Look, I want to walk you through something important that's happening at the state level right now. According to CalMatters Housing, there's a bill in the California Legislature that's trying to reduce building costs for affordable housing by rolling back electric vehicle charging requirements. The bill would let developers follow the older 2022 building standards instead of the newer 2025 standards when it comes to EV chargers in new affordable apartments.
Now here's where it gets interesting. The goal of the bill is good, right? We all want affordable housing to cost less to build. But an analysis by the National Charging Access Coalition found that this approach might actually backfire. The 2025 building code was thoughtfully designed to give residents more charging access while keeping developer costs down or even the same. It does this by allowing simple, low-cost outlets instead of expensive full charging stations when parking is assigned.
The real issue is access for the people who need it most. Apartment residents without home charging in California tend to be young and from Black or Latino communities, and they're the ones paying the price. When they can't charge at home, they're stuck using public chargers, which can cost six times more than residential charging rates. These folks miss out on the biggest financial advantage of owning an EV.
Here's something that surprised me in this analysis. Installing EV charging during construction costs significantly less than retrofitting it later. Waiting to add chargers after a building is up can triple the cost, or even run thirty times more expensive in some cases. That means taxpayers and utilities end up spending millions retrofitting buildings down the road instead of building it right the first time.
The other thing worth noting is that EV charging infrastructure really isn't the main cost driver for affordable housing construction. It accounts for less than one percent of building costs, while things like lumber, labor, and land make up the real expenses. So targeting chargers to save money doesn't make much sense when there are bigger cost issues to address.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that access to affordable housing is already the biggest challenge our communities face. If we're going to build it, we ought to build it right the first time, especially when we're talking about something that helps lower-income residents save money every month on transportation. That's real affordability, not just a lower price tag on move-in day.
