Letters to the Editor: How breaking from fossil fuels turbocharges new housing construction

To the editor: Those of us working to develop, build and operate affordable housing in California understand better than anyone the urgency of building hundreds of thousands of units to address our state’s housing crisis. It simply isn’t true that building affordable housing is in tension with our state’s climate policies, as columnist George Skelton suggests.

My job as director of sustainable design for one of the state’s largest affordable housing developers is to identify the lowest-cost pathway to building homes while maximizing long-term savings. Based on economics alone, we choose to build homes with electric heat pumps and rooftop solar, a decision that eliminates gas bills, lowers electricity bills and shields households from long-term utility cost escalation.

Skelton misunderstands the state’s current policy landscape. California already requires rooftop solar on most new construction, and that’s a good thing. The average household in a new home saves $420 annually through the requirement. Our state’s most recent building code also makes heat pumps the standard in new construction starting in 2023.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to accelerate our state’s climate work will not create these building requirements, because they already exist. And the fact is, we can build more housing, more quickly and more affordably, by forgoing fossil fuels.

Tim Kohut, Rancho Cucamonga

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To the editor: Newsom is not the only one who is touting conflicting messages. Anyone who supports building, buying and consuming is supporting climate change and the demolition of the planet.

We cannot save Earth and keep taking from it at the same time. Obviously, we need to find a balance between the two.

Much is said about homeless people or “the unhoused.” What about the over-housed? The people who have multiple houses and inhabit only one? Or the people who have “only” one house, but it’s a mega mansion with a few thousand square feet per inhabitant?

They are the ones pulling too much from the Earth. Could someone please do some research to find out how many square feet of viable housing goes unused every day in this bountiful state?

Mary VanValkenburgh, Long Beach