EV chargers wrongly blamed for housing costs in CA

By Michelle Pearce, especially for CalMatters

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Think electric vehicles are only for the rich? Think again.

Used EVs are now the best the most affordable cars to buy, drive and maintain. As gasoline prices rise and electric vehicle prices fall, demand is skyrocketingand 2026 could be the tipping point for EV adoption. The newly approved government rebates for EV buyers is further evidence.

When it comes to EVs, however, it’s a tale of two drivers: those who can charge at home and those who can’t. Having experienced the difference firsthand, I am alarmed by the California Legislature’s effort to roll back access to home charging for affordable housing residents.

I bought my first EV in 2012. Living on a tight budget, I appreciated reducing my fuel and maintenance costs and helping to clean the air in my polluted Community of the Inland Empire.

When I moved into an apartment seven years later, I discovered how difficult it was to rely on public chargers. I often go out of my way to find a working charger, wait for it to become available, and then come back to avoid idling charges.

Public charging is not only less convenient, but also more expensive. Only residential tax rates are regulated; public charging companies set their own rates – often up to six times higher than residential rates.

Residents of apartments without home charging that in California tend to be young, black, or Hispanicthus missing the key to EV’s biggest cost savings.

This made me worry Assembly Bill 2748assembly author Sharon Quirk-Silvawhich would waive EV charging requirements for new affordable housing, allowing developers to follow the 2022 rather than 2025 building standards.

The bill’s goal is laudable: reducing construction costs for affordable housing. But ironically, in some cases the bill would have the opposite effect, an an analysis by the National Coalition for Charging Access found. And in any case, it would reduce access to charging for those most in need of affordable transportation.

The 2025 Building Code was carefully designed to expand access to charging for residents while minimizing costs for developers. When parking is assigned, it removes the requirement for expensive charging stations and allows developers to provide simple, low-cost exits.

That approach roughly doubles the number of charging points compared to the 2022 code for essentially the same or lower costs, according to the coalition’s analysis. It also incentivizes developers to provide designated parking with charging outlets connected directly to residents’ meters, giving them access to utility-regulated and government discountsmaking charging even more affordable.

By excluding affordable housing from current code provisions, the coalition’s analysis suggests that AB 2748 would roughly cut access charging in half and set up tenants and property managers for much higher future costs. Installing EV charging as a retrofit can triple the cost — and in one case it was 30 times more expensive — against including it during construction, before concrete is poured and transformers are sized.

Taxpayers and taxpayers will ultimately bear the burden as government agencies and utilities are spending millions to retrofit multifamily buildings to add billing. Delaying EV charging infrastructure until it becomes dramatically more expensive isn’t saving—it’s interest-deferred spending.

Reducing toll access for the lowest-income Californians is not an effective way to reduce construction costs. EV charging infrastructure accounts for less than 1% of the cost of building affordable housing, far less than 10 to 15% spent on development fees.

The the main culprits of high construction costs are not charging contacts; they are timber, labor and land. Yet for the residents who will live in these buildings, access to home charging could mean the difference between affordable transportation or years of dependence on more expensive public charging or expensive gasoline.

Affordable housing tenants deserve the same opportunity that residents of new market apartments enjoy: to charge at home while they sleep and never have to pump gas again.

Housing must be affordable not only to build, but also to live.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.