Housing and Climate Change

Ben Adler is right to lightly chide Time magazine for not including urban planning as a major way people can fight climate change. Heating and cooling individual housing units causes at least as much climate change as auto emissions, as Time rightfully discusses. But as Adler points out, "But Americans cannot live an eco-friendly, auto-independent lifestyle under current zoning restrictions. Right now, it is illegal to build dense apartment buildings or row houses in much of the country, illegal to build mixed-use commercial and residential districts, and all new shopping centers take the form of strip mall development because of the minimum parking requirements."

Sadly, I have little confidence that Americans will ever organize over these issues. While everyone says Americans love their cars, Americans also love their individual housing units. Of course, the two phenomena are inexorably intertwined. I believe that if people lived in high-density housing units, as people do in Europe and Asia, our share of causing climate change would decline significantly, we would have a stronger social fabric, and we would have a significantly more eco-friendly society, with more walking, bicycling, and light rail, green space, and healthy ecosystems.

But Americans don't want that. They don't want to give up the SUV, the ranch house, or the 3 acres. I imagine that Time didn't include urban planning in their issue because they figured that most people would scoff. And that's awfully sad.