California faces a complex and deepening housing affordability crisis. Rising home prices and rents, high rates of homelessness, overcrowding, and displacement are widespread. For decades, California’s home prices have outpaced other states, while the state has not built enough housing to meet demand. According to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, California must build 2.5 million homes by 2030 to meet the state’s housing needs. Although the state has taken steps to expedite housing production by addressing land use constraints and approval timelines, many projects still do not “pencil” because of high and increasing hard construction costs.
In this context, innovation in the building industry has emerged as a potential pathway to lower costs and increase housing production. The research participants identified seven themes around which policies could be developed to help the industry: 1. Increase certainty through building code reform. 2. Increase consistency and certainty through other process reforms. 3. Reduce financial risk and liability to encourage industry growth. 4. Support pipeline certainty through demand aggregation. 5. Increase long-term industry certainty by developing a strong workforce pipeline. 6. Modify existing state funding streams to reflect FBH realities. 7. Address negative perceptions of risk through education and data. This paper chronicles the participants’ policy ideas in these seven categories.