California is facing significant challenges in addressing both housing affordability and climate related vulnerabilities. These urgent issues are more related than many realize, and to effectively overcome these challenges for a more resilient future, we must collaborate across these issue areas. However, the people most dedicated to working on housing and climate often work in separate rooms, speak different languages, and occasionally find themselves on opposite sides of the same fight. Common Ground exists to change that. These big challenges require bold action but the pace of the change means there is a real risk of advocates talking past each other.
In the Winter 2025-26 Common Ground Learning Series, the Alliance for Housing and Climate Solutions (AHCS) brought together over 250 housing and environmental advocates across five sessions to do exactly the opposite—discussing and engaging with each other. Here’s what we learned.
The rules are finally changing — but are they changing in the right way?
For decades, California’s housing shortage has been exacerbated by a thicket of regulations that make infill development slow, expensive, and legally risky. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has long been both a vital environmental protection and, critics argue, a tool easily weaponized to delay or kill housing near transit and jobs.
In 2025, the state legislature moved faster than it had in years. Two major CEQA reform bills, AB 130 and SB
131, cleared with Governor Newsom’s support, creating new exemptions for infill housing and advanced manufacturing. Our session with Zack Subin from the Terner Center helped situate these changes in a longer arc: California has been gradually shifting away from sprawl toward urban infill and transit-oriented development, but the pace still falls well short of what people actually need. While there is no clear consensus on exactly the size of our housing shortage, organizations like the California Housing Partnership found that we are facing a 1.3 million affordable housing deficit.
The reforms were met with a mix of enthusiasm and apprehension in the Common Ground discussion. AB 130’s targeted infill housing exemption landed relatively well. SB 131 prompted harder questions. Some participants worried it was too deferential to manufacturing interests and too vague about habitat protections.
UC Berkeley Professor Eric Biber offered one path forward: “So there are ways you could resolve this by doing some mapping. You could determine that within a certain core area, we’re going to prove that there are no wetlands and habitat to worry about. And then outside of that core area, you can take an exception if you do a site evaluation on those issues… You’d want to do careful upfront mapping because there’s going to be things you’ll carve out.”
It became clear through the session that a lot remains unknown. In this uncertainty, cities have already begun to receive new AB 130 development applications while policy advocates continue to propose new cleanup bills. What is known is that these CEQA reforms mark a pivotal, albeit controversial, shift in changing the housing landscape of California.
Climate risk isn't coming. It's here, and it's reshaping where and how we can build.
Header photo credit: Fire in the Hills by CALfire Flickr/CC-BY-NC
Wildfire has changed the calculus of homeownership in California in ways that would have seemed extreme just five years ago. Insurance companies are now charging steep premiums and, in many cases, simply not renewing high-risk policies, leaving homeowners exposed and entire communities questioning their long-term viability. Siew Gee Lim from Milliman pointed out that overall nonrenewal rates roughly doubled in California over the last five years due to increased wildfire risk.
This creates a real paradox for housing advocates: we need to build more, but we also need to build smarter. Common Ground’s session on wildfire and insurance didn’t just surface the scale of the problem. It pointed toward emerging solutions. New wildfire modeling practices, combined with community mitigation efforts, clearer standards, and new public-private partnerships, may be opening a path toward a more stable and competitive insurance market.
The broader lesson is: you cannot build resilient, affordable communities without confronting where and how you build.
The hidden costs of housing aren't hidden anymore.
Reducing the cost of housing isn’t just about zoning or permitting. It’s about every fee, every remediation requirement, and every financing gap that stacks up before a single unit is built. Speakers from CA YIMBY and Prosperity California pushed this conversation into uncomfortable but necessary territory.
Brownfield development—meaning building on formerly industrial or contaminated land—represents a major opportunity to add housing in urban areas without displacing green space or wildlife. But it comes with real environmental justice stakes: remediation has to be done right, and future residents, who are often lower-income, shouldn’t bear the health burden of a cleanup that wasn’t done right.
Impact fees generated some of the liveliest debate. These are charges levied on new development to fund public infrastructure like parks, schools, and utilities. In theory, they make sense. In practice, participants questioned whether they had become too burdensome and whether the costs were being distributed fairly.
Aaron Eckhouse of CA YIMBY put it plainly: “I love parks — but if we’re placing the entire burden of funding our park system and the growing park needs of the entire community specifically on new housing, we’re going to get less new housing. And that new housing that we get is going to be more expensive.”
That’s not an argument against parks. It’s an argument for honest accounting about who pays for them.
You can't get anywhere without transit, and transit is in trouble.
If there’s one session that felt like a wake-up call, it was the one on public transit. The Bay Area’s transit agencies are facing a genuine fiscal cliff: pandemic-era federal relief funds are running out, ridership hasn’t fully recovered across many systems, and the funding mechanisms meant to sustain these agencies were designed for a different era. A conservative estimate from SPUR and the Connect Bay Area campaign cites a $793 million deficit for the 4 major Bay Area transit agencies
in the coming year. For BART alone, that would be $350 million or approximately 30% of their operating budget.
This might seem tangential to housing and climate work. It isn’t. Transit-oriented development only works if the transit actually works. Greenhouse gas reductions depend on people having real alternatives to driving. And the communities most dependent on public transit, lower-income residents, seniors, and people with disabilities, are the same communities most at risk from both the housing crisis and climate change.
Common Ground doesn’t resolve these issues. But bringing the people working on them into the same room and clearly naming the stakes is how you start to galvanize action.
California isn’t short on people who care about getting this right. What we’re short on is time and the kind of alignment that turns good intentions into policy that actually moves.
CEQA is being rewritten, the insurance market is destabilizing, and transit agencies are facing an existential funding gap. These aren’t abstract problems. They’re being decided now, and the outcomes will shape the state for a generation.
Common Ground exists because we believe the people working on housing and climate are stronger together and because the hardest conversations are worth having out loud, in the same room, with people who might push back.
Missed the sessions? Check them out here.
