Climate

The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love

Landlords.

Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons.

Communal structures have the benefit of efficiencies of scale but the difficulties of managing a shared social space. Consequently, they are attractive on paper but only really appealing when the financial benefits of dense urban living outweigh the perceived risks and costs.

Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to.

I got to watch the Red, Green, and Purple lines installed in downtown Houston, in anticipation of an Olympics that never arrived. One of the secondary consequences of these lines was a massive private investment in the old housing stock south of downtown. Within a decade, enormous high rise condos and dense urban living spaces were either refitted, expanded, or fully constructed from scratch all along the transit corridors.

But the rent in these units was significantly higher than what could be found on the perimeter - from my experience it was $500-$1500 more expensive than the cheaper units out on Westheimer and Beltway 8, with some downtown luxury units going for $2500 to $4500/mo more.

Meanwhile, on the condo side, you're talking about 1200-2000 sqft units going for McMansion prices - $700k to $2.5M. Way outside the range of the average home buyer. Plus condo fees and taxes and higher utilities/groceries/etc. And good luck finding public education or childcare in the downtown districts.

If you were pulling a six-figure salary in a downtown office job, you could talk about living here. But I still know plenty of people commuting in all the way from Sugar Land or Katy or Spring, simply because a daily bus ticket or tollway pass was way cheaper than downtown rents. I also know more than a few junior professionals in their mid-20s who still live with their parents to save money.

So the ecological benefits are there. But the utility of these high rise units is heavily predicated on wages that match the sky high rents. The private sector demand for double-digit ROI makes all of these housing expansions of dubious benefit at scale. They might operate as a model for the future, but without public subsidies and rent caps, only the highest paid households are going to be able to participate.

Apartments are only a “great answer” to the rent-seeking pieces of shit that seek to greenwash hyperconsumption. They want you to own nothing, always be teetering on the edge of getting evicted, and pay rent to their landlord class indefinitely because “it’s better for the environment”.

Know what else is good for the environment? Turning the BlackRock C-suite (and anyone that profits from hoarding land) into mulch.

Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons. For one, residents share walls, floors, and ceilings with their neighbors, surrounding them with excellent insulation. Secondly, the square footage of each unit tends to be smaller than detached homes, so there’s less air to manage. Accordingly, it takes less energy to climate-control apartment units and keep people comfortable: The typical resident of a downtown high-rise emits one-third as much greenhouse gases as a resident of a detached house in the suburbs.