Summary
Starting in 2026, California will require all new residential units with parking spaces to be EV charger-ready, significantly increasing access to electric vehicle charging.
Multi-family developments must equip at least one EV-ready spot per unit, while hotels, commercial lots, and parking renovations will also face new EV charging mandates.
Advocacy groups praise the policy, emphasizing its balanced approach to affordability and infrastructure needs.
The initiative aligns with California’s 2035 ban on new gas-powered car sales, aiming to address key barriers to EV adoption and support the state’s transition to electrification.
Nothing ever added to building code is inexpensive. It’s always many times the cost of the simplest way of doing it because it has to be done to code.
The rampant expansion of building code is a major reason for the expense of housing.
Downvote away but you know it’s true.
I think there’s some merit to both sides of this. Using codes to mandate quality construction is a good thing IMHO. Even when it increases building cost.
What I dislike is the fact that every little municipality has their own individual special snowflake set of building codes. Some use one version of the national code, others use another version of the national code, others use the national code with a whole bunch of special stuff added on, etc. Then throw in wildly different enforcement and inspections and a handful of inspectors who just want to see it done their way code be damned and it becomes a confusing morass that needlessly increases cost.
Finally, a nuanced answer to my comment. This is exactly what I’m getting at. By the time you deal with the whole scope of the project, every little thing adds to the cost way out of proportion to just doing it. I can slap a 50A plug in, the code isn’t complicated, but if you don’t want to have a go around with an inspector, you pay an electrician exorbitantly to get the final result. When you get everyone on a project involved in getting that done, it’s several times the hundred dollars of the actual materials. Even if it’s just part of an initial project scope.
You start getting region-specific bullshit like EMT conduit for powerlines in the mix, and inspectors that will contradict themselves in the same sentence, and in the end, you’re paying $400-500/sf for putting up a house when 20 years ago it was $150-200. It’s gotten crazy, and so little of it makes an appreciable safety or efficiency difference anymore. Look at arc-fault breaker code now, these aren’t preventing any significant amounts of fires, but every breaker is 10X the cost of a normal breaker. And there are only a couple circuits that don’t need them now according to code.
Lmao. If you ever worked in construction you’d know that 1. code compliance is not that hard 2. you do not want the random contractor chucklefucks making it up on the fly without a sanity check from the inspector. Be glad your house doesn’t burn down because knob and tube isn’t code compliant.
*Also, you can absolutely build a small cheap house that is code compliant. The reason nobody does is because banks dont want to lend for it and builders want the better margins that come with a larger more upscale house.
You know why we have 99% of the regulations we do? Because without them houses we’re catching fire and killing everyone inside, or collapsing in a stiff breeze killing everyone inside.
Generally regulations exist because uncountable numbers of people died first.
While I agree, there is a line where the addition of more safety features just adds up little by little over the years and makes houses unnaffordable.
And at some point people dying on the streets from being homeless will surpass how many lives are being saved by said safety features.
Now, if we have reached that point yet I cannot say but the line is there and it will be crossed at some point if we haven’t yet.
Sure, but then at some point it became a nightmare of expensive stupid things like running conduit for every electrical line line in a wall or ceiling (Chicago) that some bureaucrat put in to justify a pay raise. It’s raised the cost of building a house several times faster than inflation, and a major reason there’s a housing shortage.
You can’t install an electrical outlet if it’s not to code now. The “code” for electric circuits has been set for decades, and when updated, affects them all.
Requiring another circuit on a building with dozens/hundreds of circuits already doesnt add any extra burden, especially at the build stage like the commentor above said. Adding electrical when the walls are open is easy as shit.
Making up a regulation boogeyman about mundane, everyday building projects doesnt actually make them difficult, no matter how much you want to pretend they are.