Biting the Big Green Apple
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
I got a kick out of New York’s reaction to a report released back in April, showing that carbon emissions in the city had increased by about 8 percent since 1997. The news stories were alarmist and the leaders angry, promising to do whatever it took to reverse the trend and reduce emissions within 25 years. Admirable sentiments, but it made me chuckle to see how many New Yorkers buried the biggest story in the report, as far as I was concerned. The average New Yorker, you see, contributes about one-third the carbon emissions of the average American. If we all lived like New Yorkers, we’d immediately make the United States’ share of the climate crisis a great deal more manageable.
New York has to face the same challenges as other cities in reducing emissions from buildings and from power generation. Its main advantage over the rest of us is that more than 50 percent of its daily commuters use mass transit. Many of those that don’t will walk or bike, or use car-sharing services like taxi cabs. No city in the country has committed to abandoning the personal automobile trip like New York has, and so we all spew out carbon at rates much greater than the Big Green Apple.
Of course, New York hasn’t committed to mass transit because it’s green to do so. Instead its subways, commuter rail systems, buses, ferries, and cab companies arose and were built to handle the population size and density that makes New York unique among American cities. It’s that density that supports the commercial dynamism and diversity that define New York. It also allows New York to house nearly half the population of its massive 20 million large metropolitan area in the 300 square miles at the center.
But that’s New York, right? Even if we wanted our city to feel like our neighbor to the north, and most of us don’t, the barriers standing in our way are insurmountable--the Freedom Tower, to take one example, will be more than ten times taller than our city's height limit. But if our future (probably) doesn’t include avenues lined with 60 story buildings, we can nonetheless learn important lessons from the things New York does best. For starters, one of the main things we can do to reduce our own carbon emissions is to reduce our dependence on automobiles. The District is already well ahead of the national average in this respect—over one-third of D.C. residents commute via mass transit—but we can do better. It should be the official policy of the city government to reduce the use of automobiles by residents and non-residents alike. This doesn’t have to be hard; much of the work can be done by pushing mixed-use developments and avoiding suburban style errors like the Brentwood Shopping Center. The city should limit the amount of space given over to parking and improve alternatives like bike lanes and trails, as well as the cab fare system and bus routing. The city should also be thinking seriously and creatively about how to create new transit lines.
But let’s be honest: Washingtonians, they of the one trip in three via transit, are not the big carbon offenders in the region. For that we have to look to the suburbs, where transit use is minimal, congestion is epidemic, and commute times stretch into the triple digits. In many ways, the struggles of the exurbs are the problems of the exurbs, but emissions and pollution don’t stay put, warming and dirtying tiny areas over Centreville and Tysons Corner. Sadly, their failure in that respect is our problem, but we, good people that we are, can help them solve it.
Picture taken by {ryan}.
The second thing that the District should take away from the New York example is that policies allowing denser settlement in the center of the metropolitan area will help reduce the percentage of new development that takes place in an exurban setting. The Examiner reported this week that the Washington region can expect population growth of nearly 100 percent over the next fifty years, according to estimates from George Mason University. Fifty years is a long time, and we should consider such projections with some caution, but we can say with reasonable certainty that job growth in the region will continue, and that jurisdictions in and around the capital will build new homes to hold those workers. The key question then becomes, how much of the new growth will the center of the region hold?
In 2004, the District accounted for about 7 percent of the new housing approved in the metropolitan area. This year, by contrast, the District is on pace to account for over 10 percent of metropolitan housing; through the first quarter of 2007, over 17 percent of new permits in the region were for homes in D.C. Some of that shift is due to the fact that weakness in the housing market has affected the outer suburbs of the region more than the center, but part of the decline in places like Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties is due to popular concern about congestion and strained infrastructure—those places have deliberately begun to slow new residential growth.
The ease with which Washington is able to continue building a larger share of the region’s housing will determine the extent to which more people means more sprawl and more traffic. If we, with our dense street grid and nearly half of existing Metro stations, take in a mere 5 percent of new growth, then we practically guarantee that population will flow primarily to areas beyond the reach of mass transit. The more we limit new growth and density in the city, the more responsible we are for increasing area emissions. It isn’t enough for us to build green roofs; we either seize the reins and take the lead in accommodating new, transit friendly growth or we leave the problem of carbon emissions to those who have proven themselves wholly incapable of planning and building in a responsible fashion. It’s unfortunate that the region’s exurbs have grown so incautiously, but this is the world in which we find ourselves.
But there is an upside, and it happens to be a pretty good one. Reducing our dependence on cars and increasing our density will have some nice side effects for the District. Density means more people paying into the city treasury. It means more people shopping for different kinds of things, which equates to a larger and more diverse array of businesses. It means less dead space, fewer vacant lots and boarded up properties, fewer overgrown rat-infested wastes, and fewer local businesses struggling to stay open on main streets while residents drive to the suburban Target. We can tell everyone we’re doing it for the good of the region, but we’ll hardly be sacrificing.
But the most important thing to remember is that the alternative isn’t the status quo. Things will change in the District whether we’re proactive or not. If we fight density and cling to our cars, we’ll make cutting emissions more costly for ourselves and more difficult for the region. More Washingtonians will be displaced as the premium on homes near Metro and downtown increases. Whether the next half-century delivers into Greater Washington 2 million or 10 million additional people, the District will change, and we can greet that change with foresightedness or nearsightedness. If we’re smart, we’ll start learning lessons where we can.