Housing Abundance in California: A Starter Home for the 21st Century

In California, housing scarcity and the resulting crises of unaffordability, overcrowding, and homelessness arise primarily from the legal prohibitions and procedural rules that prevent housing construction in places people most want to live. The state features prominently in recent books on abundance in part because the solutions to housing scarcity are relatively obvious, and furthermore California’s housing crisis may be credited in part for the abundance movement’s birth and spread. This policy brief describes the causes of housing scarcity in California, posits two paths towards abundance, and then discusses how the housing sector connects to the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab’s People-Centered Abundance Framework.

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