Democrats and Republicans currently agree on virtually nothing except the dire need to build more housing in the United States. Depending on your perspective, this country needs new housing to put people to work and boost local economies, or to build affordable housing to lower housing costs and thereby reduce homelessness. Affordability, including housing, is currently one of America’s biggest political issues.
But neither party is talking about the hidden superpowers of the new apartment complexes. That’s far better for the planet than building single-family homes. According to a new report, these units are “a form of near-automatic construction.” decarbonizationBecause three-quarters of new apartments are heated with electricity. This means that instead of burning natural gas in a furnace or boiler to heat your plants, you can run them on rooftop solar panels or rely on the grid to run on clean energy.
The Trump administration and the Republican Party as a whole are trying to reverse climate change as much as possible, while inadvertently accelerating it by calling for new construction. Deep-red Montana, for example, recently passed a flurry of bills to increase construction of multifamily housing. “Apartments are a solution to climate change hidden in plain sight,” said Alan Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, which authored the report.
I’m not against single-family homes, but apartments and condos are much more efficient for a variety of reasons. First, residents share walls, floors, and ceilings with neighbors and surround them with excellent insulation. Second, each dwelling unit tends to be smaller in square footage than a single-family home, so there is less air to manage. Therefore, less energy is needed to control the air conditioning in apartments and keep people comfortable. A typical resident of a downtown high-rise building emits one-third of that energy. greenhouse gas As a resident of a detached house in the suburbs.
Because of this inherent efficiency, apartment builders have for decades chosen to install so-called electric resistance heating devices, like baseboard heaters, instead of gas furnaces. That’s because wiring is cheaper than plumbing. methane. “If you’re building something with the intention of renting it, you really want to keep the initial costs to a minimum,” says Amanda D. Smith, a senior fellow at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit. He studies the built environment but was not involved in the new report. “In many cases, electric water heaters and electric heaters for home heating make sense from that perspective.”
And economic forces have long encouraged the adoption of such systems, the report notes. Sixty-eight percent of apartment buildings built since the early 1970s are heated with electricity. Half a century ago, no one was campaigning to decarbonize buildings to fight climate change. Electrification was just the better option. If you currently live in an apartment, you are 60% more likely to go all-electric than your neighbor who lives in a house.
And apartments can become even more environmentally friendly. Heat pumps, which move heat indoors from outdoor air rather than producing it like a gas furnace, are about three times more efficient than space heaters. Over the past few decades, this technology has become even more powerful, allowing it to extract heat even from frozen outdoor air. This has allowed heat pumps to become popular even in the coldest climates. 100,000 devices were installed in Maine two years ahead of schedule, and nearly two-thirds of households in Norway now use heat pumps. Heat pumps are also becoming increasingly common in American apartment buildings, with 18 percent of these buildings in the Northwest incorporating them since 2010, the report notes, although they were very rare in the decades after the 1950s. (Overall, heat pumps have outpaced gas furnaces in the U.S. in recent years.)
Traditional electric heat pumps function similarly to air conditioners, but require an outdoor unit that connects to an indoor unit, but newer types are easier to install in apartments and condominiums. A product from a company called Gradient fits like a saddle over a window frame, plugs into a regular electrical outlet, and takes less than 30 minutes to install. (Think of it like the old-fashioned air conditioning units that stick out of the windows of city apartments, only much cooler to look at.) Another product launching this winter combines two units into one and attaches them to an interior wall, where they exchange air with outside air. “Making it easier to renovate will change the game,” Smith said.
Even if a new building in a hot region of the United States relies on gas heating, it will still need an air conditioning system. The advantage of a heat pump is that it can be reversed in the summer to fill your home with cooler air. As temperatures rise across the country, heat pumps will work more efficiently than space heaters and gas furnaces to not only heat apartments, but also provide valuable cooling to keep people healthy. Heat already kills more people each year in the United States than all other extreme weather events combined.
Fully electrifying building heating will encourage the introduction of induction stoves, another essential piece of equipment for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “If you’re building a building and you’re heating and cooling it with heat pumps, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hook it up to the gas system and pump in a little bit of gas so that people can cook on gas stoves a few times a week,” said Matt Casale, managing director of states and territories at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition, which was not involved in the report.
All this electrification could be incorporated into a burgeoning technology known as networked geothermal. Instead of building heat pumps that use outside air, they use liquid pumped underground. These heat pumps are more efficient at heating spaces because the earth’s surface temperature remains more constant throughout the year than the atmosphere. If all local buildings, such as apartments, were connected to a networked geothermal system, there would be no need to pipe gas into the neighborhood at all. “This is a true community-based energy system, literally using homegrown energy,” Casale said. “It’s at your feet.”
In addition to superior energy efficiency and trends toward electrification, multifamily housing offers higher density housing and can accommodate far more people on site than single-family homes can manage. Located near essentials like grocery stores, residents can walk instead of driving, further reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, a robust public transportation system would allow apartment dwellers to go anywhere they can’t walk.
But Cecil Farrow, director of the clean construction program at C40, a global network of mayors focused on climate change, says building just one big apartment block won’t cut it. These structures require mixed use, with residential space above commercial space such as markets and clinics. “So they have access to needs like care, education and shopping,” said Faroud, who was not involved in the report. “But it’s also important from a health perspective to be able to exercise in places like parks and have access to nature.”
In fact, the environment surrounding these apartment complexes is also important. Green spaces reduce temperatures, improve the mental health of residents, and provide habitat for native plant and animal species. Even better, “farms” surround working farms with apartment buildings and produce nutritious crops for residents to enjoy and sell. (Faroud emphasizes that in addition to building more housing, cities need to retrofit existing buildings to be more energy efficient, such as with double-glazed windows and better insulation.)
But building apartments is often more difficult than necessary, housing advocates say. The new report notes that “all but 10 Oregon cities currently allow construction of at least four-story apartment buildings on less than 1 percent of residential lots,” but even in the progressive city of Portland, the number is 14 percent. “The main thing we need to do is re-legalize apartments in wider areas of the city,” Durning said.
That responsibility lies with cities and states, not the federal government. But increased national pressure from both parties to build more units would be a win-win for people and the planet. “Even in a political climate as fractured and divisive and contentious as we are currently seeing,” Smith said. “I think most people are willing to say, ‘We want people to own homes.'”
