In San Francisco’s Sunset District, rows and rows of pastel-colored, two-story homes flow from the edge of Golden Gate Park into the sand dunes of Ocean Beach. Many houses here have solar panels on their roofs and compost bins at their driveways, flanked by hybrid and electric vehicles.
Yet here — and all over the city — one major solution to the housing crisis and the climate crisis has been met with fierce resistance: building more.
Climate scientists and urban planners increasingly suggest that one of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions is to make cities denser. This change, scientists have calculated, is even more effective than installing solar panels on all new constructions or retrofitting old buildings with energy-saving technologies.
Illustration: Mountain People
Residents of cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis already have much lower carbon footprints than in the surrounding suburban sprawl. City dwellers tend to have smaller apartments that require less energy to heat and cool.
It also means that a certain US way of life might have to end.
The quiet, tree-lined Sunset District has been roiling with controversy over the construction of a seven-story affordable housing unit. At tense community meetings, residents complained that the construction would block sunlight, drive up congestion and rustle up toxic dust.
“Not in my backyard” (NIMBY) demonstrators clashed with progressive “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) counterprotesters outside the proposed site. It reached a fever pitch early this year when anonymous leaflets appeared in neighbors’ mailboxes, urging “no slums in the sunset.”
“It got ugly,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, a San Francisco-based housing advocacy group.
Although the Sunset project was ultimately approved, she said that similar battles over building more housing were playing out all over the city — and country.
Efforts to make US cities denser are also complicated by other countervailing trends, with the population growth of urban cores dropping in the past few years as people seek out cheap space and, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, places more amenable to remote working, for those able to do it.
“A lot of cities are worried about affordable housing and gentrification, so these issues have to be dealt with very carefully,” said Christopher Jones, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Also, if you build more density in the urban core it could end up in more sprawl with growth, with people wanting larger, cheaper homes and then commute into these new vibrant centers. It’s a bit like pouring sand on to a map — it will keep spilling out.”
Drawing more people into cities could help significantly shrink the country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Low-density developments produced nearly four times the greenhouse gas emissions of high-density alternatives, with research finding that doubling urban density can reduce carbon pollution from household travel by nearly half and residential energy use by more than one-third.
Compared with most European cities, urban areas in the US are typically sprawling and heavily dependent on vehicles.
As the tentacles of suburbs reach outward from an urban core, public transit and even sidewalks often do not follow and so more people rely upon their vehicles, with larger and more polluting sport utility vehicles becoming increasingly popular. Research has found that people living in neighborhoods that are walkable, unsurprisingly, drive one-quarter less than those in more spread out areas.
The default of vehicle ownership in an age of escalating climate crisis has also led to the rise of YIMBYism in some progressive cities, around a vision of apartments packed close to public transit hubs and amenities.
Meanwhile, the temporary shutdown of some streets to vehicles during the pandemic has heightened calls for more space to be handed over to pedestrians and cyclists, rather than vehicles, on a more permanent basis.
At a national level, US President Joe Biden has called for a “historic investment” in affordable housing, with his administration urging cities to change zoning laws to boost density and limit single-family housing developments, as well as rip up highways that have cleaved apart communities, typically communities of color, and added to air pollution.
Jones said that most suburbs in the US were “beyond hope” for public transit and that the focus should instead be on a “middle-out strategy,” where single-family plots close to city centers are divided up to accommodate additional residences, urban growth boundaries are put in place, and jobs and services are spread more evenly around cities.
“Downtowns have jobs, shopping and schools, places that people want to drive to, but you need to have many cores, rather than just one,” he said. “Having everyone coming into one hub isn’t efficient. You need many hubs and different spokes in the wheel connecting them.”
Some states and cities have begun remaking their zoning laws to build duplexes and apartments in areas that were once zoned for single-family homes.
In 2018, Minneapolis became the first major US city to end single-family zoning. In 2019, Oregon did the same, allowing for duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes to be built on parcels that were once reserved for single-family houses.
California has made some strides as well. A bill that passed a few years ago has allowed developers to circumvent certain local planning and zoning ordinances if they build affordable housing — which is how the seven-story apartment building in the Sunset district that was met with so much controversy ultimately prevailed over neighborhood resistance.
Broader upzoning bills have been defeated — often because such measures have failed to galvanize even progressives who supported the state’s groundbreaking goals for boosting renewable energy and cutting carbon emissions.
As drought, unprecedented heat waves and raging wildfires grip the country, calls to build up cities and cut down carbon emissions have gained urgency. Pushes to build higher, amp up transportation and reform land use laws have gained new momentum.
“Climate change has become the broccoli that everyone wants to push around on the plate,” Foote said. “It’s easy to argue that one housing project won’t make the difference between averting climate change and global warming killing us — but really, we need to be saying yes to as many of these housing projects as we can in order to avoid climate catastrophe.”
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