Cargill drops fight to build 12,000 homes on Redwood City salt pondshttps://www.siliconvalley.com/2021/04/15/cargill-drops-fight-to-build-12000-homes-on-redwood-city-salt-ponds-3/In what environmental groups are hailing as a “complete victory,†Cargill Salt announced this week it will not appeal a decision by a federal judge that protects Redwood City’s salt ponds from development, effectively halting its decades-long effort to build thousands of new homes there.
The move comes after a U.S. District Court judge ruled in October that the federal Environmental Protection Agency ignored its own regulations when it decided in 2019 that about 1,400 acres of San Francisco Bay salt ponds adjacent to the city’s port aren’t protected by the Clean Water Act.
As salt ponds, the land isn’t worth much financially — but if the ponds had been excluded from the act, it would have allowed Cargill to make lucrative land and development deals potentially worth billions of dollars.
The court’s ruling was seen as a victory for four environmental groups and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who sued the Trump administration last year to overturn the EPA’s decision. That decision would have legally allowed Cargill Salt to proceed with its proposal to build more than 12,000 homes on the property.
The Bay Area's crazy housing prices are the consequence of government, Enviros, and miscellaneous NIMBYs keeping housing from being built. When demand exceeds supply, prices rise.
