Testimony to the Congressional Progressive Caucus

On January 14, 2026, Terner Center Deputy Director of Policy David A. Garcia testified to the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Watch the hearing video (testimony starts at 17:41)

David A. Garcia, Deputy Director of Policy
Terner Center for Housing Innovation, University of California, Berkeley

Good afternoon, Chair Ansari and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Thank you for the opportunity to join you today for this important conversation about housing affordability in the United States.

My name is David Garcia, and I am the Deputy Director of Policy at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

The mission of the Terner Center is to formulate bold strategies to house families from all walks of life in vibrant, sustainable, and affordable homes and communities. To accomplish this, we provide timely analysis and data-driven research to support policy and innovation for policymakers, practitioners, and advocates in addressing with urgency the multiple, layered crises of housing affordability, entrenched inequities, and climate change. The Terner Center aims to provide actionable, pragmatic paths that are based in evidence and can make change.

I am here this afternoon to speak specifically about how zoning and land use regulations play a role in limiting housing affordability and to discuss ways in which Congress and the federal government can help states and localities revise and update their often outdated requirements and processes to support the creation of more homes.

Zoning and land use regulations are complex and arcane, but they are foundational, nonetheless, to this conversation. Why is that? Because zoning and land use—the rules that a city puts in place that control what gets built and where—dictate everything that we see in our communities, especially when it comes to the housing we see, or don’t see, being constructed.

For example, if I want to build a house, I first need to know if housing is allowed on the property on which I want to build and whether or not the kind of housing I want to build is allowed under the law.

These zoning rules are reasonable and needed in many circumstances, but unfortunately, they have been used over the course of decades to severely limit building in the places that need homes the most. As cities of all types have used zoning and land use to forbid or constrain new homebuilding—particularly in places rich with jobs, schools, and shops—we collectively have underbuilt the number of homes we need as a country to maintain affordability and provide safe and stable housing for everyone.

In fact, the gap between the housing we have and the housing we need to meet demand is roughly 3.78 million homes.^[1] There are many reasons why the gap is so large, but filling it starts with making it both legal and straightforward to build homes in more places and of all types.

It is also important to recognize that in cities throughout the country, residential zoning was originally created explicitly to keep lower-income and working-class families out of affluent communities. In fact, the first single-family-only zone in the nation was formed in Berkeley, California, with the intent to legally segregate the newer, wealthier areas of the city.

Those decisions made nearly 100 years ago in communities nationwide and expanded upon throughout the decades have made it nearly impossible to build the numbers and types of homes that we are sorely lacking today, such as starter homes, bungalows, and small apartment buildings.

What can we do? Thankfully, many cities, from rural towns to big cities, are taking bold steps to allow for more homes in more places and speeding up the delivery of those homes by streamlining approvals. And a number of states—from California to Oregon, Arizona to Montana—have passed laws creating baseline standards and expectations for what all cities must allow to be built.

With that said, there is still a critical role for the federal government to play. While zoning and land use are, and will always be, distinctly local issues, there are ways that Congress can encourage, support, and guide local and state efforts to build more homes through regulatory reform. This includes identifying best practices and providing incentives for local officials to implement proven strategies for catalyzing homebuilding at local levels.

In that vein, some of the policies proposed in the Housing for the 21st Century Act in the House and the ROAD to Housing Act in the Senate include ideas that stem from established zoning reform best practices and research.

For example, the Identifying Regulatory Barriers to Housing Supply Act would require cities that receive Community Development Block Grant dollars to report on the progress they are making toward removing barriers to housing construction, such as allowing Accessory Dwelling Units, known as ADUs, or reducing parking requirements for new buildings.

Our research has shown that these kinds of reforms can yield big results. Regarding ADUs, the State of California required cities to adopt ADU ordinances nearly a decade ago. Since then, new ADUs have grown from being virtually nonexistent to making up nearly one-fifth of California’s overall housing production today.^[2] Regarding the reduction of parking minimums, we’ve found that these policies can significantly reduce the cost to build new homes.^[3] Excess parking can also make building on small lots in urban areas difficult. By reducing such requirements, homebuilders can deliver new homes at lower costs and dedicate more building space to housing people instead of cars.

The BUILD Now Act, which is part of the ROAD to Housing Act, goes a step further, conditioning federal dollars on the actual construction of new homes relative to historic trends. As we’ve observed in our research, preferential access to existing funding sources can be a powerful incentive and has strong precedents at the state level.^[4]

With regard to making homebuilding more straightforward, both the Senate and the House have introduced measures to create exemptions for infill housing from the National Environmental Protection Act, which could catalyze homebuilding in places with existing infrastructure rather than on greenfields, leading to lower greenhouse gas emissions overall.^[5]

While zoning and land use are critical components of adequately addressing housing affordability, it is important to recognize that they are not the sole issues holding back increased production. We should also explore creative changes to existing federal housing programs and policies to further reduce development costs and open up new avenues of homebuilding.

The Housing for the 21st Century and the ROAD to Housing Acts include some worthy ideas in this regard, as well, such as:

• reforming the HUD manufactured housing code to make it more cost-effective and usable for small-scale multi-unit housing;
• expanding and improving the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program, which allows older public and assisted housing to access private capital to address renovation needs;^[6] and
• reforming the Federal Housing Administration’s lending programs to better support homeowners who wish to build an ADU or other small-scale housing, which is another idea that Terner Center has explored in our research.[7]

There is a need for significant federal investment in affordable housing and infrastructure, as well, so it is also important to acknowledge the critical components of the Build Back Better Act that passed the House in the previous Congress. It included investments in the HOME program and other federal programs to support the development of new homes overall, in addition to increased funding for programs that house the most vulnerable, such as the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

Thank you again, Chair Ansari and the entire Caucus for your commitment to addressing this issue. While we continue to face significant challenges as a country in providing enough safe and affordable housing for everyone, I am optimistic that our leaders here in Washington, as well as policymakers at the state and local level, are willing to work together to advance evidence-backed, bold solutions.

I look forward to working with each of you and with Congress to identify a path forward that can make a meaningful difference in our nation’s housing supply and affordability challenge.

Endnotes

^[1] Up for Growth. (2025, November 24). 2025 Housing Underproduction Report. Retrieved from: https://upforgrowth.org/news_insights/2025-hup/

^[2] Chapple, K., et. al. (2020).  Reaching California’s ADU Potential: Progress to Date and the Need for ADU Finance. Terner Center for Housing Innovation, University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from: https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Reaching_Californias_ADU_Potential_2020.pdf

^[3] Garcia, D. & Tucker, J. (2021). How AB 1401 May Impact Residential Parking Requirements. Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley. Retrieved from: https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/ab-1401-residential-parking-requirements/

^[4] Manji, S. & Ozer-Bearson, R. (2024). Pro-Housing Designation Programs: How States are Incentivizing Pro-Housing Reform. Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley. Retrieved from: https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/pro-housing-designation-programs-how-states-are-incentivizing-pro-housing-reform/

^[5] Shroyer, A. (2025). Infill Nation: Reforming NEPA to Build More Housing. Center for Public Enterprise. Retrieved from: https://publicenterprise.org/report/infill-nation/

^[6] Metcalf, B., Garcia, D., & Hacnik, C. (2023). New Pathways to Create More Deeply Affordable Housing: Early Lessons from HUD’s Faircloth-to-RAD Program. Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley. Retrieved from: https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/faircloth-to-rad-early-lessons/

[7] Garcia, D, et. al. (2022). Unlocking the Potential of Missing Middle Housing. Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley. Retrieved from: https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/unlocking-missing-middle/