Welcome!
Here in the fall of 2026, we face both a housing crisis and a political opportunity.
How can we change policy to enable homes near jobs?
I am a policy teacher, so I get way into the weeds. But my activist friend Kitty says: list three achievable things right away! So before I go into more detail:
- This week, talk to an older homeowner who is frightened of change. We need change, which is another word for opportunity; and young people need it the most.
- This month, learn one unexpected thing about our housing crisis. For the ultimate deep dive, listen to the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast.
- This year, seek out an elected leader and support them (ask them how) if they are supporting some piece of pro-housing legislation. If not, challenge them. Anything ranging from writing letters to running for their seat.
1. Know this: job-centers don’t move very much.
Employment in the Bay Area was concentrated in downtown San Francisco for 150 years. It has shifted south into San Mateo and western Santa Clara counties over the last 40 years.
In the Bay Area, most high-revenue employment will remain concentrated on the San Francisco Peninsula. Job-center location is not a variable. For Homes Near Jobs, the homes are the variable. Housing needs to be clustered near the jobs.
2. Commute time is part of your housing cost.
Here, I’m restating what you already know. Did you “drive until you qualified” for a mortgage? We want secure homes, and our tax laws favor using home-ownership as a form of savings. Both are good. But the side-effects of long commutes are not good.
- The stress of a congested commute
- Lost time with family
- Burning increasingly expensive gas
These are time-costs and stress-costs you pay for living far from your job. Since jobs are unlikely to relocate near you, how can you live closer to your job?
We need to make it much easier to develop housing where the jobs are. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (https://www.hcd.ca.gov/) issues Regional Housing Needs Allocations based on projected job growth. That is why the state has pressured Peninsula communities to build so much housing. Otherwise, you will be doomed to increasingly long and stressful commutes.
3. The Basic Reforms
Please use these as talking points at your dinner table and at community meetings. Please support bills which favor these reforms.
A. Allow modular.
The units can be built offsite while the foundation is being dug and poured. As soon as the concrete has cured, pre-built units can be craned into place. Snobbish regulations against ‘trailer homes’ need to be repealed entirely.
B. Simplify permitting.
If you had the right to develop and own housing on your own lot, you need to respect that right for your neighbor. Objections to “profiteering developers” ring hollow when anti-development activism is a conflict-of-interest. The intensifying housing shortage increases prices, which increases the asset-value of the people who are blocking new housing. So. Allow building permits by-right. If the proposal meets the regulations it should be approved immediately.
C. Simplify height and bulk regulations.
Mostly we need “missing middle” housing development, and that can be governed with very simple rules: Allow up to 5 storys, allow a floor area ratio of 3.0. To keep some shared open space at the back, require a rear yard of 20% of lot area. That’s it. No unit-density limits. No required front or side setbacks. No shadow-plane studies. We need high-quality open space, both in the design of our streets and parks. That is a more complex discussion outside the scope of this brief.
Typically, cities need to be 3-5 stories, like San Francisco or Florence or Toulouse or any other city you like to visit. The fact that tourist-popular cities are dense cities is not a coincidence. What do we find interesting? Other people.
D. Simplify Land Use Zoning.
The default land use covering most of our towns and cities should be “Neighborhood,” as it is in most countries across the world. What is allowed in the Neighborhood? Houses, schools, libraries, worship, small offices, small retail, non-polluting small industrial, small warehouse, parks. Mixed use by default.
What about hazardous uses? Centuries before zoning (1926), we have had the Nuisance Principle in land use law for 800 years. It works far better now, because we can measure pollutants and noise with precision. Furthermore, businesses and their insurers don’t want the liability from even risking a nuisance violation. The few designated land-use zones we need are places where nuisances are explicitly allowed. It is entirely possible that only land use designations we need for the entire country are:
- Neighborhood
- Industrial (noise, hazards)
- Agricultural (dust, fertilizers, pesticides)
- City Center (high-rises, noise, large retail)
You might think planners want to perpetuate zoning. No. I am a planner. I think we need to be freed from zoning-enforcement minutiae so that we can focus on emergent issues like:
- Reshaping public space in our cities to be more walkable, healthy, beautiful, and social.
- Managing the rising risk of massive urban fires.
- Managing rising flood risk in low-lying urban areas.
- Restore soil health; promote water absorption; prevent the collapse of pollinator species.
Planners face many critical new urban challenges. Repeal zoning codes and unburden us from the old, racist, segregationist practice of enforcing R-1 sprawl and boring shopping centers.
E. Get banks and insurers on board.
Lenders are always looking back at suburbia and want to profit from what they already know. But new suburbs did not keep their value in the 2008 financial crisis. Center-city housing did. Younger people prefer to live closer in, and we should not have old bankers impose their suburban tastes on young people. This mismatch is part of why our fertility rate is plummeting. Young people cannot form new families if they cannot get a suitable housing situation.
F. Enable Public Co-Ownership
Town Councils in the United Kingdom often purchase part of the equity of a home along with the resident. This should be on a sliding scale from 10% to 90%. This is still a market mechanism, and both parties enjoy the increase in equity-value. Towns have a positive incentive to invest in the community. Residents who could not afford full price are still part-owners, with a stronger incentive to care for their home than renters.
G. Enable portable mortgages
Many homeowners are trapped in larger, under-used housing because they cannot afford to re-finance for a smaller home at a higher interest rate. The Dutch allow owners to bring their old mortgage with them to a new house.
4. The Deeper Reforms
The Basic Reforms are the pro-market policies to address the housing question. The Basic Reforms expand development-rights far beyond the up-zoning being done in most California cities. But we don’t need to increase housing development everywhere, we need it especially near job-centers, where the land and housing are already most expensive.
The Deeper Reforms need to override the market logic that makes it hardest to build homes near to job centers.
A. Declare Housing as Infrastructure
The one agency within most cities that can develop mass housing is the Department of Public Works. It already does construction and maintenance. It already handles real estate. The super-rich can be left to fund their own housing, just as they send their kids to private schools. But the rest of us need meat-and-potatoes housing, which can be very well done. Look at the Mission District in San Francisco. Please don’t move there; it is already gentrified enough. But if it is that appealing–built with very basic but dense wooden housing–then we need more of that neighborhood pattern. The government of Singapore has developed 80% of the housing stock in their country. They call it public housing, but they sell it (at cost) to Singaporean households. Singapore had massive refugee communities in 1963. They solved their housing crisis by 1978, and they keep getting better at it.
Rather than burden ‘Affordable Housing’ developers with the need to satisfy 10 different lenders and their regulations, we need social housing to be the normal, default path of development.
B. Declare Housing as a Human Right in California Property Law
Any property-rights lawyer will tell you: there is not a fixed definition to real estate property. It is a bundle of rights, and the relative priority of rights is constantly in dispute. One of the rights we need to add, through legislation, is the human right to housing. This will change the very concept of property in our state, but not abolish it.
What will it mean in practice? Our rights to clean water, clean air, and universal access were all enacted as civil-rights legislation. For Americans, civil rights override the privilege of maximizing profits.
C. Enact Universal Public Healthcare
For many, their home equity is their insurance against medical bankruptcy. We need everyone to have free access to comprehensive care. It is good public health policy, it is good economic development policy, and it eliminates the need for high home values as a form of life insurance.
D. Match Wages to Costs
“The rent’s too high” also implies the other side of the same equation: “The pay is too low.” It is infeasible to burden employers with answerability for this problem. We need them to be making money so that we can tax them to fund social services! The wage/cost gap needs to be closed by state regulation.
This is much less radical than I expected. Since 1974, Social Security has had annual Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA). Since 2016, California has indexed our minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index that tracks inflation. The good news: California minimum wage is $16.90/hour in 2026, whereas Federal minimum wage has not risen from $7.25/hour since 2009. The bad news: 2 people working full-time at $16.90/hour cannot make ends meet in Fresno, let alone San Jose.
In this case, we need to increase the baseline minimum wage to match actual costs of living, and then maintain the same cost-of-living adjustments we have been using for 60 years.
The healthy incentives that come from policy: one well-resourced group of people (employers) will pressure another well-resourced group of people (landlords) to keep costs down. Employers might even pressure banks to stop over-lending to home-buyers, to slow the rate of home-value appreciation.
5. Still Not Enough?
We should not fixate on whether specific policies are ‘the solution.’ These proposals are pretty thorough, but they still might not be enough. Over the last 200 years of industrial urbanization, the only period in which regular households could afford regular housing was the second half of the 20th century when:
(a) we sprawled out into farmland using cars to access subdivisions,
(b) we demanded higher wages and proportionally lower executive pay, and
(c) the Federal government regulated banks and encouraged low-cost mortgages.
Maybe if we returned to these cultural norms, that would also help. But the real test is the outcome-test. Whatever we change, can regular households afford regular housing in a place where they have real opportunity? No? Then we need to keep pushing further policy change.
Afterword
Housing policy and the whole practice of urban planning might seem opaque to outsiders. This page is a summary of the work of thousands of researchers and practitioners over the past 70 years. In public conversations you might hear about ‘they’ want this or ‘they’ require that. Planners are often the ‘they,’ and we are misunderstood. We are sworn public servants, which means we promote the principles of the US Constitution above all, and a lot of neener regulations in particular. But we don’t always love what we are required to enforce. Knowing that might help you sense what is going on in a public meeting.
Speaking of which: consider joining a party, or running for local office, or working the polls!
PIETRO CALOGERO began studying sustainability in 1984 and urbanism in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in Planning in 2011, while working on housing policy for the (now-collapsed) Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. He teaches planning at San José State University.