Climate change policy is serious and is solely about the climate

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Fires have dominated the California news cycle in the past, as the dry season dragged into October and the Santa Ana winds started to blow. But this fall seemed different. In the wake of November 2018’s Camp Fire—the deadliest, most destructive fire in the state’s history, killing at least 85 people—we entered what might be considered a year of climate change awareness, bookended by the news that we may only have a dozen years to contain global warming and the Global Climate Strike this September. News accounts about wildfires have taken on even greater urgency. As many commentators have noted, the changing climate and ongoing deficiencies in the regulation and management of utility companies present a new, dreadful normal.

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But few are discussing one key aspect of California’s crisis: Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property. Cities and towns have expanded in increasingly disperse fashion, fueled by cheap energy. Infrastructure has been built, deregulated, and privatized, extending services in more and more tenuous and fragile ways. Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it’s hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk.

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There are other options, in theory: Rental housing serves many cities around the world well, although we should be wary about perpetuating the power of landlords in this country without delinking ownership from wealth creation. There has been resurgent interest in government-planned and -built public housing, including recent legislation proposed by Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders that would shore up and invigorate the federal system. The Green New Deal invokes prior eras of government intervention, lending itself to revitalized thinking about the social value of public goods.

There is also the potential for new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing. In New York City, cooperative apartment buildings have long been a norm. These kinds of ownership structures have often been deprioritized in federal housing subsidy programs and discouraged by standard lending practices in many regions. It is, by regulatory design, hard to do anything not consistent with the status quo. Community land trusts—nonprofit, community-based land ownership, with housing units that are typically leased in perpetual affordable status—are a promising model. There are now more than 240 community land trusts in the United States, and they are increasingly part of the consideration for those pursuing a more affordable and less market-reliant alternative. (Bernie Sanders, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, was an early champion of the idea.) The idea of cooperative living—in both financial and social terms—needs room to breathe and grow.

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