This commentary is by Vince Bolduc of South Burlington, a retired sociologist from St. Michael’s College and a member of the city’s Affordable Housing Committee.
Yes, we have a climate crisis, and yes, we desperately need more housing to meet the needs of a growing economy and population.
Since transportation emissions are the greatest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state (about 45% of the total), the location of new housing is crucial. This much is clear: If climate problems are made worse by sprawl and long commutes, then most new housing should be in, or close to, the urban core.
To meaningfully address the climate and housing problems, we need a bigger map. It’s understandable that so many of us focus on our own town as we try to address these problems, but I believe that we need to enlarge our field of vision to the 10,000-foot view.
When we use this wider lens that allows us to see issues on a regional or state level, the challenges and solutions look quite different. Climate change does not respect political boundaries and we can actually make bad policy by assuming that, if we just let every town make their own policies, then the sum of the whole would be the best for everyone.
The people who so desperately need housing, for example, probably don’t come to our selectboard meetings to ask us to build more housing. Developers do that, often resulting in small groups of residents who organize in opposition. Their reasons are predictable and well known, repeated in community after community throughout the United States.
New housing, they often argue (especially affordable housing), should be located “elsewhere,” ideally in a different community. Neighbors could also organize to support new housing in their towns, but such pro-housing lobbying is exceedingly rare.
According to Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, this has been happening in town after town and city after city throughout the country, and is one of the major reasons for the country’s housing crisis.
Her excellent book on the subject is “Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System.” Housing location is a good example of what may be a reasonable policy for one town has a negative effect on the greater whole. America’s housing policy, she tells us, is subject to the virtual vetoes of thousands upon thousands of neighborhood groups who have no interest in increasing the housing supply — at least not in their neighborhoods.
Like climate change, the need for housing is a collective problem that requires a collective solution, a coordinated approach by many towns. Too narrow a focus on one community may harm neighboring communities in their housing or climate change efforts, but more important is the whole region, the whole state.
To be sure, it is essential to reduce the carbon emissions in each community, but if housing pressures continue unabated, and if one town — say, my own city of South Burlington — makes it too difficult to live or build within our borders, population growth will be forced elsewhere — where another carbon footprint will be created.
Rejecting a new housing development in my neighborhood does not mean that those housing-related carbon footprints will disappear to the benefit of the planet. Many buyers will eventually find their way to the more distant suburbs, where new residents can achieve their dream of a single-family home and where their carbon footprint will be more damaging than it would have been in South Burlington.
We may warn new home buyers of the climate consequences of sprawl, but if they need housing they will buy wherever they can.
Sprawl-created CO2 is an enormous problem, so the net effect of rejecting housing in the urban core of Chittenden County means longer commute times, more sprawl, and more CO2 emissions. I recently heard that half of the new residents in a Morrisville development are inhabited by households that commute to jobs in Chittenden County. Hinesburg is now constructing 176 new homes in the Haystack Crossing development, 91 are being built in Shelburne’s Kwiniaska Ridge, and 93 more are proposed in Williston. There are many others, and many still further away.
All leapfrogged the heart of Vermont’s economic and population center to build in communities eager for growth, some without sufficient municipal resources to effectively manage.
These miles of long commutes will worsen sprawl and pollution much more than comparable developments in my city of South Burlington simply because of their more remote locations. The resulting traffic will mostly come into or through South Burlington, so discouraging housing developments here does little to solve the congestion and idling engines on our own traffic corridors.
South Burlington is a good example of the efficiencies that can come with greater density in an urban core. We have a smaller footprint per household because of our already existing infrastructure, our state-of-the-art wastewater treatment facilities, energy-efficient municipal buildings, a vast network of underground utilities, and our proven commitment to improving nonvehicle transit alternatives. In a denser community, all this is not only possible, but environmentally efficient.
If this is all true — and if solving climate change is really the existential crisis of our lifetimes — where should new housing be built?
To answer this, we need to think in terms of a bigger map — the regional or state map — where we can see the various urban and regional cores that dot our state. Vermont towns are neither gated communities nor villages located on islands. No town can address the housing or climate crisis on its own and decisions made in one town have consequences for the larger region.
We have to look at the bigger map and figure out how we can better address these problems on a regional or state level. Let’s redouble our efforts to solve these problems, but work on it with bigger maps in front of us.