CA Overrides Local Zoning, Mass Timber Moves Into Housing, Energy Tax Credits End

Written by Cati O'Keefe | Oct 7, 2026, 4:40:12 PM

Mass timber, electrification, and resilience advance even as affordability pressures and disappearing incentives complicate the path to better housing.

Housing has a lot of problems right now. The industry is also testing a lot of solutions.

Start with construction itself. A 150-home development in Huntsville, Ontario
will use mass-timber floor and wall panels across three multifamily buildings, putting the technology to work on something far more consequential than another showcase project: everyday housing.

New York City is taking a different approach to innovation. A new NYCHA model sustainability apartment is testing technologies designed to make old multifamily buildings easier to electrify, including window heat pumps and an induction stove that can operate from a standard 120-volt outlet. The bigger experiment may be using NYCHA’s enormous purchasing power to push manufacturers to design around the realities of existing buildings.

Then there’s California, where the fight is increasingly about what can get built, where, and who gets to decide. Menlo Park is battling a proposed 665-home development that reaches as high as 458 feet and invokes California’s Builder’s Remedy.

Meanwhile, the state has enacted more than 30 housing bills targeting barriers to starter homes, factory-built housing and redevelopment.

But getting more homes built doesn’t solve everything. An increasingly fragmented market of private and exclusive home listing is raising questions about whether buyers can even see all the inventory that’s available. That matters when affordability is already stretched to the breaking point.

And affordability has consequences for better building.The harder buyers have to stretch just to get a house, the harder it becomes to absorb additional upfront costs for efficiency, electrification and resilience.

That challenge just got tougher with the disappearance of major federal energy-saving tax credits for heat pumps, solar, battery storage and other upgrades.

Yet buyers aren’t abandoning performance. Quite the opposite. New COGNITION Smart Data
shows that once consumers experience extreme weather firsthand, resilience jumps ahead of saving money as a motivation for investing in technologies such as solar. Nearly 93 percent say they would spend more money to better protect their homes.

Also this week, our Editor’s Product Pick looks at Duravit’s Ocavo collection
made from solid European oak sourced from sustainably managed forests.

And in some exciting news, we have announced the launch of The Value Vault,
a growing collection of real-world examples showing how builders and developers are creating housing value that extends well beyond first cost.

Watch the full This Week’s Sustainable Building News episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Rather read the script? Here it is. Have a great sustainability news or trend story? Send it to Cati O’Keefe at cati.okeefe@greenbuildermedia.com