Above photo: Kayle Kaupanger / Unsplash.
Infill Housing Can Help Solve Both.
Infill housing is the single best climate policy available to cities. If L.A. is serious about reaching carbon neutrality and housing affordability, we must adopt it now.
Since taking office, Mayor Karen Bass has rightly focused on housing and homelessness in Los Angeles. But given the growing climate crisis, it’s crucial to maintain this focus while empowering our city to take effective climate action.
Already, the City and County of Los Angeles have committed to an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. To reach this critical target, we must make serious changes — especially in how we build our cities and suburbs.
This fundamental factor in our carbon footprint is so often overlooked in climate action plans. It’s also the key to tackling both our environmental challenges and our city’s housing affordability crisis simultaneously: infill housing, or the practice of building new housing on vacant or underused land in cities.
As we discuss in our new white paper, written by a coalition of urbanist and climate groups in Los Angeles, this straightforward but transformative urban planning strategy will make our city more sustainable, more livable, and more affordable.
From Barcelona to Tokyo, from Washington, D.C. to New York City, infill housing enables city living at its best: walkable and vibrant communities where people live near their schools, jobs, favorite restaurants, and places of worship. To get from place to place, people can walk, bike or catch the bus. And by increasing the amount of housing units available in a city, infill does wonders for affordability, correcting long-standing housing shortages that are driving housing costs up year after year and ensuring that everyone has options for places to live.
That cause-and-effect may seem obvious, but how exactly does infill benefit the environment? By “filling in” our cities with housing, we create compact communities that reduce car dependence, allowing people to use sustainable transportation options. With fewer cars on the road, far less carbon is emitted into the atmosphere and far less pollutants, such as brake and tire dust, are released into the surrounding air.
Research shows that for every 1% increase in density, there is a nearly equal decrease in carbon emissions per capita. This suggests that even modest density increases could reduce each Angeleno’s carbon footprint by 40% or more.
Indeed, as UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate Network emphasizes, “infill housing is probably the single most impactful measure that cities could take to reduce their emissions” – a sentiment broadly shared by environmental scientists, the Brookings Institute and even the Biden Administration.
The environmental and climate benefits of infill housing do not stop there. Due to shared walls and floors, infill housing also tends to be far more energy efficient to heat and cool, further reducing emissions. And from the bird’s eye view of the city, we can also see its benefit for local biodiversity. Infill housing slows the demand for urban sprawl at the city’s interface with wild habitat, protecting these areas for local species and preserving their valuable ecosystem services, such as water capture and filtration.
Infill housing also presents a powerful opportunity to create a more just and equitable Los Angeles. Marginalized and low-income communities have long borne the brunt of both housing shortage and climate change. By building more housing in high-resource areas, which typically sit in temperate areas closer to the coast, we can protect more people from extreme heat while providing access to economic opportunities. We can also direct public investments in climate resilience and subsidized affordable housing to historically disinvested communities. Paired with strong tenant protections, these actions will allow all Angelenos to benefit from a more sustainable Los Angeles.
The current challenges facing our city are largely linked to land use. Our city has long favored restrictive and exclusionary land practices that favor sprawl and limit how much housing can be built; three-quarters of residential land in Los Angeles is zoned to allow only detached single-family homes.
As a result, housing costs in the Southland have skyrocketed, pushing Angelenos farther from job centers in the search for housing that they can afford. This fuels car dependence, forcing many into long, polluting commutes, while contributing to the urban sprawl that destroys natural habitat and pushes many into high-risk climate areas. Infill housing can correct this trend by ending an era of restrictive, sprawling, and exclusionary land use practices that leave us and our environment worse off.
Without a robust plan to enable and develop infill housing at scale, our city and state simply will not reduce our carbon emissions enough to make a difference. A joint report from UC Berkeley and the State of California says that our state can only achieve carbon-neutral status by 2045 if our cities build large amounts of infill housing quickly.
To enact this vision, Southern California governments must adopt policies to facilitate infill housing. Upzoning residential areas, particularly near transit and near job centers in historically exclusionary neighborhoods, will unlock more affordable housing options in high-resource areas. Even outside of these targeted opportunity zones, cities can streamline “missing middle” housing — accessory dwelling units, townhomes and duplexes — and legalize new housing types, such as small-lot and single-staircase buildings. This simple strategy can allow more diverse housing options and increase the supply of housing city-wide, all without drastically changing neighborhood character.
Luckily, Los Angeles does not have to trailblaze on infill housing and can instead look to success stories from other cities. The Washington, D.C. metro area has excelled at transit-oriented development by both upzoning and incentivizing density around transit stops. As a result, D.C. now boasts some of the highest transit ridership in the nation alongside slower rent increases than other major American cities.
In contrast, while Los Angeles has a version of transit-oriented density incentives, it has been far more timid in upzoning single-family neighborhoods immediately next to rail stops — matching its broader hesitancy to allow any new housing units in single-family areas. Los Angeles should follow the powerful example of the D.C. metro area, where a pleasant and walkable cityscape, strong transit system and flourishing local economy coexist seamlessly.
Elected officials can no longer claim to support serious climate action while resisting efforts to add density to our city — the single best climate policy available to local governments. We must urge Mayor Bass and local leadership to adopt the evidence-based, common-sense strategies that will make Los Angeles a model of urban sustainability.