Rebuilding Requires Reimagining Environmentalism
Helping thousands of victims of the wildfires in Los Angeles rebuild is an urgent concern, prompting, among other things, efforts to streamline the building permit process and expedite insurance claims. But this disaster and its aftermath must also prompt us to question environmental policies we’ve accepted as beyond debate, policies that have effectively rationed the supply and inflated the cost of land, water, energy, and building materials. While motivated by environmentalist values, they disproportionately harm low and middle income Californians, and in many cases don’t help the environment.
For decades, state and local laws and ordinances have promoted “infill” and discouraged suburban “sprawl.” But the construction cost per square foot for multistory, multifamily dwellings exceeds the cost to build single family detached homes, as is the cost per acre to build on urban land. And in a stark contradiction of the conventional wisdom, there is no shortage of land. California is only 5 percent urbanized, and that is where 94 percent of our state’s population lives. We have the most densely populated urban areas of any state in America. We could build homes for 10 million people, four per household, on quarter-acre lots, with an equal amount of land utilized for roads, parks, schools, and commercial use, and it would only increase California’s urban footprint from 5 percent to 6.2 percent. There are hundreds of square miles of open land along Highway 101 and along Interstate 5 that could be developed.
Chronic water shortages in California’s cities are also the result of policy, not reality. Urban water use in California only accounts for a small fraction of total water diversions per year. Agriculture consumes between 30-35 million acre feet annually, and releases to maintain ecosystem health average about the same as agricultural use. California’s cities consumed 7.5 million acre feet per year in the 1980s, the same amount they consume today despite our population increasing by 65 percent. What if instead of clamping down further on water use, we rehydrated our cities? The prospects are tantalizing.
The original California Water Plan, written in 1957, called for 50 million acre feet of deliverable water per year, with most of it, 40 MAF, for farms. That would have left 10 million acre feet per year for urban areas. We may be thankful some of the more grandiose elements of that plan never got built, but we now have new ways to supply water. We have desalination, wastewater reuse, and runoff capture. We have new designs to safely withdraw millions of acre feet from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during major storms, and new ways to cost-effectively bank millions of acre feet underground.
Why not turn Los Angeles back into a Garden City? Why not rehydrate the city by replacing “xeriscapes” with more lawn and trees? Instead of banning these cooling and percolating amenities, why not just ban the overused herbicides and pesticides applied to lawn, and discourage highly flammable trees? Imagine a greener and cooler city with abundant water, and a revitalized Los Angeles River flowing through its heart.
These proposals underscore a fact that is often lost on environmentalist planners. Los Angeles, like the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, like the Santa Monica Mountains, will never return to its primeval state. That is obviously true for a metropolitan area. But it is equally true for the Delta, channelized by levees, or for the mountains surrounding Los Angeles, where fire suppression and nonnative grass have altered them forever. The only relevant debate is over how we manage these altered environments.
Which begs the question: Why are the hills on the perimeter of a megacity with over 10 million residents off limits to further development? Why not permit more low density housing throughout these hills and canyons, so private landowners can engage in grazing, controlled burns, and thinning? While some parkland should be preserved for public use, why not permit new and fire hardened neighborhoods to spread further into the hills, and require owners with a stake in the outcome to keep adjacent land clear of dead brush? And why, if 94 percent of California remains rural, should we impose greenbelts around all of our cities, denying any expansion?
Our shortages and high prices are a choice. We are on the cusp of abundant cheap electricity, more than enough to desalinate seawater and purify wastewater. We are developing new construction techniques and materials to greatly reduce the cost and the footprint of new homes. Every day we have new transportation and communications innovations that will make driving either unnecessary or make smarter use of our roads.
Expanding our cities and revising our policies to encourage abundant water and energy can be done while still preserving the vast majority of our unspoiled wildland. Striking this balance will make California affordable for everyone, including those who want to rebuild their homes.
Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, National Review, City Journal, and other media outlets.