Californias Proposition 45 Brings the Sprawl Debate Back

In the foothills above Los Angeles sits a yellow field with a cement plant in the distance.It looks like the middle of nowhere but lies at the center of a debate about the cause of California’s housing crisis and whether more suburbs can help solve it.The company that owns the field, the Tejon Ranch Company, has spent the past two decades trying and failing to turn the plot into housing, part of a larger plan to build what would amount to three new towns with some 40,000 homes across them.

The development has been stymied by lawsuits arguing it would increase wildfire risk and lead to more carbon emissions that cause climate change.To fight back, Tejon Ranch is backing a ballot initiative, Proposition 45, that would curtail the length of environmental reviews on large projects, including housing, roads, power and other infrastructure.Proposition 45 would also make it harder to challenge development.If passed by voters on Nov.

3, the measure could shift the state’s development pattern by reigniting the kind of edge-city growth that built the modern California but is now derisively known as “sprawl.” Proposition 45 is backed by the California Chamber of Commerce and supported by a long list of homebuilders whose vision for California’s future comes from the past.“This is the Chamber of Commerce saying, ‘We need to bring back the kinds of growth that California had in the 1960s,’” said Christopher Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies land-use regulations.It is not much of an exaggeration to say housing is the only issue Californians care about.The state’s median home price sits around $750,000, and home buyers in Los Angeles and San Francisco consider themselves lucky to find a teardown for twice that.

More than a decade’s worth of surveys place the cost of housing atop the list of issues state voters are most concerned about and the reason a steady stream of U-Hauls continues to leave California for ch...