Greening the City By Building More Stuff
(CC photo by takomabibelot)
Dave Alpert reports that DC City Council member Mary Cheh is looking for ideas about how to make Washington, DC greener:
The DC Council wants your bold ideas for greening the District of Columbia. On Friday, July 10th, Councilmember Mary Cheh’s Committee on Government Operations and the Environment and GW’s Office of Sustainability are hosing a “Policy Greenhouse” where ten people get to present their 5-minute big ideas.
The ideas need not be quick fixes, they emphasize, but rather ideas that would have a significant impact on the environment or introduce significant innovation. The site lists congestion pricing, vertical farming, “expanded retro-commissioning” (I’m not sure what that is), requiring carbon neutrality for public buildings, or “cool cars” that reflect solar energy as examples of the kinds of ideas.
I think the most important environmental policy insight that the DC government could make is simply to realize that the District, which contains only about 10 percent of the total population of the metropolitan area, has very little influence over the aggregate quantity of stuff that gets built in the metro area. The rate of job growth and population growth in the region is largely driven by independent factors. What DC policy influences is not the total quantity of stuff in the region but what proportion of the stuff winds up located in DC as opposed to located elsewhere in the region. And when you look at it, even without any additional “greener” it’s more ecologically sustainable for an additional household to locate itself in the District than to locate itself in Loudon County. Similarly, it’s “greener” for a new office building to be built in DC than to be built in Tyson’s Corner.
Under the circumstances, the “greenest” thing DC can do is simply to try to attract more stuff into the District—to try to encourage an increase in the quantity of housing units and office space located in DC as opposed to elsewhere. There are various levers to do that, but two measures that suggest themselves are to eliminate or sharply curtail regulations mandating the construction of parking as part of new developments (obviously some parking would still be built without regulatory mandates, but at the margin you’d have more development and less parking) and to permit the construction of taller buildings in the central business district and near Metro stations. Not only is development in DC “greener” than development in the suburbs and exurbs, but increasing the density of DC will make DC “greener” on a per capita basis by decreasing (on average) the distance people need to travel to get to stuff.
Additional measures to reduce the ecological footprint of existing District residents and employers—the sort of thing the Council seems to be primarily looking at—are nice, but the biggest game-changer would be to increase the proportion of DC area jobs and people that are actually located in DC.
17 Responses to “Greening the City By Building More Stuff”
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June 24th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
LOL…yet another plea for DC to allow taller buildings to be built. At the least, I like the different angles that you come at this “passion” with. Maybe you should go present this as one of the big ideas at the Policy Greenhouse. Methinks it’s a non-starter, though, as many people prefer it to be.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Congestion pricing? More Bush like policies from Obama. Did Tyler Duval burrow in the Transportation Department? It remains a friendly place for Repugnicants and PEU’s (private equity underwriters) under Ray LaHood
I voted for change.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Plant some street trees.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
For a cute cartoon on Obama-Bush:
http://tpzoo.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/through-a-glass-darkly/
June 24th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Oh, Christ, vertical farms. Please kill me.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Alan, congestion pricing is supported by just about every transportation policy expert I’ve ever encountered, regardless of ideological persuasion: liberal, conservative, libertarian, whatever. From a policy perspective, it’s a bit of a no-brainer. Note that the most largest such system in the world was championed by Ken Livingstone, a socialist, and presumably no Bush-lover.
Likewise, from a political perspective, congestion pricing elicits a fairly uniform response across the ideological spectrum: foaming populist outrage.
It sounds to me like you didn’t vote for change. Obama will continue to ignore congestion pricing and VMT taxes just like his predecessors, and you’ll thank him for it.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Any greening by growth has to be slow. That new metro-accessible office building in the district might mean that commuters are generating less CO2, but you don’t want to put up a new building just to render another one vacant. Building itself generates CO2. Steel and aluminum are energy intensive, while concrete production generates a lot of CO2 directly.
You really want greening by attrition and growth. That isn’t going to excite anyone.
There is also the school situation. Even if you change regs to allow high rise office buildings right next to high rise quality apartments and surround them with a variety of walkable stores and services, you’ve got crappy schools. DC has some of the worst schools of any big city, located right next to 2 of the best public school systems (Montgomery County, Fairfax County) in the country.
If I’m a business owner, you need to convince me to locate in a building in the district without a parking lot. As long as my workers want to live in the suburbs, away from metro (because it’s cheaper), you have a tough sell.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
into my eyes, causing more accidents. And all the surrounding buildings’ air-conditioning costs go up unless they’re similarly reflective.
Otherwise, great idea.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
More population concentration or more efficient transportation.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
“Councilmember Mary Cheh’s Committee on Government Operations and the Environment and GW’s Office of Sustainability are hosing a “Policy Greenhouse” where ten people get to present their 5-minute big ideas.”
Wait… why is the Policy Greenhouse getting hosed by Mary Cheh and GW?
June 24th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Ah yes, Mr. Yglesias’ answer to all urban problems, Manhattenization.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
DC could learn a lot from Chicago:
Chicago green initiatives
They’ve been promoting things like Green Roofs for years, with some success.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
By some measures the central business district in DC is already very dense, despite the height restriction. Unless you add significantly to the carrying capacity of the transportation system you’re just not going to get a lot more people in and out of downtown during rush hour.
There’s nothing magic about adding density in DC, as opposed to other close-in parts of the metro area that are served by transit. There’s plenty of room for environmentally responsible growth around Metro stations in Alexandria and PG County, but I guess Matt has never been to those places.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
The Doctor, the island or the drink?
June 24th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
My post was:
Allow taller office buildings/appartment buildings, especially near Metro.
Charge for street use with a GPS to track location of each car. Higher charges for proximity to other low velocity vehicles (being part of traffic congestion).
Use funds for a metro loop or loops.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Yglesias is right about everything except the need to raise the height limit. Dense and tall aren’t the synonyms Yglesias thinks they are. I wrote about it here.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:41 am
I think the funniest thing here is that in about three years Matt will be eating at home, mourning the loss of some nice buildings that were torn down and replaced with blank-faced highrise development, and wondering why they can’t just close the bars at midnight so he can get some sleep.
If DC were any other city, what Matt says would be of great value. However, DC is the national capital. And right now I’m just not that eager to increase the number of lobbyists, and the drug companies, insurance companies, and war industries that have offices there.
There are lots of other places we can improve.