Wealthier Americans have a larger carbon footprint in part due to larger homes

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Large homes and McMansions do not just take up land and resources at construction; according to a new study, they have larger carbon footprints. Here is the abstract:

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Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States. Using data on 93 million individual households, we estimate these GHGs across the contiguous United States and clarify the respective influence of climate, affluence, energy infrastructure, urban form, and building attributes (age, housing type, heating fuel) in driving these emissions. A ranking by state reveals that GHGs (per unit floor space) are lowest in Western US states and highest in Central states. Wealthier Americans have per capita footprints ∼25% higher than those of lower-income residents, primarily due to larger homes. In especially affluent suburbs, these emissions can be 15 times higher than nearby neighborhoods. If the electrical grid is decarbonized, then the residential housing sector can meet the 28% emission reduction target for 2025 under the Paris Agreement. However, grid decarbonization will be insufficient to meet the 80% emissions reduction target for 2050 due to a growing housing stock and continued use of fossil fuels (natural gas, propane, and fuel oil) in homes. Meeting this target will also require deep energy retrofits and transitioning to distributed low-carbon energy sources, as well as reducing per capita floor space and zoning denser settlement patterns.

More from the study linking energy use, wealth, and housing size:

We find that both household energy use and emissions per square meter vary widely across the country, driven primarily by thermal energy demand and the fuel used in electricity production (“grid mix”). ZIP-code level analysis shows income is positively correlated with both per capita energy use and emissions, along with the tendency for wealth and living area to increase together. City and neighborhood analyses underscore the environmental benefits of denser settlement patterns and the degree to which carbon-intensive electrical grids counteract these benefits.

Bigger homes require more energy to heat, cool, and light. Wealthier people can afford these expenses. Indeed, being able to shoulder all of these costs with a larger home may be a form of conspicuous consumption: “I have enough resources to live in a larger home and maintain it.” Critics of McMansions argue that such homes are meant to impress those who see them, not necessarily great spaces for residents to inhabit.

The study also connects the findings to possibilities for making single-family homes more green. The models work with two options: (1) retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient and (2) reducing power generated with fossil fuels (“grid decarbonization”). Yet, there are other options to pursue that could help with the situation:

1. Promoting the construction of or the inhabiting of smaller homes. This could range from tiny houses to the “not-so-big home” to smart-sizing or down-sizing. This may require more significant lifestyle changes – cutting on consumption would be difficult – that are too hard for many people.

2. Promoting fewer single-family homes. While they are the basis of suburban life and popular in many other American communities, multi-family housing is more energy efficient. Given the rhetoric surrounding suburbs (such as President Trump claiming Democrats want to abolish suburb), this may not be easy.

3. Promoting less energy use within homes. What if residents used less heat, air conditioning, and lighting? What if they watched less TV and used their phones and computers less? Again, this might require large lifestyle changes that many would find difficult.

4. Constructing newer homes with much stricter energy guidelines, perhaps even net-zero-energy homes or passive houses. Even if these are restricted to wealthier homeowners who can afford the changes, this could help limit the energy use of larger homes. Also, if such homes are viewed by the public as cool or desirable, perhaps these features trickle down.

5. Could wealthier homeowners purchase carbon offsets for their homes? This would allow them to keep their bigger structures while providing funds that could be put to good use elsewhere.

The scenarios in the paper as well as the ones I proposed all require working multiple sectors of society to get to a place where homes, particularly large ones, use less energy.

Fewer plane flights, worse weather forecasts, collecting data

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The consequences of COVID-19 continue: with fewer commercial airline flights, weather models have less data.

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During their time in the skies, commercial airplanes regularly log a variety of meteorological data, including air temperature, relative humidity, air pressure and wind direction — data that is used to populate weather prediction models…

With less spring meteorological data to work with, forecasting models have produced less accurate predictions, researchers said. Long-term term forecasts suffered the most from a lack of meteorological data, according to the latest analysis…

Forecast accuracy suffered the most across the United States, southeast China and Australia, as well as more remote regions like the Sahara Desert, Greenland and Antarctica.

Though Western Europe experienced an 80 to 90 percent drop in flight traffic during the height of the pandemic, weather forecasts in the region remained relatively accurate. Chen suspects the region’s densely-packed network of ground-based weather stations helped forecasters continue to populate models with sufficient amounts of meteorological data.

Models, whether for pandemics or weather, need good input. Better data up front helps researchers adjust models to fit past patterns and predict future outcomes. Absent of data, it can be hard to fit models, especially in complex systems like weather.

As noted above, there are other ways to obtain weather data. Airplanes offered a convenient way to collect data: thousands of regular flights could lead to a lot of data. In contrast, constructing ground stations would require more resources in the short-term.

Yet, any data collector needs to remain flexible. One source of data can disappear, leading to a new approach. Or, a new opportunity might arise and switching methods makes sense. Or, those studying and predicting weather could develop multiple good sources of data that could options or redundancy amid black swan events.

Few may recognize all of this is happening. Weather forecasts will continue. Behind the scenes, we might even get better weather models in the long run as researchers and meteorologists adjust.

McMansions, SUVs, and megachurches

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I recently reviewed the book The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry by sociologists Mark Mulder and Gerardo Martí. As the authors describe Schuller’s emphasis on growth, they include this line on page four:

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As I studied the use of the term McMansion in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I found people regularly linked McMansions to SUVs. As the cited passage above suggests, McMansions and SUVs came about at the same time. Perhaps some would go even further and say McMansion owners are likely to be SUV owners or the two consumer goods are likely to be found in the same communities or kinds of places. And, like the passage above, the comparisons could go further than SUVs to include large food items.

Rarely have I seen the growth of McMansions and the growth of single-family homes in the United States connected to megachurches. A similar argument could be made: in a period of growth as Americans liked to consume bigger items in bigger settings with providers happy to produce larger goods, McMansions and megachurches came about or became widely recognized at roughly the same time (McMansions built in the closing decades of the 1900s and as a term widely used by the early 2000s; megachurch as a phenomenon known by the 1980s). As everything grew and appetites expanded, so did churches. And maybe megachurches were likely to spring up in or near McMansion filled suburban communities flush with money, family life, and access to highways.

At least in this study, Robert Schuller was enamored with growth decades before McMansions became a thing. Mulder and Martí suggest Schuller pushed for growth in order to encourage more growth; previous accomplishments became evidence for pursuing and fulfilling future accomplishments (until it could no longer hold together). Yet, Schuller was well-positioned in a booming suburban area: he arrived in Orange County in the 1950s and capitalized on the growing population and appetite for large churches in a way that few other religious leaders could match.

Now, linking these multiple phenomena together would take some more work. Were Orange County McMansion owners more likely to attend a megachurch? Is this a pattern throughout the United States? Did an ideology of growth pervade many sectors at the same time and mutually reinforce each other or explicitly intersect at points?

Considering what we know about the broad sweep of suburban TV shows

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An Atlas Obscura piece on Levittown begins with a summary of suburbs on television:

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From the air, the homes fan out like intricate beadwork. For decades, America’s suburbs have been a popular setting for television shows, from Leave It To Beaver* to Desperate Housewives, chronicling entertaining trivialities against the backdrop of meticulously shorn lawns, the drifting smoke of barbecues, the infrastructure of cars and roads: a pleasantly domestic—but fraught—version of the American dream.

There is no doubt about the claim in the second sentence: “America’s suburbs have been a popular setting for television shows.” Today, television viewers can still find new suburban sitcoms that play with the 1950s formula (actually begun in radio) of a happy nuclear family with plenty of resources working through entertaining yet relatively low-level issues. And as noted at the end (and developed by numerous scholars – I would recommend starting with the work of Lynn Spigel), the television image of suburbs was too pleasant and reinforced a well-off white image of the suburbs.

At the same time, I have published two articles on television in the suburbs and they contribute to a more complicated story of suburbs on television. In my article “From I Love Lucy in Connecticut to Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane: Suburban TV Shows, 1950-2007,” I find that suburban-set shows never dominated the most popular American TV shows. Although such shows might be familiar, common, and live on in memories connected to a different era, they are not the only places Americans see on television. Take as one example the Brady Bunch: it may have been watched for millions in syndication, it may have particularly influenced younger viewers, and it had an iconic house but it never was a Top 30 television show. The suburban TV show is well-known but how influential they are is debatable.

Similarly, more recent suburban TV shows have truly tweaked the format. Lynn Spigel points out that twists to the typical format started early on while more recent shows feature suburban lifestyles from a different point of view (thinking of Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, and American Housewife off the top of my head). I wrote “A McMansion for the Suburban Mob Family: The Unfulfilling Single-Family Home of The Sopranos” and considered this critically-acclaimed and popular show set in suburban New Jersey. It has a similar set-up to 1950s suburban shows – the successful white nuclear family living in a big suburban house – but ultimately suggests all of this is an illusion as Tony Soprano’s mob dealings undergird and undercut the family’s attempts to live a normal suburban life. The Sopranos is not the only show to do this; others feature other family structures, deviant behavior, and alternative routes into and out of the suburban dream.

At this point, have television shows covered all of the stories of American suburbs? No. Is there still a typical format? Yes. Have creators played around with the typical format to present other stories? Yes.. Do Americans want to watch suburban TV shows? Yes and no.

Does new housing data support the claim that people are leaving cities?

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Reuters tries to connect the dots between data on housing construction and claims that people are leaving cities:

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U.S. homebuilding increased in June by the most in nearly four years amid reports of rising demand for housing in suburbs and rural areas as companies allow employees to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic…

A survey on Thursday showed confidence among single-family homebuilders vaulting in July to levels that prevailed before the coronavirus crisis upended the economy in March.

Builders reported increased demand for single-family homes in lower density markets, including small metro areas, rural markets and large metro suburbs. The public health crisis has shifted office work from commercial business districts to homes, a trend that economists predict could become permanent…

Home building last month was boosted by a 17.2% jump in the construction of singe-family housing units, which accounts for the largest share of the housing market, to a rate of 831,000 units. Groundbreaking activity increased in the Midwest, South and Northeast, but fell in the West.

It is widely assumed that large numbers of urban residents have left New York (and possibly) other places for suburbs and other parts of the country. If so, this could influence the housing industry. Yet, I would ask a few more questions.

First question to ask: is this activity due to people leaving cities or other factors? It would be helpful to consider other possible factors at play such as seasonal changes (more housing activity in warmer weather, more demand in warmer months) and the economy (ranging from confidence of different actors to mortgage rates to available capital to unemployment – all intertwined with COVID-19). Is the uptick in activity since roughly early March to today (when

Second question to ask: if there is evidence that things are happening simultaneously, is there more evidence to suggest they are causal patterns at play? If people are leaving cities, it does not necessarily mean they are looking for new homes. Perhaps they want to return to the city, perhaps they are living with others, perhaps they are willing to rent for a while and see what happens.

And out of my own curiosity, the reporting I have seen about people leaving cities during COVID-19 seems to primarily apply to wealthier residents. Does this mean the new construction of homes will tilt toward larger, more expensive homes? If so, this is a continuation of a bifurcated housing market where those with resources will have options while many with limited resources or opportunities will not.

There is a lot to consider here and we may not the patterns for a while yet. Even if the housing industry thinks that people are fleeing cities for good, this matters regardless of the actual data.

Attaching McMansions to baby boomers

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Are McMansions a a defining feature of baby boomers?

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This year has highlighted America’s generation gaps, especially between the two largest generations. Both have been stereotyped as being self-absorbed — millennials as selfie-obsessed avocado toast addicts, boomers for their oversized “mcmansions” and self-indulgence. And both are feeling pandemic pain, though in different ways.

The piece does acknowledge that this is a stereotype. Yet, some of the stereotypical pieces do go together:

  1. The term “McMansion” arose in the late 1990s and the homes have been in the United States at least two decades. The baby boomers were adults with careers and money when McMansions became a thing. Baby boomers also came of age in the era of consumerism and “greed is good.” They had the money and resources to buy the new big houses. This argument has been made before.
  2. McMansions are known for their tackiness and quest to impress; baby boomers are also stereotyped for their indulgent behavior.
  3. Commentators have suggested baby boomers will have difficulty selling their McMansions. Additionally, baby boomers will try to pass their homes to their children.
  4. If McMansions are often viewed negatively, perhaps it is easier or convenient to attach them to a group – here a generational cohort – that receives its own share of criticism. If McMansions are bad, it can be handy to blame someone for them.

Whether McMansions get passed along to millennials and future generations remains to be seen. But, based on what I have seen, there is a good chance that baby boomers and McMansions may be tied together for decades.

Naperville considering affordable housing – but primarily for current residents?

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Naperville will soon discuss recommendations from a consultant regarding affordable housing. Several of the suggestions point to at least some of the affordable housing serving current residents:

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Commissioners say the ideas are designed to help the city meet a state mandate on affordable housing and provide more places where seniors, young professionals and others who can’t afford many of the houses in Naperville can live…

Establish a rehabilitation loan fund to help low-income senior homeowners make repairs so they can age in place.

Establish a housing trust fund to help veterans, seniors, populations with special housing needs and first responders (including nurses, police officers and firefighters) purchase a home…

These ideas and others are listed in the report from SB Friedman, which found that roughly 22% of homeowners and 44% of renters in Naperville are spending more than 30% of their income on housing, making them “cost-burdened.” Many of these households are low-income, the report found, saying “there appears to be a considerable need for both owner- and renter-occupied affordable housing and income-restricted housing throughout the city to meet current residents’ needs.”

One way for wealthier suburbs to address affordable housing is to look for solutions for some of the populations mentioned above: seniors who are retired and are downsizing or having a hard time affording local housing on a restricted income; young professionals who are just out of school and looking to establish their career; and local workers who are seen as essential to the community such as teachers, fire fighters, and police officers. These are all groups that a wealthier suburb would want to keep as older residents should be able to age in place, attracting young professionals is important for keeping a strong tax base and having more young families in the community, and having certain occupations near their jobs and involved in the community is viewed as a plus.

At the same time, it is not clear that this gets at the full range of housing needs in the Naperville area, Chicago region, or the United States. There are lots of people who would benefit from cheaper housing costs yet the issue of affordable housing in many places is also connected to race and class. As noted in this article, housing is a social justice issue. Is Naperville addressing social justice issues if it is providing housing for the populations discussed above? Or, would providing housing for those with lower-wage jobs make more sense? Or, could cheaper housing provide opportunities for some future residents to experience upward economic mobility in a community with a lot to offer?

There is still much that could happen in these discussions. Naperville has a lot to offer to residents and it is a well-off and high-status community. What comes out of these conversations could help determine what the population of Naperville looks like in the coming years.

 

President Trump suggests suburbs can exclude and exercise local control

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In a June 30th tweet, President Trump expressed disagreement with policies enacted under President Obama involving desegregating housing:

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President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would reverse a federal rule that promotes fair housing and sets desegregation as a national priority. The policy is known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, or AFFH; it’s a provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, signed into law a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

“At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others,” Trump tweeted, “I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas. Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!”

Trump was specifically aiming at an Obama rule about how to finally implement the policy, a mandate (on paper only) for more than 50 years due to federal reluctance to address racial segregation. It might come as a surprise to the president, but his administration has already tackled this policy: The White House took steps starting in 2018 to gut the rule by arguing that it was too burdensome—not because desegregation would have a “devastating impact” on suburban America.

As he’s done time and time again, Trump said the quiet part out loud. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has taken numerous steps to undermine key rules and policies that promote desegregation as a requirement for jurisdictions that receive federal housing dollars. But under Housing Secretary Ben Carson, the agency has carefully framed those revisions in procedural terms—namely as ways to reduce the paperwork load for housing authorities. In his tweet, Trump essentially admitted that there’s a different motive: Eliminating the rule will reduce the pressure on local governments to provide space and opportunity for Black families in affluent white neighborhoods.

Several thoughts:

1. The suburbs were built in part on exclusion – by race/ethnicity and social class – as well as on local control where suburbanites could avoid regulation from outside parties.

2. This continues conservative opposition to President Obama’s policies regarding cities and suburbs and might give hope to those who hoped President Trump would inaugurate a new wave of suburban development.

3. As the article notes, Trump has not said much else recently about housing or suburbs. It is not an easy national policy issue to address and Democrats have not spent much time on the issue in this election cycle. Yet, Trump’s tweet fits with other things he has said about law and order, racial issues, and cities. If I had to guess, he is trying to win over some suburban voters by suggesting he would allow suburbanites to dictate their own community’s fate. Whether he has the ability to appeal to suburban voters by November given his approach and positions is something to watch.

4. I’m on the record saying addressing issues of race in the United States requires addressing residential segregation. Even as suburbs as a whole have become more diverse by race and class, this does not necessarily mean opportunities in wealthier suburbs are available to all or even many.

Poor Census response rate in neighborhoods with fleeing New Yorkers

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Here is another consequence of city residents leaving for other places during COVID-19: absent New York residents are not filling out Census 2020 forms at a good rate.

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Only 46 percent of Upper East Side households have filled out their census forms, according to a June 25 report circulated by the Department of City Planning’s chief demographer, Joseph J. Salvo — well below the neighborhood’s final response rate in 2010, and short of the current citywide rate of almost 53 percent…

Even if New Yorkers have asked the Postal Service to forward mail to their second homes, census forms are addressed to the household, not the individual, which — unless New Yorkers pay for premium forwarding — prevents the post office from including them with the forwarded mail…

Officials hope that many of the coronavirus evacuees will return by the end of October, the new extended deadline for final responses to the census. But with Manhattan parents now enrolling children in schools outside the city, it is not clear that the evacuees will return to New York City in time…

The pandemic has prompted census outreach workers to adjust their tactics, especially in trying to reach undocumented immigrants and residents in illegal housing, who may be fearful of sharing information with the government. In the heavily immigrant neighborhoods of North Corona and East Elmhurst, outreach workers have approached New Yorkers while they wait in lines at food distribution sites, for example.

A lot of effort goes into conducting the decennial census and the data collected is helpful to many. Trying to boost response rates to surveys in a world awash in data collection is a difficult task without a global pandemic. But, I imagine this might lead to some interesting lessons about data collection. Researchers need to have some flexibility in all cases as circumstances can change and plans may go awry. This could be a helpful story about how a large organization adapted in a difficult situation and maybe even made future data collection more robust.

While the article mentions the potential consequences for New York City, there is another consequence of the movement of people: would these wealthy New Yorkers boost the Census numbers elsewhere, provided that they fill out the forms about residing in other locations? Granted, they would still have to fill out a Census form but others might do that for them (if they are living with others) or they might fill out a form once they are more settled in.

Some suburbanites do not like more explicit divisiveness or racism

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With the 2020 presidential election riding on the suburbs, some suburban voters do not like the rhetoric and policies of President Trump:

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From North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Arizona, interviews this week with more than two dozen suburban voters in critical swing states revealed abhorrence for Trump’s growing efforts to fuel white resentment with inflammatory rhetoric on race and cultural heritage. The discomfort was palpable even among voters who also dislike the recent toppling of Confederate statues or who say they agree with some of Trump’s policies.

As the president increasingly stakes his candidacy on a message of “law and order,” casting himself as a bulwark against “angry mobs” and “thugs,‘’ there are signs that he is alienating voters in bedroom communities who approach the debate over racial justice with a far more nuanced perspective than the president does.

The disconnect is especially pronounced in the swing state suburbs like Cornelius — traditionally a conservative-leaning area — and along the Main Line outside Philadelphia, where some educated white voters, including some former Trump supporters, are repelled by the president’s divisive rhetoric…

While Trump won suburban areas overall by 4 percentage points in 2016, according to exit polls, white college-educated suburban women have rapidly moved away from his Republican Party, and they helped deliver the House of Representatives to the Democrats in 2018. And now, as some polling shows Trump facing competitive races even in deep-red states, he cannot afford to lose all of those voters again.

What could be behind this discomfort among some suburban voters? A few possible answers:

  1. Suburbanites do not often like open conflict or confrontation in their personal interactions with fellow suburbanites. This could also apply to contentious social issues. If a candidate, party, or figure is openly combative, this may be too much for suburbanites who prefer more polite, refined discourse. Suburbanites have a particular status to protect, particularly those with education, good jobs, and homes.
  2. Suburbia has changed quite a bit in recent decades. Suburbanites themselves, particularly in middle suburbs (stuck between the exurban Republican voters and the inner-ring suburb Democratic votersthe exurban Republican voters and the inner-ring suburb Democratic voters), may have changed views of the world. Perhaps more well-off suburbanites than before do now care about race.
  3. Perhaps this is all still unclear or undecided months out from the election. Some suburbanites are caught in the middle and right now do not like Trump’s approach. If the economy picks up and COVID-19 winds down, will these same voters show less concern about polarizing views? If social movements, which are now in the suburbs too, wane, will this make it easier to support Trump?

Which way these voters go could indeed help decide the 2020 election. Among other things, it will be interesting to see how the candidates pitch themselves to middle suburbia (even as they balance pitches to other groups).