The Built Environment 

This imagined society sounds simple enough. So why is it out of reach for so many California residents? How can California policies help create more livable lives for Californians, where the essential needs – such as housing, education, and eldercare – are accessible and affordable for all? 

In the summer of 2024, the Possibility Lab invited public policy researchers from across California to share their ideas on addressing these questions. This collaboration has culminated in the Abundance Policy Report Series, featuring 12 original memos commissioned and edited by the Lab’s Abundance Accelerator. 

In this segment, we present the perspectives of three experts on housing, transportation, and energy: Paavo Monkkonen (housing), Juan Matute (transportation), and Keith Taylor (energy). 

In his report, Matute describes the geography of California in terms of “abundance hubs” that provide plentiful resources and “scarcity zones” that provide limited access to necessities like healthcare and healthy food. Accordingly, he suggests that transportation policy should be judged by how well it enables the flow of movement between scarcity zones and abundance hubs, so that residents without proximity to necessities can easily travel to get their needs met. While broader investments in scarcity zones are a necessary long-term project, transportation policy that expands the accessibility of essentials can improve equity in the near-term. 

Similarly, to Taylor, abundance in the built environment is not just a matter of how we live and how we travel; it’s also about how we generate and distribute the energy that powers our daily lives. According to Taylor, California already has the raw renewable resources for clean energy abundance. What’s missing are the systems that can actually harness this potential and convert it into affordable utility bills for households across the state. The remedy, in Taylor’s view, is both technical and institutional: create a “Smart Grid” that enables a wider array of providers to contribute to clean energy production. California’s current system is a “hub-and-spoke” grid, where energy flows primarily from large, centralized power plants to consumers. In this model, it is difficult for smaller, local producers—for instance, a solar-equipped apartment building—to efficiently put excess power back into the system. 

A Smart Grid, powered by new digital technologies, creates a flexible network of connectivity, so that energy can move more dynamically between different producers and users. The result is less centralized control over California’s energy supply, and more opportunities for diverse actors to participate in renewable energy production.  

The reforms these researchers suggest focus on a key idea: that the built environment is as much about infrastructure as it is about people. So what role should people play in designing and carrying out these visions for abundant housing, transportation, and energy? 

In the Possibility Lab’s Framework, the path to abundance is paved by a fundamental shift in the distribution of decision-making power. Without this shift, the status quo will likely continue enabling NIMBYism to block new housing and transportation while letting existing utilities continue to dominate the energy sector. 

To shift the balance of power and create constructive opportunities for people-centered policymaking, local and state governments might consider experimenting with changes to when and where public engagement happens. For example, rather than gathering input from neighborhood residents on a project-by-project basis, planning processes for new housing, energy, and transportation projects could be deliberated at a larger geographic scale and earlier in the planning process. 

The goal would be to encourage a broader range of views, focusing less on specific, individual cases that affect people personally and creating more opportunity to emphasize their community’s broader, shared goals. Figuring out whether this and other changes to the policy process can effectively contribute to different and more equitable outcomes is an important next step for California, and for other cities and states currently struggling with a widespread lack of affordability.

Whether we’re talking about housing, transportation, or energy, reforming public engagement processes is potentially a fundamental prerequisite for productive, people-centered policymaking that can turn visions of abundance into reality.