Tag Archives: single-family zoning

Affordable housing’s carbon footprint

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Affordable housing, when it’s located near town centers or transit hubs, benefits not just its residents but the larger community. That’s because inclusive, diverse communities tend to enjoy more economic, social and cultural vitality that their exclusive counterparts. But there’s another argument for building more of this housing – which typically takes the form of multifamily, subsidized housing — in “locationally efficient” places: as part of a climate-change strategy mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

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Lower-income people drive less and use space more efficiently than non-low-income households. Therefore, a multi-unit complex occupied by lower income people is likely to produce lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions than a luxury complex with the same number of people.

So we learn from a new study for the California Housing Partnership, “Income, Location Efficiency and VMT.” VMT stands for vehicle miles traveled, the standard measure that climate-change plans try to reduce. The study, based on California data, concludes that “allocating land and funding to enable development of location-efficient areas in a way that is affordable to lower-income households is expected to yield greater VMT benefits per parcel and per person than allocating the same land to higher-income people.” After all, lower-income people not only drive less, they “own fewer cars, live in fewer rooms, and take up smaller shares of their buildings.” What’s more, they disproportionately prefer to live in location-efficient areas, the study says, further justifying the housing subsidies.

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This study complements the literature that takes suburban sprawl and the single-family home to task as unsustainable. The per person carbon footprint of the residential multi-unit complex is less than for the tract home, as a piece in the Atlantic several years ago pointed out. Some of the anti-single-family screeds can be pretty shrill, like this one out of Seattle — a city where the administration even toyed with the heretical idea of banning single-family zoning.

 

Side trip to Seattle

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While our “Thriving Communities” campaign focuses on Vermont, we’re not going to wallow in the parochial. An interesting public dialogue on zoning, affordability and housing density is going on in Seattle, and who knows, maybe there’s a takeaway for us.

What does big-city Seattle have in common with small-town Vermont, besides a foliage season?

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Well, much of Seattle is zoned for single-family residences, as are many Vermont municipalities. The news is that a housing advisory panel is poised to recommend scrapping single-family for zoning that allows duplex, triplexes and so forth. Part of the rationale is that single-family districts are perceived to have had an exclusionary effect, by race and socioeconomic class.

The housing advisory panel  reportedly wants to forestall Seattle’s becoming a haven for the rich, and one approach is to promote more density — not just in single-family neighborhoods, but also in zones where multifamily housing now limited to four stories could be redrawn to allow six.

If there’s a lesson in this for Vermont, it’s certainly not in the particulars. Seattle’s population exceeds Vermont’s, after all, and Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, could be fit into one of Seattle’s neighborhoods. (Below is an overview photo of two storied Seattle neighborhoods — Queen Anne and Magnolia — that are laced with single-family residences.

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No, the Vermont takeway is that people here, too, should be thinking about making their zoning and town planning more accommodating of greater residential density near municipal centers. Not high rises, of course, but affordable multi-family housing on a Vermont scale.