Can't Save the Planet Without Fixing Housing
Electrification Ain't Enough
Save The Housing, Save the World?
The path to staving off climate catastrophe runs right through our neighborhoods.
We have a limited carbon budget left between now and 2050, at least if we want to limit warming to livable levels. Experts are quite clear that this means more than mere electrification and clean energy generation–herculean tasks in their own right.
It also means some people are going to have to live much closer together and drive much less, enough to significantly shift the average density and distance driven per person.
Great news! Most of this can be done by simply letting people move where they want. You see, a lot of people desperately want to live in those centralized, compact, walkable places–and prices reflect that.
We just happen to make it illegal or insanely expensive to build there.
This means the most viable path forward involves something that should be simple–allow people to move into the compact, complete neighborhoods they covet.
Alas, nothing is simple, as a quick look at Bruce Harrell’s Lesser-Seattle housing plan will remind you.
Land Use is Hot
Now don’t take my word for it. Housing is one of my favorite hammers, as I’m sure you know, and so you might wonder if this hammer is just hunting for yet another nail.
But the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” the leading authority on the topic, argues that cities are critical foot soldiers in the fight against unmanageable warming. Among other things, cities must reduce energy consumption through “land use and transportation planning and infrastructure.”
Land use and transportation planning?
Yep!
It turns out that way we more or less force builders to build right now–urban sprawl–creates a carnival of carbon emissions. When people spread apart in sprawling cities, they do a lot more to heat up the planet. This is because they:
Consume much more energy to function. They have bigger houses, with unconnected walls, and they drive much more.
Rely on more built stuff, like cars, infrastructure, and the like. Manufacturing these means more “embodied” carbon emissions per person.
Displace carbon sinks. The edge of cities is often some of the most fertile productive land, and sprawl ends up moving things like food production elsewhere, which drives deforestation and destroys other carbon-gulping naturey places.
More Freedom Equals Cooler Climate
In a recent study, researchers at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a major environmental think tank, set out to understand what kind of an impact US states could make with some modest adjustments to their cities’ housing strategies.
They modeled some basic changes that would make it so people could build housing. Two of the researchers also discussed the study with David Roberts, my favorite climate journalist.
They found that if states simply required cities to let people build housing where it is currently in demand and underbuilt, we would prevent 70 million tons of annual carbon pollution by 2033.
That modest change would “deliver more climate impact than half the country adopting California’s ambitious commitment to 100% zero-emission passenger vehicle sales by 2035.”
Half the carbon savings would come from “reduced travel: cars burning less gas and consuming less electricity.” Another third from having to build fewer vehicles in the first place, as more of the population in compact neighborhoods goes car-free. The remainder would be due to central cities’ less material-intensive buildings, and the preservation of natural carbon sinks.
How They Figured It Out
To get to this, they simply modeled current carbon pollution per capita based on each census tract. By allowing for the new-housing to be built in in-demand areas, and matching the new residents’ carbon emissions to the folks already in those census tracts (which is is what happens when people move to a place), they identified this enormous impact.
For simplicity’s sake, their analysis doesn’t figure in the fact that as people move into compact neighborhoods, those neighborhoods get even denser, and emissions per person will decrease even further. They also didn’t model anything related to the more intensive investments in transit that would certainly follow from more people living in walkable neighborhoods and voting for less car-obsessed politicians, which would reduce emissions even more.
In short, their calculation is quite conservative.
They also bandied about more aggressive interventions. In the Roberts interview, they noted that their coauthor, Zach Subin, has done research that shows that if using planning you address the entire housing shortage entirely by channeling housing into low vehicle miles traveled areas, you could prevent more like 200 million tons of annual carbon pollution.
Drive Less, Live More
As noted above, a lot of this comes down to the impact on driving, which is critical, even with electrification in play.
In their conservative scenario, the people living in the new housing would drive 40% less than the average. This just matches the current driving rates in those high-demand areas. With so many people free to move into those neighborhoods, and driving less, the population level average driving rate starts to improve. In fact, in some states, where housing shortages are acute and people drive a lot in sprawling areas, this researcher’s intervention alone would reduce the average miles driven per person by 9% across the entire state’s population!
(Remember, in this scenario, no one has to move or drive less, they are just averaging the amount of driving by the new households with people living where they want, with the unchanged driving rates of the old households)
In the end, these interventions are critical.
Both/And. As usual.
The researchers note that to hold climate change below even 1.7 degrees globally, the ICCT says we have to electrify the entire fleet and significantly reduce the vehicle miles traveled.
In fact, the researchers suggest the only path to keeping our carbon budget in line in the US involves both getting 70 million electric vehicles on the road and cutting car miles driven per person by 20%.
Essentially, electrification is not enough.
Unless we allow adequate housing in our in-demand neighborhoods, we are climate vandals.