The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry | Climate Town (feat. @NotJustBikes)

When I was growing up in the suburbs,

one of my favorite activities was to run around in my backyard

as my friend John tried to shoot me in the head with a BB

gun.

Now, I don't want you to worry,

because we did switch places every couple shots to make it fair, and, obviously,

neither of us is blind, because we could never shoot for sh*t.

Now, I tell you this not to indict anyone's parents,

but to demonstrate the kind of thing

that you do when you don't have a car in the suburbs

and you're a forty-minute walk from the nearest business,

which, as it happens, is the dry cleaners.

And I know it's not exactly a hot take to say the suburbs are

boring,

but in the next thirty years,

America's population is projected to expand by a hundred million,

and if we try to spread those people

If we try to spread all those people into suburbs,

that means turning millions of acres of this and this into this.

Well, there's an easy solution:

we'll just also build things like apartments

and townhouses and high-rises

and duplexes and high-density housing for people who want it,

and that would be the right answer.

Except for the fact

that it's literally illegal to build anything

but a single family detached house in the majority of America.

We don't build low-density, low-efficiency housing because America prefers it,

we build them because housing developers are forced to

because of a thing called single family zoning.

And yes, I'm asking you to watch a video about zoning,

but don't worry because it's only like... h*ly sh*t,

why is it so long?

Wh--just make it shorter,

what do we--okay. whatever I'm gonna make this good

because it's gonna take me like eighty hours to edit it,

and if I wanted to waste eighty hours of my life watching some unfathomably

boring sh*t,

I would just watch

As the American population expands

and we're simultaneously trying to avoid being burned to the ground by climate change,

we've got to be smarter about how we do housing.

As countless studies show, higher density housing lowers our emissions, reduces traffic,

increases access to services, the list goes on.

But due to a bunch of old laws written by a handful of dead

rich dudes -- some of whom were racist by the way -- housing developers

aren't free to build anything except for single family detached houses.

Which means suburbs, and

that means paving thousands of miles of new roads to McMansion-y housing developments,

which means everyone will need a car, which means everyone needs more gas,

and so on and so forth times a hundred million.

And there's an easy solution, and you can even help, maybe?

And speaking of help,

I have enlisted the help of a personal hero of mine:

city planning genius Jason from the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes.

(Jason) Hey I'm Jason from Not Just (Rollie, interrupting):

that was Jason from f*ck, I mean fudge.

(Jason)...

Bikes.

(Rollie) That was Jason from Not Just Bikes.

He's the brains, I'm the me, and me am Rollie Williams,

climate science and policy master's degree recipient,

and a guy with the second lowest built in Taekwondo, so watch yourself.

And this is the story of how the suburbs are bleeding America dry,

featuring Not Just Bikes.

Welcome to Climate Town.

Oh man, did I learn some sh*t about zoning.

For one, it's actually a great concept: don't put a toilet in your kitchen,

don't put a heavy metal processing plant in your preschool district-- (Jason) Well a

preschool district isn't really a thing

as far as I know,

but yeah, zoning is a critical part of good city design,

and every modern city has some kind of zoning, even Houston,

which keeps all the bad stuff from the zoning code,

but just doesn't call it zoning.

Here in the Netherlands, we have strict zoning codes that result in great cities,

and Japanese zoning is famous for building compact urban environments

while maintaining affordable housing prices.

(Rollie) Okay, okay, enough international talk.

It's time to focus on America.

In the mid-1800s, or sepia times,

factories started popping up in early American cities to crank out things like textiles

and barrels and lung disease.

Workers moved in nearby,

because the only way to get to work in those days was to either

walk or... that was it actually,

you could walk or you could just die there in the street.

Either way, let's get back on those looms, people,

your arms aren't going to tear themselves off!

But even worse than that, the cities of the 1840s didn't have sewers,

so you can probably imagine how that must have smelled.

So, city managers got their little top hats together

and came up with land surveys to figure out how to move everyone's poop

to a less lived in location,

and that meant figuring out where the sewers would go,

and that's kind of the first comprehensive city planning.

One thing led to another, and by 1867,

a tenement house law was passed

that required buildings to provide just the absolute barest of essentials to the people

living there.

And we're not talking, like, hot water,

we're talking *A* fire escape and one outdoor toilet per twenty people.

(Jason) Over the coming decades, city planning started to become a profession,

and in 1909 the First National Conference on City Planning

and the problems of congestion was held in Washington,

DC, with 49 attendees.

This was back when congestion didn't mean traffic congestion.

Suburbs started cropping up

that were separate from the city

but remained accessible to downtown by streetcar lines,

and almost every city in America was built around trains and streetcars.

Los Angeles in particular had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the

world.

These so-called "streetcar suburbs", at least those that still remain,

are still some of the most desirable neighborhoods in all of North America.

In many ways, this was peak city planning.

With the invention of the automobile,

suddenly wealthier people could live even farther away

and drive in and out of cities for work,

and the American suburb was born.

And that's when things got racist. it's been one week since you looked at

me (Rollie) Actually,

no, that's when things got MORE racist it's been (Rollie) No, that's not true,

either.

That's when racism got suburbanized three days since the living room See in the

mid-1910s,

it was just straight-up okay to have a city ordinance

that explicitly prohibited people from buying property

if they were Black

or Jewish or Asian

or-- You know what?

You don't need me to come up with a list of people who are

discriminated against,

especially not when city ordinances have it all written down.

Hey, sorry, can you guys-- we're trying to do a shot,

thank you so much, but jus--just right down that way.

Thanks, you're the best.

Other cities like San Francisco I guess felt less comfortable being overtly racist,

but were still completely into the idea of passing racist laws,

so they developed a zoning practice known as R1 zoning.

San Francisco-based real estate developer Duncan McDuffie developed a tactic of maintaining white-only neighborhoods

by subdividing them into sections where it was only legal to build big,

expensive, single-family homes.

The honor of the first official single-family house zone belongs to California's Elmwood Park,

which was specifically designed to prevent a Black dance hall from opening.

So, way to go, Duncan McDuffie, you had a perfect name.

It's goofy, it's fun, it's good at parties, and you blew it.

In 1917, the Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan vs Warley

that a city ordinance in Kentucky prohibiting the sale of property to Black people

in white-majority neighborhoods was a violation of the 14th Amendment

and therefore unlawful.

But don't cry, cities seeking to enforce racist zoning,

because R1 zoning is technically just classist!

Which means even though you can't explicitly ban certain races from home ownership,

they could just switch to banning poor people from those same rights

and then let racist property developers deny Black home ownership for discretionary reasons!

And this racist-turned-classist-but-still-racist kind of zoning took off all across America.

(Jason) At this point in time, zoning still had detractors across the US,

mostly by people who claimed it interfered with personal property rights, which, I mean,

yeah, it kinda did,

but all this changed with a landmark ruling in the village of Euclid, Ohio.

Euclid wanted to keep Chicago's factories from expanding toward them

and changing the character of the village,

and, ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed.

They ruled that this kind of zoning was not an unreasonable extension of the

village's police power.

This kind of zoning became known

as Euclidean zoning -- named after the town

and not Euclidean geometry --

and the concept spread like a bad meme across the country

and into Canada,

too.

This was the first step toward the homogeneous, sprawling, asphalt-covered,

car-infested stroadline horror show

that makes up the majority of cities

and towns in the US

and Canada today.

Now, to be clear, Euclidean zoning was not explicitly racist.

Presumably it was more about the factories themselves than the people working in those

factories.

Presumably.

(Rollie) Now, that's not to say zoning stopped being racist in the '20s,

when America went through a depression that they all agreed was pretty great.

FDR came out with the New Deal

which included a hot little number called the National Housing Act of 1934,

which established brand-new home ownership tools for low-income Americans,

like the thirty-year mortgage and low-interest loans guaranteed by the government.

Unless you happen to live in a neighborhood with too high a percentage of

foreign-born or Negroes,

according to the US government,

in which case you couldn't get a loan

because you lived in a red zone.

Which is where the term redlining came from.

So, okay, yeah, maybe a racist law from the early 1900s invented to keep

non-white people from property ownership may have accidentally determined how almost all housing would

develop in the most powerful country in the world.

And, fine, it is a little ironic

that we are not free to build apartments

or townhouses in most parts of the freest country in the world,

but are those things really preventing us from acting on climate change?

Yes.

Yes, they are super are.

Now, I just want to say there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to live

in a detached single-family home.

Some people love them, and to that I say,

"whatever gets you out of bed in the morning,

brother" brother brother brother brother brother brother brother I'm aware of how destiny is

gonna take its course,

brother!

But the fact that 75% of all residential land is zoned for only detached

single-family homes leads to a real problem

when it comes to trying to keep our carbon dioxide emissions down

and stave off early onset climate change.

The suburbs represent less than a quarter of the American population,

but are so energy intensive

that they account for more than half of all household greenhouse gas emissions.

Detached houses are the least efficient kind of housing to try to heat

or cool,

because they're leaking energy from all four sides simultaneously.

The heating and electric bills in detached single-family houses are consistently higher,

which leads to power plants burning more fossil fuels,

which means more carbon dioxide emissions, and it also leads to things like blackouts.

And that's just right now.

Imagine a few more decades of being forced to move out

and out further instead of just building up like four stories.

See when you build up, you build stairs, you build elevators,

and sometimes just fireman poles.

But when you build out,

you build miles upon miles of roads and streets and culs-de-sac,

which I recently found out is the plural of cul-de-sac.

Who knew?

(Jason) Wait, what?

Holy sh*t, you're right!

How did I not know that?

(Rollie) Those roads get built right over dirt and plants, and once it's asphalt,

it no longer has the trivial quality of being able to absorb rain water

to prevent things like flash floods

or water pollution.

And since the construction of a single mile of asphalt road in America adds

four thousand tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,

building out instead of up is an excellent way to ensure we blow past

every single emissions reduction target from here until 2050.

And, of course, once you have roads instead of stairs,

you're putting thousands of cars onto those shiny new roads,

because those suburbs are almost universally cut off from functional public transportation.

There are sometimes bus routes,

but decades of under-investment in public transportation means a fifteen-minute car ride becomes a

two-hour commute via three buses,

a light rail, and a godd*mn rickshaw.

And of course all those cars need someplace to park when you're at work,

which means parking lots, which means concrete and carbon dioxide emissions,

a reduction in natural spaces that can absorb that spike in carbon dioxide,

and a sharp increase in places for the Sharks

and the Jets to knife fight to the death.

And as things spread farther and farther out,

access to everything from food to medical services

and emergency services gets more expensive

and more carbon intensive.

And just to be clear,

eliminating R1 zoning does not mean eliminating the single family detached house,

it just means developers are literally allowed to build something other than a detached

house if people want it.

Since only 25% of all residential land is allowed to be not a house,

developers are fighting over scraps,

and the ones who are winning those fights are often the bougie high-rise developers

with the lawyers and the money to wade through mountains of red tape

and secure artificially scarce land rights.

And that leads to this distinct feature in American cities: suburbs, suburbs, suburbs,

and then BOOM, skyscrapers out of nowhere.

You hit the end of the R1 zone, and it's chaos,

and it's basically this way in, like, every American city.

(Jason) In Europe, it's very common to see a wide range of different building

sizes:

single family homes, duplexes, four to five story mid-rise buildings,

and even the occasional larger apartment or condo building.

If the majority of residential land in the US

and Canada wasn't zoned for R1 single-family homes,

you'd see a lot more different sizes and uses here, too.

There has been a huge increase in demand for mixed-use,

walkable places as people start to realize

that these places are just... better places to be.

They result in urban environments that are at a human scale -- safe, enjoyable,

and comfortable to be in,

and you don't need to spend all your time stuck in soul-crushing traffic to

do normal,

everyday things like visiting friends or buying a bag of milk.

Unfortunately, there are very few truly walkable neighborhoods left in the US

and Canada -- usually only neighborhoods built before the 1940s,

so this new demand has resulted in skyrocketing housing prices for this limited stock.

Not everyone is going to want to live in a mixed-use, walkable neighborhood,

but it's clear that a lot of people do, and,

given that these places are better for our health, our city finances,

and the environment, it would be crazy of us not to capitalize on this

trend.

Our city should be removing all of the outdated zoning

and car-centric regulations that have trapped us in car dependence

and start building more of these walkable neighborhoods

as fast as possible.

Yeah, I also heard him say "bag of milk".

That's not a thing, right?

Why is this a thing?

For real, I'm genuinely angry now.

It's inconvenient, it doesn't stack, if you set it down, it spills milk everywhere.

A bag of milk is the single family housing of the beverage-carrying world,

for real.

Whatever, when an area is zoned as mixed-use,

it doesn't mean you can go right back to building a sewer through your

daycare center.

Mixed-use zoning still has a ton of regulations,

it's just not as wildly restrictive as single-family housing only.

Actually, where I grew up, there's an area of mixed-use zoning called Belmar,

and we can go there right now through the magic o--magic of editing.

Here's a real world example of mixed-use zoning in America.

You got apartments right next to a movie theater right next to a whole

bunch of restaurants right next to a school.

Now this place I'm standing right now used to be a big sh*tty parking

lot for a big sh*tty mall called Villa Italia. (news narrator) Things had started

to change,

and by the early 90s, the signs of decline were obvious.

Its retail activity peaked in in 1994.

Actually it was devastating -- we'd have a store leave and not come back,

and then another Fun fact:

my friend Eric Rose did one time get away from the cops riding a

skateboard through a parking garage,

so it's not all bad.

But once they shut the mall down, they redeveloped this area into a fun,

walkable, livable zone that is one monologue away from not one, not three,

but two grocery stores.

And now it's one of the most sought-after areas to live in Colorado

because it's kind of fun to live here,

and it generates a whole bunch more money for the city than a parking

lot for a struggling mall.

I mean the best store was J.C.

Penney's, who's gonna go to that?

Brother, you're a cheap shot artist,

you take whatever you can get as quick as you want,

you were never in my corner,

you were always on the outside waiting for me to make the first move

So while the landscape of America is currently just dominated by the lowest efficiency,

lowest density kind of housing,

cities all across the US are slowly starting to eliminate

that zoning code and allow for more types of buildings to be made.

Cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles

and even the state of Oregon have loosened their single-family regulations,

and you can help keep that going.

There are a ton of ballot initiatives all across America

and progressive groups looking to reform zoning -- link in the bio --

but you can also show up to your local zoning meetings

and really raise hell about zoning practices.

They look something like this:

So last time we tried to get a bit of a feel for what

you wanted it just doesn't fit in the character of the of the neighborhood

but it just doesn't fit,

and that-- and it sticks out like an eyesore The meetings are usually full

of people who are terrified

that their neighborhood might change even a little bit,

and the only perspective they ever get to hear is their own.

(Jason) Absolutely.

I have been to a few of these community engagement meetings,

and I have often been the youngest person there by about thirty years,

and I'm not young.

These meetings really do cater to the retired-and-bored demographic,

and the general consensus is usually

that the whippersnappers need to get off their lawns.

(Rollie) So consider showing up to one of these meetings

and advocating for mixed-use zoning,

or you can talk about how punishingly inconvenient and wasteful single-family housing is.

Remember, this isn't about taking away anyone's detached house,

it's about giving people the option to live more efficiently,

and in a more fulfilling way.

Also, it's about having more grocery stores

and services that don't require you to get behind the wheel of a car

every time you want a DiGiorno's pizza

or a... a bag of milk.

America is currently a system where the easy decision

and the right decision are not the same decision.

But what if they were?

We know you can rezone the suburbs to add more housing density

and retrofit old malls to be livable mixed-use spaces,

and if you want that to happen where you live,

your voice is actually really important.

Added a bunch of links in the description to zoning reform groups

and bills that might be in your area,

as well as how to find your local HOA meetings and zoning meetings.

Go check it out, bring a friend.

Or maybe a date?

No, that--don't do that, that's a bad--not a first date, anyway.

No scratc--you know what?

Use your judgment, I trust you.

Also I'm not your parents.

I'm just a guy sitting in a room alone asking a complete stranger to

go to a zoning meeting.

Really makes you think.

I don't care where you stand, I don't care what you believe in,

all I want from you is your best.

Okay, thank you so much for watching.

If you want to learn more about this stuff,

Jason from Not Just Bikes has a ton of videos about thoughtful urban planning

-- check him out on his channel,

don't forget to subscribe.

Also a great channel that's got a lot of this kind of stuff:

City Beautiful.

It's absolutely crammed full of interesting and relevant city planning facts,

and as long as you're just subscribing to all these YouTube channels william-nilliam you

might consider subscribing to Climate Town.

That's this one that you're watching right now.

And if you really like this channel, and I mean, like,

in an unhealthy way, you could go over and subscribe to our Patreon page,

where for about five bucks a month -- actually,

for whatever you want -- it's.. you get to pick how much per month

and it doesn't matter how much you pick,

and you get access to all of our stuff on Patreon.

That is behind the scenes stuff, Zoom hangouts,

the kind of stuff that's just not good enough to be free,

that's over on the Patreon page.

Also, we have a Discord channel you can join -- link in the description,

come on down, we got a bunch of channel-- You know how-- actually,

maybe you don't know how Discord works.

Well, come on down and freaking find out,

brother. brother brother brother They'll be trying to drink their own sweat to survive,

brother Also, check out our Instagram, our Twitter, my fricking TikTok, my fricking..

Myspace, you know, not the last one, but the first three, those are real.

Check them out if you want.

We also have classroom-friendly versions of these where I don't use the swear words.

Okay, that's really it.

Thank you for watching, go to a zoning meeting, I'll see you next time.

I have not tried marijuana.

I have never used it at any time