The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXIV: The Cut Red Tape for Housing Act. Laura Friedman is a United States Congresswoman from California and a member of both the Build America Caucus and the YIMBY Caucus.Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Congresswoman Friedman, welcome to Radio Abundance! You’ve been on Radio Abundance before, but this is our first-ever live episode!

We got an early scoop that this bill might be coming and chatted about doing an emergency podcast today to be timely, and we thought, "hey, as long as we're going to talk to you anyways, let's do it live and try a new format and see who shows up!”

I mean, we're going to have the same conversation either way!

So, this is a lot of fun. We're extremely excited to talk to you again, and we’re also extremely excited about the new bill. And always extremely excited to try a new, fun, live format.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Yeah, it's exciting! It's kind of edgy. I like it.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Super edgy…

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Dangerous!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

As is this bill, maybe? A little bit? Dangerously helpful?

I'm going to ask you about it in a second, but I want to set this up both for the audience and for you. First of all, you have been on Radio Abundance before, so for anybody that wants to know your origin story, how you got here, or how you think about this: go there!

Today, we're going to talk about the bipartisan Cut Red Tape for Housing Act.

And what I want to say to you is: you know, we have folks in our listener community who are maybe the foremost experts in their field in this sort of thing, and also folks who are coming to this movement for the first time and trying it out and seeing if they like it.

So, I bring that up (and talk so much off the bat) only to set up that, in a moment, I'm going to ask you, "What is the Cut Red Tape for Housing Act?" But, I actually want you to tell me twice. First, I want you to tell me for somebody who is joining this movement and curious and inclined to it. The layman's big picture. High level.

And then, I want to both liberate and encourage you to get real deep in the wonky details here. Because, I promise you, this is the space where you're going to be rewarded for that level of nuance and statistical precision.

So, with that intro done…

Congresswoman Friedman, what is the Cut Red tape for Housing Act?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

What this bill does is: it makes all infill housing categorically exempt from having to do a NEPA review (a review from the National Environmental Quality Act).

That would mean that, if you're building housing that has federal money in it—

(Because housing that doesn't have federal money generally does not go through a NEPA review unless there's certain things happening in terms of its location or its impact on an environmental resource. Generally, your infill housing in an existing city like Los Angeles or Boston or Memphis wouldn't have to go through NEPA unless it was receiving some federal funding.)

Generally, those projects are Affordable Housing that have pass-throughs from the federal government, often through the state, which trigger the NEPA review. That's a review that can take 12 months. It can take 15 months. Generally, they're approved. However, they take time, and they cost money: usually a couple hundred thousand dollars for Affordable Housing projects that already exist on a financial knife’s edge in terms of making projects pencil.

So, we want to get rid of that amount of time that these projects are being stalled. We've heard stories from developers about losing financing or potentially losing financing because of delays with NEPA reviews. Certainly, $200,000 could go back into creating more units, a better building, and lots of other things rather than doing a duplicative environmental review that's generally going to be approved anyway.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

This does remind me a little bit of some of the action in California. We just had Michael Tubbs on the podcast. He's running for Lieutenant Governor. As he spoke a little bit about CEQA reform, he mentioned, "if you've done a report before and the squirrels were fine, they're probably going to be fine even though you've changed the project a little bit."

That principle of “we've actually already checked, and we don't necessarily need to rerun the whole process” -- I think it's interesting.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

And, let's be clear: this bill only impacts infill housing. It has to be a site that's already been developed. We're not talking about going into a city and taking a park or a community garden and then, without doing any looking at environmental impact, building a building.

We're talking about taking a parking lot or an old donut shop or a strip mall and redeveloping it as housing. That should be, generally, an environmental positive, not an environmental negative! Because, of course, if you don't build the housing near jobs and schools and businesses, you end up building housing oftentimes in actual green spaces out in areas that haven't been developed before.

So, there should be a net positive to the environment from these projects. There's no reason for them to have to go through NEPA, especially since they're going through other environmental reviews. We also exempted projects that would require the demolition of a historic structure. And, as I said, these are previously developed lots that are in urban areas.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

I do think this is such an important point for the movement as a whole to keep coming back to, right? Which is: if you love your suburbs — and even more so if you love your rural area — the best way to protect both is to let dense areas be dense! Right? The densification of the suburbs and rural areas, perhaps some of that is population growth (for however much longer that lasts), but quite a lot of that is people being exiled from cities that are not pulling their weight.

So, this kind of infill housing, where you've already got places that are developed and that are fairly dense and that are a very natural place to build more housing — it seems ridiculous to stop that, and thank you for taking away some of those ridiculous barriers!

Let's define infill for a second. I am looking at the fact sheet, and it says, “either 75% of the site's perimeter adjoins parcels developed with an urban use, or 75% of land within a quarter mile radius of the site is developed within urban use.” So, that's how we're defining the proximity to a relatively dense urban environment. Then, I'm seeing “no larger than 20 acres, located on vacant or underutilized land that was previously developed for an urban use.” So, that is how we are defining infill. And you mentioned the demolition carve outs?

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Yeah. We wanted to make sure that we addressed any concerns that people might have going in as we introduce this bill. We want to not miss something that might lead to objections. We want to make sure it's a net positive for communities.

And so, we use a lot of the definitions that are in the new California law for CEQA exemptions for infill housing as a viewpoint and as a guide because they went through a year-long process of being in discussion with environmental groups and with cities. I'm never one to miss taking material from people that have done their homework! And it seemed like a perfect time to introduce NEPA reform.

I've worked on these issues for my time in the California legislature where I served for eight years. I have worked on and done my own bills to reform CEQA (which is the California equivalent of NEPA), particularly with an eye towards housing.

So, I've worked in this space, and when I ran for Congress, a lot of what I talked about was bringing that same work to the federal space and looking for the opportunities to do streamlining and make our processes make sense and not be barriers to the things that we need.

We know what we need to do, and we need to do it quickly. That's what this bill is about.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

It seems like — and it's shining through this conversation — you've both written a bill that is designed to have an extremely positive impact, but also a bill that you think can pass. That's ringing through how you've learned from California and learned from what I might call handling objections ahead of time.

I am curious how you see the politics and future and timeline of this? IThis is a bipartisan bill, so I'm curious about Representative Edwards: his interests and your relationship. I'm curious, especially for folks who maybe aren't deep Congress watchers, what are the chances of passage? What is the process? How long might that take?

I'm curious how you would game out the road from here.

United States Congresswoman Laura Friedman:

Well, I only got elected in November and got sworn in in January, so I'm still learning a lot about this process! But I'm very encouraged by having bipartisan support. I'm part of a new caucus called the Build America Caucus, and so is Representative Edwards, so he seemed like he was a natural person for me...