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Imagine a society where everyone’s needs are met. In this society, your housing and utility bills are affordable. You can live close to where you work and have transportation options that meet your needs.

This imaginary society sounds simple enough. So why is it out of reach for so many Californians? How can California policies help create a better life for Californians, where basic needs—such as housing, education, and elder care—are affordable and accessible to all?

In the summer of 2024, the Possibility Lab invited public policy researchers from across California to share their ideas for addressing these questions. This collaboration culminated in the Abundance Politics Paper Series, featuring 12 original papers commissioned and edited by the Lab’s Abundance Accelerator.

In this segment, we present the perspectives of three housing, transportation and energy experts: Paavo Monkonen (residence), Juan Matute (transportation) and Keith Taylor (energy).

How scarcity is embedded in our communities – and what policy can do about it

Designing our cities, towns and rural communities to better meet people’s needs requires moving beyond zero-sum thinking, where your gain is my loss This requires policies that challenge the status quo and rethink how, what, why and where infrastructure is built.

In housing, this means rethinking what makes a good home and introducing regulatory reforms that make it easier to build. To that end, Monkonen argues that California needs a paradigm shift to improve the quality of multifamily housing (such as apartment buildings and duplexes) and correct course from decades of policymaking that treated new housing as a “threat” to predominantly single-family neighborhoods.

This paradigm shift, Monkonen says, will prioritize building the “missing middle” of housing, so that new developments focus on housing stock somewhere between single-family homes and high-rise apartments. If California takes this middle ground in housing development, then Californians could expect more medium-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that offer shared green spaces as well as new pathways to multifamily homeownership.

Similarly in transport, Matute is advocating a shift away from prioritizing people rather than vehicles. This means worrying less about how many cars can travel on a given road and instead focusing on improving people’s access to whatever form (or combination) of transport they need: whether by car, foot, bike or public transport.

In his report, Matute describes California’s geography in terms of “centers of abundance” that provide an abundance of resources and “zones of scarcity” that provide limited access to basic necessities such as health care and healthy food. Accordingly, he suggests that transport policy should be judged by how well it enables movement between areas of scarcity and centers of abundance so that residents without proximity to essentials can easily travel to meet their needs. While broader investment in areas of scarcity is a necessary long-term project, transport policy that expands access to essentials can improve equity in the short term.

Likewise, for Taylor, abundance in the built environment is not just a matter of how we live and travel; it’s also about how we generate and distribute the energy that powers our daily lives. According to Taylor, California already has raw renewable resources for an abundance of clean energy. What is missing are the systems that can actually harness this potential and translate it into affordable utility bills for households across the state. The solution, according to Taylor, is both technical and institutional: creating a “smart grid” that allows a wider range of suppliers to contribute to clean energy production. California’s current system is a “hub and spoke” grid, where energy flows primarily from large, centralized power plants to consumers. In this model, it is difficult for smaller local producers – for example, an apartment building equipped with solar energy – to efficiently feed excess energy back into the system.

The smart grid, driven by new digital technologies, creates a flexible network of connectivity so that energy can move more dynamically between different producers and consumers. The result is less centralized control over California’s energy supply and more opportunities for different actors to participate in renewable energy production.

Read the full notes on housing, transport and energy

Creating a people-oriented policy in the built environment

The reforms these researchers propose focus on a key idea: that the built environment is as much about infrastructure as it is about people. So what role should humans play in designing and realizing these visions of abundant housing, transportation, and energy?

In the opportunity lab framethe path to abundance is paved by a fundamental shift in the distribution of decision-making power. Without this change, the status quo will likely continue to allow NIMBYism to block new housing and transportation while allowing existing utilities to continue to dominate the energy sector.

To shift the balance of power and create constructive opportunities for people-centered policymaking, state and local governments may consider experimenting with changes in when and where public engagement occurs. For example, instead of gathering input from neighborhood residents on a project-by-project basis, planning processes for new housing, energy, and transportation projects can be discussed on a larger geographic scale and earlier in the planning process.

The aim would be to encourage a wider range of perspectives, focusing less on specific, individual cases that affect people personally and creating more opportunities to highlight the wider, shared goals of their community. Determining whether this and other changes in the policy process can effectively contribute to different and more equitable outcomes is an important next step for California and other cities and states currently struggling with widespread unaffordability.

Whether we are talking about housing, transport or energy, reforming public engagement processes is potentially a key prerequisite for productive, people-centred policy-making that can turn visions of abundance into reality.

To learn more, visit the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab’s People-Centered Policymaking site

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