What do you think of when you read the words, “California Dream”?

For most people, the image that comes to mind is a house — perhaps with a small yard, children playing, the sun shining, a feeling of optimism and possibility.

Affordable, plentiful housing was, in many ways, the foundation of the California Dream. Come to this beautiful state, work hard, buy a house, start a family, follow your dreams. For decades, the Golden State delivered that promise. But not any more.

Today California has the highest housing costs in the nation, and the lowest home ownership. Buying a house or apartment seems completely out of reach for most people. The latest studies show that only 16% of Californians can afford to buy a typical home, which would require an annual salary of over $200,000 at current mortgage rates. And that’s assuming they could find the money for a down-payment — itself an impossible barrier for many.

What has gone so wrong?

Like most of California’s other problems, our housing crisis is a self-inflicted wound.

In the name of environmentalism (a cause which so many Californians, including me, are proud to support), we’ve made it practically impossible to build anything here. But it’s not our environmental protection laws themselves that are the problem: rather, it’s the way they’re being abused.

In 1970, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed into law the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. It was the first piece of legislation of its kind in the world, and it was intended to make sure that major government projects like new infrastructure didn’t destroy the natural environment. CEQA was never intended to cover housing — but that’s exactly what it was expanded to include in a 1972 ruling by the California Supreme Court.

Over the years, CEQA has been further expanded by the courts to cover all manner of so-called environmental impacts, including things like the view from a sidewalk, or clearing brush to prevent wildfires. Unlike other environmental laws, anyone can sue to block a project under CEQA.

And boy have they done that. Over the decades, countless lawsuits have been filed to block the construction of new housing. Just in a recent two year period, there were one million new homes approved for construction by local governments, but blocked by CEQA lawsuits.

These CEQA lawsuits can take years to resolve — in one notorious case, 11 years for one home — and most have no real environmental merit. It is pure abuse of the legal system.

By blocking the construction of the new homes we need, CEQA lawsuit abuse has artificially reduced the supply of housing, helping to increase the price.

But there’s another reason housing is so astronomically expensive in California: “impact fees.” These are charges levied on new housing by state and local government and its agencies, and as with CEQA, they have a reasonable origin. Clearly, building new housing creates the need for additional local services like parks, and that “impact” needs to be paid for.

However, these impact fees (effectively a tax on new homes) have, in some parts of our state, exploded to levels that are completely counterproductive. To build an apartment in San Francisco meant paying an Impact Fee of $300,000, for example.

These costs end up in the purchase price of a home, and with impact fees at this level, it’s no wonder that only expensive homes tend to get built.

As our housing crisis has escalated, Sacramento has barely moved. While some valiant legislators like Sen. Scott Weiner of San Francisco have been pushing hard to make change happen, even though we’ve seen over 100 pieces of legislation on housing in the past five years, the politicians have barely moved the needle.

So it’s time to take this to the people.

That’s why I helped start Californians for Home Ownership, a new organization filing a ballot initiative designed to supercharge housing in California.

Our proposed law, the California Home Ownership Affordability Act, will tackle the two main barriers to building the housing we need.

First, it would restore CEQA to its original intent by removing the ability for special interests or wealthy private individuals to file abusive lawsuits that block housing or the infrastructure (like water, or energy) needed to support it.

Second, it would end the extortionate tax on new homes by capping impact fees at a proportion of construction costs, thereby creating the incentive to build truly affordable homes. Our bill also creates a new fund to help construction industry workers get on the housing ladder if they make a long-term commitment to the industry in California.

Our ballot initiative won’t solve every problem that has contributed to our present crisis. But it does directly address the two main barriers to building the homes we need.

And now we need your support to get it on the ballot. We will soon be starting the process of gathering signatures to qualify our Initiative, and I hope that every Californian who cares about the future of our amazing state, who wants to stop our downward slide and restore the California Dream, will want to help make it happen.

Steve Hilton is the founder of Golden Together.