Why Does Housing Density Matter to Climate Change?

Even before I started Bay Modular, a lot of my unorganized thoughts were spent on thinking about climate change. Every year, it seems like more media attention is spent on the doom-ish side of climate change inevitabilities, but I tend to agree with Bill Gates.

My basic optimism about climate change comes from my belief in innovation. The conditions have never been more clear for backing energy breakthroughs. It’s our power to invent that makes me hopeful.

Alongside the richest people in the world, the ambitious goal of Breakthrough Energy is to employ innovative solutions in major sectors of industry to bring GHG emissions to net-zero by 2050. They divide the problem into 5 primary sectors: manufacturing (31 percent), electricity (27 percent), agriculture (19 percent), transportation (16 percent), and buildings (7 percent).

We call these the Five Grand Challenges of climate change. To get to zero, we will have to tackle all five.

What's interesting to me about the Five Grand Challenges is how they are connected. While the solutions may be focused on solving each sector, industry, or corporation individually, it tells a 1-sided picture.

It may be easy to point to the policy assisting industry, but the corporations that benefit and influence favorable legislation are ultimately driven by consumer spending. Weaved into the network that connects these industries is the story about people and the cities they live in. Dense urban cities consume 2/3 of the world's energy and produce 70% of global carbon emissions. The appetite for energy gets larger as cities sprawl out due to an increasing need for infrastructure and a lifelong commitment to maintenance. Add the ensuing transportation cost, sprawl and the zoning policy that enables it are a primary contributor to the increasing demand for energy and infrastructure in urban centers.

In the Bay Area alone, 82% of residential land is allocated to single-family homes, reducing density, limiting housing stock, and driving poorer families out. Without a concerted policy effort to upzone neighborhoods, private developers will follow economic incentives to build new housing developments outside the city center, resulting in increased GHG emissions related to building materials, transportation infrastructure, utility infrastructure, and even agriculture.

While it's clear our intentions should be focused on deploying new technologies to outdated practices in manufacturing, electricity, agriculture, transportation, and buildings, the holistic view is and will always be the atomic unit of the city and one solution is sitting right in our backyards.