California Land Use Blog

I spent the Thursday afternoon after the election at a meeting of Northern California homebuilders listening to presentations on the economic outlook for the coming year. The CEO of a large national homebuilding company and one of the most highly regarded locally based builders both acknowledged that green building, infill development and other more sustainable practices are, "the right thing to do." They made references to being stunned reading Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded, and one joked that their 11-year old was reading An Inconvenient Truth and they didn't snatch it away and burn it. Four years ago the same group might have burned Al Gore in effigy.

The builders on the panel struggled with the fact that consumers balked at paying for solar options, rued lagging sales of projects with enhanced green features that have higher costs and prices. A vision of future homes with zero net energy demand was articulated, if somewhat wistfully. They are looking for a way to solve these problems and not make sustainability bear a market penalty. They look forward to higher volumes of solar and other green technology resulting from broader acceptance to bring down costs. They want acknowledgment that today's building codes bring new development to market at a fraction of the energy consumption of homes built before 1990, and that rates of new construction since the 1970s, even in the boom years of the housing bubble, amount to only about 1% annual addition to the existing housing stock, while the state's population continues to increase at significantly higher rates. They fear mandates to place the burden of past sins in energy-profligate planning and development patterns on future projects will make homes even more unaffordable to Californians in comparison to most of the rest of the nation, when expending less resources on retrofitting older homes will bring much greater efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction than trying to wring the last ounce of carbon out of new construction.

These are accepted as challenges and not dismissed as barriers. I asked myself if government regulators and environmentalists used to demonizing developers as despoilers of the earth are capable of hearing this radical shift in tone and be equally willing to accept the challenge of forging practical, cost-effective solutions to housing Californians while fighting global warming? I didn't want to spoil the moment by saying aloud what echoed in my head, "Yes, we can."