Diary of a Sustainable Developer: Affordability is the New Sustainability
October 19, 2017 | Adaptive Futures, Cities, Compact Development, Equity, Green Infrastructure, Guest Blogger, Urban Transformationby
Sustainable development, impact real estate, smart growth, equitable development. Whatever you want to call it, I’d like to suggest it really starts with housing, which is currently in a crisis mode. Having moved back to Boulder in 2016 after five years in San Francisco, I can report it's real. The thing about real estate, the built environment, is that it’s such a good, reliable indicator of social values, of social impact. It’s an outward proxy for our inner-life as a society, our integrity, values, what we care about collectively.
The key to sustainability and social impact, in the most practical sense, is housing. It all starts with "oikos" or "ecos," the Greek word for house and the root of both ecology and economy, two legs of sustainability's three-legged stool.
In 2003, when we launched a research project at New Ecology/MIT that culminated in the first comprehensive study of the costs and benefits of green affordable housing, we thought simply greening more buildings was a high-impact strategy.
We missed the point.
Especially now that green building is increasingly mainstream (though honest-to-goodness net-zero energy buildings remain a stretch goal), the real challenge when it comes to creating sustainable communities, and delivering social impact, I think, is building enough housing, of all types but especially for low- to middle-income earners, to achieve the right jobs/housing and supply/demand balance in any given place, which in turn allows for a socially and economically diverse community, to say nothing of a connected, transit-oriented one, without which there is, by definition, no true sustainability, no real smart, responsible, equitable growth.
Whether it’s Portland or Palo Alto, Denver or Detroit, Boston or Austin, affordable housing and housing supply are among today’s most wicked problems. And there will be 100 million more of us living in the US within the next 40 years. Where will we, where will they live?
In places like Boulder, where I live, rents are increasing at four and five times wage growth or more. Meanwhile, the state has a shortfall of 50,000 housing units. And Colorado is no different from any other fast-growing area. Unless and until we get closer to a reasonable balance between jobs and housing, supply and demand, the rest is commentary.
In 2009, I told an audience at the annual Boulder Economic Summit that “Density is the new open space” because I believed then, as I do now, that just as communities like Boulder, the Bay Area, Portland and so many other sought-after places were bold innovators in conserving land for agriculture and recreation 40 years ago, today we need a different kind of audacious innovation, one focused on creating livable, affordable, inclusive communities. In 2016, after I paid my last $5000/month rent check for 800 square feet in the Presidio, I changed my tune just a bit: Affordability, density's flip-side, is the new sustainability.
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