Housing abundance in California first requires water abundance | Opinion
California’s housing goals could be threatened by a lack of water. The state has a housing crisis, and to make any progress on building more housing, we need to concurrently make progress on water.
Here are four commonsense steps that Sacramento leaders can take to make ensure that water supply doesn’t become a barrier to our housing supply goals:
Protect the water we already have
California’s largest freshwater system, the State Water Project, is threatened both by catastrophic collapse from earthquakes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, as well as long-term decline from saltwater intrusion into existing pumps from rising sea levels. Without action the project will fail, with consequences too devastating to contemplate for 25 million Californians from the Bay to San Diego.
The Delta Conveyance Project — which would connect existing aqueducts to a new, safer freshwater diversion point farther upstream from the Bay via an underground tunnel — has been studied for over 40 years at the expense of hundreds of millions of dollars and is simply the most cost-effective solution to this problem. Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed commonsense administrative streamlining for the project to reduce costs and save ratepayers money. The legislature should pass it.
Capture and create more water
Scientists estimate that climate change could reduce California’s water supply by about 10% by the year 2040. Just as concerning, our warming climate is resulting in more rain and less snow, overwhelming a system designed to capture gradual snowmelt — not sudden deluges.
Senate Bill 72, authored by Senator Anna Caballero, D-Merced, addresses this challenge by requiring the state to establish specific long-term water supply targets for additional storage, recycling, desalination and conservation.
Consider California’s housing needs
We must also make sure state environmental agencies do a better job incorporating housing needs into regulatory decision making. For example, Foster City was forced to adopt its water-neutrality ordinance after the State Water Board curtailed the city’s primary water supply to boost water available for rivers and streams. While the board is required by state law to analyze the impacts of such decisions on housing production, in practice, the board dedicated just three sentences to the matter in its otherwise thousands of pages of analysis, concluding without evidence there would be no impacts.
That must change.
Prevent the weaponization of water scarcity
Finally, we need to prevent cities from weaponizing water scarcity as an anti-development tool. Cities currently have broad discretion to impose moratoria, neutrality ordinances or other water-related restrictions on development. As California restrains the ability of cities to abuse tools like zoning or the California Environmental Quality Act to block housing, some may be tempted to embrace an artificial form of water scarcity.
The state should make sure such restrictions are justified by real resource constraints, not just NIMBY obstructionism.
By protecting existing water supplies, expanding the amount of water we capture and create and ensuring fair statewide oversight, state leaders can help ensure California has the abundant water supply needed to match its ambitious housing production goals.
Jim Wunderman is President and CEO of the Bay Area Council, a San Francisco-based nonprofit public policy organization.
This story was originally published August 28, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Housing abundance in California first requires water abundance | Opinion."