Urban Land Use Planning Book Pdf

[Zulema Estabrooks]

Ive always felt slightly ambivalent about this argument, though. Don't get me wrong, I think denser, more walkable communities are desirable for a whole panoply of reasons. They are, relative to car-focused sprawl, more economically vibrant and more conducive to physical, psychological, social, and even political health.

I mean, I can't take it, though. I can't take better than that. I came back from Barcelona; I just walk around Seattle now, looking around, being like, "You could fit a whole apartment there. You could fit a whole apartment there." So I love this stuff. But my question and I have sort of two questions, one of which we'll spend most of our time on. One is, is it really the best climate policy? If you're just focusing on greenhouse gas emissions, is this the fastest or best way to do things? And then two, which maybe we can get to a little bit at the end, political implications of attaching this to climate, of making this a climate thing.

That's a lot, but it's still generally overlooked as a major contributor to the climate crisis. Both our analysis within RMI is showing that if we are going to have any pathway to staying on a climate alignment, we're going to have to reduce VMT in the United States by 20%, along with getting 70 million EVs on the road. So those two strategies are going to have to be complimentary.

We're also seeing similar analysis globally as well. I'm not sure if you caught the analysis that ICCT put out last year, but they put out analysis showing that if we're going to do an all-out scenario, to even stay aligned with a 1.7 degree C scenario, we're going to have to both electrify everything, but also reduce the amount that we're driving and shift to more efficient modes of transportation. So land use reform is going to be absolutely critical if we want to have any chance at staying aligned with 1.5 or 1.5 degree C scenario.

My addition to what Heather said would be one, there's a really, really strong relationship between urban form and per capita emissions, and it's a near universal relationship. So you see it everywhere in the world, and you see it regardless of differences in climate, wealth, culture, demographics, whatever.

On the demand side, urban form is the closest thing we have to a master key. It's critical to unlocking emissions across sectors. You referenced transportation, and that's the most obvious one. You reduce travel distances, you reduce car dependencies, but the impacts that are relatively unappreciated, or at least underappreciated, are the embodied carbon in the built environment, both buildings and infrastructure. There's 40% less embodied carbon on average, in the average multifamily housing unit than there is in a single-family one, reducing energy consumption in buildings. So detached single-family homes consume way, way more energy. And by the way, way more energy is required to actually transmit and distribute that electricity and water to them in the first place.

If you take the emissions out of the cars by electrifying them take the emissions out of the buildings by electrifying them and attaching them to clean energy. In other words, if you attach both cars and buildings to clean electricity, what's the remainder? In other words, what in land use itself, what's the remainder there?

Yeah, even if we flip some magical switch today and got 100% EV sales tomorrow, we'd still have nearly 100 million internal combustion engine vehicles on the road in the US today. And just to put the numbers in context, 2022 EV sales were less than 14 million. We have 112 million registered light-duty vehicles. So, there is this stock versus flow problem.

Exactly. And we did this analysis: What would it look like to do an "all of the above" strategy with respect to transportation emissions reductions? And the thing that you see is that material emissions reductions associated with demand reduction, with that whole system strategy, with reducing VMT, they start now, material emissions. Because as soon as you take

a vehicle off the road, you have reduced emissions regardless of the powertrain of that vehicle. Whereas electrification only starts to deliver big material impact in emissions terms once you've achieved a reasonably high penetration in terms of on-road vehicles. So there's this stock versus flow issue.

you're talking about transportation or any other sector, is actually reduce demand. The second point I'll make is that these strategies are entirely complementary. And by reducing demand you're actually accelerating the process of electrification. You're making it easier and faster and cheaper to get 100% penetration of EV's or clean energy or whatever else it is.

Right, so let's then look at this recent analysis. It's basically trying to look at, in the US, what is the scale of emission reductions available through good land use policy. So maybe, Heather, you could just tell us a little bit about that analysis and how it worked.

You mentioned that in your introduction, and I think this is something that we really need to look at. A local equivalency is if we look at Colorado, our analysis found that the greenhouse gas emissions reduction would amount up to 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2033, which is equivalent to half a million gas-powered vehicles being driven for a year.

Hmm. How to think about that number is something I want to come back to, but let's talk about the analysis anymore. So a couple of things. One is, when you say you modeled good land use policy, my understanding is that what you modeled is, you know, we have x population growth projected for this state. Let's model that population growth going into those areas of the state where they already have lower VMT. Basically. Like, let's channel new population growth to the places where there's already less driving. Is that roughly what you mean when you say you modeled good land use policy? Like that's what you modeled? Yes.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. We looked at emissions associated with

new housing a decade from now using two things. One, the population growth forecast and housing underproduction data to project new housing construction. And then we also looked at census block level data sets estimating residential vehicle miles traveled, the amount that we're driving to determine transportation emissions in each state under different housing development scenarios.

Right. So just to be clear, like this is not modeling the full suite of what you could imagine doing in urban reform. It's not even really about making places that now suck, better. It's just channeling population growth to the places that are already doing well, basically.

This is sort of based on analysis by UC Berkeley's CoolClimate Center. And again, this is a point that you made earlier in the conversation. They found that relationship applying consistently across jurisdictions and found that urban infill was almost invariably one of the top three climate action levers within local government control across the state of California. So that 70 million ton figure: yeah, I think it's fair to say that it's conservative, or at least it's by no means an upper bound.

Well, I was going to get to this later, but let's wrestle with it now because I'm wrestling with how to think of that figure. On the one hand, it's a lower bound in that this is a pretty modest reform. Right? You're just channeling new population growth to areas that are already doing well and you theoretically could do a lot more with urban land use. On the other hand, you are modeling every state doing this. Right? Like you're, you're modeling reform happening in, you know, hundreds of jurisdictions. So in that sense, in the political sense, it seems a huge lift.

if they have the patience and the capital and to navigate through the thicket of regulations and permits and all the rest of it, and manage to develop a project, an urban infill project, example of compact mixed-use development, there's quite often windfall profits associated with them.

Well, I want to press on that a little bit, but I want to set it aside for

now. I want to get to the analysis. So the reforms modeled are channeling new population into low VMT areas. And so you're adding up how much emissions are avoided. What are the sort of categories of emissions that are avoided by doing that?

So there's three. About half of pollution reduction is associated with increasing conveniently located housing and from that translating into reduced travel. So half of the pollution is coming from cars burning less gas and from cars consuming less electricity.

Exactly. But as Rashad has mentioned a couple of times, there's such a broader impact that land use reform is bringing to decarbonization. And so we're seeing that a third of the pollution reduction is also coming from reduced vehicle manufacturing, as mentioned earlier, too, around the lifecycle of it. So reducing vehicle manufacturing and upstream oil production.

Absolutely. I mean, it's a complex problem and if we're going to solve complex problems we actually have to look at the whole system and that's a portion of it. The other thing that we're seeing, which I think is certainly less frequently talked about, is the impact that land use has on carbon sinks. So those are being lost to urban sprawl. And we're also seeing buildings that are coming up with urban sprawl being less efficient and the materials are more carbon intensive.

Yeah. I wish you all could come and talk to Seattle NIMBYs about that because they love to invoke trees around here when they're nimbying. And, you know, you lose so many more trees by sprawling out than by infilling.

So, you know, historically, most urban land expansion occurs on agricultural land. And not just any agricultural land, the most productive agricultural land, because it makes sense that that, you know, we build cities around the most productive agricultural land. So it's the indirect impacts that matter. So if you care at all about forests, about biodiversity, you need to care about this. So there's analysis that shows, and there's a range that that indirect loss of forest cover from cropland displacement can be 5-10x higher than the direct displacement associated with housing production and sprawl on the urban periphery.

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