The Environment and the Housing Crisis

One of the founding fathers of ecology, John Muir, famously said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The environment is tethered to almost everything, and certainly to housing.

Somehow, we’ve created housing policy in the United States that has led to insufficient housing, but also to most housing being built in unsustainable ways. We’re 0 for 2. We don’t build enough housing (leading to skyrocketing prices for shelter) and the stuff we do build takes up open space and requires environmentally damaging transportation infrastructure.

The Housing Crisis and How We Got Here

First, by “housing crisis” we mean the serious shortfall in housing that has accrued, particularly over the last 15 years, when housing production declined significantly. This decline resulted primarily from the collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession, when developers went bankrupt and construction workers left the industry, leading to dramatically reduced production capacity.

This has resulted in a shortage of 4 to 7 million homes nationally, causing extraordinary rises in the prices of both rental and purchased homes, which in turn has strained budgets for families and driven many to homelessness. Here in San Diego, estimates are that we're about 90,000 homes short, leading to record-high prices and an ever-upward trend in the unhoused camping in the streets of America’s Finest City.

Even before the recent collapse in construction, environmentalists generally have been largely antagonistic toward homebuilding. As far back as Watership Down and other children’s stories, housing developers have been portrayed as rapacious destroyers of edenic idylls. And there has been much truth to that stereotype. 

Housing has stretched far into what was once farmland or open space, with attendant loss of habitat and local food availability, as well as increases in travel-related pollution. And in San Diego, we have the added threat of fire in the backcountry, which has helped scuttle many housing developments in undeveloped areas. The environmental negatives of suburban sprawl on our environment (and physical and mental health) are well documented.

But the reason why this sprawl happens is less clearly understood. Here we enter the murky world of municipal zoning rules. Zoning rules, which took hold in the early 1900s, began as a way to separate housing from noxious industry in the name of safety. But zoning quickly took a darker turn, becoming a way for the comfortable to keep the “wrong people” out of their neighborhoods. The wrong people had less money, of course, but also frequently had darker skin. The racist history of zoning rules, particularly rules requiring only single-family homes, is not widely known but the results have been clear. The primary way to build family wealth in the U.S. has been through home ownership. Denied that path for most of the 20th century, the median Black family’s net worth is still only a small fraction of the average white family’s. And studies suggest that gap is getting worse, not better.

So a vile mix of racism/classism helped push housing into the hinterlands, resulting in a gawd-awful panoply of environmental negatives. Not to mention that making housing difficult to build disproportionately burdens the poor and exacerbates homelessness. With this in mind, you’d think the bright-blue (and green) cities on both coasts (like San Diego) would be lining up to toss out the zoning handbook to help right environmental and social ills alike.

You’d be wrong.

Better Housing Policy

It’s not that there isn’t movement happening to rectify the worst of restrictive zoning and increase the housing supply, but it’s mostly happening on the state level (states led by both parties), with often furious pushback from cities and towns, where zoning decisions are traditionally made at a neighborhood level. This pushback is often led by people who would be utterly aghast to be associated with racism, homelessness, or environmental destruction, but who nonetheless have yard signs up (“No on SB 10” is the San Diego version) that clearly declare their desire for the problems to be solved … somewhere else, by someone else.

But a big part of the solution is likely right in your neighborhood. What is needed is called “infill development,” and sometimes “densification” by those opposed. Supporters often call it the “missing middle,” housing that’s not huge apartment blocks, but also not single-family homes. Think of duplexes or small-scale apartment buildings, though it can take many forms like townhomes or “cottage courts.” Places where a small family might find a rung on the housing ladder without shelling out for a whole house.

Infill housing is by its very nature more affordable — and more environmentally friendly — than single-family homes (being smaller and using less land and fewer resources). Another type of housing in this category is the “accessory dwelling unit” (ADU), also known as the granny flat.

Thomas DeFranco, a board member and Policy Co-Chair with YIMBY (“Yes, In My Back Yard,” as opposed to NIMBY, “Not In My Back Yard” a person who opposes … everything) Democrats of San Diego County, explains how “environmental” resistance to infill is misplaced: “People see what happens in their community, and they see an infill housing project that goes in and maybe gets built on a dirt lot that has a tree on it, and so that tree gets cut down… They think, ‘We need to stop the growth right now, in our city, so that we are not perpetuating the climate crisis.’ But the reality is that when you stop that growth in your city, on that one lot, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those people just go away… Their VMT and GHG emissions don’t just go away… they often increase. We’re kind of exporting the climate crisis… it just goes to somewhere else, where maybe it doesn’t impact your community or your state, but it often has a larger net impact on the global climate.”

Certainly infill development can be more large-scale. In several San Diego neighborhoods, like University City and Hillcrest, proposed Community Plan updates allow for more large buildings with thousands more new homes than were possible before, primarily in commercial areas, close to transportation, jobs, and amenities. This is key, because again infill development reduces both the need to drive and to build expensive infrastructure in undeveloped areas.

Indeed, San Diego has been generally supportive of statewide actions, approving a Housing Action Plan that implements state requirements to allow duplexes in single-family zones, removes cumbersome parking requirements, allows for housing on underused commercial property, builds housing on underused City property, and streamlines ADU permitting, among other modest steps. However, the city backed down in the face of severe resistance when it came to implementing SB 10, a voluntary state measure that would have loosened housing rules in areas within a mile of transit.

Still, even with recent changes, 81% of residential land in San Diego City is zoned single-family, a figure that rises to 87% when the whole county is considered. This, in a time when the average household (in San Diego and nationally) is getting smaller and older, and will continue to do so. This means that fewer single-family houses will be needed in the future, though at this point every housing unit is needed.

Housing Economics Myths

Two myths about housing economics need to be busted to better make the argument for better, greener housing policy. The first is the myth that “developers” get insanely rich building housing. They don’t. The animosity towards developers is both counterproductive (in that it makes housing harder to build) and irrational, in that if developers were making crazy money, there’d be many more of them and we’d be swamped with new housing.

The second myth is that new housing doesn’t help affordability. Generally, it’s actually pretty true that new housing is expensive. It’s the older housing that’s cheaper. New housing is expensive because we’ve tied up developers with rules that limit what they can do, and that have driven up the cost of doing business. So new projects tend to be “luxury.” But here’s the thing: If you don’t build luxury housing for people who can afford it, they’ll buy up the affordable housing and make it luxury. Allowing more market-rate multifamily construction preserves the affordable units that do exist.

In My Backyard

I live in a neighborhood that is zoned for multifamily housing, but is primarily single-family. Over the decade-plus I’ve lived in my house, I’ve seen bunches of new apartments and “dense” condos be built (not to mention a bunch of ADUs) all over my neighborhood (South Park/Golden Hill) and not one has negatively impacted my enjoyment of my neighborhood or my home price (check the average home prices for 92102 if you think I’m kidding). The pictures in this article are all a few minutes walk from my house, and all this new housing is in a neighborhood close to downtown jobs, local businesses, and transit (transit in San Diego is not great, but at least it exists). The other thing is, these changes happen slowly. New zoning in the neighborhood isn’t going to lead to a wholesale rush to build; building takes time. The neighborhood is evolving, not changing radically.

And we are all going to need to evolve to meet the environmental and social housing challenges we’re facing. The fear-mongering from opponents of new housing in established neighborhoods cuts across traditional political lines, but in the end it comes from an ugly place (metaphorically), and ends up in ugly places (literally).

What You Can Do

You can join groups fighting for better housing and zoning, primarily the “YIMBY” movement. YIMBY groups generate critical political support (here’s the San Diego group, and the California group) for better housing policy, which is really all that’s required. If we remove the political obstacles, the builders will take care of the rest.

I asked Thomas, of the San Diego YIMBY Democrats, about the political affiliation. “We want to show people that YIMBYism and pro-housing is a core tenet of the Democratic party, and that’s not always been the case, and there are still some internal party struggles with that … Most of the NIMBYism locally, and in larger California cities, and in California as a whole, is from Democrats.” But, Thomas notes, “The idea that these policies are just Democratic policies is not necessarily true. There are definitely Republicans who understand the housing crisis we are in, and believe that we need to be building more housing in our most environmentally friendly areas.”

Another great educational resource is Strong Towns, a group that educates and fights for sensible city planning based primarily on the argument that suburban sprawl is often not economically viable.