City Dwellers Pay the Price
Just a few quick observations.
First, cities are generally the greenest place for people to live. "Greenest" in the sense that an urban lifestyle (small house, relatively little car use) is generally less polluting than a suburban or rural one. I think this is pretty well understood these days, at least among the audience for this blog. (It is worth noting briefly that (A) big cities tend to have big, polluting suburbs, so if you take the entire metro area into account I'm not sure big cities are actually all that green, (B) poor people tend to have low-carbon lifestyles wherever they live, and rich people tend to have high-carbon lifestyles wherever they live, and (C) with better public policy smaller cities and suburbs could be made to be pretty green. These are all topics for a different post.)
Anyway my real point has to do with my second observation, which is that cities tend not to be at all green in the sense of having healthy environments. This used to be a severe problem, now in the developed world it is not nearly as bad (more on that in a minute), and it's even improved quite a bit in many big cities in developing countries (Mexico City for instance). But it's still pretty bad to live in a city. This is extremely unfair in my view. If you live in a leafy green suburb you really will live a longer, healthier life than if you live in a city. In particular as I've started to ride a bicycle around the city more and more, I've noticed that I'm breathing a lot of really terrible air. (This post was motivated by this article, but there's plenty more evidence that small particulate pollution is very damaging. By the way, that article was published in Britain, which is why there are so many misspellings.) It kills me to think that I'm trading away my health in this way. (I know, probably the exercise benefits outweigh the costs to my heart and lungs, but still, it's a shitty tradeoff.)
My third point is that despite what I've said, cities' environmental conditions seem to have improved a lot relative to the rest of the country in the last 50-100 years. This may be a partial explanation for the high prices that houses in some urban areas command. Emphasis on partial! I'm not trying to deny the supply constrains that appear to be the core problem. But I suspect demand would be far weaker if pollution were as bad today as it was in the 1950s. In some ways, what is happening is that the product is improving dramatically and the price is responding as you would expect.
I'll write a separate post on how to think about where to live.
[Update: I think I should link to a recent piece on the conservative movement's abandonment of cost-benefit analysis. It's a well-written piece that I think manages to explain the problem without glorifying CBA itself. I will return to this topic too, but for now I'll just observe that it appears that reducing small particulate matter pollution is a hugely beneficial policy.]
First, cities are generally the greenest place for people to live. "Greenest" in the sense that an urban lifestyle (small house, relatively little car use) is generally less polluting than a suburban or rural one. I think this is pretty well understood these days, at least among the audience for this blog. (It is worth noting briefly that (A) big cities tend to have big, polluting suburbs, so if you take the entire metro area into account I'm not sure big cities are actually all that green, (B) poor people tend to have low-carbon lifestyles wherever they live, and rich people tend to have high-carbon lifestyles wherever they live, and (C) with better public policy smaller cities and suburbs could be made to be pretty green. These are all topics for a different post.)
Anyway my real point has to do with my second observation, which is that cities tend not to be at all green in the sense of having healthy environments. This used to be a severe problem, now in the developed world it is not nearly as bad (more on that in a minute), and it's even improved quite a bit in many big cities in developing countries (Mexico City for instance). But it's still pretty bad to live in a city. This is extremely unfair in my view. If you live in a leafy green suburb you really will live a longer, healthier life than if you live in a city. In particular as I've started to ride a bicycle around the city more and more, I've noticed that I'm breathing a lot of really terrible air. (This post was motivated by this article, but there's plenty more evidence that small particulate pollution is very damaging. By the way, that article was published in Britain, which is why there are so many misspellings.) It kills me to think that I'm trading away my health in this way. (I know, probably the exercise benefits outweigh the costs to my heart and lungs, but still, it's a shitty tradeoff.)
My third point is that despite what I've said, cities' environmental conditions seem to have improved a lot relative to the rest of the country in the last 50-100 years. This may be a partial explanation for the high prices that houses in some urban areas command. Emphasis on partial! I'm not trying to deny the supply constrains that appear to be the core problem. But I suspect demand would be far weaker if pollution were as bad today as it was in the 1950s. In some ways, what is happening is that the product is improving dramatically and the price is responding as you would expect.
I'll write a separate post on how to think about where to live.
[Update: I think I should link to a recent piece on the conservative movement's abandonment of cost-benefit analysis. It's a well-written piece that I think manages to explain the problem without glorifying CBA itself. I will return to this topic too, but for now I'll just observe that it appears that reducing small particulate matter pollution is a hugely beneficial policy.]
posted by James | 4:13 PM
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