The state’s environmental review law is a massive obstacle.

A 123-unit senior housing building in NoHo. A new headquarters for a blood bank. A 79-unit affordable housing development in Sag Harbor. A neighborhood rezoning in Inwood. What do all these projects have in common?

They were all delayed, and in some cases denied, after private individuals challenged their land-use approvals under New York State’s environmental review law, the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA).

In recent years, federal and state lawmakers across the country have realized that initially well-intentioned environmental review laws like SEQRA have instead slowed down and increased the cost of development.

In her most recent budget, Gov. Kathy Hochul joined their ranks, proposing to exempt a handful of strategic priorities, like multifamily housing, childcare and resiliency projects, from SEQRA to accelerate their development.

These reforms did not come out of nowhere: The history of SEQRA can shed light on why she is proposing this now and how the proposal might play out in Albany.

From good intentions to bad results

SEQRA requires state and local governments to identify and address the potential impacts of public actions like rezonings and infrastructure projects on the surrounding communities — and allows those communities to challenge those reviews in court if they believe them to be insufficient.

In passing SEQRA in 1975, state lawmakers hoped that environmental review would make the government more accountable to New Yorkers. But a half century later, these reforms have instead slowed public decision-making by burying new development in paperwork and opening the door to legal challenges.

Gov. Hugh L. Carey proposed the bill that became SEQRA in April 1975, at a moment when public trust in New York government was at an all-time low. Robert Caro had just published “The Power Broker,” his biography of Robert Moses’ use and abuse of power to build housing and infrastructure throughout New York. The New York State Urban Development Corporation was insolvent, causing Carey to appoint Richard Ravitch to stave off default on its $1 billion in outstanding debt. And New York City was in the middle of its fiscal crisis, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy after banks cut off its access to the bond market.

Like many other governors at that time, the newly-elected Carey responded to the perceived failures of big government by placing checks and balances on the state and local agencies that had nearly bankrupted New York. Returning power to communities, he hoped, would enable individuals to hold executive power to account. 

SEQRA was one of the most far-reaching of those reforms. The idea was appealing: If only Robert Moses had been required to pause, crunch numbers and hold public hearings, he might not have pursued projects like the Cross Bronx Expressway that polluted the environment and displaced thousands of New Yorkers. 

During the early 1970s, many states passed state-level equivalents of the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which Congress approved in 1969 after a series of environmental disasters including an oil spill off Santa Barbara, Calif. and a fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.

But Carey’s proposal went further than other state’s local NEPAs. SEQRA would subject a broad range of actions to review; New York became one of just seven states, for example, that would require it for zoning and land use actions, in addition to the large-scale infrastructure projects subject to NEPA.   

Carey signed the bill into law in August, over the objections of a coalition that included the Real Estate Board of New York, building contractors, construction unions and New York City Mayor Abe Beame. They all warned that interest groups could weaponize SEQRA to obstruct development, as had already happened after the passage of NEPA. After NEPA went into effect in 1970, environmental advocates and community groups successfully blocked federal projects across the country, including a 1972 lawsuit to halt the construction of the Metropolitan Correction Center in lower Manhattan.

Carey insisted those concerns were overstated — that SEQRA would only apply to “significant” projects and that any problems that arose could be fixed in the future. Those revisions never came, and the delays and cost concerns raised by SEQRA’s opponents became baked into New York’s planning processes. The genesis of Hochul’s determination to pass SEQRA reform responds directly to the warnings of those early critics.

How Long SEQRA Takes

Environmental review adds years before a project even reaches the approval process

Median duration of environmental review and pre-certification for NYC zoning changes, before entering the formal land-use review (ULURP)

Full EIS
Environmental Impact Statement

Streamlined assessment
No significant impacts found

012 mo24 mo36 mo

These timelines are before the project enters ULURP — the formal approval process adds more time on top.

Elizabeth Street Garden

Affordable senior housing tied up in SEQRA litigation for nearly a decade

Mayor withdrew from project

Inwood rezoning

2018 rezoning won at lower court, overturned on appeal

First project delayed 3 years

0

states with SEQRA-like review for zoning changes

0

SEQRA court challenges decided in 2024

0

challenges that actually prevailed

Even meritless lawsuits add cost and delay. The threat of a challenge is enough to deter projects from ever being proposed.

Source: Sean Campion, Vital City. Median durations based on NYC zoning changes 2014-2017.

How it works

Under SEQRA, state and local governments must conduct an environmental review for all “discretionary” actions: cases in which a public entity has a choice about whether to approve a proposal.

Review is required, for example, for land use actions that require zoning changes or special permits, for the construction of new public facilities like schools, libraries and highways, and for many private projects that are awarded public subsidies. It is not needed for routine actions where governments must issue approvals based on a set of criteria, like the issuance of building permits for projects that meet zoning rules, or for maintenance and repair work.

Before an agency can grant a discretionary approval, the applicant (a public agency in the case of public projects, or a private developer for many rezonings or permit applications) must extensively review the project’s potential effects on the surrounding community. 

After determining that the project is not explicitly exempted from review under law or regulation, the applicant first conducts a streamlined review known as an environmental assessment (EAS) to determine whether the project might have “significant adverse impacts” on the environment or surrounding community, such as traffic flow, construction noise, shadows, increases in the number of school-age children or water runoff.

Most projects end the environmental review at this stage. The reviewing agency declares that the project will not have adverse impacts, occasionally after a public hearing, and the project can move to the agency’s decision-makers for a final thumbs-up or thumbs-down. In New York City, projects enter the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) after completing this step.

A smaller number of projects, including many capital projects and neighborhood rezonings, however, are required to undergo deeper scrutiny through a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

An EIS requires its own extensive process. The agency or private applicant develops a scope of work, prepares for and holds a public hearing, then publishes a draft impact statement on up to 20 topics. This is followed by another public hearing and round of comments. The agency overseeing the review must declare that the review is complete before accepting a final EIS, which must include a statement of findings and any potential mitigations.

Even for simple projects that end review after the streamlined EAS, this process translates into months, and often years, of legal, lobbying, communications and executive time. Projects requiring a full EIS produce impact statements whose length can better be measured in linear feet than in page numbers.

The threat of a SEQRA challenge is enough to deter projects from ever being proposed — a chilling effect that never shows up in court statistics. Some applicants shrink projects to avoid triggering a full EIS; others expand scope proactively to head off complaints.

Review as roadblock

This complex process alone does not explain how environmental review came to become an obstacle to discretionary projects. On paper, SEQRA is merely an information-gathering requirement. Yet in the real world, its implementation has created a time consuming and bureaucratic exercise in risk management.

Three developments led to this point:

1.    Environmental review is enforced through the court by individuals: Like many reforms of the 1970s, environmental review empowers individuals to challenge administrative actions by suing public agencies, a concept known as a private right of action. The intent was that public accountability would keep agencies on the straight-and-narrow. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before project opponents leveraged SEQRA’s private right of action to obstruct projects they disapproved of, as had already happened under NEPA with the lower Manhattan jail. Over the past 50 years, private individuals and groups have challenged nearly every action that public agencies take in the environmental review process. As a result, agencies and applicants have potential lawsuits in mind at every step. 

2.    Early SEQRA litigation made a “hard look” the law of the land: A series of early court rulings increased the level of scrutiny required beyond Carey’s original intent. The most significant of these cases was a 1979 decision that temporarily blocked the construction of Syracuse University’s JWA Wireless Dome stadium. Neighbors sued to block the project, arguing that the State authority overseeing the project had failed to thoroughly analyze the stadium’s traffic impacts before approving it. The court agreed with the plaintiffs, halting the stadium project, and finding that agencies must take a “hard look” at all potential impacts before acting. Over time, subsequent cases applied this “hard look” test to every step in the review process, increasing the time needed to complete reviews.

3.    How many technical analyses?! SEQRA originally focused on a limited number of environmental impacts, but over time, the number grew. One City government veteran described the additions as driven by planners and advocates, like myself, who insist on data-driven and accountable governance. But the desire to improve analysis has increased review times and opened new opportunities for potential lawsuits. New York City, for example, now requires 20 technical analyses, ranging from intensive analyses of impacts on infrastructure, traffic, and air quality to non-environmental concerns like neighborhood character, socioeconomic changes and historic resources. Mistakes in any one of those analyses can trip up a project, and scope changes can require starting the analysis over again. The ongoing redevelopment of Willets Point, for example, required two supplemental EISs: one in 2013 to modify the original 2008 EIS, and a second revision in 2024 after the scope changed again.

What it all adds up to

The good news is that relatively few projects get sued under SEQRA, and most lawsuits challenging environmental review fail. In 2024, for example, State courts decided 43 SEQRA challenges, of which only five prevailed. But the mere threat of legal challenges increases the time, cost and uncertainty for projects that already undergo extensive environmental review.

My analysis of New York City zoning changes from 2014 and 2017 found that environmental review, even for projects that have no impacts, takes a long time. Projects taking advantage of streamlined environmental assessments took a median of 23 months to complete environmental review and pre-certification before entering the City’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), compared to 33 months for those undergoing a full EIS.

Simply dragging out the approval process can be enough to stop a project. Applicants can run out of money or lose financing. They can be required to redo analyses after a certain period of time. Markets and political winds can shift.

Opponents of a proposal to build affordable senior housing at the Elizabeth Street Garden, for example, tied up the project in litigation for nearly a decade before convincing Mayor Eric Adams to withdraw from the project in his final months in office. A lawsuit challenging the 2018 Inwood rezoning, which permitted 1,800 new affordable housing units, won at a lower court before getting overturned on appeal, ultimately delaying the first project, with 174 affordable units and a new public library, from securing approvals for three years.

More rarely, a lawsuit can kill a project altogether. In 2022, wealthy Sag Harbor residents used SEQRA to block a 79-unit affordable housing complex in a town where the average home is worth $2.2 million.

Interested parties can also leverage the threat of a lawsuit to extract benefits. Recently a labor group challenged the EIS for Micron’s new semiconductor factory in Clay, NY to secure labor commitments.

And even for the majority of projects that do not get sued, environmental review requirements can affect what gets proposed or built. Some applicants shrink projects to get below thresholds known to trigger a more extensive EIS. Others, especially in the public sector, proactively expand the scope of capital projects to anticipate complaints from potential detractors. Leah Brooks’ and Zachary Liscow’s analysis of federal transportation projects, for example, found that highway construction costs tripled following the passage of NEPA.

The shape of reform

Despite its economic success, New York faces an immense housing shortage, threats from climate change and aging infrastructure that is increasingly falling into disrepair. Addressing these challenges will require public actions that are subject to SEQRA, such as increasing housing capacity via rezonings, expanding renewable energy and upgrading storm sewers to mitigate climate risk.

New York’s land-use and permitting framework was adopted in the 1970s, in the wake of urban renewal and environmental disasters. It prioritized environmental protection, community input and transparency into public decision-making. By design, it slowed down and increased the cost of projects, and sometimes dissuaded them from happening at all. But in the process of addressing those concerns, environmental review often wound up preserving the status quo at the expense of progress.

Reforming environmental review does not mean abandoning state and local oversight. The development that Governor Hochul would exempt from SEQRA would still be subject to zoning and building codes. Approval processes like ULURP would remain in place. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will enforce the state’s many environmental protections, most of which passed after SEQRA went into effect. 

The changes simply rebalance public decision-making processes so that New York can address its mounting needs at a pace befitting the scale of its challenges.