Those Green Developers

Speaking of Ed Glaeser, here's a post of his from Economix in which he highlights the ways in which environmentalist action can occasionally be counterproductive. For example, San Francisco is the greenest metropolitan area in the country, in terms of carbon emissions per capita. There are multiple reasons for this -- California's appliances are efficient and the state gets a lot of energy from green power sources, but big gains also come from the city's use of transit, and from the fact that its climate is temperate, requiring little in the way of energy to cool or heat homes. But California, and specifically San Francisco, has had an extremely successful slow-growth movement for decades now, which has made it very difficult to build new housing there.

The local opponents of construction don't have the ability to stop building in the United States as a whole, which hums along at roughly the rate of new household formation. When California's anti-growth activists restrict building in California, then construction increases in Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. These three areas are both among the nation's five most carbon-intensive living areas and among the four fastest-growing metropolitan areas. To be complete, California's mandated environmental-impact reviews should ask not only about the impact on the local environment if a project proceeds, but also about the impact on global environment if the project gets moved elsewhere.

This issue is one I have struggled with in my own neighborhood -- Brookland, in Northeast Washington. On Sunday, the Sierra Club hosted an Earth Day picnic in Brookland which featured a speaker railing against "hyperdevelopment" threatening the neighborhood. Specifically at issue is a plan that has divided the neighborhood, potentially allowing developers to erect mixed-use buildings of up to 7 stories on parcels immediately around the local Metro station -- land which currently has some natural vegetation, but which is mainly occupied by parking lots and old industrial buildings. The development would provide existing residents with many new retail options within easy walking distance, while also adding hundreds of new transit-accessible residential units to the city's housing stock. In other words, it would reduce the carbon footprints of current residents, and add new residents with carbon footprints well below the metropolitan average.

This is green living -- allowing hundreds of people to live on just a few acres and use trains to get around, where elsewhere they'd live on hundreds of acres and rely entirely on automobiles. It's unfortunate that some environmental groups -- and local residents -- don't see it that way. They miss the forest for the trees.