Why do climate funders prefer cutting checks for electric vehicles over fighting for dense, transit-oriented housing? I talk to Ben Holland, who recently interviewed major climate foundations about their anti-urbanism bias, and returning guest Caroline Spears, who is working to pass climate-friendly housing policy at the state level. We discuss why obsessing over easily quantifiable emissions reductions is blinding the movement to massive, tractable wins, and why ignoring zoning reform is no longer an option for serious climate advocates.
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David Roberts
All right. Hello everyone. Greetings. This is Volts for April 8, 2026, “Why climate funders don’t fund housing policy and why they ought to.” I am your host, David Roberts.
Volts listeners know that housing and urban land use have become something of an obsession of mine. Over the past few years I’ve done a series of episodes trying to build a case, not just that dense, walkable urbanism is good (which it obviously is, for a million reasons) — but that it is good climate policy. It belongs on a podcast about decarbonization, not as a nice-to-have or a co-benefit, but a core part of any serious strategy for getting emissions down.
I talked with experts at RMI about the quantitative case — why meeting our climate goals requires not just electrifying the vehicle fleet but actually reducing how much people drive. I talked with Matthew Lewis of California YIMBY about the increasing political salience of housing and the lack of understanding in the climate movement. I talked with YIMBY activists about how the movement is racking up wins from New York to Texas and learning from itself across geographies. And I talked with Montana state senators about what bipartisan legislative success actually looks like from the inside.
At least from my perspective, the empirical case has been made, the political case has been made, and there’s a growing track record of legislative success. And yet climate funders still largely seem to be sitting this one out.
Today I want to understand why — and what it would take to change it. My guests are Ben Holland of WRI’s New Urban Mobility Alliance, who has been spending the last several months interviewing climate funders about exactly this question, and (serial Volts guest) Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet, who just released a major housing-climate policy platform and works with state legislators on this stuff. He is going to talk about what they are thinking, and she is going to talk about what they ought to be doing.
With no further ado: Ben Holland and Caroline Spears, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Ben Holland
Thanks for having us.
David Roberts
Ben, let’s start with you. You have been working on urbanism-related issues in the climate world for several years now. Now you’re at WRI. Before that you were at RMI. I would like to hear about your experiences and specifically how did you find the reception of this work upstairs, up the ladder, at the boss level, let’s say.
Ben Holland
The story I like to tell as far as how I got converted to urbanism goes back to 2017, 2018. I was living in Austin, Texas for a project that the RMI Mobility Team was running down there. It was a direct partnership with the city of Austin and local stakeholders where, like a lot of NGOs in the space at the time, we were trying to advance electric autonomous shared mobility services and really the shiny object of those things — we were very much caught up in all of that. I was the on-the-ground government affairs person for that project and moved to Austin for that work.
Over the course of a couple years there, I became well connected with the urbanism groups there and would find ourselves in conversations about, “What are you doing with regard to urban sprawl? If you think the future is autonomous vehicles, for instance, what is that going to do to vehicle miles traveled? People living farther away from core destinations?” We didn’t have a great answer for it at the time. We would have been, “These will be electric.”
David Roberts
“Did you see how shiny it is?”
Ben Holland
Yeah. It was in my time there where I came to understand the flaws of just that vision and the real need for better housing policy as well as tried and true transportation planning policy. I came back to Colorado, continued working for RMI, and started to build up what we called a climate-aligned urbanism team. Your former guests, Rushad Nanavatty and Heather House, were two of my colleagues at the time, as were Zach Subin and Jackie Lombardi.
The work we were trying to do came from this acknowledgment that there needed to be better data on the actual impacts and benefits of land use reform. It was vibes-based, in my opinion. Everybody intuitively understands compact, connected communities are good. Some people have read the David Owen book “Green Metropolis,” intuitively understanding that these urban centers are, on a per capita basis, lower emissions. But that was about the extent of it. We started to try to put some real analysis together that I think you talked about on that previous podcast with Rashad and Heather.
I’ll say bluntly, and I’ll take transportation as an example: even under the most wildly optimistic electric vehicle adoption scenarios, we are not going to be able to meet our climate goals without addressing the demand side — essentially reducing vehicle miles traveled.
Within that goal of reducing vehicle miles traveled, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, levers is improving the way that we build and where we build and improving our land use. Over time, we started stacking up all these different analyses and putting together these beautiful decks. I think you saw one of the presentations at Climate Week back in September with our event with Gehl Architects, and we finally have the data. We’re showing you the real potential of reducing emissions through land use.
Over the past few years, not just in my recent conversations with climate funders, but over the past few years, I’ve heard a number of universally held beliefs or skepticisms around the viability of land use reform or even mode shift on the transportation side of things as a fundable strategy.
David Roberts
What shocked me is that after that presentation, after all this extraordinary empirical work that RMI did, which I thought was quite impressive and made the case in pretty clear terms, even RMI decided not to expand its urbanism work.
Ben Holland
We’ve also seen a major shift in politics and where funding is going right now. A lot of funding has moved to more international interests given the current political climate. I can get into why that is understandable from their perspective, but it is also much needed to have even a state focus here in the States.
David Roberts
You say it’s understandable. Maybe we can address it later. But I don’t understand it at all. The fascists showed up and our response is, “All right, we’re out. Later. We’re gonna go spend overseas. We’ll be back when the fascism’s gone.” What are you guys for? Sorry, I’m yelling. Caroline, go ahead.
Caroline Spears
I think it’s an impulse to. Sometimes people collapse U.S. policy discussions into just Washington, D.C. and forget that we have 50 other rulemaking bodies here where we can make progress. The “no DC, go international first” impulse collapses a lot of it — oversimplifies a policy discussion. We have states and they have budgetary power. I had a lot of those conversations after, which was really folks asking questions “like that” and reminding people that we have states and their state budgets spend trillions of dollars a year and we have a lot of opportunity.
David Roberts
Is part of it — I don’t want to get too deep into this now — but is part of it like when you said, Ben, that most of the urbanism work before you started digging into it with RMI was mostly vibes-based? I get that. I think it’s worth saying also that the left funding community is full of aspiring technocrats — people who very much fashion themselves smart and empirical, etc. Meaning they want numbers, they want payback periods and —
Ben Holland
Exactly.
David Roberts
— deliverables, etc. Now I think they want that to a fault in ways we can discuss later. Obviously you can see why, at least before all this empirical work was done, why this was a bad fit. That’s one thing — the fuzziness. And then the other thing is what, and this is what Caroline brings up for me, is that I think they also are all — they aspire to big things. They want to be big and important and federal government feels big and important and international feels big and important. To some extent, little state battles and city battles just don’t feel grand enough for them. Is that a piece of it, Caroline, do you think?
Caroline Spears
One thing that always shocks people to that point that I say is that Wisconsin as a state has more greenhouse gas emissions than the country of Norway. How many times have I seen someone, maybe on the Internet, get excited about Norway’s electric vehicle progress or something “like that”? I find that exciting too. But it is smaller than most of the states that we have in America.
David Roberts
The US is very big. Let’s all remember the US is very, very large. Ben, you did this work at RMI. I think RMI decided not to blow this out and follow up on it. You moved to WRI. Now you’re doing this mobility alliance. Now you’re digging into it. You’re out talking to climate funders about this. Is this just an informal thing you’re doing on your own? What is the project you’re working on right now?
Ben Holland
Let me first say that this work did continue at RMI for a bit. I think some of the challenges are universal across the board. What I’m about to get into —
David Roberts
I don’t mean to single out RMI.
Ben Holland
— Most NGOs are, if you talk to people in the land use space or even non-electric vehicle transportation people at NGOs, this is a universal challenge that they’re facing.
David Roberts
Yes.
Ben Holland
But I guess I would say you touched on some of these things. Some of the universal themes I think are —
David Roberts
Wait, before we get into the specific objections, tell me about the project itself. Why are you — is this all on your own, on your own initiative?
Ben Holland
Yeah. I’ve been doing a series of interviews with national and international climate foundations to better understand where they’re coming from on this subject. It’s part of a small project we were funded to do at WRI on the New Urban Mobility Alliance team.
David Roberts
It’s overdue. The thinking of left funders is such an object of discourse. Many people are consumed by trying to figure it out and they’re just up there. You could just go ask them. It’s weird that there’s not more transparency about why they do what they do.
Ben Holland
I should caveat that we are still thinking through how we are going to publish these findings, but nothing I am going to say here is going to be of any great surprise to anybody.
David Roberts
Yes. What we’re going to do is — before all this started, Ben, you emailed me, “I’ve been talking to funders about this, climate funders. Here are the things I hear about why they’re not getting involved in urbanism.” What we’re going to do now is just go through the main objections you heard, and obviously, we don’t have time here to fully address any one of them, much less all of them, but we’re going to at least say a few words about why you and Caroline think they are wrong. Just going to walk through them one at a time, the kinds of things you heard from funders.
It’s funny, I’m not even in the funding world. I’m not trying to raise money for urbanism. I’m just some schmo. Even I’ve heard all of these. To your point, they are universal. These are all very familiar. Let’s go through them.
The first is this notion that when you’re doing energy policy, you have a couple clear constituencies that you’re trying to mobilize who can get you over the finish line. I think they have it in their heads that when it comes to urbanism, the stakeholder landscape is just too complicated. There are too many different groups who want too many different things. There’s too much work trying to get all the constituencies on one page. What do you make of that?
Ben Holland
At first blush, it makes sense that you have a distributed network of policymakers and stakeholders and community advocates, etc., that you have to bring together around one policy — has been the belief. I would go a step further: many in the funder and NGO space worry that you have to do that city to city, across hundreds to thousands of cities across the country.
David Roberts
That’s the thing — these are bespoke and local and geographically specific.
Ben Holland
Bespoke would be the word.
David Roberts
All of these are very understandable. That’s understandable to me to have that objection. To some extent, the battle in Cleveland is unique to Cleveland, and the battle in Austin is somewhat unique to Austin. You have to go in and figure out the landscape and who’s who and who’s fighting for what, and you have to do that city by city. That makes some sense to me. What do you tell them about this?
Ben Holland
At the risk of making it sound like one simple hack, there are 75% of residential land — around 75% across the US — zoned as single family. In most high-demand cities where there is a very high demand for housing, there is significant need for multifamily housing near destinations, near public transit, that is currently illegal to build. Just legalizing apartment buildings in an infill environment near transit, near key destinations, is a universal tool that you see the YIMBY movement using across the country to great success. Caroline is going to get into that.
There are dominoes falling, not just at the city level, but in a very exciting way at the state level as well. The one thing that comes to mind for me is how many initiatives within the climate space do work at the state and city level and require coordination and alignment among many stakeholders. If you’re thinking about passing building electrification strategies.
David Roberts
Once you get in distribution grid stuff —
Ben Holland
Yes.
David Roberts
All of that is somewhat geographic-specific, somewhat bespoke. You say these dominoes are falling. Caroline, maybe you can answer this from the funder’s perspective. Another thing that makes sense to me is when I’m thinking about advocating for apartments or whatever, the big constituency that’s going to benefit from apartments being built doesn’t yet exist. It is the people that will live in the apartments who don’t yet know that they’re part of that constituency. Anybody who’s status quo-biased and fighting against change — they are all concentrated and mobilized. The people who will benefit from change tend to be scattered and not mobilized.
As an a priori fear about this, I can understand funders having that fear, but then look — it’s working, it’s happening. The dominoes are falling. Caroline, my question is, who are the constituencies who are stepping up? It turns out, it’s not as difficult to find and mobilize constituencies as we thought. Who are these people who are turning out to be the constituencies in question?
Caroline Spears
Dave, I don’t know if you have heard about this, but affordability is a key thing.
David Roberts
The word is not ringing a bell.
Caroline Spears
We had this discussion, but because of the affordability and cost of living crisis, which is primarily driven by the cost of housing, policymakers or constituents are approaching land use in a different way than they did 10, 20, or 30 years ago, which I think is when some of these priors are baked in. Costs are skyrocketing. In climate, we have had a long and detailed conversation about electricity.
When you talk to policymakers, the number one cost issue for most of the people living in their district is the cost of housing. It’s the cost of putting a roof over their head. Median American families spend about $2,000 a month on housing. They spend another thousand dollars more on transportation. When you tackle that as a bucket, you can see some big cost of living and affordability wins, but also some big climate wins as well. You have both of those happening at once. This affordability conversation gives us new avenues and opportunities.
David Roberts
I want to think that young people get this —
Caroline Spears
Yes.
David Roberts
— and are rising up. Is that accurate?
Caroline Spears
I think there is a big generational gap between folks who bought their house in the 80s and folks who are trying to buy a house now.
David Roberts
That’s the first one. That’s the constituencies question. The answer to that is just that the cavalry has arrived. The constituency is there, it’s been demonstrated. Ben, tell me if I’m getting out over my skis here, but it seems having pulled those constituencies together and won, each time you do that in a new city, it’s a little easier the next city just because you have a better understanding of what the constituencies are and the dynamics, etc. It’s not proving to be 100% bespoke. 100% start over, right?
Ben Holland
They’ve created a template — California YIMBY has. You’re seeing that adopted state to state around the country right now with major wins happening. Alongside at the state level, you also have many very successful city-level campaigns. Austin, Texas gets a lot of attention in this space. It’s becoming a standard template that I think is fairly adaptable and not bespoke city to city or state to state.
David Roberts
A little bit like what happened with renewable portfolio standards in the 90s and 2000s — the first few were a lot of work and bespoke, and then they just started going once they got established.
Caroline Spears
Just to double down on that, to talk about renewable portfolio standards: it goes state by state. You get people, “Oh, you got to go in each state, each day, each state.” By 2015, half of all renewable energy built in America was built because of a state renewable portfolio standard. We have a track record.
David Roberts
Then you’ve got a case to make at the federal level. Your case at the federal level is much stronger if you’ve got a bunch of states pulling in the right direction. The second objection, this one I almost think has the most bite, is the measurement question. As we said, Ben, all these funders, or at least their officers, the people they have working with them, all fashion themselves technocrats. They all want to be, “How many votes will I get for this dollar of investment in the electoral system?” They want things quantified.
In this area, there’s a pretty long causal chain between mustering the constituencies, passing the policy, having the policy work its magic for a few years, then you see a marginal reduction, a VMT, then you get some carbon benefits. That’s a long chain. It’s very difficult to track, it’s difficult to quantify, it’s difficult to say for certain to a funder, “Invest this dollar, you’ll get X result.” That is understandable to me. I think they take it too far. I think they get obsessive and psychotic about it. A lot of stuff that ought to get money doesn’t get money because of that weird obsession. But at its root, it makes some sense. They want to know, does this stuff work? What is your answer to the measurement question?
Ben Holland
I’m going to combine this with something I think you were going to bring up a little bit later too, around VMT. First of all, yes, that is an understandable skepticism. However, there is interesting evidence coming out around the actual VMT reductions when housing is built close to transit, close to destinations and jobs. I’ll just throw out a couple. Between 2013 and 2024, housing units grew 20% in Minneapolis while overall VMT fell 12% and per capita fell by 18%. Most states, and Minnesota is one of them, that have some kind of VMT reduction goal tend to be around the 20%. They top out at 20% per capita. That’s pretty remarkable that they’re seeing an 8. Obviously there are other factors involved there.
David Roberts
It’s a case in point — Minneapolis has done a bunch of things. Which of those is responsible for how much of that 8%? It is very difficult to figure that out.
Ben Holland
One of the things to simplify, at least from my perspective, is that if you have a suite of housing policies that are being introduced at the state level, there is certainly some questioning around, “If you just do a basic duplex, fourplex, broad upzoning, where is it going to be built and how much is it going to actually reduce VMT?” I don’t want to overestimate how easy it is to quantify those things. There is significant potential to also support more housing near transit, where if you have properties that cannot be developed with multifamily housing in existing low VMT areas, then people are going to build elsewhere.
When you liberalize those properties to be developed, you are making it possible to live in a lower VMT area. There is a lot of work that Terner Center has done looking at the viability of prioritizing new housing in existing low VMT areas.
David Roberts
It’s easy to establish directionally what will happen. If you upzone a bunch of single-family lots around a transit station, people will build on them. That much you can say. Specifying how much they’ll build and then, further from that, deriving how much greenhouse gases they will save by living there — you’re back in fuzzy territory. You can get directionality but not precision.
Ben Holland
I’m going to get some flack from some of my EV friends for this following statement. I used to work in the EV space. There’s a confidence that if we pass this EV policy or these tax credits, there’s a one-for-one replacement in people buying EVs. I’m not saying it’s as fuzzy as land use. However, there are some assumptions that go into play as far as checking that box.
We have this big EV win, but are those vehicles second or third vehicles? That is changing over time. EVs are getting cheaper, they are becoming the primary vehicle for a lot of households. How much VMT is that replacing? How many electrified miles is it creating versus ICE miles? I think simply legalizing multifamily housing in places where it is currently illegal for me is enough of a level of certainty as far as this being a reduction.
David Roberts
What I would ask is — because I think the class of policies for which you can reliably project precise effects is pretty small. Most social and political and economic policy spirals out and has second-order effects. It is very difficult to predict the effects of almost anything. When you talk to funders about this, what would you like to see? Would you like to see more empirical work and measurement and precision in the urbanism world to mollify this concern? Or would you say to funders, “You got to loosen up a little bit about this?” Should funders adjust what they expect? Which side or both?
Ben Holland
I believe that the funders in the climate community writ large in the US right now need to participate in the discussions related to housing policy where they are currently, for the most part, not participating in those discussions. As far as the flows of funding, supporting pro-housing initiatives and pro-housing groups in states and cities across the country would be very valuable. I have heard these numbers thrown around and I apologize if they are not completely accurate, but I think on average there is about $4 billion of funding committed to climate in the US every year. This pro-housing movement up until recently has had a little more than $40 million, I think, across the whole country.
Even just a small amount of investment in this space —
David Roberts
And look at the relative success, the relative results of those two different buckets of spending.
Ben Holland
I know that Caroline has some thoughts on this too as far as playing a role in this conversation related to housing policy.
David Roberts
Let’s get to what I think is one of the other understandable objections. I think this is one that not just funders have in their head, but that a lot of ordinary people have in their head. A lot of people I encounter online, which is this: if you want to decarbonize housing and transportation, just make everything electric and non-carbon, solve it with technology, substitute low- to zero-carbon technologies in there.
If you ask just an ordinary person, “Which is faster: shifting land use policies and thereby shifting development patterns and transportation patterns, or just giving everybody who buys an EV a $10,000 check?” A lot of people will intuitively think it’s just faster to get the electric vehicles out there. It’s just faster to replace a technology than it is to change social and behavioral and long-standing patterns of how we live. A lot of funders think, “We have a technological lever we can pull here that’s clear and easy and we know exactly where to put the money,” in contrast to this fuzziness that you want me to get into. How do you address that objection?
Ben Holland
That’s an understandable sentiment. However, this is going to sound a bit like a cop out, we have to do both. Some of the analysis that my team when I was at RMI did found that to meet 2030 emissions goals we would need something on the order of — for the transportation sector alone — we would need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030. What that would amount to is 70 million EVs on the road by 2030. Even under that wildly optimistic scenario, we would still need to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 20% per capita.
That’s getting close to that Minneapolis number I mentioned. We have a little over 6 million EVs on the road today and less than 6 years — sorry, less than 4 years till we get to 2030. I know some of the goalposts are moving on this, and as far as timelines out to 2050, the EV market could potentially get there to pick up the slack.
David Roberts
Cars have their life cycle and don’t turn over that often.
Ben Holland
12, 13 years.
David Roberts
There are limited public policy tools that can really hasten that cycle. You are tied to that timeline in that world.
Ben Holland
Meanwhile, sprawl is continuing throughout the US and housing policies are being made that could either improve or worsen those conditions and basically locking in a hundred years of development patterns into perpetuity. Hypothetically, and borne out just in the reduction of battery costs and the adoption of EVs, technology moves fast, but not fast enough for where we need to be.
David Roberts
That’s the main thing and that’s what was established in the RMI episode I did, which is that no matter your feelings about EVs, there’s no model, no prospect of getting where we need to get purely through EVs. You can’t do it. You can’t hasten that cycle enough. There’s also a corresponding intuitive sense of the slowness of urban reform that is belied by events — things are moving pretty quickly. Austin has changed quite a bit pretty quickly. Minneapolis has changed quite a bit pretty quickly. It’s not always slow and incremental.
Caroline Spears
We have specific examples recently about that. Since New York City put in congestion pricing, pollution has dropped 10%. There are other cities — Barcelona — in the last decade and a half, they have reduced their carbon pollution by roughly 20% in 15 years. Name another sector of climate policy where we have been able to get that amount of emissions reduction in that short of a time. Guess what? They did it through a combination. You got EV policy in there, but a lot of it was walkability, bikeability. You should be able to walk to your corner store and make a livable community. That makes that a reality. That is how they did it.
David Roberts
The response there is twofold. One is EVs can’t move as fast as you might think they could. They’re slower than you think. Two, urban reform moves faster than you generally might think it would. Once it gets going, it moves pretty quick. Having that congestion pricing example out there is really helpful. You would be challenged to find a policy that is more evidently beneficial immediately to everyone.
The fifth objection, which I don’t know how often or substantial this one is, but it’s interesting to me, is just as a little background, there’s this abundance thing going on. Anybody who follows Democratic politics is no doubt familiar with this hype around abundance. The abundance people love the YIMBY people. They claim the YIMBY people as part of their own. A lot of how abundance has gotten press and attention is by crapping on green groups. That’s how they’ve levered their way to high profile, which I would imagine makes some people in the green groups and in the green funding world somewhat suspicious of the abundance people, perhaps even hostile to the abundance people, which then might be putting them off YIMBY because they associate it with abundance.
I’m curious what’s going on there. What are funders thinking about that specifically? From a distance, you’d think, “The abundance people love YIMBY. The climate people love YIMBY. Let’s all just support YIMBY and be happy and hold hands and make good things happen.” Of course, that’s not how it works. Instead, everybody’s at each other’s throats. I’m curious what you’ve heard from funders about this.
Ben Holland
I was afraid you were going to bring this one up — step into the whole abundance debate.
David Roberts
Can you hear the stampede in the distance? It’s coming at us.
Caroline Spears
Ben, why don’t you take this one?
Ben Holland
Yeah, sure. There is a concern that, especially with regard to transportation and land use, this enthusiasm about reducing permitting hurdles and eliminating environmental assessments necessary for projects could give rise to, for instance, more highways. The book focuses a great deal on, “Why don’t we have high speed rail in California yet?” There’s a whole myriad of different environmental regulations and processes that have slowed that down, which I’m very sympathetic to that argument.
Many in the climate space would say the abundance movement is, by supporting that, also potentially expanding more highways, getting more fossil fuel interests involved, and things of that nature. It’s interesting to me because the climate space has had nothing to say about highway expansions or highways or transportation investment of that kind to date either.
David Roberts
Now we don’t like it?
Ben Holland
That would be another episode altogether, around just transportation funding.
David Roberts
If I could summarize what you just said, it’s that abundance — the vibe of abundance is “build, build, build everything.” The vibe of climate people is, “Okay, fine, build, but only good stuff.” That is the source of the disagreement between them. Again, I return to the fact that they can both agree on “build, build, build housing.” This seems like it ought to be a site of collaboration and bridge building between these two factions. I don’t know that I’m seeing that happen.
Ben Holland
I would agree with that. There’s still a fair amount of education conversation that needs to be had on the left and within the environmental space around what we mean as far as housing abundance and how they can play a role in influencing more climate-aligned housing development, which is combining building decarbonization goals with pro-housing initiatives in urban centers around the country — could be super powerful. I don’t think that zoning is really even on the radar of most climate groups. If you’ve seen a lot of skepticism online and on Twitter, there are a lot of anti-abundance Twitter accounts. They don’t like to even engage in the zoning discussion. It tends to just focus on corporate interests.
David Roberts
My worry is that the abundance people introducing themselves through crapping on green groups has polarized members of the green groups against things like zoning reform. That to me is just tragic. It’s tragic that it’s happened. I want to stop that trend from happening. How do you navigate this, Ben? I don’t know to what extent you’re trying to be a funder whisperer and change these people’s minds, but what works on this question to get around this sensitivity?
Ben Holland
For me it’s really focusing this subject around the infill and transit-oriented development policies that could be a part of those abundant — if you want to call it abundance — packages. That term, there’s some overlap with the YIMBY movement. I will say that the YIMBY movement’s done an amazing job of creating compelling messaging and fact-based messaging around the climate benefits and in many cases have successfully bridged relationships where they didn’t exist, like with Sierra Club for instance, in California and in Oregon. You’re seeing more and more of this happen at the state level without any meaningful participation from more national groups.
David Roberts
It’s sad. If I was in the YIMBY movement, my attitude toward this would be, “We’re winning. I don’t want your loser coalition grabbing onto me. No thanks. We’ll just remain independent and keep winning.” Has anyone asked the YIMBY people whether they want climate showing up at the door?
Ben Holland
This is a fear of mine and it’s something I talk to some of the YIMBY movement about. I’m a big fan of Matthew Lewis who you interviewed, but in some places — I’ll give you an example of where additional support for pro-housing, in particular infill and transit-oriented development policies, would be really effective: in more purple and just straight-up red states. We have some forthcoming analysis at WRI that finds significant emissions reduction potential in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and places like that because people drive a lot there. There are more sprawling development patterns.
David Roberts
You mean just through basic upzoning and —
Ben Holland
Yeah, something akin to a transit-oriented development bill like you’ve seen in your state of Washington or California or Colorado. However, I think the YIMBY movements in those places understandably would be a little cautious about the climate space coming out very vocal about it.
David Roberts
Would it help for the Sierra Club to show up in Texas and say, “Hey, we love this too”? It’s not clear to me.
Ben Holland
Or would they scuttle the whole thing. I have heard differing opinions on it. The groups we’ve talked to in Texas had to get some Democratic legislators on board to support recent state-level zoning policy wins there — they recently passed legislation that allows, by right, development of housing on commercial lots, which ideally will give rise to more development in some urban centers. There are times when the climate message is really effective. I think it gets to a level of political strategy that I’m not very adept at — to think about how much those discussions are behind closed doors and can the climate funding space support some of these initiatives without derailing the whole thing?
David Roberts
Caroline, let me ask you about this because you are in dialogue with state and city level politicians all the time. If you’re a poster online, it helps you for abundance and climate to be fighting because, oh, the content it generates. But if you are a state politician trying to do things and pass bills, it seems you would look at this and say, “This seems like a natural overlap. I need constituencies. I need popular policies that are going to help multiple goals at once.” This overlap seems rich and attractive to me. I’m curious whether state politicians are maybe ahead of the climate funding community on this question.
Caroline Spears
Just to be clear about where housing policy is in state capitals — state capitals being our only avenue for climate progress for the next three years, state and local. Just to be clear about where housing policy is, housing policy is going to pass most state legislatures. It has already hit most state legislatures the last few years. I will go on this podcast and make a public prediction that almost every state, if not 100% of them, will pass some policy to build more housing in the next session or two.
David Roberts
We’ll see. But we’ll hold you to that.
Caroline Spears
Someone can fact check me on this because it is the number one cost driver for people in America. Housing prices have skyrocketed.
David Roberts
Somewhat miraculously to me anyway, housing seems to be — I’m knocking on wood even as I’m saying these words — but it does seem to me, at least to date, to have avoided the absolutely chronic, crippling polarization that affects literally everything else in American public life. I don’t know why that is or how long it can last, but that’s magic dust in today’s politics.
Caroline Spears
Building more housing has this bipartisan constituency. Absolutely. From a climate perspective, we have two choices. Option A for housing policy, as it passes, spikes transportation pollution. Option B reduces transportation pollution. There are two paths. That’s why get involved. You can either have more costs, more traffic, more time in the car instead of time with your family, or you can create low-pollution communities. That’s the choice that folks are facing. That’s the choice in front of climate right now. Here are the two options.
Everyone’s going to pass more housing policy. You can pick option A or option B. Option B is the one in which climate gets involved a little more.
David Roberts
The pitch here is housing policy is happening regardless. Is it going to be climate-friendly housing policy or climate-negative housing policy?
Caroline Spears
That’s right.
David Roberts
That depends somewhat on whether climate groups are in the room, in the door, engaged in this area.
Caroline Spears
Exactly, absolutely.
David Roberts
Do they buy that? I buy that, but of course I want to buy that. I’m curious whether they buy that. Do they view housing as — it is still, even though it’s happening everywhere, it’s still dangerous, it’s still fraught, there’s still a lot of arguing about what kind is good, etc. Do they buy the idea that this is the train that’s moving, hop on or get run over? Is that working?
Caroline Spears
What’s challenging about it is something you and Ben talked about earlier, which is that it’s a bit of a walk. Transportation pollution is the number one source of climate pollution in America.
David Roberts
Yep.
Caroline Spears
Right now, there has been this — to Ben’s point, the focus of transportation policy for the last at least decade and a half has been electric vehicles and specifically the California electric vehicle standards, and trying to get those into as many states as possible. Then someone by the name of Donald Trump got elected, threw that plan into the bonfire. We’re in a space now where we have to go back to the drawing board on transportation policy. The question then becomes, how many options can we put on the table that are tractable, that are doable, where we can get something done on transportation policy with the avenues that we have and the power that we have. Then housing policy starts looking like a very interesting solution.
David Roberts
One of the reasons why, as I’m thinking about reasons why that hasn’t happened, this raises another question, which is the generational thing. If I’m diagnosing, why is that the case? My suspicion is that older people in general have a much more positive view of driving and cars generally. I think to an older generation they represented freedom and prosperity, etc. This has all been written about to no end.
Old people drive and hate policies that make them drive less. Legendarily, older people are overrepresented in our politics in general and at the municipal level in particular. They are the ones who show up at the meetings, fill out the response cards, and call the legislators. I wonder, if I am a state legislator and think about, “I am going to pass a policy with the explicit goal of having people drive less,” I am in terror of organized old people in my state crucifying me. I wonder how the generational thing is playing out on the ground. Do you or Ben have any thoughts on that?
Caroline Spears
The generational gap is a big part of it. Our goal — EVs are part of the picture. If people love driving, that part of the picture really speaks to that. It’s about transportation choices. Transportation is the second largest monthly expense that the average American family faces. It’s about having options and choices about where you want to put that. About 25% of all of Philadelphia choose to get to work every weekday on SEPTA, the Philadelphia public transit system — a zero carbon transportation system that almost got defunded last year, and it’s still struggling.
David Roberts
A lot of city transit systems are still in that perilous situation.
Caroline Spears
It’s about giving people choices. If I were to tell you, “I have a magic bullet to convert 25% of Philadelphia’s cars to EVs,” I think someone would be really excited about that. When you peel back the curtain a little bit and say, “It’s the bus,” sometimes folks change it. From a climate perspective, the point is the same. It’s about giving people options and choices, and EVs are part of that. But also there is transportation. Zero carbon transit is a part of that as well.
David Roberts
People’s views on this are vibes-based. When people have personal experience with something, empirical analysis goes out the window. You can throw numbers at them all day long. They’re saying, “No, but I got uncomfortable on the bus once.”
Ben, this is perhaps a slightly awkward and uncomfortable question. The funders themselves are those old people. By and large, the funders themselves are from an older generation that had a different attitude towards cars and driving and I think very deep in their bones views like, “You grow up, you get a job, you become independent and you get a car. If you’re still an adult stuck on public transit, it is a sign of failure.”
That is deeply ingrained and it is not coincidence that all the funders are from that generation. Is that accurate on my part and is there any generational overturning, renewal happening in the funding community?
Ben Holland
That generalization is largely accurate. They also tend to be deeply rooted in an anti-developer sentiment that goes back to the 70s. Your classic environmentalist.
David Roberts
Land preservation, all that stuff.
Ben Holland
Land preservation, yeah. I’ve lived in Colorado and Boulder, Colorado for most of the last 20 years. Every time there’s some upzoning or housing development or zoning policy that’s introduced, people come out of the woodwork using climate as their excuse for fighting it. That is rampant.
Caroline Spears
That’s what’s wild to me as someone who also — I love hiking, I love being outside — is I do care about preserving ecosystems and things like that. I don’t want anyone to have to super commute two hours each way to get to a major city. It’s funny that that’s where we are because I think the bridge here is that we have a way into not paving over really nice farmland you could be using to grow food for people. We’re down to our last 5, 10% of wetlands in the state of California. Let’s not go there.
David Roberts
Let me tell you, having run this argument on Nextdoor, they’re not convinced. It doesn’t work.
Caroline Spears
The big generational gap, though, besides the attitudes towards driving, is cost of housing. When I talk to folks who bought a house in the 80s and they tell me, and I do the little inflation adjustment in my head, I’m like, “Are you serious? What was the cost of housing? That’s incredible.” The goal with housing is let’s create a world in which we can do that again.
David Roberts
To the Nextdoor people, if you fight housing here, it is just going to go out and plant itself on the land that you say you want to preserve. You are having perverse effects here by fighting housing. But I have not changed a single mind on Nextdoor yet.
Caroline Spears
On Nextdoor. Godspeed.
Ben Holland
You mentioned the transit piece and I think that’s accurate as well. This is a gross generalization, but there are probably not a lot of heavy transit users as far as the big money environmental —
David Roberts
They live in suburbs and they drive. Wealthy white American people live in suburbs and drive mostly.
Ben Holland
I remember back when we had the whole shared electric autonomous initiative and every other NGO in the space. It was almost this understanding or conventional wisdom that was, “The transition is not effective on a cost basis and the ridership is really weak,” and these were the firmly held beliefs among, in some of those discussions. Some people, their eyes glaze over when you talk about things like transit-oriented development because it’s been a topic and well-worn territory in the planning space for so long but —
David Roberts
It doesn’t feel disruptive. It doesn’t feel techie, it doesn’t feel futuristic. They all want self-driving unmanned drone VTOLs. All these guys, they are all 12-year-old boys, and buses and trains are just boring, reliable, and standard.
Ben Holland
That’s very true. My colleague Justin Huckleberry is running some analysis right now looking at the existing densities along transit lines in 70 different cities. The rule of thumb is you want something north of 15 units per acre to be supportive of transit operations. The land use adjacent to transit lines in a lot of the cities we are looking at on average is abysmal.
David Roberts
It’s wild.
Ben Holland
Five units per acre maybe. I’ve heard you talk about this with regard to Seattle even, which is surprising to a lot of people.
David Roberts
Yes. They built this giant multi-billion dollar light rail system in Seattle, which is great. But there’s a station next to the interstate near my house, and I can stand in the parking lot of that light rail station, throw a rock, and hit a single-family home across the street or a golf course. A golf course caddy-corner to the transit station. We have dozens of golf courses. But you better believe the community rallied to protect that golf course. This is baffling to me, Ben, and Caroline, maybe you have something to say about this too.
Forget climate, forget pollution, forget everything else. Just allowing building along transit routes is a GDP generator, it is a tax revenue generator. It is the most reliable growth generator that you have as an urban politician. It seems in self-interest they would want to do at least that.
Caroline Spears
That’s true. One question that people have around housing and land use is, is it tractable? Y’all talked about, is it too slow, etc. This is a place where just last year Illinois passed this incredible first piece, really cool legislation, the NITA Act, which not only dedicated over $1.5 billion a year to zero carbon transportation — $1.5 billion a year to zero carbon transportation — it also allowed people to build multi-unit near transit stops. By that I don’t just mean trains, I mean buses, I mean walkability. It really built all of this.
Building on that, Illinois is not stopping yet. JB Pritzker has introduced the Build Act Illinois this year. That would legalize ADUs, legalize missing middle homes that are symptomatic of this larger housing affordability problem. It eliminates parking minimums — need to eliminate parking minimums near transit stops. This goes more statewide and this is it. Already passed. I have great news, y’all. All of these ideas that we’re talking about, they’re tractable, they’re moving through states, and we already have a great one out of Illinois. They’re building on it.
David Roberts
If you’re running a climate group in Illinois, wouldn’t you like to be one of those people standing behind the desk when JB Pritzker signs this beautiful victory legislation? Wouldn’t you like to be one of the people ascribed as the person who helped get this done? Wouldn’t you rather be on that train?
Caroline Spears
That was good. That was well done. There’s this great coalition there that got that over the finish line and is working on more. There’s even more in the future. What I really want to see is folks learning from that group that got that bill over the finish line. How do we take this out into — we can keep going.
David Roberts
Yeah. I did a pod on the Illinois climate half. They’re passing all kinds of stuff in Illinois. I did a pod on the climate half, but not on the transit half. The coalition building in Illinois, it’s so germane to everything we’ve been talking about, should be studied. I have to say, because I have not said it yet in this episode and I am going to get scolded by multiple people if I don’t say it on the EV question: it’s worth throwing out there that all the research has come back that electric bicycles are responsible for more oil demand destruction worldwide than EVs.
Caroline Spears
Is that true?
David Roberts
Yes. I will be shot if I don’t at least say in this episode that electric bikes, not just EVs, not just cars — electric bikes are magic in this area. They make your walk shed, your non-car shed, so much larger, so much easier. They’re so good for families, they’re so good for groceries, they’re car replacements, etc. I just have to sing the praises of E-bikes here so I don’t get yelled at.
Ben Holland
I got to give a shout out to my former colleague Bryn Grunwald. RMI has done a lot of great work in this space, developed this fantastic e-bike environment and economics impact assessment tool, has been plugging away at this in the US context for a long time.
Caroline Spears
That’s amazing.
David Roberts
Even if you’re a climate funder jazzed about technology, how about peeling off a little bit of your money and funding some E-bike subsidies? That would be so cheap. It would be so cheap for a city to just do E-bike subsidies. They’re doing them in Colorado, I think a couple other places. Everywhere I’ve seen one pop up, it is immediately oversubscribed. There’s a lot of untapped demand for E-bikes out there. Climate people, hello. Let’s just wrap up by asking what can people do here?
I’m yelling online. I think that has limited efficacy. Lots of other people are yelling online. I’m not certain that even more people yelling online would substantially help things. Perhaps there are other things people could do. Ben, specifically on the question of how to move climate world on this, what would you recommend that people do? Because I have no idea what affects funders. What lever of influence does anyone have over these people? They just seem floating in the clouds — like on Mount Olympus. The money floats down. It is what it is. We get what we get. There doesn’t seem to be any feedback mechanisms. Is there any way to reach these people and affect how they think?
Ben Holland
I think that — and this is not general public — but my peers in the climate advocacy and NGO space just need to continue screaming from the rooftops about this. There has been a lot of momentum and reason to be optimistic on this front. There is a fantastic group called the Clean Rides Network, a coalition of NGOs and funders that are really pushing the mode shift side of things. We just need to keep being louder because ultimately the philanthropy NGOs and the community groups are the ones that are running the analysis and also seeing at the ground level successes. Continuing to get behind this and then informing alliances with some of the climate-aligned pro-housing groups like your Matt Lewis from California YIMBY and folks like — I am just very much in the continuing to scream from the rooftops position at this point.
David Roberts
Caroline, you’re down in state politics. People can call their state legislators and say, “Do something about housing.” You make the point frequently that affordability — everybody’s, as you noted, obsessed with affordability now and particularly the climate energy world has become fixated on electricity affordability. You make the point frequently that housing, on an objective, measurable basis, is a bigger cost center than electricity. Transportation is a bigger cost center than electricity. Electricity is getting more expensive. It is a problem. But if you care about affordability as such, go after the unaffordable bits, the most unaffordable bits first.
Especially if you can get some climate benefit along the way. What do you want people to do and what do you want state legislators to do? I imagine a lot of them are like, “Well, I get this, but what are the support mechanisms, what are the groups, how can they tap into this?”
Caroline Spears
We look at four of the biggest household bills that Americans face on a month-to-month basis — things that climate has a real tangible system solution for reducing costs. We’re about to launch our 2026, 2027 policy platform. This is a preview. It’s for the biggest household bills and when we show up to state capitals. When you work with any type of lawmaker and you say, “I care about affordability,” you got to talk about the largest source of costs for people. Now, that’s housing and transportation. Electricity is absolutely a part of that at about three or four hundred dollars a month for folks, but housing and transportation are about $3,000 a month for folks.
To be able to show up and say, “I have a solution on this, and by the way, it’s going to make housing prices go down. We’re going to help out with transportation prices. By the way, we got an electricity plan as well.” Lawmakers are excited about that. Like I said, it’s already passing in a lot of states and we have an option in front of us. We can push in the climate-friendly direction. But there’s also a risk of some of this going in a spot where we’re building homes in wildfire interfaces, homes with a lot of climate risk. There are two options in front of us and let’s do it.
David Roberts
This is such a good point. The climate train is not chugging along very well these days. It’s not very healthy. The housing thing is happening, the affordability thing is happening. They could either happen in climate-friendly ways or climate-unfriendly ways. Rather than staying off in its own little corner waiting for its perfect climate policy, I feel the climate community and climate funders need to get involved in these other things to make sure they turn out well.
Caroline Spears
I totally agree.
David Roberts
Ben, just to wrap up, tell me about this project you’re working on now and your work now at WRI. Are you working on building this empirical case, trying to build up the — bring some numbers to the game?
Ben Holland
We are. In the next couple months we will be releasing two publications. The first will be in the next couple of weeks, I believe. Maybe by the time this airs, we’ll have a piece that comes out with Pew Charitable Trust that looks at the economics of housing production, the economic benefits and the fiscal benefits of housing production. In particular, infill housing production — the suburban sprawl Ponzi scheme thing that Strong Towns talks about from time to time. We put some numbers behind that. That’ll come out with Pew and then on the heels of that, we will be publishing some analysis of 12 states and the emissions reduction benefits or potential through land use reforms that would allow for more infill and transit-oriented development. The numbers there are really big — 15 million metric tons a year in Texas, for instance.
David Roberts
Do you find that the potential is bigger in red states because they have been more car-friendly in the past or —
Ben Holland
Yeah, largely it is because of that. It’s a lot of people moving there — places like Texas, North Carolina and Florida. I guess it’s unfair to really call North Carolina fully red state, but very sprawling development patterns at times and dirty cars, a lot of SUVs there. Anything we can do to get more people, more housing available in the city centers and close to transit, it’s going to be a benefit emissions-wise there. Those things will come out in the next couple months. Very excited about that.
David Roberts
Awesome. As a final word out there to anyone listening, if you are a climate funder or an officer at a climate fund or one of those family people — the family officers that decide how the family funds spend their money — if you’re someone with your hand on a bunch of money in climate, I would love to talk to you. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking. What are your other funders thinking? How do you cognize all this? Get in touch.
Ben, Caroline, thank you so much. This was delightful.
Caroline Spears
Thanks so much for having us.
Ben Holland
This was fun.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts — it takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out especially to my super producer Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at Volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.
Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
