A large part of my enthusiasm for promoting development that facilitates dense, city living is the belief that it is more sustainable, in terms of both resource and energy consumption. Accordingly, Alex Baca’s piece in Slate (though not its headline) rang true to me: The Green New Deal’s Huge Flaw. The author, Alex Baca, calls out not exactly a “flaw” in AOC’s proposal, but that by failing to address the car-centric structure of America, the Green New Deal is missing out on a key way to reduce both energy consumption and economic inequality.
A large part of Baca’s argument is the claim that personal car usage is a large fraction of America’s energy consumption and pollution. According to Baca, “America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is transportation. In California, the proportion of CO2 from transportation is even higher: above 40 percent.” To dig into that a bit, the “transportation sector” defined for most energy studies includes both passenger and freight, as well as all vehicles from motorcycles to airplanes to cargo ships. The EIA report on worldwide Transportation Sector Energy Consumption says, “Passenger or personal mobility-related fuel consumption accounted for 61% of total world transportation energy consumption in 2012. Among the personal mobility modes of transport, light-duty vehicles accounted for 44% of total world transportation energy use.” The share of personal vs. total transport for Americans is even higher, suggesting that indeed a large fraction of emissions can be attributed to personal cars. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported that transportation accounted for over 30% of national energy consumption in 2017 (also their flow charts are amazing for understanding energy use, and they’ve been producing them since the 70s!!).
“But the Green New Deal is all about electric vehicles!” you retort. Sure, but better than converting gasoline vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to electric VMT would be reducing VMT entirely.
Baca rightly attributes America’s intense dependence on cars to suburban sprawl, enabled by highways and federal spending packages of decades past and current. An ambitious policy like the Green New Deal could work to reverse that trend, focusing development on increasing density in existing cities, instead of building even further out exurbs. Baca also acknowledges the *convenient* housing crisis, stating “the scale of housing demand at this moment is such that we could build...in car-centric suburbs, too, and provide a human density that would not just support transit but also reduce the need to travel as shops, jobs, and schools crop up within walking distance.” Density density density!
Baca also provides a good summary of how sprawl exacerbates existing economic disadvantage by gating access to employment and services on access to a personal vehicle.
She concludes by citing a few specific recommendations for AOC’s proposal: tracking transportation-related emissions and explicitly combat spatial mismatch between jobs and residences.
“A Green New Deal must insist on a new, and better, land use regime, countering decades of federal sprawl subsidy. The plan already recognizes the need to retrofit and upgrade buildings. Why not address their locations while we’re at it?”
Saturday, February 9, 2019
Thursday, January 31, 2019
SMBC on Gentrification
Well, nice to see that my pet topic is even getting talked about in my favorite web comic :)
"None of the local tenants own any property." Yes. So what to do?
An interesting solution was brought up by CityObservatory. Planners in Washington DC are proposing to "use a combination of private investment and public funds to acquire existing housing, and maintain its availability for low and moderate income households." Instead of building public housing projects, why not take the cheaper, existing more affordable housing and use funds to keep it that way? I like it.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-real-villain
An interesting solution was brought up by CityObservatory. Planners in Washington DC are proposing to "use a combination of private investment and public funds to acquire existing housing, and maintain its availability for low and moderate income households." Instead of building public housing projects, why not take the cheaper, existing more affordable housing and use funds to keep it that way? I like it.
Saturday, January 19, 2019
Filtering and Related Phenomena
In the housing affordability crisis, it’s the lowest income bracket that winds up getting priced out and displaced, so how can we expect the almost exclusively luxury housing being built in the tightest rental markets to solve the problem? Even market-rate housing is already too expensive (see: the definition of the affordability crisis). While it may be true that high-end development alone won’t solve the affordability crisis, especially for the lowest income renters, there are several mechanisms by which it can definitely help.
The most obvious of these is tightly related to supply and demand. In its simplest form, the argument is that if you increase the supply of housing, competition for units will go down, and rents along with it. Acknowledging the spectrum from comparatively affordable older units to luxury new construction, we can still see that providing new housing for the highest income bracket relieves pressure at the next say high-middle income bracket, which in turn relieves pressure for middle income housing, and so forth. Build some high end units, and eventually some lower end units will become vacant on the other end.
The second mechanism by which market-rate or more luxury development lowers rents for all is called “filtering.” According to the Washington Post, “Filtering is the process by which, as housing ages, it becomes less desirable to wealthier residents, thereby becoming affordable to the middle class and poor.” In fact, much of what we consider affordable housing today was originally built as market-rate housing (and probably marketed as luxury :P).
It should be noted, however, that if newer units are not added to the market, filtering will not happen. If there are no newer, sexier units for higher income renters to move into, they will continue to compete for the slightly older, would-be affordable units, keeping rents high even as the units age. In this way, the two phenomena are actually one and the same. So really, filtering is the process by which "older market-rate housing becomes more affordable as new units are added to the market," (source: Berkeley IGS).
While filtering may not solve the entire affordability crisis today, with the anticipated growth of cities in the coming decades, we need to be building now if we want to have a large stock of more affordable housing in the future.
The most obvious of these is tightly related to supply and demand. In its simplest form, the argument is that if you increase the supply of housing, competition for units will go down, and rents along with it. Acknowledging the spectrum from comparatively affordable older units to luxury new construction, we can still see that providing new housing for the highest income bracket relieves pressure at the next say high-middle income bracket, which in turn relieves pressure for middle income housing, and so forth. Build some high end units, and eventually some lower end units will become vacant on the other end.
The second mechanism by which market-rate or more luxury development lowers rents for all is called “filtering.” According to the Washington Post, “Filtering is the process by which, as housing ages, it becomes less desirable to wealthier residents, thereby becoming affordable to the middle class and poor.” In fact, much of what we consider affordable housing today was originally built as market-rate housing (and probably marketed as luxury :P).
It should be noted, however, that if newer units are not added to the market, filtering will not happen. If there are no newer, sexier units for higher income renters to move into, they will continue to compete for the slightly older, would-be affordable units, keeping rents high even as the units age. In this way, the two phenomena are actually one and the same. So really, filtering is the process by which "older market-rate housing becomes more affordable as new units are added to the market," (source: Berkeley IGS).
While filtering may not solve the entire affordability crisis today, with the anticipated growth of cities in the coming decades, we need to be building now if we want to have a large stock of more affordable housing in the future.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Housing Affordability Crisis
There is a housing affordability crisis in US cities today. In his imaginative, animated article for the Huffington Post, Michael Hobbes explains the problem and its causes as one of zoning and self-interested homeowners.
He first acknowledges that city downtowns are where most high-paying jobs are located, and that most people want to live within a 30 minute commute from their work. As cities grew, “[t]hey built upward, divided homes into apartments and added duplexes and townhomes,” to accommodate the increased demand for housing near downtown. Have we just run out of room now? Not exactly... 😞
In the 1970s, likely spurred by the outlawing of explicit housing discrimination based on race, neighborhoods began using zoning and other restrictions to intentionally inflate the price of housing, to prevent poor people (read: black people) from being able to move in. Yeah. Nasty.
Maybe today people are no longer quite as racistly motivated (maybe), but arguably it is in homeowners' best interest to increase their real estate value by limiting the supply of housing. There are many mechanisms they can use to do this. Hobbes mentions requiring large backyards and multiple parking spaces, prohibiting multi-family units, or limiting the height of new apartment buildings to prevent shadows. Some techniques, like requiring extensive “design reviews” which slow down and increase costs for new development, are done in the name of preserving neighborhood character. Whether the motivation is racist, self-interested, or sentimental, the effect is the same: less dense housing gets built, the existing housing becomes more expensive.
I appreciate Hobbes’ simple illustration of housing as supply and demand, with the supply being constrained by all-too-powerful homeowners and neighborhood associations, however, among affordable housing advocates there is disagreement about whether relieving some of the constraints on development would result in lower housing costs. Since developers are incentivized to build more expensive, luxury units, how exactly will that solve the affordability crisis? And isn’t it the most affordable units that are often demolished in favor of new development? Cliffhanger??
He first acknowledges that city downtowns are where most high-paying jobs are located, and that most people want to live within a 30 minute commute from their work. As cities grew, “[t]hey built upward, divided homes into apartments and added duplexes and townhomes,” to accommodate the increased demand for housing near downtown. Have we just run out of room now? Not exactly... 😞
In the 1970s, likely spurred by the outlawing of explicit housing discrimination based on race, neighborhoods began using zoning and other restrictions to intentionally inflate the price of housing, to prevent poor people (read: black people) from being able to move in. Yeah. Nasty.
Maybe today people are no longer quite as racistly motivated (maybe), but arguably it is in homeowners' best interest to increase their real estate value by limiting the supply of housing. There are many mechanisms they can use to do this. Hobbes mentions requiring large backyards and multiple parking spaces, prohibiting multi-family units, or limiting the height of new apartment buildings to prevent shadows. Some techniques, like requiring extensive “design reviews” which slow down and increase costs for new development, are done in the name of preserving neighborhood character. Whether the motivation is racist, self-interested, or sentimental, the effect is the same: less dense housing gets built, the existing housing becomes more expensive.
I appreciate Hobbes’ simple illustration of housing as supply and demand, with the supply being constrained by all-too-powerful homeowners and neighborhood associations, however, among affordable housing advocates there is disagreement about whether relieving some of the constraints on development would result in lower housing costs. Since developers are incentivized to build more expensive, luxury units, how exactly will that solve the affordability crisis? And isn’t it the most affordable units that are often demolished in favor of new development? Cliffhanger??
Friday, January 4, 2019
Friday, December 28, 2018
I'm your density
The world is becoming a denser place. Not only is the global population growing, but the population is concentrating itself in bigger and denser cities. 1 in 5 people today live in a city with over 1 million people, predicted to rise to 1 in 3 by 2030. In the United States today, 3 in 4 live in a city.
And if humans are going to continue living on this planet, that density is probably a good thing. As Oscar Boyson summarizes in his discussion-starter video The Future of Cities,
"When density is done right, it's the best if not the only solution to our growing climate crisis."
-Oscar Boyson
So how do we build dense urban centers in a sustainable way, while also maintaining or even improving quality of life for those who live there? There are plenty of problem areas to focus on, like education, employment, or renewable energy, but the two issues I'm hoping to examine first in this blog are transportation and housing. Here are some pithy thoughts of mine to start with:
Transportation
Biking is super fun. Cars killed the city (everyone hates walking under a freeway). Biking and walking make people healthier. Public transportation evens the playing field. A University of Waterloo Study (among others) finds a direct link between commute time and overall satisfaction in life. Not to mention the environmental benefits of limiting car use, and the decreased wear and tear on infrastructure.
Lastly, car traffic just sucks. (And more roads don't fix the problem.)
Housing
Affordability. Gentrification. Displacement. Homelessness. Loss of green-space. Eviction. Rent control. NIMBY, YIMBY, PHIMBY?? How do we increase residential density without destroying existing communities? Some solutions I do like the sound of: mixed-use development, residential infill, eliminating parking requirements.
Overall, my goal here is primarily to educate myself on these topics, and hopefully make those learnings accessible to anyone else who wants to follow along. I'll begin with the articles and media that have gotten me interested over the past few years, and then branch out into new material, maybe eventually even doing some of my own data analysis 😮 Cities are the future. Let's do them right.
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Urbanism and Drawdown
Last winter I read Drawdown in an effort to better understand the current landscape of solutions to climate change, and specifically how ...
