By Ben Christopher / CalMatters / October 26, 2026
For nearly a decade, California’s Yes In My Backyard activists and other pro-development advocates have wanted to overhaul California’s signature environmental law to clear the way for more housing construction.
Now Proposition 45 is on the ballot. Supporters say it would, among other things, overhaul that law, known as the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, to clear the way for—you guessed it—more housing construction.
So why are YIMBYs divided?
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and one of the movement’s most stalwart champions in the Legislature, is for it. So is the bulk of the building industry, including many major for- and non-profit developers.
Bay Area pro-housing advocates Eastbay for Everyone and the Greenbelt Alliance, two typical allies of Wicks, are emphatically against it.
In the uncommitted middle lies the lion’s share of California YIMBYism: Abundant Housing Los Angeles, SPUR, and both California YIMBY and YIMBY Action — the movement’s two flagship advocacy organizations — have all taken neutral positions.
“It’s been a weird campaign so far,” said Ali Sapirman, advocacy manager at the Housing Action Coalition, an urban building industry group that supports the measure. “The housing community has been a little bit fractured.”
Those fissures aren’t over whether more homes should be built across California. Instead, it mostly boils down to a question of where.
“The central question here is how you feel about sprawl,” Max Dubler of California YIMBY wrote in the group’s non-endorsement statement, referring to low-density housing development at the edge of metro areas. Though some exurban growth “will necessarily be part of solving our housing shortage,” he expressed concern about making it easier to build “car-dependent sprawl housing and the freeways and water infrastructure necessary to serve that sprawl.”
To sprawl or not to sprawl
For nearly a decade, the Legislature has been on a tear, passing “streamlining” bills aimed at speeding up the regulatory approval of new construction. Almost all of those laws have only applied to projects in places where homes and other infrastructure already exist.
Prioritizing so-called infill development helped wrangle together a coalition of developers and construction labor unions, but also a diverse swath of Democratic-leaning advocates whose interest in seeing more apartments and condos goes beyond the cause of affordability alone. That includes climate activists who want to see less commuter car traffic; transit, bicycle and pedestrian advocates who want more riders and walkers and urbanists who want Los Angeles to more closely resemble Barcelona.
In breaking from that urban focus, Prop. 45 is driving a wedge inside that coalition.
