Hello, I'm Dana Taylor, and this is a special episode of USA Today's The Excerpt.

Lack of affordable housing is an urgent problem in cities and states across America, but perhaps

nowhere is it felt more acutely than in California. That's where a 55-year-old regulation known

as CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, has created a lengthy process, a review process

that's been blamed for gumming up the developmental pipeline.

But in June, in a move that angered environmentalists, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills that effectively rollback portions of CEQA.

What happens now and will the impact finally pave the way for developers to create the

housing so desperately needed?

Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley,

joins us to talk about what this might mean for housing in California.

Ben, thank you so much for joining me.

It's my pleasure.

I'm very happy to be here.

Set the stage for us here. There's been a partial rollback of Sequa, the signature law,

which has largely been blamed for holding up new housing projects. What were the issues

SQL was originally trying to address and what parts did Newsom effectively repeal in June?

Siqua was one of a number of state level sort of environmental protection laws that came

into force in the early 1970s at a time of real environmental activism and a time where there

was a real concern that development had

been running rampant and buildings had been getting built in places that were dangerous,

potentially for the inhabitants, or causing real harm to wildlife or habitat.

The law itself is actually sort of, on paper, seems very reasonable.

...