My wife recently alerted me to a The New York Times article reporting about how planners in Princeton were enthusiastically pushing forward a series of proposals to address the epidemic of residential teardowns. The date on the piece: May 8, 2005.
Should we be surprised that progress on this issue over the past thirteen years has been, well, nil? Let us be honest, commitment to effective policies to limit the seemingly ceaseless process of raze, rebuild, repeat was always destined to be fleeting because of a powerful confluence of different, but ultimately convergent, interests. The tax collector favors residential upsizing. Existing property owners may initially fret about changes in local character, but they know deep down that resolve will soften as the closing date to sell their own home approaches. Neighbors, too, may wring their hands, but they are, of course, also beneficiaries of larger houses and rising property values.
The wide array of enablers—real estate agents, lawyers, mortgage brokers, architects—are surely not going to throw grit into the money-making machine. So any effort to stem the trend, under current conditions, is destined to crumble under a cumulating pile of self-interest. A few idealistic souls will emerge from time to time, but they will be ridiculed for “not understanding how the market works” or “not having read the zoning ordinance.”
I live on Morgan Place, a small street with just thirteen mostly 1950s-era houses—in planning vernacular they are deemed to be obsolescent which in practical terms means too small and too out-of-date (without sufficient compensating qualities to give them marketable retro appeal).
I recently received notice that the second home on this small block in just five years had been booked for an appointment with the bulldozer and in dutiful and democratic fashion several of my neighbors and I once again paid a ritual visit to the Princeton Zoning Board of Appeals only to have our concerns, like numberless other fellow residents under similar circumstances, summarily dismissed as so much nonsense.
On the basis of research reported in publications with cheerless titles like the Journal of Industrial Ecology and Energy Policy, we can be virtually certain that the newly built house will be more energy consumptive than the existing home. This situation is due to the fact that a more sizeable structure has more surface area and experiences more heat loss and unwanted heat gain. In other words, the engineering science advises us that increasing structural size will almost certainly result in greater energy use—and this outcome tends to hold regardless of the number of design improvements or enhancements in efficiency technologies. Interested readers are invited to contact me directly if they interested in the relevant references.
It furthermore merits pointing out that the seemingly relentless pattern of residential upsizing stands in direct opposition to at least two of the Township’s recent policy statements. In the first instance, the 2017 Reexamination Report of the Princeton Community Master Plan identifies the promotion of “sustainable development practices” as an objective of future land development. To be sure, there are a multitude of definitions outlining what constitutes sustainable development, but I submit that most informed people would contend that for development to be sustainable we need at the very least to cap (and more likely to drastically reduce) consumption of climate-warming fossil fuels.
Second, and perhaps more unsettling, in June of last year, Mayor Lempert announced that Princeton was joining with over 200 mayors around the country (including at least eleven others from New Jersey) to pledge support for the Paris Climate Agreement. This accord calls for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by 26‒28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. At the time, the mayor was quoted as saying, “It is imperative that towns and cities take the lead on climate action.” Partly because of this initiative, Princeton is now part of a country-spanning network called the Mayors National Climate Action Agenda that aims to hold signatories to account.
Before we take final stock of our predicament, it is lastly instructive to absorb a key insight of a path-breaking report recently released by Sustainable Princeton which provides a detailed profile of our collective greenhouse-gas emissions. Using a state-of-the-art methodology, the analysis determined that 20 percent of local releases are directly attributable to residential energy use.
The take-away here is that how we manage our local housing inventory—which is largely a function of the zoning ordinance and how it is applied—is critically important if we are to reach our climate objectives over the next seven years. If we continue to allow applicants to routinely demolish modestly sized homes and to permit the construction of significantly larger replacements it will be virtually impossible to meet our stated intentions. It is simply unrealistic to expect that incremental efficiency improvements and renewables substitution—as essential as they are—will ever be able to adequately offset increases in energy use due to residential upsizing.
Princeton, at least as I understand it, is a community that strives to make decisions on the basis of the most reliable scientific knowledge available. If this is indeed the case, the lesson that we need to take on board is that when it comes to the environmental implications of residential design, size matters. And it matters more than any other variable in the construction equation. To reiterate the point above, this is not a problem that we can address with hopeful engineering fixes that simply seek to make our homes more energy efficient. As former Vice President Al Gore famously noted two decades ago, climate change raises a number of inconvenient truths. The question remains whether we have the courage to face up to reality.
Maurie J. Cohen
[The writer is Professor of Sustainability Studies and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This commentary is am modified version of a statement presented to the Princeton Township Zoning Board of Adjustment on July 25, 2018.]