Steepening problems

The problems that cities face are steepening. The longer we wait to address them, the harder they become to address. This is a concept that came from Alex Steffen in regards to combating and adapting to climate change, but it applies to all of the core problems cities must contend with today, including climate change, housing affordability, fiscal solvency, public health, and the local economy.

Climate Change

To keep the Earth’s warming under 2℃, we have a remaining carbon budget of approximately 330 gigatons (Gt) of CO2. When I wrote about the carbon budget at the end of 2016, we had a budget of approximately 350 Gt of CO2, but in the 15 months since that post humanity has added approximately 20 additional Gt of CO2 to the atmosphere. The longer we wait to reduce our CO2 emissions, the more radical the required shifts in our behaviors and industries will need to be to stay within our carbon budget. This perfectly illustrates a steepening problem.

As we wait longer to address climate change, the harder it becomes to address. We start to run out of resources, in the case of climate change those resources are time and carbon emissions. By waiting to act, we require a steep drop-off in carbon emissions at some point in the future. If we act now by reducing carbon emissions, we can extend that drop-off further into the future and make it less steep. By saving emissions today, we can then spend those emissions in a future year.

The graph to the left illustrates this. If we continue to increase our CO2 emissions by 2% per year, as we did in 2017, then we’d need to completely stop emitting CO2 in 2034 to stay within the Earth’s carbon budget for 2℃. In other words, we’d need to go from emitting 24 Gt of CO2 to zero in one year. If we were to continue emitting 17 Gt of CO2 each year, we’d gain ourselves three years, and would need to stop emitting carbon in 2037, going from seventeen Gt to zero Gt in one year. Instead, if we start decreasing our carbon emissions, we can lengthen that time even more. A 1% reduction in CO2 emissions per year would get us to 2039, a 2% reduction per year would get us to 2042, a 3% reduction per year would get us to 2047, a 4% reduction per year would get us to 2058, at which point we’d need to go from producing about 3 Gt of CO2 to zero in a single year. If we can achieve a 5% reduction per year, we ensure that we can stay within the Earth’s carbon budget for 2℃.

To look at this another way, if we start cutting CO2 emissions today, we need to cut 5% per year until we reach zero. If we wait just two years until 2020 to start cutting emissions, we’ll need to cut them at 6.25% per year. If we wait until 2025, we’ll need to cut emissions just over 10% per year. If we wait until 2030, we’ll need to cut emissions by 23% per year. By 2035, we’ll have blow through our budget.

The longer we wait to address climate change, the harder addressing it will become. It is a steepening problem.

Housing Affordability

Housing affordability is a steepening problem in a slightly different way than climate change. Housing affordability becomes a steeper political problem as houses become less affordable. As housing prices go up and exceed their intrinsic value as shelter, homeowners start to view their homes as a financial vehicle for investment. Once a house is an investment, rather than a home, homeowners start to try to protect that investment, and the best way to do that is to constrain the supply of new houses.

Housing is a market, just like any other, that is governed by the rules of supply and demand. If there is high demand to live somewhere, but not many houses, then home prices will be high. If there is plenty of supply for the amount of demand, then prices will be more moderate. For homeowners that view their property as an investment vehicle, they benefit from limiting supply of new housing so their home value will be higher.

This, in turn, leads to existing homeowners opposing new housing developments. As home prices rise, more people start to view their homes as their retirement savings, and therefore start to oppose new housing. This is what has happened in California over the past forty years. It has become increasingly difficult to build new housing as housing has become more expensive. The problem has become steeper the longer we have waited to address it.

Fiscal Solvency

The Growth Ponzi Scheme is another example of a steeping problem. As more unsustainable development is built, it requires an ever increasing amount of new development to support it. If today a city has one unsustainable neighborhood and a second neighborhood is built to subsidize it in the short-run, in the long-run the city will need to build two more unsustainable neighborhoods to subsidize the first two, and suddenly the city has four unsustainable neighborhoods.

As more neighborhoods are built the problem becomes harder to tackle. The longer a city waits to change its patterns of development, the more unsustainable neighborhoods will be built. The more unsustainable neighborhoods a city has, the more neighborhoods that produce a surplus will be needed. If a city doesn’t have enough growth demand to build all of the surplus neighborhoods, then they’ll continue to run a deficit and eventually either find a new equilibrium with lower services or go bankrupt.

Public Health

Sometimes, when talking about parking, people will say that they want close parking because their knees or their hips make walking long distances hard. Most of the time, these are people that are in slightly poor health who would have benefited from walking more. The problem is, because they haven’t walked, they now can’t walk. This is its own form of a steepening problem.

Because we’ve built our cities in a way that doesn’t keep us healthy, it becomes increasingly difficult to rebuild our cities for public health. This is because residents and customers demand a built environment that allows them to maintain their current habits instead of being forced into healthier ones.

Local Economy

The local economy death spiral that most people are familiar with is a steeping problem of its own. Most communities around the world have experienced it over the past half century. As national chain stores come into a community, they push out local businesses. Where the local businesses shop at other local businesses, the chain stores have their own distribution networks that patronage other large companies. This leads to weakness in the local businesses, which are easy targets to be replaced by national chains. As they get replaced, these chains lead to further weakness in other local businesses, and the process continues to repeat until few local businesses are left.

While this death spiral is happening, the problem gets increasingly steep and hard to solve. Early intervention can save many local businesses, but once they’re gone it becomes increasingly difficult for new businesses to keep their money local and grow local wealth. Once enough businesses are gone, even the remaining local businesses will need to purchase goods from outside of the community.

These steepening problems are really no different than most things in life. Problems always get worse when we procrastinate solving them. When it comes to the way we build our cities and organize our economy, procrastination never helps. Quick, bold solutions flatten out the difficulty curve on all of these problems, making it easier to implement additional change in the future.

[Note: This is one article in a longer series on finding local solutions to global problems and to build a better world, including solving issues related to climate change, housing affordability, the local economy, the fiscal solvency of cities, and public health.]