To lower building costs, California wrongly takes aim at EV chargers for new apartments

Think electric vehicles are just for the rich? Think again.

Used EVs are now the most affordable cars to buy, drive and maintain. As gas prices surge and EV prices drop, demand is skyrocketing, and 2026 may be the tipping point for EV adoption. The newly approved state rebates for EV buyers is more proof.

When it comes to EVs, however, it’s a tale of two drivers: those who can charge at home and those who can’t. Having experienced the difference firsthand, I’m alarmed at an effort in the California Legislature to roll back home charging access for affordable housing residents.

I purchased my first EV in 2012. Living on a tight budget, I valued cutting my fueling and maintenance costs and helping clean the air in my polluted Inland Empire community. 

When I moved to an apartment seven years later, I discovered how hard it was to rely on public chargers. I often drive out of my way to find a working charger, wait for it to become available and then dash back to avoid idling fees.

Public charging isn’t just less convenient, it’s also more expensive. Only residential charging rates are regulated; public charging companies set their own prices — often as much as six times more than residential rates.

Apartment residents without home charging, who in California tend to be young, Black or Latino, are thus denied the key to EV’s greatest cost savings.

That’s made me concerned about Assembly Bill 2748, authored by Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, which would roll back EV charging requirements for new affordable housing by allowing developers to follow the 2022 building standards, rather than 2025.

The bill’s goal is laudable: to reduce building costs for affordable housing. But ironically, in some cases the bill would have the opposite effect, an analysis by the National Charging Access Coalition found. And in all cases, it would reduce access to charging for those who need affordable transportation the most.

The 2025 building code was carefully designed to expand charging access for residents while minimizing costs for developers. When parking is assigned, it removes a requirement for expensive charging stations and allows developers to provide simple, lower-cost outlets. 

This approach roughly doubles the number of charging outlets compared with the 2022 code for essentially the same or lower costs, according to the coalition’s analysis. It also incentivizes developers to provide assigned parking with charging outlets wired directly to residents’ meters, which gives them access to utility-regulated and state-discounted rates, making charging even more affordable.

By exempting affordable housing development from the current code provisions, the coalition’s analysis suggests AB 2748 would roughly halve charging access and set up tenants and property managers for much higher future costs. Installing EV charging as a retrofit can triple costs — and in one instance was 30 times more expensive — versus including it during construction before concrete is poured and transformers are sized.

Taxpayers and ratepayers will ultimately bear the burden as state agencies and utilities spend millions retrofitting multifamily buildings to add charging. Delaying EV charging infrastructure until it becomes dramatically more expensive isn’t savings — it’s deferred spending with interest.

Reducing charging access for California’s lowest income residents isn’t an effective way to reduce construction costs. EV charging infrastructure accounts for less than 1% of the cost of building affordable housing, far less than the 10 to 15% spent on development fees. 

The main culprits of high construction costs are not charging outlets; they are lumber, labor and land. Yet for the residents who will live in these buildings, access to home charging can mean the difference between affordable transportation or years of dependence on higher-cost public charging or expensive gasoline. 

Affordable housing tenants deserve the same opportunity that residents of new market-rate apartments enjoy: to charge at home while they sleep and never need to pump gas again.

Housing must be affordable not only to build, but to live in.