Build, Baby, Build To Fight Climate Change

The climate is getting hotter, and people are contributing to the change. What should we do about it? Many people think they’re fighting climate change and keeping the environment pristine by prohibiting development on huge chunks of land in California and otherwise making it prohibitively costly to build there.

They’re wrong. Building restrictions in California and other temperate areas make building new housing in the greenest, most climate-friendly places prohibitively costly and push people to the browner, less climate-friendly, carbon-spewing south.

Enter Bryan Caplan’s new book Build, Baby, Build, which I reviewed for AIER here. Caplan explains the optimistic economics and ethics- and pessimistic politics- of building regulation and shows just how many social problems can be addressed if not altogether alleviated simply by letting people build more housing. With respect to climate change and the environment, he explains research by the economists Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn showing how restrictions on building in California and the Northeast have raised housing prices and encouraged migration to less climate-friendly areas. I write this from my Sweet Home Alabama, which has a lot going for it but would be practically uninhabitable without air conditioning from about April until October.

In graduate school, I applied for a job in San Jose, California. I remember looking at the weather and being shocked: it now shows lows of 42 in December and January and highs of 82 in July and August. Birmingham, meanwhile, has lows of 36 and 33 in December and January and highs of 91 in July and August. Birmingham has five months–May, June, July, August, and September–with high temperatures greater than or equal to the hottest part of the year in San Jose. The median sale price of a single-family home in Birmingham? $189,450. Compare that to $1.7 million in San Jose. Yes, San Jose is expensive even for California, but the median single-family home sale price in Oakland is over $1 million. Even our very nice, centrally-located, well-insulated five-bedroom home built in 2018 is worth about a third of San Jose’s median sale price.

Yes, San Jose looks like a very nice place to live, and its gentle climate means people’s lives are gentler on the environment. The heavily regulated California housing market, however, means many people are priced out of places where their environmental footprint is smallest and pushed into places where their environmental footprint is largest. A browner, warmer planet is the unintended consequence of California regulators’ demand for low-density “green” housing.

If you’re looking for a great introduction to the environmental issues Caplan discusses, Kahn (one of the authors he discusses) did the world a huge favor by writing Fundamentals of Environmental Economics and publishing it on Amazon for $1 a little over a decade ago. It’s the perfect gift for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, and other gift-giving occasions, and it’s both cheaper (and greener) than a greeting card. It might even make people understand that cities like San Francisco need more housing much more than recycling bins.