The best thing New York and other cities can do for the climate is to let more people live there.
Read the full Risky Climate column at Bloomberg Green.
Climate change is hitting home everywhere. Just in the last few weeks, extreme heat, floods, and fires have all come to look like part of the new abnormal, and few places are safe. New York is issuing air quality alerts because of wildfires some 3,000 miles west.
Climate policy, too, is increasingly personal, and there’s nothing quite as personal as housing policies—where we live, and how.
It’s clear that city living cuts carbon—by around 50% relative to living in suburbia. If cities are part of the answer to climate change, then of course we should be enabling more people to live there. The pandemic flight to the suburbs might have been woefully exaggerated, but cities do have work to do. Task number one: build more housing.
Housing stock in New York City, where I live, has sagged inexcusably behind employment figures. Jobs here were up some 28% in the 15 years from before the Great Recession to before Covid hit, but housing units increased by only slightly more than 8%. That unsustainable discrepancy pushes home prices ever higher and more and more people from the city into the suburbs, increasing CO₂ emissions in the process.
All of this must surely be known to the liberal, well-educated, and, yes, rich residents of places like Soho and Noho in lower Manhattan. But that doesn’t make it any easier to build more homes.
These neighborhoods are home to a mere 8,000 of New York’s 8 million residents, with plenty of space to add more housing. And indeed, that’s precisely what the city plans to do, aiming for 3,200 new units, around 800 of them classified as affordable. In addition, 123 affordable units are slated to be built on the site of what is now the Elizabeth Street Garden, a community garden on a roughly 1-acre lot owned by the city.
It’s not ideal to trade green space for housing. But more and better housing in cities demands just this kind of tradeoff. Nobody will be deprived of access to green space because of this development. There are two parks within a 2-minute radius of the Elizabeth Street Garden: one that’s tiny but has a mighty playground, the other that’s almost 8 acres, with four play gyms and two soccer fields. They’re also open after 6 p.m., when the organization running Elizabeth Street Garden locks the gates. The proposed development, meanwhile, includes around 6,600 square feet of open outdoor space. Moreover, the Garden rezoning has already passed City Council and is now subject to additional lawsuits, the SoHo/NoHo rezoning has yet to pass.
Wagner’s kids and dog enjoying lunch at Elizabeth Street Garden. Source: Gernot Wagner
Continue reading at Bloomberg Green.
Related: “How I Greened My Prewar Co-op,” Curbed/New York Magazine, 12 August 2021.