Jennifer Hernandez: Inequality through California’s Environmental Quality Act

On this episode, Kevin chats with Jennifer Hernandez, a land use attorney from Holland and Knight, about how California's Environmental Quality Act has been corrupted from its original environmental protection purpose into a tool for special interest groups to advance ulterior motives. Jennifer expertly draws connections between CEQA's flaws and the rights of California citizens to have attainable shelter, revealing how the Act is now used by those with money to stop development through NIMBY tactics, secure project labor agreements for local unions, stop competition, and provide bounty hunting lawyers fertile ground to extort cash from developers. The conversation explores the importance of humility and recognizing how much you don't know beyond your narrow expertise, the role a home played for Jennifer's mother and grandmother in tough times and why that's worth protecting, and how CEQA's strictest interpretation would freeze California in 1972. Jennifer discusses how government agency discretion plus any environmental change triggers CEQA, the fact that only 13% of CEQA complaints come from pre-existing entities while 87% are filed by entities created just for the complaint, how CEQA challengers need not identify themselves, how bounty hunting lawyers employ bots to monitor for new Environmental Impact Reports to extract payments, the complete mess of affordable housing, and why not understanding politicians is their problem—insist on policies that make sense.