A Green New Deal for housing

this touches on a couple of things that a lot of people don't typically account for in climate and environmental policy. housing policy doesn't usually get put into these sorts of ideas, but it likely needs to form a significant crux of the push to limit climate change.

Density alone isn’t a low-carbon solution good enough to prioritize yuppies on bike paths over ending poverty. Density does lower carbon emissions. But study after study also finds that when residents of dense neighborhoods are wealthy, the footprint of their luxury consumption — from iPads to plane trips — overwhelms the carbon savings that come from walking to brunch.

Per capita carbon footprints in the West Village are two to three times higher than those of many comparably dense neighborhoods in the Bronx. Dense, mixed-income and working-class neighborhoods near public transit, anchored by public housing, are good to live in and have small carbon footprints. Right now, in hot land markets, well-planned public transit hubs raise housing costs and displace low-income residents away. Public transit-plus-housing would be far fairer — and would suck carbon out of the streets.

Could the United States reverse that damage and achieve anything resembling Red Vienna’s achievements? A brilliant report by left policy think tank, the People’s Policy Project, “Social Housing in the United States,” shows how Vienna, Sweden, and Finland managed to produce such high quality housing — and how the United States could do the same. Two takeaways stand out.

First: quality and financing. With upfront investment and intelligent policy design, you get glorious housing by pricing generous maintenance costs into tenants’ monthly payments. Then, for the poorest tenants, you subsidize out of a separate anti-poverty fund. One column for quality public housing. A second column for abolishing poverty.

The other takeaway: Speed. In the 1960s, Sweden had about three million housing units. Many were crumbling; plus they needed more. With some admittedly rough edges, Sweden built one million public homes in ten years. They increased their housing stock by roughly a third in a decade. Half a century ago.

The PPP proposal is more modest: ten million public housing units in ten years (which I propose repeating decade after decade), federally financed and locally implemented with financial structures similar to Vienna’s and Sweden’s. The cost? Roughly the equivalent to the Trump tax cut.