Climate Issues in the 2026 Governor’s Race: Housing and Climate

Fifth in a series of posts outlining key challenges and opportunities facing California’s next governor.

California faces complex and integrated challenges of unaffordable housing and climate change. Failure to build adequate housing supply has resulted in high prices that have pushed home buyers and renters to locations that are further from jobs, schools, and services. This results in compounding climate risks – increased emissions from driving, conversion of natural and working lands that store carbon and provide resilience benefits, and, in some cases, increased development in areas highly exposed to climate hazards such as wildfires. In short, California’s housing shortage exacerbates the state’s climate challenges.

Building housing in already-developed neighborhoods (i.e., infill housing) and denser development patterns provide multiple benefits. Dense development reduces energy and water use, requires less land, and makes more efficient use of existing infrastructure, including water and electricity distribution systems. This means not only building more homes near transit, but also building more multifamily units, accessory dwelling units, and smaller homes in existing, walkable neighborhoods.

While the State has taken significant action since 2017, through both legislation and regulation, to increase home production, production still falls far below what is needed. California’s next governor will need to continue to maintain pressure on local governments to develop adequate housing supply, especially in areas that reduce reliance on driving.

Some key actions will include:

Containing housing costs: High development costs, especially in coastal cities, pose a major challenge to increasing housing production. Potential solutions include factory-built housing, building code reform to reduce costs, and allowing small multi-family buildings to use the same code as single-family homes.

Aligning regional planning processes: Regional governments are required to plan for growth in both their Sustainable Communities Strategies and Regional Housing Needs Allocation. However, lack of alignment between these two processes and the lack of consistency with local land use planning processes limits the ability to more strategically align land use, housing, and transportation planning.

Affordable housing and infill infrastructure funding: Existing state funding programs do not meet the scale of the investment needed to significantly increase housing supply. Additional funds are needed to meet the scale of the State’s housing challenge. Potential funding sources could include revenues from vehicle miles travelled-to-housing mitigation bank developed under AB 130 and reallocation of eligible transportation funds to support housing and infill infrastructure.

You can read more about Housing and Climate issues facing California’s next governor and access all of CLEE’s climate issue briefs at California Climate Vote. Read the other posts in the series here:

2 Replies to “Climate Issues in the 2026 Governor’s Race: Housing and Climate”

You are of course free to believe what you want – but these supply side policies will not reduce the cost of housing in any appreciable way. The yimbies are lying to you when they tell you this will work – they understand the real estate market and apparently, you don’t. For one thing, understand the difference between unaffordability v a mere supply crunch.

Btw, the Terner Center is at the Business School – you should note that when you introduce them.

Best of luck waiting for the Great Pumpkin.

Meanwhile, I too am a sad sack voter, bc all the candidates for governor are yimby.

Every single one.

I wonder, how did that happen? I will say, the forces of ev*l are clever and they never sleep. I am not sure it matters much if we elect a republican. Maybe it would at least slow down some of the stupid.

I fear not, though. There is really no good option here. If anyone can prove me wrong, please do.

Just in case it is helpful, I am putting here a link and a quote which demonstrate why I think affordability will not improve, even if yimbies are politically successful in the short term

If you go to this page: https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/ctr/forecast/reports/uclaforecast_Sept2017_Nickelsburg.pdf

and scroll down to page 48, you will see this:

“Using their estimates of the need for housing for both Californians and migrants attracted by the California life- style and more affordable housing, we find that to obtain a modest 10% reduction in price requires a little over 20% more housing. In Los Angeles County there are currently 3.5M housing units. This means rolling back to 2014 price levels requires 1.28 million new units. Some of that will support people doubling up who will now move to newly available units and some to support new residents. The City and State affordable housing initiatives will contribute only a small percent of that.”

The scale that would be necessary to actually move prices is just too large.

And land is too expensive.

All you yimbies are accomplishing is that you are destroying a few neighborhoods, and making already rich people richer (ADUs are very expensive, plus, people put their relatives in them).

I am confident that you mean well subjectively, but this is just a fad, like charter schools. Charter school people were great at making teachers feel bad about themselves – but afaict, they didn’t really fix anything in the big picture. It is all the same. They’ve just stopped talking as much.

It will be the same with “abundance” housing.