Housing Growth: Ezra Klein Intervew

Annie Galvin

So one more question that relates to the environment. Alyssa asks, “How do you reconcile the need to build more housing for people with catastrophic biodiversity loss” that might come along with that effort to build?

Ezra Klein

So I don’t think those are in tension, really. A lot of the pressure to build more housing comes from people who want to see dense places zoned so you can build up. And I don’t think it’s the case that if we just made it easier to add stories to buildings in San Francisco, you would have any more biodiversity loss. The biodiversity in San Francisco proper is — it’s already pretty lost.

What’s happening right now is what’s creating a lot of biodiversity loss. So in California, because zoning is so terrible and it is so hard to build a house in the places people want to live, you’ve had tremendous outflow into what gets called now the urban wildland interface, which is to say building more homes in these more wooded exurban or rural or even, until now, relatively empty areas of wilderness. And that does have a lot of biodiversity loss.

But it’s also bad for the climate because people are driving more. It’s bad for fires for a bunch of different reasons. It’s just bad. But it is happening because we won’t build up in the cities where they actually want to live. And so we are pushing poorer people out to these more vulnerable, more ecologically difficult places.

So as a first approximation on housing, I would like to see more dense housing in areas people are already living in and want to live in. I would add, by the way, that in terms of biodiversity loss, the amount of land we give to animals, to grazing animals, it is beyond comprehension. It is so much of the land that is habitable on planet Earth. People have no idea how much this is picking up.

And so one of the best things we can do is to move to foods that don’t require so much land. If it’s legumes, great. But also, if it’s plant- and cell-based meats, great. But either way, I don’t think there’s really a tension between housing and biodiversity. But I think there are a lot of places where our current policy is creating terrible, terrible biodiversity outcomes. And denser housing, and a move away from industrial animal agriculture would be to things that could really help.

Annie Galvin

How many stories high do you think buildings in San Francisco should be allowed to be?

Ezra Klein

A lot higher than now.

Annie Galvin

[LAUGHS]

Ezra Klein

I don’t care.

Annie Galvin

Higher than three?

Ezra Klein

I don’t care. Again, I’d start with higher. I have been to cities like New York, where buildings get pretty high, and it’s fine. I don’t love everything about the architecture, but people do enjoy New York.

Annie Galvin

That’s true.

Ezra Klein

I don’t know, make it easy to build 10-story apartment buildings. Let’s start there before we get to skyscrapers. I understand the ways in which people like the aesthetic and even population-level characteristics of the places they live. But when you have places that are as economically central in some of these cities, like San Francisco, where so many people work, and so the reality is you have an entire service class in the city that is made to commute in so you can have your view — I don’t like it, and I think it’s unjust.