The Climate Action Lab: We Need Smaller Houses
GUEST POST: Kaja Kühl is an Urban Designer and Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP. She originally developed the Climate Action Lab as a week-long workshop to take place at Wally Farms. COVID-19 may have changed the format of this workshop, but it has also highlighted its relevance. Fundamental to climate action is the urgent need to rethink how humans build their homes and communities.
In lieu of an on-site workshop, Kaja will be sharing her curriculum digitally. Each article will explore an element of the research and design process, highlighting pragmatic solutions to the climate crisis. The series* is intended to spark conversation on how to ACT on climate solutions, and will ultimately offer a insights for creating carbon neutral dwellings and communities.
When I was first introduced to the idea of thinking about a small dwelling for Wally Farms, my immediate thought was: Who else would benefit from this? How can architects working at the scale of 300–400 sf contribute something meaningful to the housing discussion? And to solutions to the climate crisis. Can smaller units lead to a smaller environmental footprint?
For a recent research project with the Hudson Valley Initiative at Columbia University, we used data from the Cool Climate Network at the University of California, Berkeley to map consumption-based emissions in the Hudson Valley, where our project is located. The maps illustrate significant spatial trends. The primary drivers of carbon footprints are household income, vehicle ownership and home size, all of which are considerably higher in suburbs. To dive into this issue, I spoke with June Williamson, a professor of architecture at The City College of New York/CUNY and currently the chair of the Architecture department there. June is the co-author, with Ellen Dunham-Jones, of the book “Retrofitting Suburbia,” and author of “Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb.” She has a third book coming out, again co-authored with Ellen-Dunham Jones, “Retrofitting Suburbia Case Studies: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges” expected to be released at the end of 2020.
We talked about consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions, housing as a product and the primary vehicle for wealth building in the United States, which drives the move towards larger homes and some of the federal policies that encourage this trend. We also talk about accessory dwelling units and some trends towards legalizing it in more areas. And about housing as a right vs housing as a commodity and whether we should even have to make that choice.
When I talk about smaller houses, I am not talking about sacrifice. Everyone squeezing an entire family into a one-bedroom apartment, like my own, is probably craving for a door to shut or an extra closet somewhere. But we are not the average American family. The issue of right-sizing apartments to the needs of city-dwellers and the introduction of micro-units is nothing new to architects. What about detached single-family homes, which is what more than 60% of the population lives in.
Source: US Census, Characteristics of New Housing, 2018
Since 1975, the typical size of a single-family home in the US grew by one third to an average of about 2,400 square feet. During this same period the average household size decreased by one third. We are using more space for housing but we are occupying it with fewer people. And it often doesn’t come at the size we need it because we — the end users — of this housing have little to no influence on the types and sizes of housing units being built. The size of houses offered is determined by zoning laws, financial institutions and land value. Interestingly, adjusted for inflation, the median price per square foot for a single family home in the US has only increased slightly from $115 in 1975 to $120 in 2015 according to the US Census Data on Housing characteristics. However, homes are much bigger (and thus more expensive) while accommodating smaller households.
At the height of the housing boom in the 1990s, two million single-family homes were being raised per year upon thousands of acres of undeveloped farm land, a sprawl of development fueled by speculation. Over the next 25 years, the sprawl of “McMansions” slowed periodically only because of cycles of recession. Bigger homes consume more energy, both to construct them and to live in them. Emissions from residential buildings in the United States peaked in 2005, but at a little over 1 billion metric tons they contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions just in operational energy alone (not accounting for the energy it took to build these units).
We should design & build housing units that can more appropriately address our actual needs or desire for living space. We need to dismantle regulatory and financial barriers to allowing a greater variety of housing types and sizes. The Climate Action Lab is aiming to develop a prototype for small units in low-density contexts. While there is much attention given to cities and the need for density to be more sustainable, even many cities in the US are considered “low-density.”Last summer a New York Times analysis found that in eight out of the ten cities analyzed, more than 70% of land area is zoned for detached single-family homes. These policies together with risk-averse developers present a big obstacle to change the American housing market.
What stuck most with me from the conversation with June, is the idea that housing construction in the United States is not primarily a vehicle to house people, but a vehicle for building wealth. We keep building these large homes, not because we need so much space, but to secure our financial future, ironically, at the expense of the health of the planet.
RESEARCH/NOTES
https://www.statista.com/topics/1618/residential-housing-in-the-us/
https://www.curbed.com/2020/3/10/21168519/homes-for-sale-american-home-suburbs
Maps of detached single-family housing
https://uli.org/wp-content/uploads/ULI-Documents/Housing-in-the-Evolving-American-Suburb.pdf