How San Diego rewired California housing incentives with Colin Parent

Building Better Cities · May 13, 2026 · 34m

For generations, California has approached housing growth through a familiar playbook: long planning processes, neighborhood-by-neighborhood debates, and major reforms that often struggle to deliver homes at scale.

But every so often, an incentive structure quietly changes the system.

In this episode of Building Better Cities, we explore one of those policies: California’s Density Bonus Law, and the findings from Circulate Planning and Policy’s new “Win-Win Bonus” report on how this tool has become one of the state’s most effective drivers of housing production and urban development.

Colin…