There are numerous reasons why the Bay Area has a housing crisis. The reason we most often hear about is the influx of new residents to the area. The one we hardly think about, however, can be found in our own collective backyards.

“Not In My Back Yard” is a phrase that’s been used quite often in California over the last 30 years, usually as a precursor to challenge, block, delay or kill construction projects across the state. And NIMBY activists’ bludgeoning tool of choice is the California Environmental Quality Act. Like NIMBY, it’s better known by its acronym: CEQA.

The spirit behind the state’s environmental law is sound, but its application in all manner of building proposals is not, experts say, and decades of abuse has punched a good-sized hole in the state’s housing stock.

“It (CEQA) has been abused in this state for 30 years by people who use it when it has nothing to do with an environmental reason,” said Carol Galante, faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Galante spoke to me by phone as she traveled to Sacramento to provide testimony on the housing crisis to the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee.

“NIMBY-ism is connected to the fact that for everyone who owns their little piece of the dream, there’s no reason to want development next door to them,” she said.

“CEQA gives them a tool to effectuate their interest,” she said. “It’s a sense of entitlement that comes with an incentive, because it makes their property worth more money.”

That’s downright disgusting. It’s an entitlement fueled more by greed and selfishness than any legitimate environmental claim.

In a study released in August by the San Francisco law firm of Holland & Knight, lawyers researched three years of state Environmental Quality Act challenges and came up with some startling findings.

Among them, the study found that 49 percent of all CEQA filings target taxpayer-funded projects. The usual targets are transit and renewable-energy projects often approved to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve environmental quality. It found that 80 percent of such filings challenged urban in-fill projects. And the most frequently targeted private sector development is housing.

“CEQA has been singled out as one of the key causes of runaway housing prices and as a major reason California has fallen far behind other states in creating, retaining and on-shoring the middle-class manufacturing jobs that have helped create a manufacturing renaissance in other states,” said Jennifer Hernandez, head of the law firm’s West Coast Land Use and Environment Group and lead author of the study.

The study offered possible remedies: requiring anyone filing a new lawsuit under CEQA to state their environmental concerns, eliminating duplicate lawsuits for plans and projects that have already won approval, preserving the right of environmental review and public comment, and scaling back court-ordered invalidation of project approvals that harm health, destroy tribal resources or threaten the environment.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if suburban sprawl is blocked for environmental concerns, and open lands are protected and urban in-fill is limited, it’s going to be very difficult to provide housing of any kind, except for the very wealthy.

If the Bay Area’s housing crunch is a byproduct of overzealous use of environmental law fueled by no-growth supporters, it’s the responsibility of the local and state elected officials to change that, even if means adopting measures to rein in state environmental laws, which were passed to preserve our environment, not bar the door to all new growth.

“We need to fundamentally rethink how the CEQA process works in this state,” Galante said. “I’m an academic. I say it like I see it, and this is a major issue that needs to be tackled.”