To face a climate emergency, we must take on housing
If business leaders lent their voice to this fight, we could achieve reforms that benefit both the economy and the environment — while providing homes to people who need them.
Earlier this summer, buoyed by thousands of activists who descended on the virtual Capitol demanding change, the Connecticut Legislature enacted the most sweeping land use reforms in over three decades. Among other things, it legalized accessory apartments, required training and certifications for zoning officials, modernized traffic standards and eliminated minimum unit size requirements. Connecticut also became the first state to cap minimum parking requirements for housing, to require zoning codes to “affirmatively further” fair housing and to develop a model form-based code which will lead to more objective decision-making.
We should celebrate these reforms, which will enable the creation of more, and more diverse kinds of, housing. Yet they have one major flaw: they fail to meaningfully address climate change. According to the recently released report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we likely only have until 2040 to completely reengineer the way we live, or risk irreversible self-destruction. The first signs of climate collapse, including extreme heat and sea level rise, are already affecting Connecticut.
Unfortunately, Connecticut’s land use policies both create climate change and prevent us from adapting to it. As we show in the DesegregateCT Zoning Atlas, on 81 percent of residential land, property owners need an acre to legally build a home. In large-lot neighborhoods, people are fully dependent on cars, which is disastrous given that the transportation sector is the leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
To fulfill our legal mandate to primarily build sprawl, we have to cut down the trees that clean our air, filter pollutants and lower temperatures. We also end up destroying farmland, which results in our food traveling from farther and farther away, carried by trucks that release greenhouse gases. Suburban lawns now cover more of Connecticut than farms. Indeed, between 1985 and 2010, we lost 6.5 percent of our forests and 15 percent of our agricultural land.
Making things worse, land use laws mostly ban the kind of housing that reduces driving, such as multifamily homes near shops, activities and transit. Just 2.1 percent of residential land freely permits four-or-more family housing. People prefer walkable neighborhoods over sprawl, so it’s no wonder the census released this week revealed that Connecticut has a depressingly stagnant population.
On the other hand, there may be a hidden silver lining to low growth. Between 1970 and 2000, when the state’s population grew 12 percent, residential land increased 102 percent. If in the coming years we add more people before changing zoning laws, we’re going to see even faster destruction of the landscapes that so many of us love.
Our neighbors have done better. Vermont has tackled the environmental scourge of minimum lot sizes, enabling homeowners to subdivide their land to create new housing plots. Last year, Massachusetts, with overwhelming bipartisan support, enacted legislation to permit transit-oriented development around every MBTA station in the state.
For Connecticut to catch up, we need the public to embrace a new land use policy vision, and we need leaders who understand the gravity of inaction. During the last session, a proposal similar to the one passed in Massachusetts died before any vote. The proposal would have jump-started development around train stations and ensured 10 percent of new units were deeply affordable. Another proposal that died would have created walkable communities by enabling housing around commercial main streets. The CBIA complains about thousands of unfilled manufacturing jobs, and restaurants are shutting down because they can’t find workers, but few link the worker shortage with the housing shortage. If business leaders lent their voice to this fight, we could achieve reforms that benefit both the economy and the environment — while providing homes to people who need them.
A few have beaten the tired drum of “local control.” But as I’ve written elsewhere, climate change is just too big to be tackled by local governments acting alone, even if some cities, including Hartford, have tried. Similarly, the housing crisis cannot be solved adequately by 180 zoning jurisdictions making separate, uncoordinated decisions. While the vast majority of planning and zoning commissioners mean well, few have the technical training, political will or long-term perspective that will lead to necessary change. It took us six months just to read and analyze the 32,378 pages of zoning codes for the Zoning Atlas. Imagine how long it would take to beg 180 zoning boards to identify and revise key provisions that we know can change our trajectory on climate.
We don’t have that kind of time. Together, we launched an unprecedented campaign to begin to tackle entrenched segregation. In the light of mounting evidence that land use policy is climate policy, and housing justice is environmental justice, we must now expand the fight to include intersectional, statewide policy reforms that can shelter more families, in more affordable housing, in smarter places. Before it really is too late.