Abundance is an emerging policy framework that emphasizes addressing affordability through increasing supply, overcoming regulatory burdens, and promoting innovation. Housing policy researcher Paavo Monkkonen and transportation policy researcher Juan Matute from UCLA participate in the Abundance Policy Research Consortium, a UC Berkeley-based group working to develop an evidence-based, fundamentals-first policy agenda for California focusing on expanding access to 12 human essentials. In this event, these policy experts will present frameworks for identifying scarcity problems and policy levers to improve housing and transportation affordability and supply.

Nine in ten Californians live in megaregions with populations of 1 million or more. They are no strangers to the impacts of traffic congestion on their abilities to meet their areas of need: accessing jobs, education, healthcare, and other goods and services. California is in a cycle of auto-dependence that makes it hard for people to travel by car and hard to build new housing and buildings that bring people closer to their needs. Matute will present his view that escaping this scarcity trap and getting California moving again will require a targeted package of mobility abundance interventions.

California built fewer housing units in the 2010s than in any decade since the 1940s, when World War II constrained materials and labor. California has the highest rate of unsheltered homeless population and the second highest housing costs in the country. The political challenges to expanding California’s multi-family zoning beyond its current 5% of residential land area are well known. Professor Monkkonen will present reforms to zoning, building codes, and exaction as well as policies for development financing, co-ownership models, and new mechanisms to improve neighborhood support, which, taken together, will tilt the political balance towards support for more Californians in urban neighborhoods of California.