Photo: Mark Strosberg, under a Creative Commons license.
At this point, most serious researchers agree that the average city-dweller produces fewer climate-warming emissions than a typical suburban or rural resident. City-folks tend to drive less, and walk or use transit more, than those of us who live in suburbs or out in the country. And city dwellers also tend to have less living space per capita, and are more likely to share walls or ceilings with their neighbors—all of which tend to reduce energy consumption per person. (And just to be clear: there’s no finger-pointing intended here, since my own neighborhood easily qualifies as suburban!)
The connection between urban form and greenhouse gases is strong enough that many policymakers concerned about climate change are looking for ways to trim back on rural development, in exchange for a little more housing in city and town centers.
A little while ago, at the request of King County (which contains Seattle and its closest suburbs), Sightline took a look at one increasingly popular mechanism for doing just that: Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR. In a nutshell, TDR programs allow willing owners of rural lands to sell their development rights—which means that the rural lands will remain rural. In turn, landowners in areas where the county wants to encourage development can purchase those rights, and thereby gain the right to boost housing intensity to higher levels than local zoning rules would ordinarily allow. At their best, TDRs are a winner all the way around: rural landowners get some income for protecting their land; purchasers get a financial boost from higher development intensity; farmland or open space gets spared from development; and taxpayers and utility ratepayers save a little cash from having better-planned development. And, with a little luck, the county that runs the TDR program might help trim greenhouse gas emissions in the process!
That’s the theory, anyway…and, in fact, our study found that the greenhouse gas reductions are almost certainly real:
Sightline’s analysis of King County’s TDR program and a variety of public data sources suggests that a single TDR exchange could reduce climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions by about 270 metric tons over 30 years, compared with development patterns that might otherwise occur. This is a significant reduction, representing half of the average [per capita] emissions from one US resident for the same period.
Combining energy savings on transportation, electricity, and home heating, we found that shifting a home in the distant exurbs of King County into a compact city or town center can make a real dent in household emissions. And the greenhouse gas reductions were still substantial, even when we assumed that cars and home appliances would grow more efficient over the years.
The largest reason that emissions fell in urban areas was that city dwellers drive less. We used two very different models of household transportation energy by neighborhood—based on completely different methods and data sources—and they came to the same conclusion: people in far-flung neighborhoods with few businesses or stores nearby logged more miles in their cars than folks in compact town and city centers. See, for example, this map of transportation emissions in western King County, based on a transportation model from the Center for Neighborhood Technology.
But the devil is in the details. In fact, we looked at some specific cases where King County had used TDRs to boost housing density in areas that were technically inside the urban growth boundary, but still pretty far out in the suburbs. The models we were using showed that some of this new housing would have been associated with even greater transportation emissions than the average King County home!
So you just can’t say that all TDR transactions automatically reduce emissions. Some definitely do—especially when they boost housing in the yellowest parts of the map above. But some are arguably worse for the climate than doing nothing at all.
What this all points to, in my mind, is that TDR programs can help cities and counties pare back on greenhouse gas emissions. But like any tool, they should be used with care. From the climate’s perspective, using TDRs to boost single-family housing at the urban fringe often represents a wasted opportunity.
Sightline GIS intern Erik Cortes conducted mapping and other analysis for Sightline’s report on Transfer of Development Rights programs.
Peter
I strongly disagree with the inference. Those living in rural areas have footprints that have a small multiple owing to a larger degree of self-sufficiency. Consumerism is also far more geared toward refurbishing existing equipment rather than discarding and buying anew. Those in urban areas work for corporations whose footprints are extensive both with the region and country and internationally. That footprint explains the discrepancy between this urban elitist report and international studies that lambast the US footprint.
For America’s urban elites, look in the mirror, especially at consumption habits before turning your hipster gunsites on those in rural areas.
Eric Hess
Peter — As Clark said, he’s not dissing on suburban and rural residents. Rural communities certainly play an important role in feeding the country. This is just a statement of facts that when you preserve rural areas and increase urban density through TDR, climate-warming emissions can go down.
Facts are facts, and two main drivers of personal GHG emissions, transportation and energy, drop in dense communities (where things are closer, you’ve got more access to public transportation, and smaller living spaces require less heat). See the charts in our report for data.
That’s not a critique of a rural life. As a society, we’ll continue to emit GHGs and studies like this help prioritize where we can responsibly emit, like in rural food-production areas, and where we can trim—like ending unnecessary sprawl that increases emissions with little societal benefit.
Certainly, rural residents beat their urban counterparts in some aspects, perhaps with less consumerism as you note. See our recent post on the Repairing Renaissance underway.
Not Fan
Speaking of facts being facts, please acknowledge another fact: The Sightline Institute utterly despises single family housing, and is doing its utmost to force people into apartments, and otherwise order us to live the way you want us to live.
Come on, be honest, if you can.
Thank you.
Gwendolyn High
This post is so very timely. King County is considering the major four-year updates to their Comprehensive Plan right now. In fact, the Transportation, Economy and Environment Committee was briefed this morning on the proposed TDR Program policy updates. This is something that our community have been working on for years. We are on the urban fringe on the plateau east of Renton between May Creek and the Cedar River. We have received the highest concentration of TDRs in unincorporated King County. And we are not well suited to absorb this extra density. None of the 6 TDR projects approved here is walkable to anything. We have very limited transit service (weekday mornings in-bound to Seattle ONLY and evening out-bound from Seattle only and no weekends), no Park & Ride, we still have open ditches and moonlight instead of sidewalks and streetlights. But when the new density lands, there is no infrastructure or amenity investment to match. Which is really unfair in light of the fact that King County has contracts with Seattle, Issaquah, Bellevue and Sammamish for up to almost $2M to accommodate additional impacts from the TDRs they have agreed to take. If the same funding model as these contracts was used to support unincorporated communities who receive TDRs, there would have been between $800K and $2M to King County neighborhoods. Not a penny…
Building pressure is mounting. Projects that were approved nearly 5 years ago are finally clearing trees or submitting plat revisions. Time is of the essence. We need to take the time we have to tune up these policies.
King County very literally leads the way in Washington on TDRs. Their program is the basis for the Regional TDR Program that was recently adopted – which will bring 17,000 TDRs to King County from neighboring counties. We have an opportunity and an obligation to show the region how to do this _right_!
You can see all of our maps, data and analysis here:
http://careeastplateau.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/tdr-testimony-at-king-county-council-tree-committee/
We welcome all feedback!
Not Fan
A good friend of mine is a retired city planner from Portland. We were discussing the City of Seattle’s underhanded attempt to further dilute single-family zoning at the behest of developer-funded “greenwash” interests.
He told me that Portland did all of these things quite a while back, to the extent that the formal zoning maps there are a joke. Everywhere you look, there is some trap door that got carved out by some politically connected developer.
The TDR program in King County is just one more example of how big money interests mask themselves as “progressive” and “environmentalist,” when all they’re actually doing is building a larger and more obnoxious development somewhere, and often with fewer amenities.
Pseudo-environmental interests like the Sightline Institute are all too happy to go along with the charade.