Later this week, Vice President Kamala Harris will give the first major policy speech of her campaign focused on tackling the “rising cost of living,” according to early press reports. That includes the skyrocketing cost of housing — but of course, you don’t need me to tell you that.
The housing shortage is now perhaps America’s defining economic problem. Over the past two decades, the median cost of housing in America — for renters and for owners alike — has grown much faster than the median income; more than 90% of Americans live in a place where housing costs have outstripped income growth.
Housing is in such short supply that it is distorting and holding back the country’s economy. This morning, the Labor Department announced that prices rose only 2.9% over the past year, a welcome signal that inflation has finally returned to a normal rate. The inflation that we’re still experiencing is driven, above all, by housing, which was responsible for a whopping 90% of the monthly increase in prices.
Friday’s speech is meant to fill out Harris’s relatively skinny set of policy proposals; so far, her team has yet to announce any real deviation from the Biden administration’s climate policy. But I would encourage her — and them — to see housing policy as a climate policy issue. If America hopes to reach net-zero by 2050, then one of the easiest and cheapest ways for it to do so will be to build more housing, especially in cities and transit-connected suburbs.
In America, where you live determines how much carbon dioxide you emit. That’s somewhat less of an issue in other countries that have retained older and more walkable development patterns. But here, half a century of sprawling suburban development has made a high-emissions-lifestyle all but compulsory. If you live in New York, Washington, D.C., or another walkable city, then your carbon emissions are substantially lower than if you live in the suburbs or exurbs. In the country’s sprawling suburbs — not only in the Sunbelt, but also in New Jersey, Maryland, and California — carbon emissions are much higher.
That’s because where you live basically determines how much you drive — and driving is America’s biggest climate problem. The transportation sector is the most carbon-intensive part of America’s economy, generating more emissions than any other activity, and cars and trucks are responsible for most of those emissions. By one estimate, cars and trucks create perhaps 40% of America’s carbon emissions. (That estimate includes the greenhouse gases emitted by manufacturing cars and trucks.) Even in 2030, when millions more Americans have purchased electric vehicles, driving is still expected to dominate the country’s emissions portfolio, according to the Rhodium Group, a private energy analysis company.
So if we want to cut emissions, we should make it as easy as possible for Americans not to drive — or to drive only when they want to. But right now, housing is critically undersupplied in the cities and suburbs where that is possible. Freddie Mac, a federally-backed enterprise that supports the housing market, estimated in 2018 that America had roughly 2.5 million fewer homes than it needed; it has since updated that number to 3.8 million. Many of these housing shortages are worst in the cities where economic growth has been most profound. In the 2010s, New York permitted fewer new housing units than in the 2000s, or even the 1960s.
“Oftentimes, the climate-friendly choice is more expensive, or you’re trying to get people to embrace something they wouldn’t always embrace,” Ben Furnas, the former director of the New York City mayor’s office for climate and sustainability, told me. But that isn’t the case for building more housing in dense, walkable, and transit-affiliated areas, he said.
“The prices in all of these places suggest there’s huge pent-up demand for people to live in these places,” he said. “And even just lowering the regulatory barriers to let that kind of development happen and that kind of growth occur would both make it more affordable, and let people live closer to their families, and be good for the climate in terms of per capita emissions.”
Housing is more than a climate issue for driving-related reasons, though. America’s buildings are responsible for about a third of the country’s carbon emissions. Most of those emissions come from heating and cooling, as well as from generating hot water. But it is cheaper and more energy efficient to do that heating and cooling when houses share a wall or are in the same building. “Heating and cooling a 3,000-square-foot single family home is much more expensive than heating and cooling a 3,000-square-foot condominium in a city,” Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, told me. “The heating loss and cooling loss is much lower in apartment buildings than in single family homes, so having those levels of density matters a lot.”
This is not a millennial problem. America has been underbuilding housing for a long time, and much of that supply shortfall is due to overly restrictive zoning codes at the local level. Even as president, however, Harris has ways to nudge cities to build more. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed the “YIMBY Act,” which would fund cities and states to pursue a race-to-the-top-style effort to loosen housing restrictions. Even without help from Congress, a Harris administration could create a national housing construction fund to provide steady financial support to build new multifamily housing, so that the construction of new apartments and condos doesn’t stop when interest rates rise or the economy hits a snag. Finally, Harris could use the bully pulpit to push local governments — especially in Democratic-leaning states with their own forward-looking climate policies — to drop rules that restrict multifamily development, enforce parking minimums, or prevent the construction of single-stair buildings.
These policies don’t have to transform American society to do a lot of good. “Even a difference between a long drive and a short drive also makes a climate difference,” Furnas, who now runs the 2030 Project, Cornell University’s climate initiative, said. “If you live in a duplex in a somewhat walkable area, one of the two parents drives to work and the other takes the bus, and they can walk to the kid’s school or a grocery store,” that is much more pleasant — and will have much lower emissions — than a scenario where both parents must drive everywhere. It will also be cheaper.
Harris doesn’t need to sound like a radical on these policies, in other words. And she doesn’t even need to do anything more than nod at them. (If I were giving her political advice, I’d say that she doesn’t need to spend much time talking about climate policy between now and November 5 — although as a climate journalist, of course, I feel differently — but perhaps that’s a topic for another column.) But they are basically the free money of America’s climate transition — they would cut inflation, reduce greenhouse gases, and create more pleasant places to live. Should she win the White House, she should pursue them aggressively.
