Housing Policy Has Consequences For Urban Communities … And Nations

Last Updated on: 10th July 2025, 12:47 am

In his post on Substack on July 9, Paul Krugman included a quote from page 501 of the Mandate For Leadership, a/k/a Project 2025, where the MAGAlomaniacs laid out in exquisite detail their vision for a white America. Here’s what it said:

Congress should prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home. Homeownership forms the backbone of the American Dream. The purchase of a home is the largest investment most Americans will make in their lifetimes, and homeownership remains the most accessible way to build generational wealth for millions of Americans. For these reasons, American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.

Now, it would be hard to find a clearer example of the utter hypocrisy of these people. On the one hand, they want local control over housing policy, while on the other hand, they want to jam their vision for the country down the throats of people in California who want to lower the amount of pollution from gasoline and diesel powered vehicles they are forced to breathe. If ever there was an example of “do as we say, not as we do,” that is it.

The failed president wants to ban the congestion charge that New York City instituted voluntarily earlier this year. He doesn’t like it for some reason. Maybe he thinks it kills all the birds. Whatever the reason, it is little more than using the heavy hand of the federal government to bludgeon a city into submission. Before the election, conservatives were speaking in tongues and rending their garments because of what they called “government overreach,” but now it’s OK if they are the ones doing it? Mealy mouthed, two faced, lying bastards! But I digress.

It should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that a focus on single-family housing is, de facto, an embrace of suburban and rural living and a disparagement of cities. People who live in Chicago, or New York, or Miami often don’t live in single-family homes. They live in apartments or condominiums or co-ops that maximize the number of people living in each square foot of available land. One could get the impression that the single-family home the authors of the Mandate For Leadership have in mind is a a plantation house where white people sip cool drinks on the veranda while “guest workers” toil tirelessly outside under a broiling sun.

Urban Housing Policy

One of the leading lights on urban living and carbon emissions is Lloyd Alter, whose posts on Substack are quoted frequently here at CleanTechnica. Alter lives in Toronto, which allows him to live a mostly car-free existence. Primarily he gets around the city on foot or by bicycle, which has brought him regularly into conflict with Ontario’s current premier, Doug Ford, who is pursuing an agenda that includes ripping out bike lanes in Toronto and building more highways to suburbia so people can live outside the city and drive to work every day.

In 2022, Alter joined Green Building Advisor. After a year, he wrote, “it became clear that it mattered less what I did than where I lived. I could give up driving because I lived in a 110-year-old ‘streetcar suburb’ where everything I needed was close by, and I never actually needed to drive. My electricity is almost carbon-free, coming from hydro and nuclear. I had subdivided my 100-year-old house into two units eight years ago, so my wife and I occupied just 1200 sq. ft. My carbon footprint was smallish because of the design of the built environment — how much space I occupied, how I got around, and how it was all powered.”

Urban, Suburban, & Rural Carbon Emissions

Project 2025, of course, does not care a bucket of warm spit about carbon emissions, but researchers at United Nations University published a study four years ago that found city dwellers in Austria had the lowest carbon emissions. Austrians living in suburban areas had 8 percent higher carbon emissions, while those living in rural areas had 4 percent higher carbon emissions. They reported that 58 percent of the people in the world live in cities, even though they only occupy about 3 percent of the global land area. The compact nature of cities offers emission savings linked to higher densities, connectivity, accessibility, and land use, the research suggests.

The main difference the researchers found is that the city dwellers “had lower direct emissions from transport, heating and cooking. They did have more indirect emissions, that is, emissions released upstream in the production chain, by factories producing TVs for example. But in total, we found that the emissions of urban dwellers were still comparatively low.” The analysis only works in relatively wealthy nations, however, where people have the economic resources to live above the subsistence level. People who don’t consume much are not responsible for a lot of carbon emissions.

Whether urbanization is good or bad for carbon emissions is not an easy or  simple question to answer, the researchers report. But they argue city life is “the sustainable option, at least once countries reach a certain income level and when doing it right. Governments around the globe should make best use of high densities, connectivity, accessibility and land in urban areas — and plan cities and their surroundings in a smart and climate friendly way. Governments…..should make best use of high densities, connectivity, accessibility and land in urban areas, and plan cities and their surroundings in a smart and climate friendly way.”

Good public transportation systems and protected bicycle lanes (painting a line on the pavement doth not a bicycle lane make) are important considerations for urban planners. In addition, short distances to basic infrastructure, efficient buildings, and low carbon heating and cooling systems are all proven ways of cutting carbon emissions. In addition, carbon pricing can create incentives for greener value chains and more sustainable consumption.

“The way urban and rural areas are designed will affect people’s choices — such as their preferred mode of transport — and associated emissions. But ultimately we as individuals determine our own consumption patterns and our carbon footprint can be large or small, whether we live in the city or elsewhere.” Lloyd Alter would be the first to agree with that last sentence. He is a staunch advocate for sufficiency rather than consumption.

Urban Gardens Improve The Quality Of Life

One addition to urban living has been in use in Stockholm, Sweden, for well over a century. Dotted throughout the city are 7000 garden allotments, known as koloniträdgårdar, that offer city dwellers access to green space and a reprieve from crowded urban life. “Coming here, it feels like you’re out in the countryside really quickly,” Ellen Gustavsson told Ingrid Wilson of the New York Times recently. She bikes to the garden a few times a week to water plants and host get-togethers with friends. Many of the gardens come with simple cottages where residents can clean vegetables, prepare meals, or even spend the night.

The garden programs were specifically designed to improve the mental and physical health of city dwellers, said Fredrik Björk, a lecturer at Malmö University who specializes in environmental history. “The idea was that a working class family would be able to spend the summer there and work together but also have some leisure and fun,” Björk said. Cecilia Stenfors, an associate professor of psychology at Stockholm University, said her research shows those who frequently visit green spaces, whether a forest or a koloniträdgård, “have better health outcomes, in terms of fewer depressive symptoms, less anxiety, better sleep and fewer feelings of loneliness and social isolation.”

Search as diligently as you like through the more than 900 pages of the Mandate for Leadership and you will not see a single reference to positive health outcomes other than a desire to punish innocent people — mostly non-white — for the crime of not being affluent enough to afford private health insurance. Urbanization is a fact, one that is not subject to the whims and wacky ideas of ideologues who hate their fellow human beings with a passion that burns white hot. Not only is it the default for 85 percent of the world’s population, it is also, in most cases, the lifestyle with the lowest carbon emissions.

There is a solution to the idiocy promoted by the authors of the Mandate For Leadership. Raise the price of gasoline to reflect its economic impact on the planet. Then stand back and watch the tide turn in favor of bike lanes and urban living. When the cost of filling up exceeds $100, the nonsense about 10-lane highways and tearing up bike lanes will end — fast!