Hi, I'm Clara Jeffery, editor-in-chief here at Mother Jones.
I want to tell you about "Save Lafayette," which, last month, finally lost a long-running battle to stop a 315-unit housing complex from being built in Lafayette, a small affluent city near Oakland, California. From a climate perspective, the spot was ideal: on a former quarry, next to a high school, close to mass transit. Sixty-three units—20 percent—were set aside for low-income households. But the group of “Lafayette residents who support our City’s historic character” objected to “excessive urbanization that overcrowds our schools, causes massive traffic congestion, worsens parking problems, and threatens our health and safety.”
This was a classic NIMBY ("Not in My Backyard") battle: a rich community spurning the less affluent—never mind that those people staff their schools and restaurants. Never mind, too, that hampering urban density causes people to sprawl into the wildlife-urban interface, which is a major cause of forest fires, and parts of Lafayette are in what Cal Fire deems a “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.” And if you’re surprised to learn that Lafayette residents overwhelmingly voted for Biden, don’t be.
NIMBYs come in a variety of forms, but the most confounding are those who call themselves progressive yet abuse laws conceived to protect the environment, or foster good government, to block desperately needed housing, driving up costs and fueling homelessness. Some on the left continue to be quite acrobatic in their defense of blocking housing, ignoring all evidence that this mostly benefits rich homeowners.
So why am I banging on about housing in a package devoted to the green energy transformation? Because watching how the housing wars have played out in California makes me very worried about whether we can achieve that transformation. Doing so requires building tons of denser, transit-linked housing, but also massive wind and solar farms, enough transmission lines to circle the Earth three times, lithium mines, and scads of factories, and that’s just for starters. As Bill McKibben notes in our cover story, “Yes in Our Backyards”: “California used to be the world’s ideal—the Golden State. Now it’s increasingly a cautionary tale, of the wildfires that break out when you don’t control the temperature, of ‘bomb cyclones’ that dump a year’s worth of rainfall in a month, and of the homeless camps that inevitably arise when the only houses still available are too expensive for most people to afford.”
Today, we must consider not just personal interests, but global impacts. Failure to decarbonize will not be borne equally, but it will be felt everywhere. The housing crisis and the green energy transformation intersect on a variety of planes. Taking on these enormous tasks in earnest will require progressives to shed some old habits and challenge some dearly held assumptions. Challenging assumptions is part of Mother Jones’ role, and I believe that we’re uniquely positioned to speak truth to friends, as well as to power.
—Clara Jeffery
