The House Select Committee on Climate Change released a new legislative blueprint this week for tackling the climate crisis that incorporates many of SGA’s recommendations across our programs, demonstrating how smart growth is at the core of any potential plan to reduce emissions.
“This is the kind of bold but multifaceted plan that we’ll need to tackle the climate crisis and prioritize aid for those Americans most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change,” said SGA President & CEO Calvin Gladney. “There’s no one solution to climate change, and we will only reach our targets if we start to unwind all the many ways that current federal policy incentivizes sprawl, increases emissions, and accelerates inequities, and then propose new, more holistic paradigms that will lead us to a more equitable and climate resilient future.”
So how are we going to get to those ambitious targets? Here are four ways the committee has adopted a smart growth approach to solving the climate crisis, including many specific recommendations that we offered to the committee staff.
Lower emissions by building more homes people can afford near more transit
Housing and transportation are inextricably linked, and the best kind of affordable housing is in places with good access to lots of jobs and services via a range of low-cost (and low-emission) transportation options—like public transportation. The Committee demonstrates a good grasp of this concept (p.109):
The United States is facing a housing affordability crisis, particularly in its urban areas as more people move to cities in search of economic opportunities. At the same time, construction of affordable housing in these areas has fallen, often due to zoning restrictions and neighborhood opposition, causing demand to far outstrip supply. The result is rising housing costs in urban centers and displacement of low-income communities and communities of color to more suburban areas, where public transit options may be scarce or insufficient. Housing policy becomes climate policy when it limits households to one choice—cars—to commute and access services.
But they also understand the implications—it’s not as simple as only building more housing near transit:
Experience in cities across the country, however, shows that development near transit does not always help low-income households—those who are least likely to own cars and would benefit the most from transit access. Unless cities force inclusion of affordable housing and factor in equity concerns, developers gravitate toward higher-rent options, such as luxury condos and retail space.
“Transportation is the single largest source of carbon pollution in the U.S. in part because federal transportation policy has long prioritized high-speed, long-distance car travel at the expense of cleaner and more affordable transportation options as well as shorter or shared car trips,” said Beth Osborne, the director of Transportation for America. “This climate action plan would dramatically change how we measure success in transportation to stop incentivizing transportation investments that contribute to catastrophic climate change.”
Similar to the INVEST Act transportation bill being considered by the House this week, this plan recommends creating a new performance measure for greenhouse gas emissions, requiring states and metro areas to measure emissions and then create plans for lowering them. This seems like a subtle change but it is hard to overstate the impact. It gets a lot harder to justify building a new highway (that you probably can’t afford to maintain anyway) when you have to reduce emissions with your federal dollars, considering that every one-percent increase in lane miles results in a one-percent increase in vehicle miles traveled.
The plan also adopted T4America’s core priority to start measuring access to destinations, directing states and MPOs to start evaluating how well the transportation system facilitates access to housing, jobs, and critical services by any and all modes—similar to provisions that were included in the INVEST Act. Measuring access (instead of just vehicle speed) is already a more just way to evaluate transportation spending, but the plan also directs agencies to look at how access might differ for low-income communities and communities of color.
Lower emissions by prioritizing everyone’s safety instead of just those driving
The Committee makes numerous recommendations throughout the plan to prioritize funding for low-carbon transportation, especially walking and biking. The plan says Congress should update and boost funding for the Transportation Alternatives Program—which was doubled in the INVEST Act but is still just a paltry $1.5 billion per year for the entire country—as well as for other programs that make streets safer and more welcoming for bicyclists, pedestrians, and other vulnerable users.