A 179-unit affordable housing community in the San Francisco Bay Area just installed 92 EV chargers for its residents — and it's the kind of quiet, locally-driven win that rarely makes the headlines.
CleanTechnica reported this week on Middlefield Junction, a new affordable housing development in North Fair Oaks, California (San Mateo County). The complex now has 76 Level 1 outlets and 16 Level 2 chargers available to residents — every unit, on a fair-use basis. Residents who drive more can be assigned one of the faster Level 2 stations; everyone else plugs into the universal Level 1 outlets using the mobile cordset that comes with every new EV sold in California.
Why this matters more than it sounds
The charger gap at apartment buildings is the single biggest reason Americans who rent can't switch to electric. Public charging works for road trips and occasional top-ups, but daily life — commuting, errands, school runs — depends on plugging in at home. Roughly 36% of US households rent, and concentrated charger installations at multi-family housing are how that share of the country actually gets access to EVs.
The Middlefield Junction project also addresses something quieter: cost. Level 1 installs average about $2,700 each in Peninsula Clean Energy's program; Level 2, about $7,000. The chargers were folded into a new-build project, which kept costs lower than a typical retrofit. Property manager Mercy Housing is assigning chargers to residents as they get EVs, so the system scales with demand instead of overbuilding on day one.
The power behind it is itself uplifting
Every kilowatt flowing through those 92 chargers comes from Peninsula Clean Energy, the local community-choice aggregator. San Mateo County's power content is among the cleanest in California — overwhelmingly renewable. So the residents charging at Middlefield Junction aren't just driving electric; they're driving electric on a grid that's already mostly wind, solar, and hydro.
That's the story behind the story. An affordable housing complex in one of the country's most expensive metros now gives lower-income renters the same charging economics that suburban homeowners take for granted — and they do it on clean power.
What "uplifting" actually looks like in this space
A lot of EV news is about specs, prices, and which manufacturer is winning the quarterly sales race. This is a different kind of story. It's about a community-choice energy provider partnering with an affordable housing operator to make sure renters aren't an afterthought in the electric transition.
Phillip Kobernick, Associate Director of Energy Programs at Peninsula Clean Energy, told CleanTechnica the project was funded through the agency's "EV Ready" program, which mostly focuses on retrofitting existing multi-family buildings. A new-build project like Middlefield Junction is actually cheaper per port than a retrofit — which means the model scales. The bigger lesson is that the technical and financial path to universal charging access is no longer hypothetical; it's just a question of municipal will and a willing utility partner.
What's next
For every county in California that already has a community-choice aggregator, this project is a template. San Diego, LA, Sonoma, Marin — Peninsula Clean Energy just showed the playbook. For counties without one, this is the case for building one.
For renters anywhere in the US, it's worth asking your property manager whether their next capital improvement plan includes EV charging. The cost is real, but the demand is real, and the buildout is now well-understood engineering. The question isn't whether this scales; it's whether your zip code will be on the list.
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Source: CleanTechnica — 92 EV Chargers Installed At Bay Area Affordable Housing Community (https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/29/92-ev-chargers-installed-at-bay-area-affordable-housing-community/). Republished on AutoWheeler with added context on the affordable-housing EV transition.