What are the energy and emissions consequences of continuing to allow rural sprawl – the proliferation of nonfarm dwellings throughout the rural landscape? That’s one of the questions currently being addressed in Lane County by a task force looking at the county’s land use policies.

Rural development patterns enabled by cheap and abundant fossil fuels have energy and climate consequences, as almost 40% of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are associated with residences and cars. Changing development and transportation patterns can significantly impact energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Data that break down per capita CO2 emission rates along other important categories of the United States, such as by urban vs. suburban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, apartment dwellers vs. homeowners, or by ethnic/racial origin is hard to come by. But new studies are beginning to shed some light on the issue.

A 2008 report by the Brookings Institution found that the average American in a metropolitan area has a carbon footprint of 8.21 tons — 14% less than the average American living outside the city.

Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, reached a similar conclusion in a study titled The Greenness of Cities:  Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Urban Development. Glaeser and co-author Matthew Kahn found that cities generally have significantly lower emissions than suburban areas. The city-suburb gap is particularly large in older areas, like New York, which developed prior to the dominance of the automobile.

A new study titled Cities produce surprisingly low carbon emissions per capita appearing in the April issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization looked at cities in a variety of countries and, for the most part, affirms these findings. Analyzing the per capita emissions from 12 major cities in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, the study’s author, David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development found that per capita emissions from cities were typically smaller, and often far smaller, than their nation’s averages.

For example, greenhouse gas emissions for New Yorkers are less than a third of those of the national average for the USA. Those of Barcelona residents are half the average for Spain. Londoners have little more than half the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the UK average. Brazil’s two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have less than one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions per person of the average for Brazil.

Tokyo has considerably lower emissions per person than either Beijing or Shanghai, suggesting that prosperity need not inevitably result in greater emissions and that well designed and well governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the study cautions that emissions from manufacturing are currently allocated to the countries in which these greenhouse gases are produced, rather than to the locations in which the finished products are purchased and used.

The main driver of greenhouse gas emissions is unsustainable consumption, especially in the world’s more affluent countries.

An analysis by the Urban Land Institute finds that the typical household in the study area spends upwards of $22,000 annually on housing, which represents roughly 35% of the median household income ($68,036). With transportation costs for the typical household reaching nearly $12,000 annually, the combined costs of housing and transportation account for roughly 54% of the typical household’s income.

Similar studies conducted for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington, D.C., region have found average housing and transportation cost burdens of 59% and 47%, respectively.

“Drive until you qualify” make no sense when the transportation costs offset the lower house prices.

When gasoline prices rose to over $4 per gallon in 2008, the high prices hit exurban areas hard and magnified the housing bust in areas such as Riverside County, CA.

A news story in the Minneapolis -St. Paul Star Tribune now reports a reversal in the migration to suburbs and exurbs in Minnesota:

New estimates suggest that the movement into suburban and exurban counties within commuting distance of Minneapolis and St. Paul has stopped cold for the first time in recent memory.

For many years, the combination of robust growth, a multitude of freeways and plenty of open space helped ignite an explosion in exurban living. People were commuting for hours from towns such as Mora, Glencoe and Owatonna. National experts classed the Twin Cities as having the nation’s third-largest exurban flight from 2000 to 2005, ahead of even sprawling Atlanta.

But the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimates — the first to reflect the impact of 2008’s $4-a-gallon gas — suggest that:

• With people abandoning foreclosed and unsellable homes, the two-state ring of exurban counties is hardly growing. For these counties as a group, 2009 marked the first time more people left than moved in.
• In the five big suburban counties closest to the center (Dakota, Scott, Carver, Anoka and Washington), new arrivals have slowed to a standstill. With a wave of baby boomers sitting on empty nests in older suburbs such as Eagan, and new construction all but extinguished in once-booming counties such as Scott, growth is half what it was a decade ago.
• The two big core counties of Hennepin and Ramsey, losing tens of thousands of people a year as recently as five years ago, are on the rebound. Growth is gaining by the year.

When gas is cheap, moving farther out as a way to get more space for less money can make sense. But there’s a trade0ff. Time spent commuting is time not spent with a spouse, a child, a dog. Distance can be a drag. When gas prices rise and housing prices collapse, being upside down on a mortgage can make it difficult or impossible to escape.

Ominously, gas prices are now rising again.

Over the last 60 years, anti-urban policies have resulted in an energy-sucking, emissions-spewing U.S. Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, points to subsidization of highways and home ownership as deliberate policy choices that have bled cities and encouraged a suburban and exurban infrastructure – one that is dependent on high levels of energy inputs (resulting in emissions outputs) both for transportation and to power buildings.

Glaeser cites studies that find each new federally-funded highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18%. Cities don’t benefit much from that highway infrastructure because dense areas already have good means of getting around – like walking.

Subsidizing home ownership is also anti-urban. Glaeser gives Boston as an example: 62% of Boston homes are rented; 78 percent of suburban Wellesley homes are owner-occupied. Cities are dominated by apartments, and more than 85% of homes in multi-unit structures are rented. Suburbs are dominated by single-family detached houses, and more than 85% of such homes are owner-occupied.  Multi-unit structures are generally both smaller and more energy-efficient than detached single-family dwellings considering both embedded and operating energy and emissions – at least up to a point.

Subsidizing home ownership, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the home mortgage interest deduction, lures people out of apartments and cities, increasing their energy and emissions footprints.

The U.S. isn’t alone in promoting sprawl. Canadian government at all levels spends more than four times as much on highways as on transit, thus opening up suburbs for development. As in the U.S, Canadian cities and suburbs artificially limit density through single-use zoning that also imposes density limitations and minimum parking requirements.  Low density limits the number of people who can walk to jobs, shops or transit stops, thus making development more car-oriented. But overall, the Canadian government promotes sprawl less aggressively than the United States – and gets less of it as a result.

One consequence of “less bad” anti-urban policies, Canadian cities are healthier and more vibrant than American cities. Among the ten cities that were America’s most populous in 1950, eight have lost population- often by huge margins.  The most extreme example is St. Louis, which lost 59 percent of its population between 1950 and 2000.  By contrast, every single one of Canada’s 1950 “Top Ten” cities has gained population.

So how to reduce energy consumption and emissions? A good start would be to eliminate highway subsidies, to stop subsidizing home ownership, and to give more respect and provide greater rewards to renters.

Energy Information Agency data shows U.S. liquid fuels consumption declined by 810,000 bbl/d (4.2 percent) to 18.7 million bbl/d in 2009, the fourth consecutive annual decline. That’s 10% off the peak in consumption of 20.8 million bbl/d in 2005.

As energy analyst Jeff Rubin points out, the U.S. will never regain pre-recession peak levels of oil consumption – and ditto for oil consumption in Canada, Western Europe, Japan, or anywhere else in the OECD economies.

But don’t expect oil prices to go down. Rubin says:

Back in the 1990s, that kind of demand contraction in the OECD would have foretold a big decline in oil prices, since those countries accounted for almost three quarters of global oil demand. Today, they account for barely half, and tomorrow they will account for even less.

In a world where oil supplies have most likely peaked, global oil consumption has become a zero-sum game:

As China moves from consuming 8 million barrels a day to 10 million barrels, and OPEC ramps up its own daily consumption from 10.5 million to 12 million barrels, somehow, somewhere else in the world, there must be a corresponding decline in oil consumption. That somewhere else just happens to be the U.S. market and the oil markets of the other OECD economies.

Automobile sales in the U.S. have also peaked, never to regain former levels. Calculated Risk reports estimated car sales for February 2010 at 10.4 million SAAR (seasonally adjusted annual rate).

The current level of sales are very low – far below the 17 million that were sold each year between 1999 and 2007 – and are still below the lowest point for the ‘90/’91 recession (even with a larger population).

All of our land use and transportation planning assumes that vehicle travel will continue to grow at historic rates. Based on those assumptions, reducing the historic rate of increase would require heroic efforts; reducing per capita vehicle miles traveled (VTM), even more.  Reducing overall VTM significantly enough to achieve even the modest emissions reductions goals that are currently on the table would be a Sisyphean task, especially if population were to continue to increase as projected.

Given the new reality of dwindling fuel supplies and collapsing vehicle sales, it may be wiser to devote our planning efforts to figuring out how people can live and get around in communities with far less fuel and far fewer vehicles. The new reality is, the era of car-dominated communities is drawing to a close.

Lane County is convening a stakeholders group with the objective of revising the county’s comprehensive plan and development code to address the burning issues of the 21st century: how to best ensure cleaner, healthier, safer, and more prosperous communities in a world increasingly threatened by energy shortfalls and a warming climate.

Here’s the text of an email sent out by Planning Director Kent Howe:

All,

As part of the citizen involvement process for Lane County’s Long Range Planning Program, you have volunteered to participate in the Lane County Stakeholder Group that will be reviewing potential revisions to land use policies and regulations.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners has directed Land Management Division staff to facilitate this group process.

The first meeting of the Stakeholder’s Group is Thursday, February 25th, 6:00pm, Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave, Eugene.

At the Feb 17, 2010, meeting the Board specified the Stakeholder Group review the first 6 policy issues in the Goal One Code Amendment Proposal, attached. These correspond to lines 1-24 on the Preliminary List of Code Amendments spread sheet, also attached.

We look forward to working with you. If you have any questions, please give me a call.

Thanks,

Kent Howe
Planning Director
Lane County
541-682-3734

The text of the amendments proposed by Goal One Coalition and LandWatch Lane County is available here.

So all of you Lane County folks who are concerned about figuring out a way to strong local economies that will be resilient enough to grapple with the challenges we are already beginning to face, here’s your chance to take on the developers who normally have their way.

See you Thursday!

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

• Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
• Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
• Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
• Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
• Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
• Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
• Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
• Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.

Lane County will at long last be reviewing and approving property line adjustments.

That’s the effect of amendments to Lane Code Chapter 13 – amendments which have long been pushed for by LandWatch Lane County and Goal One Coalition.

The Lane County Board of Commissioners approved the revisions by a unanimous 5-0 vote at its afternoon meeting on Wednesday, December 9.

Lane County’s historic “hands off” approach to property line adjustments has long allowed for developers to find tiny “lots”, often created when road construction sliced through properties, leaving new “lots” on each side. Speculators buy up the land; reconfigure the property lines by simply recording deeds; obtain “legal lot verifications” for the reconfigured properties; and then sell off the developable parcels at a hefty profit. All this happened without public notice, any opportunity for public comment or participation, adequate county review, or any way to challenge the result.

A Court of Appeals decision (Phillips v. Polk County) and the passage of two bills in the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions ( HB 2723, dealing with retroactive unit of land validations; and HB 3629, dealing with property line adjustments) made it obvious to everyone – including the development community – that Lane County’s practices failed to comply with state law, putting Lane County property owners in an untenable position.

In the spring of 2009, the Board of Commissioners directed the Land Management Division (LMD) to initiate the post-acknowledgment plan amendment (PAPA) process to adopt the code changes drafted by LandWatch and Goal One Coalition. Following a joint public hearing before the Board and Planning Commission, the Board directed LMD to call together a work group composed of land use advocates, surveyors, and the development community to see if a consensus proposal could be achieved. The Planning Commission recommended approval of the draft resulting from that effort, and with formal Board approval the new provisions will now become the law of the land.

This morning (December 9, 2009) the Linn County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to overturn the Planning Commission’s denial and approve the application of its Parks Department to establish a park on 175 acres of farmland at the I-5/Highway 34 interchange.

An RV park is the key and most controversial element of the proposed park. Owners of several existing local, private RV parks complained vociferously that competition from a publicly operated RV park would put them out of business. While the original proposal envisioned as many as 196 RV hookups, the Board imposed a condition of approval limiting that number to a maximum of 100.

The local farm community also voiced strong opposition, arguing that farm land is irreplaceable and that farming, Linn County’s biggest industry, deserves and needs the county’s support and protection.

The Board of Commissioners has three elected members: Roger Nyquist, Will Tucker, and John Lindsey. Lindsey’s seat is up for election next November.

It should be obvious to everyone – even our county commissioners – that investing public funds in an RV park when we are facing climate change, peak oil, a financial crisis, and the need to ensure our food security is as foolhardy as can be. Come November, the voters will have a chance to voice their opinion.

Pete Boucot, a declared candidate for Lindsey’s seat, is leading the opposition to the Board’s plans. The county borrowed over $1.25 million from its road fund to purchase the property. Boucot objects this is an inappropriate use of the county’s road funds. Boucot also points out the commissioners have been silent on how or when the road fund is to be paid back or where the funds to develop the park are to come from.

From Tuesday’s Eugene Register-Guard:

Springfield growth inventory delivers a surprise

City councilors were prepared to adopt the results of a buildable residential land inventory, which concluded the city was short by more than 300 acres in what it would need to meet 20-year growth projections.

Instead, they learned the city actually has a slight surplus of buildable residential property.

The change brought a howling protest from one developer and muted concern from two others who spoke at a public hearing Monday night.

Springfield’s early estimates suggested it might be short by as much as 1,000 acres of land for homes. But by August, with the help of local consultant EcoNorthwest, the city concluded it was short by only 344 acres of the land it would need for housing by 2030.

But Monday night, Springfield planning supervisor Linda Pauly explained that that total was based on a mistaken assumption that housing could only be constructed on land that had no more than a 15 percent slope.

When a community member concerned about the survey results asked to see the data, city staff and EcoNorthwest discovered they’d used the wrong slope constraint, Pauly said.

Housing can go on hillsides with a 25 percent slope, according to state law. It’s commercial buildings that require the 15 percent slope limitation.

The mistake was only discovered last week, Pauly said.

The revision concludes the city has a small surplus: 59 acres more than they’ll need to meet expected residential growth between now and 2030.

The “community member” mentioned in the article was LandWatch Lane County member Mia Nelson. Through dogged persistence and determination, she overcame stonewalling by the City of Springfield and EcoNorthwest, who didn’t want to make available the data which supposedly supported the earlier conclusion that 300+ more acres of land would be needed to support projected growth. When Nelson finally got her hands on the raw data, she brought to light the flawed assumption.

City officials aren’t yet ready to give up on their precious expansion plans:

Mayor Leiken called the latest review a hiccup in an otherwise useful process. . .

While some councilors worried that the new numbers may be as flawed as the old ones, they voted unanimously to adopt the Residential Lands Study.

Al Johnson, a consulting attorney for the city, assured the councilors that their vote would not be considered the last word on the subject, and that their conclusions about how much land they’ll need won’t be considered final until the city formally adopts its Springfield 2030 Plan, a process it will undertake with Lane County.

Can you visualize the day our political leaders will let go of the idea of growth?

The urban structure of our cities, towns and suburbs is one of the largest drivers of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Cities that are compact, walkable, and transit-served, with a good distribution of daily services, use a fraction of the energy and generate a fraction of the greenhouse gases as U.S. cities.

There is an enormous difference in energy use between compact cities and sprawling cities, as American ones tend to be – with no corresponding difference in quality of life. This chart shows gasoline use.

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VTM) is just part of the story. Other sources of emissions from urban form in the five key categories of infrastructure, and its embodied and operating energy; other advantages of “location efficiency,” including additional benefits of walking; optimized size, orientation and urban shaping of buildings; lost ecosystem services; and behavioral factors and “induced demand” may add up to twice as much as emissions from personal transportation and VMTs alone.

Michael Mehaffy explores each of these factors in depth in an article at Planetizen. Bottom line: increasing urban energy efficiency and cutting urban emissions is about a lot more than increasing density, reducing VMT, and improving fuel mileage. The way we design the places we live can make it improbable or even impossible to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. But if done right, the places we live can make it possible an elegant, satisfying, low-carbon way of life.