Environmental housing arguments don’t hold water

Your suburb is not sustainable. The woods in your backyard do not make you environmentally friendly, and your car-dependent lifestyle is not saving the planet.

The fight to keep Connecticut exactly as it is and never change anything, which is what opponents of zoning reform are waging, has taken a number of forms. There have been arguments in favor of local control. There has been a lot of talk of neighborhood character. There has been outrage that anyone could ever think high-minded Connecticut suburbs could possibly have been built on racism (though they were).

Now we’ve entered a new phase — environmentalism. Affordable housing might be a laudable goal, this argument goes, but it’s not friendly for the planet. And besides, our ecosystem just can’t support that sort of development.

In every particular, it’s about as wrong as it gets.

It’s not surprising we’ve taken this turn. Connecticut, in general, likes the environment. We believe climate change is real and that we need to do something about it. We say we want to take steps to limit emissions and consumption.

But single-family homes, which dominate Connecticut development, are not the environmental option. Building densely is by far the better choice for the climate, whether you can see trees from your window or not.

According to a 2009 article from the Yale School for the Environment that looked at locations based on reputations for environmentalism, the average city resident in the U.S. consumes only about a quarter as much gasoline as the average Vermonter, the state that had been awarded a distinction as “greenest” in America.

“New Yorkers have the smallest carbon footprints in the United States … (at) less than 30 percent of the national average,” the article concluded.

The upshot is clear. The environmentally friendly solution to housing is never to stick with sprawl.

Bill Finch, who served eight years as Bridgeport’s mayor and never found an environmental initiative he couldn’t champion, liked to talk about how his city’s growth was the greenest of all possibilities. The average Bridgeport resident, he said, is responsible for half to a third the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as a suburbanite, for reasons including smaller homes and better access to mass transit, in addition to shared walls and floors that cut energy costs.

“There’s no government entity in the world that has plans to reduce greenhouse gases by half to a third,” Finch told me a few years ago, “and urbanization and densification would do it. … There’s no other plans that do that, even if you closed all the coal plants.”

Suburbanites have been clear they don’t want their quaint communities to turn into Bridgeport, but the argument holds anyway. If environmentalism is the goal, Bridgeport wins and New Canaan loses.

It goes deeper than building design, and local suburbs have a long history of fighting housing over questions of water and sewers. If communities allow multifamily housing at all, they will often require a sewer hookup, which conveniently is unavailable in the vast majority of the town. “When CT towns claim water and sewer prevent inclusionary zoning, they’re relying on the situation they created to keep people out,” UConn professor Bethany Berger said last week on Twitter. “Don’t fall for it.”

The other environmental issue that has been raised in opposition to affordable housing is water supply. A Darien attorney recently argued at length in these pages that the southwestern corner of the state did not have enough water to support the kind of “unfettered” multifamily housing that zoning reformers would like to see.

Never mind that the proposed zoning changes are pretty small and new development would be nothing close to “unfettered.” It’s true there are some questions on water supply to be worked out, and issues around river diversion and reservoir levels can seem arcane.

But we shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Water isn’t wasted by a theoretical four-plex in Darien or a garage apartment in Westport. It’s wasted in 5,000-square-foot mansions with five bathrooms and acres of lawn in those same towns, not to mention the 14 golf courses in Fairfield County.

If we’re worried about conservation, let’s start there.