This conversation is totally great and I really enjoyed it.
BUT… it’s a little hard to hear from David who owns a yard and (probably) a grill that everyone should not want that. And his guest was similarly fortunate to have a home in Berkeley. That didn’t sit well with me even if I agree with the messaging.
I think - at least for those of us in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts - your housing show missed the mark on where the housing crisis stems from. It is not foreign investors. It is, in our area, people who do not live in the Berkshires who buy 2nd, 3rd, or 4th homes here that they visit a few times a year - or maybe for the summer. They drive up housing prices so our young people starting families cannot afford to stay here, which depletes our workforce, so the only jobs tend to be seasonal and low-paying (restaurants, ski /slide resorts, motels). We do also have landlords who buy up housing stock and rent at whatever cost the market will bear, but most do not insulate, weatherize, or electrify - even when they could do it for FREE!!!! Their stated reason - their tenants don't deserve it. I was shocked at this response. No amount of - but it would increase the value of your asset - or if you save your tenants money, they will be better able to pay their rent. Nope, they hate their tenants too much to take advantage of the programs available. So, housing prices go up. Kids move away. And the folks from the city own - in some towns more than half the homes that they may eventually retire to, but it is killing us now. Most of my "environmentalist" friends who live in the city and tout the green advantages have 2nd homes outside the city.
This pod really does the "why can't we get people to move out of the housing stressed big coastal cities" argument a disservice, which is not surprising given that both the guest and the host live in large coastal cities. Some of us actually live in the midwest with relatively affordable housing, in cities that are wildly underrated and which *should* have more residents. In fact, people moving out of large coastal cities into the midwest is a win-win-win. You further revitalize a region that has seen some degree of economic downturn, you improve average climate resilience, you relieve pressure on coastal-city housing markets, *and* you have dramatic positive implications for national politics.
The latest edition of the Atlantic just arrived and Yoni Appelbaum's article, "Stuck in Place" rhymes very nicely with your pod on YIMBY. It appears that the things done with the best intentions often create outcomes that we don't anticipate and later regret. We have plenty of "undoing" to work on.
You might be interested interviewing Kev Polk (Edenicity). He promotes the notion of a Permaculture Garden City if you will with some fairly detailed base plans to layout entire communities he might make for an interesting episode.
In a recent YouTube post, the works through some straightforward calculations he made for the resource use differences between a car free city, especially a car free city with Permaculture integrated into it. The rough numbers he comes up with is around a 90 to 92% resource savings over car centric urban landuse.
The savings comes from all the resources used to provide for cars, the fuel the maintenance, the cars themselves, then the roads, the materials used in roads and the maintenance costs. Replacing cars with suitable transport saves a massive amount of resources to build and sustain the car centric design.
Also, you could hit up an interview the folks from Strong towns
This was useful, Dave. If you revisit or review the topic, I strongly urge you and your readers to check out this multimedia piece in the NY Times | How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/30/opinion/new-york-housing-solution.html. It demonstrates many of the comments your guest made in this podcast episode
What about HOAs? I don't think a town or city or county can require them to alter their "zoning," right? "Covenants," I think they are usually called. In the Sunbelt, a big fraction of homes are in HOA or other association-controlled subdivisions.
I live in one of areas with the highest housing:income ratios in the country. Colorado rural resort. Right now we have local "climate" and "environmental" "movement" "activists" going ballistic because the housing folks from Habitat for Humanity pointed out that the more resort-y locus of the area is short about 3000+ units just for the "workforce. "Growth bad, development bad, capitalism bad, traffic bad, not enough resources;" all the usual reactions.
Our town kinda sorta tried loosening some zoning to get some higher density. We had all the problems you enumerated. I do like the idea of just mostly toss the zoning out and let the "impacts" spread out." I can see the logic. We do kinda need to interfere with the market here to make sure a lot of any new housing goes to the local workforce and not to retirees and zoomer boomers or vacation units.
It's sad. Workforce in resort town is pushed out and they commute 10 miles from the next town; they push out the local workforce in that town; those folks commute 20 miles, and so on. Some skip all that and just commute 60 miles. White collar workers do more remote work and meetings, but "essential" workers gotta fill 'er up. And yeah, not great for the social fabric of the towns either.
Very fun pod and really resonated with me after I spent some time listening in to local city council meetings after our provincial government had passed down an edict for municipalities to accelerate housing. I have a couple quibbles: In Canada, 1 in 5 properties are owned by corporations and as of 2021 there were 1.3 million vacant homes (we have something like 10 million families in Canada and 40 million people). So, commodification of housing has been a driver of the cost and shortage. Regarding trees: just as neighborhoods that are walkable are also more valuable, neighborhoods with tree canopy are also more valuable. New developments like to have "graded" land for building. This means that unless you have strict tree bylaws, many trees get removed to make it easier for builders. It takes decades to get these trees back, for shade and biodiversity. We don't have decades.
It is in the section discussing land use and transportation.
This includes livable and walkable neighborhoods.
Transportation images on the front page includes pedestrians and cyclists.
Buses and boats are mentioned.
In the background of the photos, you can see cars.
Of course, this general plan is aspirational. Buses do not have enough funding. While cyclists and pedestrians are receiving big improvements, it is necessary to push back against drivers.
Of course housing is a climate & energy issue. There's the relative energy efficiency or inefficiency of your home for heating, cooling, and lighting and there's the location. How far do you have to travel to get to your job and to shop. In 2016 my wife & I moved 11 miles from a rural neighborhood in Roanoke County Virginia to a home in Roanoke City. We cut our driving by 70%. Then we insulated our new (1953 house), got rid of our gas furnace and water heater, and went fully electric with a heat pump. After that we put 26 solar panels on our roof that supply 100% (net metered) of our home energy needs. Our annual bill is $107.04 from Appalachian Power.
I am chair of a local affordable housing committee and have been on the local affordable housing non profit for about 20 years. I agree with much of what you said. I am in the Seattly area as well and we both know that varied density housing is now possible in most of the city.
I disagree that large cities are the only way we can face the future of climate change, disabling pollution, and resource depletion. You talked about the importance on human contact and the carbon footprint of long commutes. What you failed to take into account is the financial and environmental costs of bringing large quantities of food, water, energy, and other resources into the city, and the burden of dissipating the large amounts of waste and pollutants that are created. I grew up in the Chicago area and have always used commuter rail to go into the city. Besides the extreme energy efficiency of moving people and goods by rail, there is the possibility of both powering trains with electricity, and moving renewable energy cheaply from the rural areas. Another side benefit is that rubber tire pollution is minimized. You may be aware that there is a substance from tires that runs off into our water courses that is deadly to our salmon.
You talk about "social housing" as something that has been utilized in the past and is not done now. In fact, a much better and equally effective tool is being used right now. There is a growing number of Community Land Trusts (CLT's) in this country and one in my community on Vashon Island that I helped to establish about twenty years ago. One of the biggest problems in providing affordable housing is appreciation of land and housing as a biddable commodity on the market. A CLT provides a different bundle rights to the buyer. The CLT maintains ownership of the land while the buyer owns the home or other structure in just the same way as any other home owner. By owning the land, the trust can require that the buyer agree to a limited equity agreement so that whatever subsidy invested in the original construction is preserved through future sales.
Your dismissive comments about leftist housing advocates expecting that somebody should supply them housing for free is similar to Reagan's tales of the "welfare queen." Access to shelter for any living being on this planet IS a right, and basic housing should viewed as a utility first and as an investment second. Nobody should expect somebody to provide it to you for free but one should have the ability to access it with the means that they have. It is now impossible for the lower 50% of the population to even contemplate purchasing a home in the open market. Sorry the first part of my comment has been cut out.
Great conversation, really interesting to hear! If people want to see how things look elsewhere, I strongly recommend to find Not Just Bikes on YouTube a channel about urbanism mainly comparing Europe to America.
Firstly, there's no doubt that housing reform is hugely important for so many reasons, including making achieving climate targets easier.
That said, I'm curious about the calculations suggesting that reducing VMT is the only viable path to do so.
In one's wildest YIMBY dreams, the majority of Americans (and Australians and Canadians) are going to be living in large single-family homes in the suburbs in 2050, and most of these people will be driving cars at roughly the rate they do now. As such, we're going to have to electrify all of this regardless. While it will be cheaper to do so with YIMBY reforms, and society will undoubtedly be much better off if we do YIMBY, why isn't electrifying 9000-pound pickup trucks and 5000-square-foot homes a viable path to a net zero America?
Thanks for talking about "embodied emissions," it's a topic that really interests me that I always want to hear more about. Like most electrification, it's a "capex vs opex" problem. No doubt there will be some emissions to build or retrofit, but if we're looking at the long-term curve of emissions, getting the opex right is essential. After all, it only takes about 12k miles for an EV to "work off" the emissions from its production. Same could be said for a new apartment that's on a train line with electrified appliances.
Our city is building several high-rise apartments. There are a small number of units that are designated “affordable “. Middle class amount affordable. We have a large homeless population. I foresee people from the Bay Area renting the apartments that are priced at 4 times the rate middle class can afford and then commuting 40 miles each way. Won’t do a thing to reduce carbon or get people off the street. Only result is unattractive downtown.
This conversation is totally great and I really enjoyed it.
BUT… it’s a little hard to hear from David who owns a yard and (probably) a grill that everyone should not want that. And his guest was similarly fortunate to have a home in Berkeley. That didn’t sit well with me even if I agree with the messaging.
I think - at least for those of us in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts - your housing show missed the mark on where the housing crisis stems from. It is not foreign investors. It is, in our area, people who do not live in the Berkshires who buy 2nd, 3rd, or 4th homes here that they visit a few times a year - or maybe for the summer. They drive up housing prices so our young people starting families cannot afford to stay here, which depletes our workforce, so the only jobs tend to be seasonal and low-paying (restaurants, ski /slide resorts, motels). We do also have landlords who buy up housing stock and rent at whatever cost the market will bear, but most do not insulate, weatherize, or electrify - even when they could do it for FREE!!!! Their stated reason - their tenants don't deserve it. I was shocked at this response. No amount of - but it would increase the value of your asset - or if you save your tenants money, they will be better able to pay their rent. Nope, they hate their tenants too much to take advantage of the programs available. So, housing prices go up. Kids move away. And the folks from the city own - in some towns more than half the homes that they may eventually retire to, but it is killing us now. Most of my "environmentalist" friends who live in the city and tout the green advantages have 2nd homes outside the city.
This pod really does the "why can't we get people to move out of the housing stressed big coastal cities" argument a disservice, which is not surprising given that both the guest and the host live in large coastal cities. Some of us actually live in the midwest with relatively affordable housing, in cities that are wildly underrated and which *should* have more residents. In fact, people moving out of large coastal cities into the midwest is a win-win-win. You further revitalize a region that has seen some degree of economic downturn, you improve average climate resilience, you relieve pressure on coastal-city housing markets, *and* you have dramatic positive implications for national politics.
The latest edition of the Atlantic just arrived and Yoni Appelbaum's article, "Stuck in Place" rhymes very nicely with your pod on YIMBY. It appears that the things done with the best intentions often create outcomes that we don't anticipate and later regret. We have plenty of "undoing" to work on.
You might be interested interviewing Kev Polk (Edenicity). He promotes the notion of a Permaculture Garden City if you will with some fairly detailed base plans to layout entire communities he might make for an interesting episode.
In a recent YouTube post, the works through some straightforward calculations he made for the resource use differences between a car free city, especially a car free city with Permaculture integrated into it. The rough numbers he comes up with is around a 90 to 92% resource savings over car centric urban landuse.
The savings comes from all the resources used to provide for cars, the fuel the maintenance, the cars themselves, then the roads, the materials used in roads and the maintenance costs. Replacing cars with suitable transport saves a massive amount of resources to build and sustain the car centric design.
Also, you could hit up an interview the folks from Strong towns
This was useful, Dave. If you revisit or review the topic, I strongly urge you and your readers to check out this multimedia piece in the NY Times | How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/30/opinion/new-york-housing-solution.html. It demonstrates many of the comments your guest made in this podcast episode
You guys are firing on both cylinders here.
What about HOAs? I don't think a town or city or county can require them to alter their "zoning," right? "Covenants," I think they are usually called. In the Sunbelt, a big fraction of homes are in HOA or other association-controlled subdivisions.
I live in one of areas with the highest housing:income ratios in the country. Colorado rural resort. Right now we have local "climate" and "environmental" "movement" "activists" going ballistic because the housing folks from Habitat for Humanity pointed out that the more resort-y locus of the area is short about 3000+ units just for the "workforce. "Growth bad, development bad, capitalism bad, traffic bad, not enough resources;" all the usual reactions.
Our town kinda sorta tried loosening some zoning to get some higher density. We had all the problems you enumerated. I do like the idea of just mostly toss the zoning out and let the "impacts" spread out." I can see the logic. We do kinda need to interfere with the market here to make sure a lot of any new housing goes to the local workforce and not to retirees and zoomer boomers or vacation units.
It's sad. Workforce in resort town is pushed out and they commute 10 miles from the next town; they push out the local workforce in that town; those folks commute 20 miles, and so on. Some skip all that and just commute 60 miles. White collar workers do more remote work and meetings, but "essential" workers gotta fill 'er up. And yeah, not great for the social fabric of the towns either.
Very fun pod and really resonated with me after I spent some time listening in to local city council meetings after our provincial government had passed down an edict for municipalities to accelerate housing. I have a couple quibbles: In Canada, 1 in 5 properties are owned by corporations and as of 2021 there were 1.3 million vacant homes (we have something like 10 million families in Canada and 40 million people). So, commodification of housing has been a driver of the cost and shortage. Regarding trees: just as neighborhoods that are walkable are also more valuable, neighborhoods with tree canopy are also more valuable. New developments like to have "graded" land for building. This means that unless you have strict tree bylaws, many trees get removed to make it easier for builders. It takes decades to get these trees back, for shade and biodiversity. We don't have decades.
Oakland is currently updating its general plan.
It is in the section discussing land use and transportation.
This includes livable and walkable neighborhoods.
Transportation images on the front page includes pedestrians and cyclists.
Buses and boats are mentioned.
In the background of the photos, you can see cars.
Of course, this general plan is aspirational. Buses do not have enough funding. While cyclists and pedestrians are receiving big improvements, it is necessary to push back against drivers.
https://www.oaklandca.gov/topics/oakland-2045-general-plan-update-land-use-and-transportation-element-lute-2
Of course housing is a climate & energy issue. There's the relative energy efficiency or inefficiency of your home for heating, cooling, and lighting and there's the location. How far do you have to travel to get to your job and to shop. In 2016 my wife & I moved 11 miles from a rural neighborhood in Roanoke County Virginia to a home in Roanoke City. We cut our driving by 70%. Then we insulated our new (1953 house), got rid of our gas furnace and water heater, and went fully electric with a heat pump. After that we put 26 solar panels on our roof that supply 100% (net metered) of our home energy needs. Our annual bill is $107.04 from Appalachian Power.
I am chair of a local affordable housing committee and have been on the local affordable housing non profit for about 20 years. I agree with much of what you said. I am in the Seattly area as well and we both know that varied density housing is now possible in most of the city.
I disagree that large cities are the only way we can face the future of climate change, disabling pollution, and resource depletion. You talked about the importance on human contact and the carbon footprint of long commutes. What you failed to take into account is the financial and environmental costs of bringing large quantities of food, water, energy, and other resources into the city, and the burden of dissipating the large amounts of waste and pollutants that are created. I grew up in the Chicago area and have always used commuter rail to go into the city. Besides the extreme energy efficiency of moving people and goods by rail, there is the possibility of both powering trains with electricity, and moving renewable energy cheaply from the rural areas. Another side benefit is that rubber tire pollution is minimized. You may be aware that there is a substance from tires that runs off into our water courses that is deadly to our salmon.
You talk about "social housing" as something that has been utilized in the past and is not done now. In fact, a much better and equally effective tool is being used right now. There is a growing number of Community Land Trusts (CLT's) in this country and one in my community on Vashon Island that I helped to establish about twenty years ago. One of the biggest problems in providing affordable housing is appreciation of land and housing as a biddable commodity on the market. A CLT provides a different bundle rights to the buyer. The CLT maintains ownership of the land while the buyer owns the home or other structure in just the same way as any other home owner. By owning the land, the trust can require that the buyer agree to a limited equity agreement so that whatever subsidy invested in the original construction is preserved through future sales.
Your dismissive comments about leftist housing advocates expecting that somebody should supply them housing for free is similar to Reagan's tales of the "welfare queen." Access to shelter for any living being on this planet IS a right, and basic housing should viewed as a utility first and as an investment second. Nobody should expect somebody to provide it to you for free but one should have the ability to access it with the means that they have. It is now impossible for the lower 50% of the population to even contemplate purchasing a home in the open market. Sorry the first part of my comment has been cut out.
Great conversation, really interesting to hear! If people want to see how things look elsewhere, I strongly recommend to find Not Just Bikes on YouTube a channel about urbanism mainly comparing Europe to America.
Great interview! Appreciate the discussion about Los Angeles especially.
Firstly, there's no doubt that housing reform is hugely important for so many reasons, including making achieving climate targets easier.
That said, I'm curious about the calculations suggesting that reducing VMT is the only viable path to do so.
In one's wildest YIMBY dreams, the majority of Americans (and Australians and Canadians) are going to be living in large single-family homes in the suburbs in 2050, and most of these people will be driving cars at roughly the rate they do now. As such, we're going to have to electrify all of this regardless. While it will be cheaper to do so with YIMBY reforms, and society will undoubtedly be much better off if we do YIMBY, why isn't electrifying 9000-pound pickup trucks and 5000-square-foot homes a viable path to a net zero America?
Thanks for talking about "embodied emissions," it's a topic that really interests me that I always want to hear more about. Like most electrification, it's a "capex vs opex" problem. No doubt there will be some emissions to build or retrofit, but if we're looking at the long-term curve of emissions, getting the opex right is essential. After all, it only takes about 12k miles for an EV to "work off" the emissions from its production. Same could be said for a new apartment that's on a train line with electrified appliances.
Our city is building several high-rise apartments. There are a small number of units that are designated “affordable “. Middle class amount affordable. We have a large homeless population. I foresee people from the Bay Area renting the apartments that are priced at 4 times the rate middle class can afford and then commuting 40 miles each way. Won’t do a thing to reduce carbon or get people off the street. Only result is unattractive downtown.