Prosperity California works to create a California where everyone has access to abundant housing they can afford in safe, sustainable, and job-rich communities.

Here’s How We Get There Together

With housing costs on the rise, contamination threatening our groundwater, and an urgent need for climate action, we’ve set the following priorities for 2025:

1. Investing in infrastructure to deliver more affordable and missing-middle housing with protections from climate change-driven disasters.
2. Reducing pollution and risks to our groundwater by making it easier to remediate and redevelop brownfield sites for home building at scale. 
3. Building a powerful movement of housing and environmental advocates to secure legislative and regulatory victories through our co-leadership of the Alliance for Climate and Housing Solutions.

Why These Issues?

Our ability to address California’s worsening housing crisis is impeded by outdated infrastructure that can’t support increased density and contaminated lands that will not be cleaned up without redevelopment. 

Despite passing numerous laws to encourage housing production in recent years, new homes have been slow to materialize–in large part because of infrastructure and brownfield challenges that make it harder to build multi-family housing at scale in our existing communities. 

We’re working to make those projects easier to implement by ensuring that California’s infrastructure investments are robust and safely remediating land is no longer an obstacle but an opportunity to improve environmental conditions and provide Californians with more homes. 

At the same time, through our 2025 legislative agenda, we’re focused on cutting red tape, increasing government efficiency, and building more affordable homes to ease the burden on families struggling to make ends meet.

1. Upgrading Infrastructure to Unlock Housing Potential & Build Resilient Communities

The most recent American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card for California’s Infrastructure (2019) gave the state a C- for its overall infrastructure. Our critical infrastructure crisis impacts everything from housing production to public transportation to utilities. In many neighborhoods, the sewer, water, and electrical infrastructure needed to support new multi-family housing is insufficient or at risk of failing. 

This prevents growth where it’s needed most. We advocate for increased investment in infrastructure; making it easier to build homes for low-income and working families in walkable and transit-rich communities near jobs and essential services.

The Infill Infrastructure Grant Program (IIG) is an effective but oversubscribed program funding the upgrades to water, sewer, transit access, and open space that make new housing possible. By updating the program and increasing funding, we can prime larger areas for more dense and affordable housing in our existing communities. With the right investments we can ensure that more climate smart housing projects move forward while protecting more Californians from the impacts of climate driven natural disasters. Prosperity California has identified the following areas of improvement for the program that include:

• Identifying a permanent source of increased funding for Infrastructure to support lower cost multifamily housing
• Making walkable, amenity-rich communities competitive for IIG funding
• Aligning the program with newly passed legislation and allowing local governments to upgrade larger areas to attract new development. 
• Tighten criteria for road development to ensure the program is funding housing in our existing communities.  
• Ensuring IIG funds can fund the nature-based capital improvements that make new housing more resilient to climate change driven disasters, including wetland restoration, drought mitigation, and green infrastructure.

2. Removing Pollution Through Redevelopment in Existing Communities

Much of California’s developed but underused land—often prime for new housing—has been contaminated by previous industrial or military activity. These sites are often located in low-income communities and communities of color, whose residents already experience disproportionate health impacts from pollution.

Without clean-up, much of this contaminated land is a ticking time bomb. As sea levels rise, so does our water table, causing soil contamination to seep into our groundwater, rivers, and oceans. There are 5,200 contaminated sites at risk of sea level rise in the Bay Area alone.

Advocating for the redevelopment of these sites creates a financial incentive to clean up and remediate these properties. Repurposing vacant and formerly polluted land for housing addresses pollution and provides new opportunities for housing families in existing communities. By mapping the needed strategic reforms, we can accelerate the cleanup process and attract developers to these sites, improving the health and quality of life for neighboring residents.

In 2025, Prosperity California will be convening stakeholders and experts and leveraging our cross-sector partnerships to create a roadmap for securing critical reforms. These are the areas of focus we’ll be exploring together through 2025:

• Fix the Clean-Up Math: There are limited and decreasing public funds to aid in removing pollution from sites contaminated by previous industrial or military activity. Without private investment and redevelopment, most of these locations will remain polluted and underutilized. Providing incentives for the safe redevelopment and addressing common clean-up challenges will create healthier, more affordable communities across California. 
• Predictable Timelines and Costs Encourage Redevelopment: Accurate assessment and thorough clean-up planning and implementation take time, but subsequent regulatory review and clean-up certification can take years. These delays, which are highly unpredictable, have caused affordable housing developers to lose state grant funding and standard bank financing to be withdrawn from good projects. We need to accelerate review, especially of sites that are relatively less polluted. When local governments require developers to shoulder the cost of community-wide pollution assessment and cleanup, instead of the parcel they are building on, it makes many projects infeasible and delays clean-up. Some contaminants do travel between adjacent parcels so we need to identify financing strategies that support local government and developers in larger scale clean-up efforts. 
• Cleaned Sites should be available for Development: We can start by creating a durable pathway off the Cortese list. Once a site is on the Cortese List, a state-maintained list of formerly and currently contaminated sites, there is no established pathway off. Even when a site is certified as clean and safe, unnecessary and ongoing restrictions make these sites much harder to redevelop.
• Accelerate Clean-up with Clear Standards: Most regulators have designed their review process for the most dangerous and toxic sites, but many, if not most, sites are less contaminated and do not require the same level of process as a superfund site to ensure safe and complete clean-up. By defining and categorizing lower-risk sites which require a lower level of remediation, can we create a safe but less time-consuming pathway for clean-up? By using the best available science to clarify regulations and accelerate safe clean-up for specific types or levels of contamination we can save time and money.

3. Housing Policy is Climate Policy: Building a powerful coalition of  housing and environmental advocates through the Alliance for Housing and Climate Solutions

California is in the midst of both a severe housing shortage and a climate crisis. More than half of all Californians struggle to afford housing, and we need to build at least 2.5 million new housing units by 2030 to avoid serious human and economic consequences. Our housing shortage is a result of a history of deliberately racist policies that stop smaller, more naturally affordable homes from being built near jobs, transit, and walkable communities. These same policies have encouraged decades of “greenfield” development on the state’s agricultural and natural lands. These development patterns force Californians further into remote areas with long, polluting, commutes to find housing they can afford – increasingly in areas that put them in the path of wildfires, flooding, and other climate-related disasters.

Where we build our desperately needed housing determines whether we will meet our climate goals as a state. Personal car trips are 40% of all GHG emissions in California, and the only category of emissions that continues to rise. How we choose to grow (or not grow) our communities determines whether we continue to disproportionately put lower income Californians and communities of color in harm’s way. In order to create choice for Californians we need to make it easier, cheaper, and faster to build smaller and less expensive homes in our existing communities.

To further our goal of abundant climate safe homes, Prosperity California co-leads the Alliance for Climate and Housing Solutions with Greenbelt Alliance.

California can combat our severe housing shortage and meet critical climate goals. Learn more at www.housingclimatealliance.org.