If you ask a lineup of housing advocates whether they support streamlining new housing, the answer is “of course.” That’s the energy the California Chamber of Commerce (CalChamber) is hoping to harness with the measure they’re working to put on the 2026 ballot – the “Building an Affordable California Act” (BACA). But BACA is about streamlining destructive sprawl—not infill housing. East Bay for Everyone opposes BACA and urges other housing advocates and stakeholders to join us.
BACA is all the more insidious because it masquerades as a solution to a real and complex problem. Housing advocates have been pushing for reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for years. CEQA is a law that was passed in the 1970s when California did not have adequate environmental protections. But it goes much further, essentially requiring studies for anything that has an impact on the built environment.
CEQA reform has long been needed to streamline expanding public transportation, infill housing (or housing in an already-developed area), and renewable energy generation and transmission projects. Recognizing this, the legislature passed two historic CEQA streamlining bills in 2025: SB 607 and AB 130. This legislative package exempted infill housing from CEQA, which was a monumental win for housing advocates. Prior bills since 2020 have provided targeted CEQA streamlining for electric rail, light rail, bus rapid transit, bike lanes, pedestrian infrastructure and other clean transportation investment.
Enter BACA, a new proposal on the block to further streamline CEQA. BACA provides significant streamlining to a very broad array of what it calls “essential projects.” The measure defines “essential project” to include almost all housing, water, transportation, clean energy, transmission, wildfire-risk mitigation, broadband, healthcare, education, and first-responder projects.
So if we’ve already streamlined infill housing under CEQA, what does BACA do for infill housing? Nothing.
Instead, BACA streamlines destructive single-family sprawl developments and their infrastructure. The number of single-family developments we are building in California’s hinterlands should be shrinking, not rising. Sprawl forces people into soul-sucking supercommutes away from jobs and other destinations, driving up vehicle miles travelled while destroying essential habitat.
In addition to streamlining sprawl housing, BACA streamlines new freeways, data centers, and enormous projects like dams that have significant environmental risk and impact on local communities. BACA additionally streamlines all “related and ancillary infrastructure,” a very broad term that could mean anything from transmission lines through protected habitat to a freeway interchange that requires demolishing a low-income neighborhood. BACA does not distinguish between projects of different sizes, so a new highway is evaluated under the same rules as a 5-unit residential development.
Moreover, BACA does not provide any specific relief to public transit, intercity rail, cycling, walking or other clean, low carbon infrastructure. It treats a bus rapid transit project that reduces greenhouse gases, congestion and particulate emissions the same as a massive freeway widening project. Finally, despite California High-Speed Rail being the poster child for CEQA-inflicted delay and cost increases, BACA explicitly excludes high-speed rail from CEQA streamlining!
BACA functions both by setting strict timelines on local agencies and freezing environmental review to existing standards. Both of these sound good on face value, but because they apply to such a vast array of projects—including bad projects—it gets dicey.
By requiring any agency that is not the lead agency to issue final approvals within 90 days of an application being completed, BACA overwhelmingly benefits sprawl. Greenfield projects often require approvals from many different agencies—especially for annexations, which currently involve substantial review and fiscal analysis. Sprawl would benefit massively from this provision.
And by freezing review to existing written standards, BACA lowers the bar most in places with the weakest environmental frameworks—predominantly more rural areas without robust municipal regulations. That disproportionately benefits sprawl development. Projects like Mowery Village on Newark’s wetlands would have a clearer path forward, while infill—which is already streamlined and governed by stronger standards—gains little.
Over and over again, BACA sounds good—until you recognize that it is focused on streamlining all the wrong things.
Rubber stamping sprawl is not in alignment with East Bay for Everyone’s values and goals as an organization. CEQA remains deeply flawed, but BACA is not the way to solve it.
If you want to learn more about BACA, Greenbelt Alliance has a blog post that goes into depth on the flaws we mentioned above.