Housing is green infrastructure
To help the climate, we have to build fast and build smart
…Timetables like that will not meet the climate emergency we now face. Either we build faster or we accept catastrophe. There is no third option. – Abundance, p. 97
Two crises and two kinds of environmentalists
Northern New Mexico faces twinned environmental crises: a housing shortage and climate change. The public response has revealed a fissure in the environmental movement—what housing journalist Jerusalem Demsas calls the divide between “Crisis Greens” and “Cautious Greens.”
Crisis Greens, who tend to be younger, feel the strain of both crises most intensely—by dint of their age, they’ll be dealing with climate change for far longer. They see climate change as an emergency requiring immediate action. They also don’t have the access to housing that their parents did. They understand that housing policy is tied to climate policy, and that environmental policies that sound great on paper mean nothing if they prevent the infrastructure that reduces emissions.
Cautious Greens, who come from a generation shaped by very real environmental devastation, favor methodical process over speed. While their kids see “the environment” as global (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions), Cautious Greens are more likely to locate their advocacy in their own backyard; they want to guard the trees they see, the landscape they love. They instinctively feel that the best thing for the environment is often doing nothing at all: build no houses, no transmission lines, no transit. Where they concede we must take action, they prefer to move slowly, lean on rules and bureaucracy as guardrails, and to slow things down with extensive reviews and regulations.
Walk into any city meeting in Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Taos, or really anywhere in the US where housing prices are high and housing opposition is even higher. Casually say something like “Seems like people have to commute a lot around here! Probably not great for the climate. How about we build some more housing?” Cautious Greens will hear the call and whip out an impressive laundry list of demands: “Sure we should build housing but only if it’s 100% affordable, 100% sustainable, LEED certified, has gone through a least a dozen community input reviews, has all-electric everything, requires solar panels on every roof, and does not mess with my view of the mountains.”
You might be convinced, listening to this list, that goals for housing and goals for the environment are in tension. But here’s the “we can have nice things” part: these crises want to get solved together. One of the single best and easiest things Los Alamos, northern New Mexico, and probably the whole United States and planet Earth can do to address climate change is to enable people to live much closer to where they work.
Workers are priced out
Young Lab families want to live in Los Alamos with their school-age children for all the same reasons that the Cautious Greens in town did when their children were small: Parents wouldn’t have to spend a couple of hours away from their kids in a grinding commute; they could go to parent-teacher conferences in the middle of the day; if a child is taken ill or hurt at school (I had both of those things happen to my kids), then they’d be close by. By far the best thing Los Alamos can do to bring these people into town is to build dense housing of all types—from apartments to high-end condos and townhomes, duplexes, quads, you name it—and to do it quickly.
But now notice something: If you bring these people into the town, you have taken them off the road. OK sure, they are not literally living in their offices, but it matters that they are 5 miles from work and not 45 miles. Allowing people to live closer to the stuff they need (work, shopping, schools, healthcare) is one of the top tools we have for combating climate change. Urban sprawl contributes up to 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing this sprawl is really nice for the planet and—super enormous bonus!—it’s really nice for us, too. Commuting sucks and people do not actually like it.
When you spread stuff out more, traffic results
Los Alamos’s own Climate Action Plan tells us that transportation accounts for 38% of community-wide emissions—the largest single source of local carbon pollution. This is the inevitable consequence of land use policies that spread everything out, and of housing policies that force workers to commute daily.
Each commuter traveling from Santa Fe to Los Alamos racks up roughly 100 miles per day. That's more than many urban residents drive in a week. Santa Fe creates the same problem for its own workers: The city prioritizes “historic character” over livability.
Santa Fe’s regulations cater to the wealthy and prevent housing supply from meeting demand. This drives housing costs further out of reach, displacing the very people who gave the city its historic character. Imagine how it would feel to know your great-grandfather built a little adobe house on Garcia Street that now sells for $1.5 million—meanwhile, you commute to your job at the City of Santa Fe from Rio Rancho or Belen because nowhere in Santa Fe is affordable for your family. Your family, which has been here for generations.
This all has a terrible human cost, of course, but to the point I’m making here, it has a terrible climate cost. Even with an impressive 70 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, the United States would still need a 20% reduction in per-capita vehicle miles traveled to meet climate targets. Housing supply therefore functions as climate infrastructure, creating the foundation that enables other green investments.
A basic apartment complex that eliminates 50-mile daily commutes for a hundred people delivers more climate benefits than the fanciest LEED-certified home that never gets built.
Who is not at the meeting?
Let’s get back to our typical town meeting on some housing project. By showing up to the meeting and advocating for a cautious slow approach with ample traffic studies, LEED certification, individual-tree preservation, and further reviews, the Cautious Green feels like she has done something good for the environment. And if everything on her list could happen with the snap of a finger, and didn’t cost a cent, she’d be right! But many things on her list take time, usually a lot of time, and that raises the cost of every project. Most importantly, her list ignores a fundamental problem: housing that is the most climate-friendly on paper is useless to both the climate and potential occupants if it never gets built.
Meanwhile, the Crisis Green doesn’t show up at this meeting. It’s 6 p.m. when the public lines up at the mic, and he’s still driving home. He’s already been away from his kids and partner for a full workday plus an hour or two of hair-raising commute time. He is exhausted. But this isn’t the worst of it. Our Crisis Green doesn’t even know about any of the endless “community input” sessions required for each project. Why? He is not invited. Our young dad can’t afford a home in the same community where he works, so he’s excluded. He isn’t wealthy enough. He doesn’t get a vote or a say.
If this fellow did get an opportunity to show up, he might say this: “My parents could afford a starter home—but those don’t exist anymore. I can barely afford an apartment, it’s 50 miles from my work, and my planet is burning.” The Crisis Green sees the Cautious Green’s list of housing demands as tactics designed to make housing more expensive and less likely to happen. If he follows the community input sessions in the town where he would like to live, he notices these meetings usually result in fewer houses at higher prices than the builder’s original plan. He notices that the scant housing being built is increasingly constructed farther away from town centers, transit, and workplaces.
Who shows up at a meeting is not hypothetical: Research from Boston University shows that public meetings about housing are dominated by people who are older, wealthier, whiter, more male, and more likely to be homeowners than other people in the town.
This means a powerful and highly unrepresentative sliver of each city has far more of a voice in government than their neighbors: they have more say than poorer people, people of color, renters, young parents, and workers. And they are vastly more likely to oppose new construction. The implication of this is that community input, which is meant to enhance democracy, is actually not very democratic at all. The promise and pitfalls of “participatory democracy” is a topic I’ll get into more another time—but for now, elected leaders and appointed commissioners should keep this in mind at every meeting where people are lining up to take the mic. Rather than focusing solely on the people in the meeting, they must also ask themselves, “Who is NOT in this room?”
The perfect is the enemy of the good—and the planet
So we have a democracy problem, a housing problem, and a climate problem … and they’re connected. The people most affected by both the housing crisis and climate change—young families, workers, renters—have the least voice in housing decisions. Meanwhile, those with the most privilege use their power—and environmental laws—to prevent any housing from getting built at all.
That’s right: the very regulations written to protect the environment are being weaponized to stop development entirely. In California, laws designed to protect nature have been twisted into tools that reward sprawl and punish density. In Minneapolis, similar laws were used to halt upzoning that would have reduced emissions.
The question isn’t whether we should care about housing more than the environment—we should care about both, and the beautiful thing is we do not have to choose. Helping one helps the other. The win-win is so clear that you have to wonder what’s in the way! The answer is what it usually is: politics and power: Policies meant to help the environment have become elaborate systems for ensuring that a few privileged people can easily stop the very infrastructure needed to solve our climate crisis.
Coming up: In keeping with my goal of shorter-and-more frequent, I’ll stop here and continue the rest later. Stay tuned for: How environmental laws became the enemy of environmental progress, why speed itself is a green building standard, and why values about housing and the environment ended up in a conflicted muddle.
Routine reminder that I am a planning commissioner, but I speak only for myself and not the commission.
I just joined the Sierra Club and have been following the housing mailing list discussions. It’s really evident from reading it that there is a clear divide between Crisis Greens and Cautious Greens just like you mentioned here.
I think what has happened is that the Cautious Greens in the org haven’t had anyone in my generation to talk to. They have battle wounds from the past and they still behave that way with regard to anything new that might roll back what they fought for.
Woof! Great read.