In this episode, I speak with Heather House, a manager in RMI’s carbon-free transportation program, and Rushad Nanavatty, the head of Third Derivative, an early-stage climate tech accelerator co-founded by RMI, to better understand the role of urban land use in the overall climate picture.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
It has become common among urbanists and YIMBYs — groups of which I count myself a member — to say that the climate movement should embrace urban land use policy as a major area of focus. After all, it is well-established that communities in which people drive less and live closer together emit less carbon dioxide. Solve the housing shortage and the climate crisis at once! Sounds great.
I've always felt slightly ambivalent about this argument, though. Don't get me wrong, I think denser, more walkable communities are desirable for a whole panoply of reasons. They are, relative to car-focused sprawl, more economically vibrant and more conducive to physical, psychological, social, and even political health.
But are they, relative to other items on the climate policy menu, the fastest, most economically efficient, or most efficacious way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions specifically? Can they match the speed and scale of, say, electrifying the light vehicle fleet? What’s the scale we’re really talking about here?
Last month, RMI released an analysis concluding that “addressing America's chronic housing shortage intelligently — by building more housing where most people need it — can deliver similar climate impact as the country's most aspirational transportation decarbonization policy.”
That caused me to sit up. So this week I'm talking with two of the authors of that analysis, Heather House, a manager in RMI’s carbon-free transportation program, and Rushad Nanavatty, the head of Third Derivative, an early-stage climate tech accelerator co-founded by RMI, to better understand the role of urban land use in the overall climate picture.
All right then, with no further ado, Heather House, Rashad Nanavati, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Rushad Nanavatty
Thank you.
Heather House
Thanks so much for having us, David. We're really excited to be here.
David Roberts
This is a subject in which I'm obsessed, and I've been meaning to do a pod on this forever. I think there's a bunch of different ways into this subject, and there'll probably be a bunch of different pods I'll do on it. But I want to focus kind of on the big climate picture. So, as I said in the intro, I love good urbanism for a million reasons. Everybody should. I've completely land-use-pilled, as they say. I did the cliched thing: I went to Barcelona for a few weeks and it ruined me. It utterly ruined me for —
Rushad Nanavatty
Perth's even better than Barcelona, though.
David Roberts
I mean, I can't take it, though. I can't take better than that. I came back from Barcelona; I just walk around Seattle now, looking around, being like, "You could fit a whole apartment there. You could fit a whole apartment there." So I love this stuff. But my question and I have sort of two questions, one of which we'll spend most of our time on. One is, is it really the best climate policy? If you're just focusing on greenhouse gas emissions, is this the fastest or best way to do things? And then two, which maybe we can get to a little bit at the end, political implications of attaching this to climate, of making this a climate thing.
And we could talk about that later. So just to start the big picture of urban sprawl and its contribution to greenhouse gases globally, maybe, Heather, you can start there.
Heather House
Yeah, sure, I'm happy to. When we look at the global picture, urban sprawl is directly or indirectly responsible for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
David Roberts
A third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Heather House
That's a lot, but it's still generally overlooked as a major contributor to the climate crisis. Both our analysis within RMI is showing that if we are going to have any pathway to staying on a climate alignment, we're going to have to reduce VMT in the United States by 20%, along with getting 70 million EVs on the road. So those two strategies are going to have to be complimentary.
David Roberts
A note for listeners who may not know VMT refers to vehicle miles traveled.
Heather House
Yeah.
David Roberts
So just have to reduce the amount people are traveling in cars.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yep.
Heather House
We're also seeing similar analysis globally as well. I'm not sure if you caught the analysis that ICCT put out last year, but they put out analysis showing that if we're going to do an all-out scenario, to even stay aligned with a 1.7 degree C scenario, we're going to have to both electrify everything, but also reduce the amount that we're driving and shift to more efficient modes of transportation. So land use reform is going to be absolutely critical if we want to have any chance at staying aligned with 1.5 or 1.5 degree C scenario.
David Roberts
Why is that? What is it? When we say urban sprawl contributes emissions, what do we mean by that exactly? In what way? Through what means?
Rushad Nanavatty
My addition to what Heather said would be one, there's a really, really strong relationship between urban form and per capita emissions, and it's a near universal relationship. So you see it everywhere in the world, and you see it regardless of differences in climate, wealth, culture, demographics, whatever.
David Roberts
Yeah, and I should just point out, because this always blows my mind, if people want to google these maps, it not only holds, like, between cities, it holds within cities.
Rushad Nanavatty
Oh, absolutely.
David Roberts
It holds within neighborhoods, like it's wild. How consistent it is. Density means less emissions on almost every level of analysis.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah. So, to throw out one data point as an example, right, when you compare Stockholm's per capita emissions — and I'm cherry picking data here, but the point holds — when you compare Stockholm's per capita emissions against those of the US average, you're talking about emissions in the US on a per capita basis that are 600% higher. You can't explain that away with the grid mix. You can't explain it away with culture or consumption patterns. The thing that explains it is urban form. And in some ways it's obviously intuitive, right? Sprawl means more roads, more cars, bigger cars, bigger houses, more land.
But despite that, it's massively neglected as a climate action lever. And I have one relatively simplistic way of looking at it. When you think about
the energy transition, there's the supply side, where essentially everything hinges on carbon-free electricity. That's the master key.
David Roberts
Yes.
Rushad Nanavatty
On the demand side, urban form is the closest thing we have to a master key. It's critical to unlocking emissions across sectors. You referenced transportation, and that's the most obvious one. You reduce travel distances, you reduce car dependencies, but the impacts that are relatively unappreciated, or at least underappreciated, are the embodied carbon in the built environment, both buildings and infrastructure. There's 40% less embodied carbon on average, in the average multifamily housing unit than there is in a single-family one, reducing energy consumption in buildings. So detached single-family homes consume way, way more energy. And by the way, way more energy is required to actually transmit and distribute that electricity and water to them in the first place.
And then you actually reduce emissions associated with land systems change, and in particular, displacement of very rich, productive agricultural land on the urban periphery to places where productivity is much lower. And so when you add up all of those impacts, then the point Heather made to start with, suggesting that urban sprawl is, directly or indirectly — and indirectly is a key word here — responsible for one third of all greenhouse gas emissions, it starts to make sense. The caveat on that is — it's a good paper, but it's a thesis dissertation by a very smart individual, but hasn't exactly been through the rigorous review process.
David Roberts
The one that came up with sprawl being a third of global emissions. I think we can just say that's directionally helpful. I don't think — It's not precise. It's not precise. The people who are skeptical toward this as a climate solution, I think one of the questions they would have, I'm going to do a little devil's advocating here.
Rushad Nanavatty
Love it.
David Roberts
If you take the emissions out of the cars by electrifying them take the emissions out of the buildings by electrifying them and attaching them to clean energy. In other words, if you attach both cars and buildings to clean electricity, what's the remainder? In other words, what in land use itself, what's the remainder there?
Heather House
I think one thing that's worth pointing out is the life cycle emissions. Even if we electrify vehicles, there's going to be emissions from upstream and from recycling as well.
David Roberts
Oh, you mean making the cars.
Heather House
Exactly. So if we can reduce the amount that people need to drive overall, we're going to be reducing emissions upstream for the entirety of the lifecycle of a vehicle.
Rushad Nanavatty
There's two additional points. One is the stock versus flow point. People own their cars on average for ten or twelve years. And that's increasing, by the way.
David Roberts
Is it?
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, even if we flip some magical switch today and got 100% EV sales tomorrow, we'd still have nearly 100 million internal combustion engine vehicles on the road in the US today. And just to put the numbers in context, 2022 EV sales were less than 14 million. We have 112 million registered light-duty vehicles. So, there is this stock versus flow problem.
David Roberts
The problem is growing.
Rushad Nanavatty
Exactly. And we did this analysis: What would it look like to do an "all of the above" strategy with respect to transportation emissions reductions? And the thing that you see is that material emissions reductions associated with demand reduction, with that whole system strategy, with reducing VMT, they start now, material emissions. Because as soon as you take
a vehicle off the road, you have reduced emissions regardless of the powertrain of that vehicle. Whereas electrification only starts to deliver big material impact in emissions terms once you've achieved a reasonably high penetration in terms of on-road vehicles. So there's this stock versus flow issue.
The general perception is it's faster to electrify, but the fact is the faster way to reduce emissions, and this is, regardless of context, whether
you're talking about transportation or any other sector, is actually reduce demand. The second point I'll make is that these strategies are entirely complementary. And by reducing demand you're actually accelerating the process of electrification. You're making it easier and faster and cheaper to get 100% penetration of EV's or clean energy or whatever else it is.
David Roberts
Yeah. Reducing the distance to target.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah. And so VMT reduction can happen while this long, but accelerating progress, term or process of full electrification is playing out.
David Roberts
Right, so let's then look at this recent analysis. It's basically trying to look at, in the US, what is the scale of emission reductions available through good land use policy. So maybe, Heather, you could just tell us a little bit about that analysis and how it worked.
Heather House
So we wanted to better understand how compact development can impact greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation, the built environment, and land systems change. So we estimated the impact of climate-friendly land use policies for all of the states except for Alaska — unfortunately, we didn't have the data for that. And what it was showing us was that state-level land use reform encouraging compact development can avoid an annual US pollution of 70 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2033, which is not insignificant. This is actually equivalent to half the country adopting California's ambitious commitment to 100% zero-emission passenger vehicles by 2035.
You mentioned that in your introduction, and I think this is something that we really need to look at. A local equivalency is if we look at Colorado, our analysis found that the greenhouse gas emissions reduction would amount up to 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2033, which is equivalent to half a million gas-powered vehicles being driven for a year.
David Roberts
Hmm. How to think about that number is something I want to come back to, but let's talk about the analysis anymore. So a couple of things. One is, when you say you modeled good land use policy, my understanding is that what you modeled is, you know, we have x population growth projected for this state. Let's model that population growth going into those areas of the state where they already have lower VMT. Basically. Like, let's channel new population growth to the places where there's already less driving. Is that roughly what you mean when you say you modeled good land use policy? Like that's what you modeled? Yes.
Heather House
Yeah, that's pretty much it. We looked at emissions associated with
new housing a decade from now using two things. One, the population growth forecast and housing underproduction data to project new housing construction. And then we also looked at census block level data sets estimating residential vehicle miles traveled, the amount that we're driving to determine transportation emissions in each state under different housing development scenarios.
David Roberts
Right. So just to be clear, like this is not modeling the full suite of what you could imagine doing in urban reform. It's not even really about making places that now suck, better. It's just channeling population growth to the places that are already doing well, basically.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, and I'd say, David, channeling might even be too strong a word. What you're doing is simply allowing it to happen because right now it's not allowed to happen.
David Roberts
Right. Right. I guess one way to look at this is as a low-end estimate because you could do a lot more than that. Right? Like, you could, for instance, create new good places.
Rushad Nanavatty
Absolutely.
David Roberts
You could reduce VMT in places where they are high rather than just piling population into where it's already good. So.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah.
David Roberts
Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that this is not exhaustive urban land use.
Rushad Nanavatty
It's not the upper end. And to give you a sense, this isn't an upper
bound either, but it gives you a sense of what might be achieved. So a
lot of this analysis was driven by Zack Subin, who's now at the Terner Center, which focuses on housing policy. An analysis he did — this was
a while ago — showed that if you essentially employed the same strategy and encouraged growth in — addressed the housing shortage essentially entirely in the lowest VMT locations, you'd see something like a 200 million ton decrease relative to business as usual. And to maybe sort of bring this down to the household level, a household with $80,000 in annual surplus income in the US can account for anywhere, typically between 20 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year or 80, depending purely on where they live.
This is sort of based on analysis by UC Berkeley's CoolClimate Center. And again, this is a point that you made earlier in the conversation. They found that relationship applying consistently across jurisdictions and found that urban infill was almost invariably one of the top three climate action levers within local government control across the state of California. So that 70 million ton figure: yeah, I think it's fair to say that it's conservative, or at least it's by no means an upper bound.
David Roberts
Well, I was going to get to this later, but let's wrestle with it now because I'm wrestling with how to think of that figure. On the one hand, it's a lower bound in that this is a pretty modest reform. Right? You're just channeling new population growth to areas that are already doing well and you theoretically could do a lot more with urban land use. On the other hand, you are modeling every state doing this. Right? Like you're, you're modeling reform happening in, you know, hundreds of jurisdictions. So in that sense, in the political sense, it seems a huge lift.
It seems like an upper bound. It seems like this is if reform works everywhere.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, our job in a sense, and this is what
RMI does, is to define the art of the possible. And I think it's —
you're right: this assumes that you'd see meaningful reform across the country. But it's worth, I think, reflecting on a couple of things. The reforms themselves are pretty modest. You're talking about upzoning, urban infill, which is essentially developing underutilized parcels. You're talking about transit-oriented development. And many of those things are politically pretty feasible. There's also incredibly high latent demand for communities that are less car-dependent. Like one of the things we hear routinely from real estate developers is that if they manage to,
if they have the patience and the capital and to navigate through the thicket of regulations and permits and all the rest of it, and manage to develop a project, an urban infill project, example of compact mixed-use development, there's quite often windfall profits associated with them.
So there is pretty high potential to build broad and unlikely coalitions for this, given that latent demand and given the relatively modest reforms that I think would be necessary.
David Roberts
Well, I want to press on that a little bit, but I want to set it aside for
now. I want to get to the analysis. So the reforms modeled are channeling new population into low VMT areas. And so you're adding up how much emissions are avoided. What are the sort of categories of emissions that are avoided by doing that?
Heather House
So there's three. About half of pollution reduction is associated with increasing conveniently located housing and from that translating into reduced travel. So half of the pollution is coming from cars burning less gas and from cars consuming less electricity.
David Roberts
Right. That's the straightforward and obvious way this works. People just drive less.
Heather House
Exactly. But as Rashad has mentioned a couple of times, there's such a broader impact that land use reform is bringing to decarbonization. And so we're seeing that a third of the pollution reduction is also coming from reduced vehicle manufacturing, as mentioned earlier, too, around the lifecycle of it. So reducing vehicle manufacturing and upstream oil production.
David Roberts
Yeah, I feel like this is a category that gets overlooked in a lot of climate discussions and a lot of climate analyses. Just the embedded carbon in stuff like that. It's not a trivial remainder.
Heather House
Absolutely. I mean, it's a complex problem and if we're going to solve complex problems we actually have to look at the whole system and that's a portion of it. The other thing that we're seeing, which I think is certainly less frequently talked about, is the impact that land use has on carbon sinks. So those are being lost to urban sprawl. And we're also seeing buildings that are coming up with urban sprawl being less efficient and the materials are more carbon intensive.
David Roberts
So that third bucket is land use changes, the loss of carbon sinks.
Heather House
Yeah.
David Roberts
Yeah. I wish you all could come and talk to Seattle NIMBYs about that because they love to invoke trees around here when they're nimbying. And, you know, you lose so many more trees by sprawling out than by infilling.
Rushad Nanavatty
So here's a message you can take to those folks.
David Roberts
Don't make me talk to them, for the love of God.
Rushad Nanavatty
So, you know, historically, most urban land expansion occurs on agricultural land. And not just any agricultural land, the most productive agricultural land, because it makes sense that that, you know, we build cities around the most productive agricultural land. So it's the indirect impacts that matter. So if you care at all about forests, about biodiversity, you need to care about this. So there's analysis that shows, and there's a range that that indirect loss of forest cover from cropland displacement can be 5-10x higher than the direct displacement associated with housing production and sprawl on the urban periphery.
So between I think, 1992 and about 2015-2016, urban expansion globally led to direct forest loss of about just over 3 million hectares. Indirect forest loss was something like 18 million hectares, 18 million hectares of forests
lost on account of urban sprawl, at least partially on account of NIMBYism, and at least partially on account of Seattle NIMBYism.
David Roberts
Yes, I'm trying to envision that discussion in my head, and it's making
my palms sweat, but it's a good point. So you analyze this for all states; channel your new growth into low VMT areas, and then you're avoiding direct emissions of people driving, embedded emissions of just making the cars and disposing of the cars involved in the driving, and then indirect emissions from land use changes from the loss of carbon sinks from sprawl. Those are kind of the three big categories.
Rushad Nanavatty
Did you mention building energy and embodied carbon in buildings in the built environment?
David Roberts
I don't think we did. Is that in bucket two or bucket three?
Rushad Nanavatty
We captured it in bucket three, but that's really, really significant. You know, I mentioned at the start a lot less embodied carbon in a multifamily housing unit than a single-family one, and a lot less embodied carbon in the associated infrastructure, whether you're talking about roads or sewer lines or whatever else it is as well.
David Roberts
Yeah, extending all that infrastructure out there. Yeah, that's really striking. Like, I forget the statistic. I used to use it a long time ago, but people are always sort of invoking, like, "well, my house is, you know, like, I have solar panels on my house, on my suburban house, so I don't have to feel guilty," but I don't — I think people underestimate just how big that delta is between energy use in an urban apartment and a suburban house. Like, you'd have to go, like, you know, even if you go passive house and are literally zero energy consumption, you still have the energy embedded in the infrastructure to reach you, the roads and sewers and all that.
So, like, you know, it's not a trivial difference.
Rushad Nanavatty
Absolutely. Here's another number for you. The embodied carbon and the road network per capita. You mentioned Barcelona. Barcelona has about three and a half tons per person of embodied carbon in its road network. LA has about 13 tons.
David Roberts
Those are really cherry-picked. Those are really — two ends of the spectrum there.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, but you brought up Barcelona. I have to go there.
David Roberts
Oh, I'm never going to criticize anyone for talking about Barcelona. My family has prohibited me from talking about it further, so I have to talk about it with guests now.
Rushad Nanavatty
And fair enough, it is painting the extreme, obviously, cherry-picking
the data, picking the extreme examples. But you're absolutely right that the embodied carbon calculus is often ignored and the operating carbon calculus is often ignored because how many builders of tract homes are building to passive house standards? They're not. Look at the data. Just in California, a single-family home consumes twice as much electricity. Those which are still using gas, twice as much gas as your average multifamily home. So these are all impacts that are part of this urban land use and housing policy equation.
David Roberts
Right. One thing I thought was pretty interesting is which states — you know, you analyze this for, I guess, 49 states — which states could get the most juice out of this squeeze? To use an unnecessary metaphor. Which states could benefit most from doing this and why?
Heather House
Before I answer that, I just want to start with saying that most states have an opportunity to address their housing shortage by encouraging construction, and these convenient, well-connected, amenity-rich locations. I say this because we presented this analysis recently at YIMBYtown in Austin, Texas, and we had someone come up to us from Washington and they said, "You know, it looks like relative, potentially to other states, we're not as high impact, so we shouldn't be doing this." I was like, "Well, it seems like we need to potentially change the way our illustration is on the map," because the impact is significant for almost all states. I think there are very few that have, they don't have population.
A significant population growth right now to where it wouldn't make a lot of impact. But to answer your question directly, the most significant carbon reduction would happen in states where there is a lot of population
growth, a lot of driving and general need for housing. So those states are Texas, California, Florida, quickly followed by Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and in a couple of those in Texas, Colorado, North Dakota, we're seeing housing shortage hovering around 20%, which is significant.
David Roberts
Wait, did you say North Dakota?
Heather House
North Dakota, yeah.
David Roberts
North Dakota?! I mean, God bless North Dakota. But is it really, are there people really herding into North Dakota?
Heather House
I'm not sure that people are herding into North Dakota. I know we've seen a lot of data coming out of the pandemic that there are places that people are frequently moving to, like Texas and like Arizona. But I guess the overlooked state has been North Dakota as well.
David Roberts
That's a puzzler.
Rushad Nanavatty
David, you made the point at the start of the conversation, right. You
see this pattern that it's kind of almost fractal, right? You see within neighborhoods, within towns, within districts, and sort of areas within a state, you see it at the state level. So the same logic applies anywhere. Right. Like, you have low emissions locations, a big spread between low emissions locations and high emissions locations at any level, any level of granularity that you choose for a map.
David Roberts
I wonder — not to get obsessed with North Dakota — but what is the maximum density point in North Dakota? They have a city. What is the city in North Dakota? Let's all google.
Heather House
I was going to say: you might have to quickly google that.
David Roberts
Anyway. So, you know, the modeling here in this analysis is just sort of shifting population growth in — less a specific policy than just like, what would happen if we channeled population growth into these areas. In an analysis last year, you modeled kind of more specific policies and showed the impact they could have. Talk a little bit about some specifics here, like what are the specific policies that could have these modeled effects?
Rushad Nanavatty
So I think what you're referring to is the analysis we did on Austin, Charlotte and Denver, correct?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah. We picked those three, first of all, because they're three of the fastest growing metro regions in the country.
David Roberts
Oh, wait, can we pause for a second here? It's Fargo. Fargo, North Dakota, the largest city in North Dakota with 131,000 population. Anyway, onward. Sorry.
Rushad Nanavatty
So we picked Austin, Charlotte, Denver, because they're three of the fastest growing metro regions in the country. And this report is, I think, a really important complement to the one that's focused on state level reform because it shows what local governments can achieve with much, much more surgical, much more modest reforms. You don't need wholesale changes to urban form. You don't need to turn Seattle into Barcelona. You don't need to rebuild entire neighborhoods. You don't need to put up 20 story buildings. And so we looked at very,
very limited measures, targeted upzoning, removing restrictions on multifamily housing in certain locations, urban infill, so, building more housing on land parcels that are really, really underutilized.
So, think of vacant lots or derelict ones or massively underutilized ones, and then transit-oriented development, which, you know, of course, planners have been talking about for eons. So that's building more density, building taller residential buildings and commercial clusters close to high-quality transit. And you saw a pretty impressive impact. So, a 16% reduction in per capita building energy use compared with business as usual in Austin. This is in a sort of 2040 timeframe, a 12% VMT reduction. So, a 12% reduction in driving on a per capita basis, Denver would see something like a 13% reduction in VMT.
And of course, these impacts would be much, much bigger if you made complementary transportation system improvements alongside which we didn't model. So, if you combine these land use reforms with better transit service, better bike infrastructure, more rational road and parking pricing, then those impacts get even bigger.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to ask if you have modeled congestion pricing because that, I think, is like the wonks — you know, that's every wonk's favorite policy in this area. Wonks do love pricing. Do we have a sense of its efficacy relative to, I don't know, upzoning or something like that?
Rushad Nanavatty
No, we haven't done that. And it's hard to do because, well, from a practical standpoint, you want to take an "all of the above" strategy because
these are policies and actions that are entirely mutually reinforcing. So, implementing them piecemeal is pretty suboptimal and it's very, very hard to disaggregate impacts. Like London, for example, has seen a 60% increase in bus usage over the course of a ten-year period, but they did congestion pricing alongside major improvements in transit service. Now, what portion of that impact you attribute to, which is really difficult. And of course, it was a good thing that they did those things together because they fed off each other.
David Roberts
So, let me ask, I guess, an unanswerable political question, which is I look at something like what Paris has done. Paris in the last, whatever, five years, has basically been like an urbanist's deranged fantasy come to life. They've done all the things that urbanists want, encouraging density, upzoning, closing off streets to traffic, more bike lanes, on and on and on. And it just seems like it benefits everyone. It benefits the economy, it benefits the air. Like, these are just, these are, you know, this is just like what urbanists keep saying over and over again. These are like win, win, win changes.
And yet, and yet I could, like, list the cities who are doing real serious, substantial movement in this direction on one hand, or maybe two, you know, and part of what you say in this most recent analysis is that it can be very difficult to do this at the city or municipal level, which is one reason for moving to the state level. But why is it, why is it so difficult? Like, I feel like at this point, the evidentiary record is just overwhelming. Like, it's just. There's just not really an argument left. And yet it is incredibly difficult to do these things everywhere they get done.
Why? What is — why?
Rushad Nanavatty
We're obviously not behavioral psychologists or political scientists, but so I can — we'll give you, like, you know, in typical RMI fashion, like a data-driven answer. Right? So what — the pattern that seems to repeat itself is that you have a majority, or at least a plurality, usually a majority, opposed to the change, and then you have almost a mirror image, basically the same majority in favor of it once it's been implemented.
David Roberts
Yes, over and over and over and over again.
Rushad Nanavatty
And, you know, people don't like change. And it's not, you know, telling somebody that, "oh, it's worked in London or Stockholm or Singapore" is not sufficient to convince them that it has merits in New York. Thankfully, it's happening in New York. So I think that's part of the problem. But I think policymakers and politicians should anchor on and should take heart in the fact that you see this play out over and over again. It might be unpopular when you implement it, and then it becomes pretty damn popular when you do. And Anne Hidalgo has been reelected.
And so I guess that's what my response would be: Politicians and policymakers need to be brave enough to try. And those that are quite often see pretty decent political returns.
David Roberts
Yeah. Yeah. It's rare to find a substantial reform of urban form that is reversed or that is unpopular or — you know what I mean? It's really hard to find anyone who wants to go back to the old way once you do these things. And yet all that evidence never seems to convince the next group of people to embrace it.
Heather House
I would also say we are seeing some cities like Oklahoma City or Grand Rapids, making some moves in the space and realizing that if they're going to be competitive cities and desirable cities, places that people want to move to and live and work and play, that they need to be walkable. And these cities are moving toward becoming more walkable.
David Roberts
Well, if we don't want to wait on every, you know, NIMBY battles in every city, part of what you say in this latest analysis is that there are advantages to moving to the state level. So maybe explain the kind of the political advantages and then explain, like what, you know, I understand what city level policy looks like here. You know, cities have some control over zoning, but what do states do and why is it easier in some sense to do this via state action?
Heather House
I think we have seen that when cities try to take on these types of reforms, it can move really slowly. And they are facing, I mean, we're facing the kind of common enemy of the NIMBYism crowd across the board and other aspects of energy transition as well. But that can just be such a huge barrier to slowing progress. And when we know that we are in, as RMI says, the "decisive decade" and we have to move quickly if we are going to stay aligned with a 1.5 degree C scenario, we have to move further and faster.
And that's why I think a lot of states, and we're looking at states as
a potential lever for driving change faster. But it's also not a silver
bullet. We're seeing them both facing political opposition both at the city municipal level and at the state level. I mean, we've seen city efforts be successful and fail. We've seen state efforts be successful and fail. So, you know, at this point, there's a necessity to be sort of pushing on both fronts.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah. The political challenges, I mean, I think a relatively simple way to understand it is that land use reform in a town or city benefits potential future voters. Right?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Rushad Nanavatty
People who would benefit from living in that particular city or town
but don't currently have the privilege of living in that city or town. And that's a really hard political dynamic for a local politician, for a mayor or city council to overcome. And that's what sort of commends state-level reform. But as Heather said, that's hard to do, too. And so we'll take
our wins where we can get them. And as Heather also said, we're seeing progress on both fronts. Right. You've got both Portland and Maine and Oregon. You've got Minneapolis, you've got Milwaukee. You've got New York City, Houston, South Bend, Charlottesville.
So a pretty diverse range of cities. And you have California, Oregon, but you also have Montana.
David Roberts
Yeah, Montana.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, damn right, Montana. Go Montana. So I think there's hope, and I think politicians are starting to get it. When we — at least when I first started working with cities and you looked at city climate action plans, very few talked about land use reform and housing policy.
David Roberts
Which is crazy because, like, what else are you doing in cities? What else are you doing? What else do you think you're going to do to reduce emissions? It's wild.
Rushad Nanavatty
They do other stuff, but this is really important. It was, and the reason was simple, right? Because they drew a very tight boundary around the city and cared about emissions only within that and not the spillover effects, not the effect that city policies were having on emissions outside of their jurisdictions. And now, I don't know if it's the case with most, but that's significantly shifted. Most climate action plans, all good climate action plans actually have this front and center.
David Roberts
Like the states who are good on this, what are they doing? What is a good state policy here?
Heather House
I think some of the ones we've seen happen recently, I mean, you mentioned Montana. I think it's a really good example to talk about. They took this approach, it was nonpartisan, and it was all about deregulation and freedom and choice. They, you know, the Montana governor basically charged the legislators with cutting the red tape that, in his words were "stymieing new development."
David Roberts
Yeah, love that framing.
Heather House
So this was just, you know, Montana took a process to make it easier, more streamlined, faster for development to occur. We also saw Arizona requiring municipalities to provide a 2% height or density bonus in specified zones near transit stops or multifamily housing developments with 20% floor area units. There were some exemptions that applied there. And then we're also seeing states like Maine make requirements for communities to allow up to four units on any residential lot and designated areas.
David Roberts
Washington, as Volt's listeners will know, Washington state did some cool stuff on this, on zoning around transit stops and the whole missing middle housing. A lot of work on that. One of my favorites, and maybe this — one of my favorites is California, where they are telling cities basically, like, "Show us how you're going to build more housing, or else we're cutting you off from any, or else we're going to just start fining you, just outright fining you. Figure it out or we're going to fine you." And it's watching these NIMBY filled California enclaves kind of wriggle under this is giving me some satisfaction.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah. And just a further resource on this, if you want to dig in, is, again, the Terner Center — shout out to them — and the Urban Institute have a report on assessing and looking at state laws across the country encouraging
or requiring or mandating municipal action on housing policy. So that's
a good resource if you or your listeners want more.
Heather House
Yeah. Also UC Berkeley's zoning reform tracker as well. The other thing
I wanted to just point out is we're talking about what states are doing, what cities are doing. And I think what happened in Minneapolis is really, it's a really exciting data point. You know, Rushad said earlier, RMI is data-driven, we want to look back at the data and see where change happened. But they added 12% to its housing stock over a five-year period. When we were doing our analysis, we were trying to take a conservative approach in estimating longer periods of time for growth to happen.
I think this is certainly an ambitious scenario, but it's giving us some hope for optimism as well, to see what is possible if we are ambitious and we move quickly.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, one thing, I don't want to get too mired in this, and I know that mostly about politics, but one of the features of the Minneapolis fight is that environmental groups were on the wrong side of it, most of them. And that has been true in state after state. That is true in California. It almost seems like that's getting worse in California, even since the start of the whole YIMBY thing. YIMBY is growing in popularity. All this is spreading. It almost seems like environmental groups are digging in on the wrong side of this. Do you guys have any insight into that dynamic or anything to say about that?
Rushad Nanavatty
This is why I think climate philanthropy and the climate action community in general has a really important role to play in terms of embracing
this agenda and changing that dynamic. And I think you are, in fact, starting to see it change. So, you know, there are counter examples.
If you look at Desegregate Connecticut, for example, there's something like 60 organizations that are part of that consortium or that group or that alliance. Friends of Oregon, similar. And these include environmental groups. They include housing affordability advocates. They include the private sector and the real estate industry. So, the dynamic that you just described is very real.
But I think the more people understand and appreciate the climate impact, the kind of impact that we were talking about with respect to the spillover knock-on effects on forests, I think the more you start to see environmental activists or nonprofits or NGOs turn and there is this real potential to build these big tent coalitions. It can and does have appeal to people regardless of political stripe. You know, Amory Lovins at RMI had a phrase that sort of became a bit of a mantra for us, which was "focus on outcomes and not motives." So regardless of whether you care about, you know, forests and biodiversity or emissions reductions or equity and closing the racial wealth gap —
David Roberts
Or economic systems, the one I pound on are — these are better performing economically.
Rushad Nanavatty
Right. And so it doesn't really matter what your motives are, all of them lead you essentially to the same answer in that this is the right thing to be doing.
Heather House
I'd also like to chime in to say that we want to think that data can change people's mind, and oftentimes it does.
David Roberts
Oh, Heather.
Heather House
Doesn't always do the job, but we can help. For a long time, we haven't had any data backing up the case that land use, urban land use reform, has a massive impact on the energy transition. That's why we wanted to do this analysis. And hopefully now that this is out there, this can start shifting some of those mindsets.
David Roberts
One other political question: I get, and this returns to my intro, like I get emphasizing the climate benefits of this, as we're saying, urbanism, all this, I mean, we haven't really mentioned them yet in the pod because we're focusing on climate. But of course, all these reforms that we're talking about are good for people's health. They reduce health care costs. Children do better developmentally when they have some autonomy and can navigate the city themselves. Like just go down the list: particulate pollution, just tired dust pollution, just on and on and on. And there's
a gazillion benefits to this, but it seems like one reason to emphasize
the climate benefits is to get those intransigent environmental groups on board.
But do you worry at all? Because right now it seems like the push towards urban, you know, better urban form seems like one of the very, very, very few things in America that seems a little bit bipartisan right now. Like,
as you say, Montana is approaching this for very different reasons. You know, you could, there are plenty of conservative reasons to do this. Do
you worry at all that subsuming this into the climate movement has the potential of alienating some possible allies? It can gain some, but do you worry that it can also lose some at all?
Rushad Nanavatty
I think it would be a mistake to focus and communicate only the climate impacts. I think the beauty of it is, as you said, that in the American context, this is about freedom and choice and deregulation. And we need to speak to all of the amazing outcomes it delivers. Right. If you care about equity in the context of the energy transition, this is it. Exclusionary zoning — low emissions locations also happen to be high opportunity locations. And exclusionary zoning essentially shuts families out of those opportunity rich neighborhoods. It's basically the 21st century equivalent of redlining, and it affects everyone who isn't rich.
And, you know, when you look at the data, housing accounts for something like 30% of the racial wealth gap. So if that's what you care about, you need to care about this. If you care about addressing the chronic housing shortage in general, this is it. Ed Glaeser, I don't know if you've had him on your pod. He's a cities focused economist. Yeah. You know, he refers to this "law of conservation of construction," which means if you don't allow building in one location, that demand isn't going to disappear, they're going to build elsewhere. And you can choose to build in the form of sprawl in high emissions locations, or we can allow it to develop where it's most needed.
And if you care about other planetary boundaries, if you care about forests and biodiversity, this is it. We talked about that 60% of urban expansion happening on agricultural land, which in turn displaces much, much more forest land away from the urban center. And you need not only more land to grow those crops, you need more water, more fertilizer. There's more runoff to produce the same amount of food. And if you care about
resilience, the other thing exclusionary zoning does, it pushes a lot of housing development, forces it to happen in places like the wildland urban interface.
So, in areas that are going to be increasingly prone to flooding. So I think we need to be talking about resilience. We need to be talking about other planetary boundary issues. We need to be talking about addressing the housing shortage. We need to be talking about equity, and we need to be talking about climate.
Heather House
And the important thing here is there are a lot of organizations who have been focusing on those other elements and focusing on affordability and equity. And this data would ideally broaden that tent and broaden the coalition.
David Roberts
Got it. Well, by way of wrapping up, then, and on this sort of same subject, let's return back to the climate person. Let's say we're talking to a person who has climate goggles on, or whatever the term is, who's obsessed with greenhouse gases above all else, and just doesn't care about the other stuff. To the climate person, if I'm looking at in the new analysis, you say if every state does this just channels population growth to low VMT areas, we get 70 million tons per year in avoided pollution, which would amount to about 60% of the emission reductions that would result from all states adopting California's zero emissions target.
So the electrifying cars thing, like just getting California's zero emissions standard to spread, that is a relatively limited set of levers you have to pull, right? Like maybe one per state or not even one per state. Like, you just get California there and a bunch of other states sort of follow almost automatically. So there's a very centered target there. Like there's one
thing you have to do and that results in an enormous change. If I'm the climate guy, I turn and look at the alternative here, and it looks to me like not one thing to do, but basically like grinding, difficult battles against NIMBYs in every city and every state to get the same amount that you get from pulling the one electrification lever.
So how do you just respond to the climate person who says, just purely climate wise, this seems very slow and messy and difficult, like a grinding march when we need big leaps forward. Like just how do you deal with this? Sort of, like — this seems like a difficult and slow way to get emission reductions, I guess, is the much more short winded way of putting that. How do you, how do you respond to that?
Heather House
Well, I would first say that anyone who is choosing to work on the climate crisis is not doing it because we think it's going to be easy. So I would hope they understand that, you know, we have to find, fight all of the battles, and it's not one or the other. And I think that's an important point that we have to continue to get across and emphasize is that electrification is not the silver bullet, land use reform is not the silver bullet, but they complement each other and both are needed for us. Like for the climate person that cares about staying line with 1.5, we have to do both.
And yes, it's going to be complicated and messy, but if we're not tackling this, then we're kind of choosing to not stay aligned with the most ambitious scenarios possible.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, big plus one to that. I have two other. So on the part that Heather made. Yeah. If we were only doing what's easy and not what's necessary, we wouldn't be doing building decarbonization. We wouldn't be doing industrial decarbonization.
David Roberts
Yeah, those are really hard, too, now that I think about it.
Rushad Nanavatty
We wouldn't be looking for clean form power solutions. We wouldn't be dealing with transmission interconnections. There's a lot we would be ruling out.
David Roberts
You're really making it sound hard.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, when the business is doing what's necessary, not what's easy. Point number two, and we were just talking about this. This is a rare, non-partisan, bipartisan issue that appeals to many, many constituencies beyond the ones that care about climate and is a really powerful vector for delivering many outcomes other than ones related to climate. So that's reason number two. Reason number three is, as I said earlier in
the conversation, this is entirely complementary and serves as a force multiplier for the other stuff. It makes it easier, faster, cheaper to get to 100% EV's, to get to 100% clean energy, to reduce the emissions associated with building materials, you name it.
So those are the three reasons: We're doing it because it's necessary, there's actually some political momentum because it appeals to so many constituencies, and it makes everything else, if we do this right, it makes everything else that much easier in the context of the transition.
David Roberts
That is very well put, and it sounds like a great way to wrap up. Thank you all so much for coming on. Thanks for doing this analysis. I'm so glad that we're getting some numbers out of this, out of what has been a very fuzzy area for a very long time. So appreciate the work you guys are doing. Thanks for coming on.
Rushad Nanavatty
Yeah, thank you. We could use some money, so if... anyone's listening.
David Roberts
Give RMI money, people.
Heather House
It's been a pleasure. David, thank you.
Rushad Nanavatty
Thanks so much.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf. So that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.
How much can urban land use policy do for the climate?