{"id":133336,"date":"2026-01-14T15:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T15:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/133336\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T15:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T15:32:09","slug":"sponsored-what-would-it-take-to-make-housing-energy-and-transportation-affordable-in-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/133336\/","title":{"rendered":"Sponsored: What would it take to make housing, energy, and transportation affordable in California?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sponsor<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

Imagine a society where everyone\u2019s needs are met. In this society, your housing and your utility bills are affordable. You can live near where you work, and you have transportation options that meet your needs.<\/p>\n

This imagined society sounds simple enough. So why is it out of reach for so many California residents? How can California policies help create more livable lives for Californians, where the essential needs \u2013 such as housing, education, and eldercare \u2013 are accessible and affordable for all?\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2024, the Possibility Lab invited public policy researchers from across California to share their ideas on addressing these questions. This collaboration has culminated in the Abundance Policy Report Series, featuring 12 original memos commissioned and edited by the Lab\u2019s Abundance Accelerator.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this segment, we present the perspectives of three experts on housing, transportation, and energy: Paavo Monkonnen<\/a> (housing), Juan Matute<\/a> (transportation), and Keith Taylor<\/a> (energy).\u00a0<\/p>\n

How Scarcity is Built into Our Communities \u2013 and What Policy Can Do About It<\/p>\n

Designing our cities, towns, and rural communities to better meet people\u2019s needs requires moving beyond zero-sum thinking where your gain is my loss. It requires policies that challenge the status quo and re-examine how, what, why, and where infrastructure is built.<\/p>\n

In housing, this means reimagining what makes a good home and enacting regulatory reforms that make it easier to build. To this end, Monkonnen argues that California needs a paradigm shift to improve the quality of multi-family housing (such as apartment buildings and duplexes) and course-correct from decades of policymaking that treated new housing as a \u2018threat\u2019 to neighborhoods of predominantly single-family homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This paradigm shift, says Monkonnen, would prioritize building out the \u201cmissing middle\u201d of housing so that new developments focus on housing stock somewhere between single-family homes and skyrise apartments. If California were to embrace this middle path in housing construction, then California residents could expect more medium-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that offer shared green spaces as well as new pathways to homeownership in multifamily buildings.<\/p>\n

Likewise in transportation, Matute argues for a shift from prioritizing people rather than vehicles. This means worrying less about how many cars can travel on a given roadway and, instead, focusing on improving people\u2019s access to whatever form (or combination) of transportation they need: whether by car, foot, bike, or public transit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his report, Matute describes the geography of California in terms of \u201cabundance hubs\u201d that provide plentiful resources and \u201cscarcity zones\u201d that provide limited access to necessities like healthcare and healthy food. Accordingly, he suggests that transportation policy should be judged by how well it enables the flow of movement between scarcity zones and abundance hubs, so that residents without proximity to necessities can easily travel to get their needs met. While broader investments in scarcity zones are a necessary long-term project, transportation policy that expands the accessibility of essentials can improve equity in the near-term.<\/p>\n

Similarly, to Taylor, abundance in the built environment is not just a matter of how we live and how we travel; it\u2019s also about how we generate and distribute the energy that powers our daily lives. According to Taylor, California already has the raw renewable resources for clean energy abundance. What\u2019s missing are the systems that can actually harness this potential and convert it into affordable utility bills for households across the state. The remedy, in Taylor\u2019s view, is both technical and institutional: create a \u201cSmart Grid\u201d that enables a wider array of providers to contribute to clean energy production. California\u2019s current system is a \u201chub-and-spoke\u201d grid, where energy flows primarily from large, centralized power plants to consumers. In this model, it is difficult for smaller, local producers\u2014for instance, a solar-equipped apartment building\u2014to efficiently put excess power back into the system.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A Smart Grid, powered by new digital technologies, creates a flexible network of connectivity, so that energy can move more dynamically between different producers and users. The result is less centralized control over California\u2019s energy supply, and more opportunities for diverse actors to participate in renewable energy production.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read the full memos on Housing, Transportation, and Energy<\/a><\/p>\n

People-Centered Policymaking in the Built Environment<\/p>\n

The reforms these researchers suggest focus on a key idea: that the built environment is as much about infrastructure as it is about people. So what role should people play in designing and carrying out these visions for abundant housing, transportation, and energy?\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the Possibility Lab\u2019s Framework<\/a>, the path to abundance is paved by a fundamental shift in the distribution of decision-making power. Without this shift, the status quo will likely continue enabling NIMBYism to block new housing and transportation while letting existing utilities continue to dominate the energy sector.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To shift the balance of power and create constructive opportunities for people-centered policymaking, local and state governments might consider experimenting with changes to when and where public engagement happens. For example, rather than gathering input from neighborhood residents on a project-by-project basis, planning processes for new housing, energy, and transportation projects could be deliberated at a larger geographic scale and earlier in the planning process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The goal would be to encourage a broader range of views, focusing less on specific, individual cases that affect people personally and creating more opportunity to emphasize their community\u2019s broader, shared goals. Figuring out whether this and other changes to the policy process can effectively contribute to different and more equitable outcomes is an important next step for California, and for other cities and states currently struggling with a widespread lack of affordability.<\/p>\n

Whether we\u2019re talking about housing, transportation, or energy, reforming public engagement processes is potentially a fundamental prerequisite for productive, people-centered policymaking that can turn visions of abundance into reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To learn more, visit the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab\u2019s People-Centered Policymaking site<\/a><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Sponsor, CalMatters This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. Imagine a society…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,22262,1709,68229],"class_list":["post-133336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-exclude-inline-cta","tag-exclude-module","tag-knowledge-hub"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}