Why Climate Activists Should Care about Housing
A new White Paper I was a co-author
I wanted to return from my brief hiatus of posting to announce the official publication of something I had a chance to work on in the past year: a policy white paper I contributed to as a volunteer for Abundant Housing LA. The paper is titled “Infill Housing & Land Use as a Tool to Fight Climate Change.” My friend
spearheaded the effort as someone eager about housing and environmentalism, believed strongly that this was a way to build consensus here in Los Angeles. He assembled a group of authors and organizations with diverse perspectives, yet all made a common policy argument.
You can download the full report below:
I will state upfront that, like any group effort, the paper represents the consensus view, not necessarily my personal beliefs or framing of the intersection between housing and environmental policy. But I was happy to see the authors/organizations that signed on come to a consensus and work together across whatever differences still exist.
I have said many times that part of the beauty of the housing issue is that it can have true appeal across the ideological spectrum. Building more housing in our cities is good for economic growth and has positive economic spillovers on new business formation - issues typically coded as “right of center.” As discussed in some recent posts, building more housing can also help encourage families who right now may struggle to balance the desire to have children and find housing large enough to house them.
But on the flip side, good housing policy should also appeal to issues traditionally embraced by more “left of center” perspectives since it also has tremendous upside for increasing social mobility, reducing wealth inequality, and accelerating human impacts on our environment, as we focus on in this paper.
Unfortunately, historically, the relationship of many in the legacy environmental movement to new housing has been mixed and negative. Much of the Environmental movement was conceived as a reaction against the broad industrial revolution. Specifically in California, much of the big wins by the environmental movement came in the late 1960s and 70s, when the zeitgeist was turning against the suburbanization of the state in the post-war era. Thus, the assumption is that new development would harm the environment by taking land out of more pastoral uses and turning it into ever-sprawling cul-de-sacs. Therefore, many of the tools the environmental movement has developed can be broadly surmised as ways to stop building new things. The best illustration of this is the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”), which I wrote about extensively back in 2022:
It's Time to Reform CEQA
Over the weekend, the Orange County (OC) Register published another op-ed that I wrote on local politics here in California. Read it on the site! It’s good to get web traffic to ensure they consider me in the future. This piece had to do with the recent case out of Berkeley, where residents have successfully used CEQA to block the University of Californi…
We can debate another time whether this environmental focus of trying to stop building new things was well conceived at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe this mindset was counterproductive for the environment—especially regarding how it was deployed to stop nuclear power and infill housing—but I acknowledge others may disagree with me, and we can respect those differences.
What is abundantly clear, though, is that whether or not they were helpful in that era, they no longer serve the purpose of combatting our contemporary environmental challenges. There is a broad and growing consensus that to fight the most significant environmental challenges of our time (climate, continuing to curb air pollution, preserving wilderness areas), we need to build a lot more - more housing in walkable neighborhoods, more solar panels, and more transit options.
Climate is not an issue I have written extensively on this blog. That is because, while an existential risk, it is not a policy issue where the most impactful levers - tools like carbon pricing and carbon border adjustment taxes - are issues that ultimately need to be tackled by our dysfunctional congress and cannot be enacted working locally. But if you care about the issue and want to do something tractable, housing policy is your best single issue to focus on.
The two most significant contributors to an individual’s carbon footprint are 1) transportation and 2) household electricity, and if you want to give people the ability to live a less carbon-intensive lifestyle - you need to reckon with our housing policy in California.
Dense urban cities are a carbon-lite form of living - not only does public transit emit less than personal autos, but maybe more importantly, urban cities tend to give people options to walk to their daily school, work, church, parks, and restaurants instead of driving there. Our paper illustrates this using data:
research shows that every 1% increase in urban population density cuts per capita CO 2 emissions by 0.8%. As a result, increasing population density by 50%—the equivalent of turning every other home into a modest duplex—reduces CO 2 emissions by 42%.
To visualize this, consider this New York Times map of how New York City, America’s most transit-dense city, compares to its outlying suburbs:
Living in the city can decrease the emissions footprint of a resident by a factor of 2-3x. Even in LA, downtown areas with much less robust transit than New York still have strong scores compared to their neighboring suburbs like La Cañada Flintridge:
Soberingly, however, we illustrate how Los Angeles's efforts to give carbon-lite transportation options are failing due to flawed housing policy:
To illustrate how housing must be central to climate investment, consider Los Angeles’ efforts to increase ridership on its public transit system. Despite the declaration of a city-wide “Green New Deal ” and a county-wide plan to invest $400 billion over the next 30 years , Metro ridership is down 27% from 2019’s pre-pandemic levels and down a precipitous 43% from its peak in March 2013. All the while, car traffic and fuel consumption has increased steadily. Future investments are unlikely to lead to increased mobility for Angelenos because we have not adequately addressed land use: research shows that residents who live within a half-mile of transit are four times more likely to use transit, including 52% of automobile commuters who switch to public transit instead. To truly transform our mobility and greenhouse gas emissions, we must pair green transportation infrastructure with ambitious changes in land use around major transit stops. This is exactly why the world’s most successful public transit systems were created by combining land use and transportation policy into one cohesive strategy.
You may recognize this argument from something I wrote back in 2022 about how LA’s newly elected leaders needed to fix our housing and land use policy around transit - a call yet to be heeded. If you want people to take transit, letting the market build housing adjacent to transit will be a far more effective tool with an infinitely higher ROI than simply spending money on more and more rail lines alone.
In terms of home electricity, California's housing policy has also done an enormous disservice to the climate. The housing typologies common in cities - apartments and townhomes are much more carbon-lite than single-family homes. More importantly, the coastal environment of California requires year-round temperature control from either heating or air conditioning, unlike almost anywhere else in the US, regardless of the type of housing. Extremely high housing prices along the California coast have pushed residents out of coastal San Francisco and LA and towards cities with much higher home electricity costs, such as Riverside, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Dallas.
What can be done?
My main contribution to the paper came in trying to give case studies on how good housing policy can be made. Two are places where LA has already seen some significant success:
Allowing missing middle housing in all neighborhoods throughout the city. California and Los Angeles, in particular, have succeeded in the tens of thousands of ADUs that have been built since the state took steps to legalize them statewide in the late 2010s. LA can hope to see more success if it allows more missing middle typologies in more places in the city.
Relaxing parking minimums around transit - something that happened statewide in California in 2022. The report cites the fivefold increase San Diego saw in 100% affordable housing near transit in the wake of its 2019 decision to drop parking requirements near transit. After the report was written, my research has shown how LA is experiencing a similar phenomenon with the for-profit development of ED1 projects - something that should be legalized throughout the city:
There are also three policy ideas that we think LA can grow into:
Upzoning High-Resource Areas: We examine Houston’s success in densifying affluent, inner-ring suburbs by legalizing building on small lots, spurring tens of thousands of townhouses to be built.
Transit-Oriented Development: We examine Arlington, Virginia’s success in building housing around transit through super-charged density bonuses and placing transit lines in commercial areas where they can promote walkability.
Legalizing Single-Stair and Single-Room Occupancy buildings - Los Angeles could see more housing development if it legalized types of apartments prohibited under the current code but that provide dense housing that meets the needs of people who currently find dense urban areas unhospitable. Families can be better served through the larger unit sizes found in single-stair buildings, and financially struggling individuals who might otherwise be pushed out of the city or into homelessness can find more affordable options in Single-Room Occupancy buildings.