Joining Climate Justice and Affordable Housing

By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor

Davis, CA – What is the link between affordable housing and climate justice?  That’s a critical part of the conversation that often gets omitted from housing and climate change discussions.

This was the subject of a talk last Sunday at the Davis CAN where Jonathan London and Catherine Brinkley from the UC Davis Center For Regional Change discussed the issues of climate justice and affordable housing.

“These two pieces of climate justice and affordable housing and how they really need to be brought together,” London explained during his talk last Sunday. “This idea that they’re really joined at the hip, when we separate them, we run the risk of not achieving either because housing justice really truly is climate justice and we can’t have one without the other.”

He explained, “But climate justice and injustice is really about the structural and historical and global dynamics where those who have been least responsible for the problem are bearing the greatest brunt of the impacts.”

The key point he raised is that, while Europe and the US are the biggest contributors to carbon emissions, the biggest impacts are felt by the underdeveloped countries.

He explained that “if you see the climate impacts, you see a very different picture. You see the United States and Europe taking a very tiny hit of those kinds of impacts and people in the global south having a much greater impact.”

He continued, “You can see the poorest half of the population of the world were responsible for only 6% of the climate emissions, whereas the wealthiest 10 percent were responsible for almost 50%. You really see this great global injustice.”

London described that this isn’t just heat—it’s all sorts of health impacts.

But importantly, “The unhoused are hugely affected (by this) for really obvious reasons. They don’t have the buffers that many of us have in our lives.”

After he pointed out all the ways the poor are disproportionately impacted by climate change including lack of shelter, lack of economic buffers, transportation, air conditioning and the like, he noted that “climate injustice touches all of us, but it touches different ones of us in different ways to different degrees.”

He noted, “The climate justice to housing justice is the … scandalous, horrible, way out of control problem of affordable housing.”  He noted that in Davis, “people paying way far beyond their means for housing, over 30 percent (of their take home income) which is the definition of housing burden.”

He added, “97 percent in this placement that we’re in right now are paying over 30 percent of their income on housing.”

Catherine Brinkley is taking over as director of the UC Davis Center for Regional Change.

Brinkley explained the housing portion of this equation, starting with RHNA, saying “first what happens is regional governments get together and determine how much housing needs to be built. This is called the Regional Housing Needs Assessment. It results in a regional housing needs allocation.”

She explained, “Affordable is determined as it should be, no more than 30% of a monthly household income for rent and utilities. If it’s beyond that, then a family is considered rent burdened.”

She said, “The median rent in Davis is about $2,500. In order to afford just that rent, not utilities on top of it,  you would have to earn at least a hundred thousand dollars a year, which is, you know, an associate professor salary perhaps.”

About 20 percent of the people who live in Yolo County, live below the poverty line, which for a family of four is less than $26,000.

Brinkley explained “that’s nowhere near what’s needed for just housing.”

The current RHNA called for Davis to put together a plan to build over 2000 units of housing, of which 930 were meant for lower income households, and another certain percentage for very low and median income households.

Brinkley talked a bit about the General Plan process and what that entails.

“Davis has a long history of wanting to preserve farmland, not growing out, but also sadly, not growing up,” she said.  “It had a one percent growth cap.”

She noted that recently the state added a requirement to address environmental justice.

“Believe it or not, our General Plan does not yet use that term, environmental justice.”

Brinkley referred people to a website to be able to search city and county general plans.  She looked at how many addressed things like environmental justice and racism, compared to, say, golf courses.

She noted that while nearly every city addresses golf, only two address racism (redlining, segregation, housing and affordability) while only 93 of 482 cities mentioned even the term environmental justice (and just 19 of 58 counties).”

Brinkley said, “There’s a lot of work to be done and if communities aren’t already talking about it, they’re not planning to change it—which means it’s not going to happen.”

Jonathan London asked, “What would it look like for us to say Davis can link affordable housing and climate justice?”

He said, “So there’s everything from social, racial and environmental justice, which we’ve talked about a bit. Climate education and engagement, indigenous climate action just transitions, community resilience and adaptation.”

London talking about the notion of “just transition.”

He said, “It’s really about not just going from stopping burning fossil fuels and putting up, you know, industrial scale solar. It’s much bigger than that. It’s really transforming the economy, the politics, the society, the culture as a whole, and going from this extractive economy towards a living economy across all of these different dimensions.”

Pulling from an article in Nature, he said, “It’s everything from energy efficiency, and all of these things have an equity lens.”

He asked “who is getting access to these kinds of energy efficiency technologies—renters, low-income people and so on, to deal with these energy burdens as well as these rent burdens that we’ve talked about?”

London noted the “discourse on climate justice” is being “co-opted by folks who don’t want any kind of new housing because, for an environmental basis,” he said, “But if we’re not going to have housing in town, that’s going to mean some density, because people are going to live somewhere.”

He said, “So they’ll be commuting in from other places across the causeway from north to south.  And that’s going to be adding to climate change and air pollution.”