, look, that's part of the overarching problem here is that we don't have enough housing that is affordable.

But I would also say that's largely a public policy failure.

We have the slowest permitting times, the most aggressive environmental laws, the highest impact fees.

I mean, we've made it so slow and expensive to build that the housing market isn't keeping up with demand and actually building housing affordably for people.

Yeah, no, I agree with you.

I don't think it needs to be either or at all.

Now, I do think

There's a big difference between wanting to build out in greenfield, open space, outside of a growth boundary.

If you want to build out in the valleys and the hills of California, that probably should take an environmental review process that is quite a bit more robust and takes more time than if you want to do infill development.

My big complaint has been even in our urbanized areas.

where we have roads and sewers, and we're talking about building on a surface parking lot or a place that is adjacent to a bunch of urbanized development, we will still take, at least up until very recently, on almost all projects, have taken over a year to go through environmental.

And our definition of environmental, just to be clear, with California's Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, is so much broader than what you might imagine is the environment.

It's not...

Clean air, clean water.

It goes far beyond that.

It is noise impacts, traffic impacts, shadows, historic registries, Native American remains in the ground.

I mean, just an endless list of potential impacts with a lot of discretion or debate over what are the right mitigations.

Yeah.

And I think we've got to simplify that.

Now, it's not to say we shouldn't check if you're destroying a historic building.