How the Terner Center for Housing Innovation shaped California’s decade of housing reform

In 2015, when the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley was founded, a national news headline sounded an alarm: “Every Single County in America Is Facing an Affordability Crisis.” Over the intervening decade, the need to ease that long-brewing crisis has only intensified — particularly in California, which has the largest total homeless population in the country and a higher-than-average proportion of “cost burdened” renters and homeowners, or people who spend more than 30% of their income on a place to live. 

To arrive at workable solutions, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have relied on the Terner Center’s research, which has influenced legislative blueprints that range from easing “granny flat” regulations to changes in zoning.

Founded under the College of Environmental Design to continue the life’s work of I. Donald Terner, a Berkeley architecture professor and affordable housing leader who died at 56 in an aviation accident, the center has grown from a team of three to 17, published more than 150 research papers and furnished data to guide policymakers both in California and across the country. 

“The Terner Center has been a critical force in shaping housing policy,” wrote Linda Mandolini, the president of the California-based nonprofit Eden Housing, in a statement. “Their research has catalyzed numerous statewide housing initiatives — streamlining production, enabling the creation of more homes and offering a model for other states to follow.”

Carolina Reid, an associate professor of city and regional planning at Berkeley and the Terner Center’s faculty research advisor, described its mission as “moving the housing policy agenda forward to ensure that everybody has a safe and affordable place to live.” The immense nature of that challenge has never deterred their efforts. When it opened, its founder Carol Galante wrote, “Our mantra will be ‘No Limits.’” Terner would focus, she continued, on bold solutions that addressed on-the-ground needs, bringing the rigor of academic research to applied problems.

In 2015, when the “super startupy” team consisted of only Galante, Reid and graduate student Sara Draper-Zivetz, Terner’s focus was novel: California did not at that time have a center like theirs devoted solely to housing policy research. “There was a real gap,” Reid said. 

Since those early days, the Terner Center has pivoted as current events altered the housing landscape. Some of the initial proposals they advanced, such as a federal renter’s tax credit, became less feasible when the 2016 election led to shifting federal housing priorities under a Republican administration. 

“But at that same moment, California state legislators started to realize that they were confronting a growing affordability crisis in the state and were hungry for data and evidence-driven ideas. We found that there was a lot of demand for the kind of research that we were doing,” Reid recalled.

Some of that research has borne legislative fruit. Senate Bill 35, passed in 2017, took its cue from a similar measure in Massachusetts that the Terner Center had penned a report on. The law streamlined approval processes in areas that were behind on housing production goals and had a quantifiable result — San Francisco, for instance, saw a marked increase in the speed and number of affordable housing developments approved. When the bill came up for renewal, Terner produced more research on its effectiveness; that policy is now in place until 2036.

Terner’s research has also informed state policy on matters like the Tenant Protection Act of 2019, which capped exorbitant rent raises, and AB 2094, which holds local jurisdictions accountable for producing housing for their poorest residents. SB 9, which made it possible to split single-family-zoned lots in two, was also influenced by Terner findings. The researchers later evaluated the policy’s mixed impact. This summer, a Terner Center paper as well as Terner experts’ testimony in Sacramento contributed to the creation of a unified state Housing and Homelessness Agency.

In the decade since the Center’s founding, the national conversation around housing has shifted. In half of the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, more than one-third of renters are cost-burdened, hinting at how housing struggles have spread to more and more corners of the U.S. A record 771,480 Americans were unhoused as of January 2024. And climate-related natural disasters have further stressed the state’s housing supply.

Under the direction of professor Ben Metcalf, who brings decades of direct policy experience at both the state and federal level to the role, the Terner Center has evolved its priorities with the times, adding focus areas that address homelessness as well as the intersection of housing and climate change. In 2020, Terner Labs, an affiliated nonprofit that concentrates not on policy but rather practical innovations like novel construction methods or data-driven tools, spun off from the organization.

Another evolution came when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Reid said she takes particular pride in the team’s quick shift to produce research on the utility of emergency rental assistance measures.

This year, the Terner Center has already published research on housing choice voucher use, rebuilding after the Los Angeles fires, which cities are expanding housing in climate-friendly walkable neighborhoods and more. Much of that work was made possible by Berkeley student researchers. Over the years, 110 graduate students and more than 10 undergraduate research assistants have lent their time and minds to the Center’s work, many of whom have stayed in California working in housing-related fields. 

“[Student involvement] is one of the main factors for our success,” said Reid. “One of the joys of working at Terner … is mentoring the next generation of housing leaders.”

Looking forward, Reid acknowledges that, despite momentum and increased investment in affordable housing in California, the federal landscape is challenging as funds and entire programs are cut. But, she points out, insights from the Terner Center — “knowledge we didn’t have 10 years ago about what really works” — are helping lawmakers in cities and states across the country tackle the housing crisis and could eventually help housing advocates build back improved federal systems when the time comes. 

After all, in that first blog post, Galante wrote words that are as true in 2025 as they were a decade ago: “California is at the epicenter of these challenges, but it can also be at the vanguard of solutions.”