A house with a fence, a herb garden and fruit trees, maybe even a small jacuzzi - the homeowner dream growing up for many of you. It was mine. I've wanted to write this for a while: why I've given up that dream a long time ago, and not for the $ reasons you might think. https://twitter.com/BrentRichter/status/1052230712391135232

Watch the top right corner of this gif, of the clear cutting of northern Coquitlam over just 10 years. What went there?

Houses went there, of course. Single detached houses, to be exact. Streets and streets full of them.

Let’s look a bit more carefully. These new houses are all huge and luxurious. Thousands of square feet per person. There are multiple, big cars in practically every driveway, though each of these have their own double+ garages.

People are so sparsely populated here that public transit won’t work. People *have* to drive. No choice. No car means no mobility. Everyone has to have their own car.

They use that car for every little thing. These streets have nothing but single detached houses on them, which means that even going out for a coffee or grabbing milk and eggs means driving.

Let’s stop and think about the climate crisis. What are most people’s biggest carbon footprints?

Housing and transportation. You think a single detached house is green if you have trees, solar panels, and drive electric?

Think again.

This graphic here, showing how much smaller the carbon footprint of an average person who lives in an apartment vs. an average person who lives in a detached house, is one of the biggest reasons why you, me, all of us - should be taking building multifamily housing seriously.

I made a few adjustments to my dream. Growing up didn’t have to mean owning a giant house. I still have plants and pets.

I'm very happy with my low-carbon, public transit-oriented lifestyle, and wish more people had the option to enjoy it as I do, but I digress. I've finally written this thread, because of this https://twitter.com/sharethecities/status/1227652575165472768

You see, as a housing activist, I see this all. the. time. Protecting trees in urban areas is great, until you use it as a sword to smite down the rezoning applications of new multifamily housing. I'm looking at you, Vancouver municipal Greens.

1) People need homes. 2) Homes can physically only go up or out. And when we go out - when we sprawl - we clearcut. We destroy every semblance of the ecosystem that existed there, landscape, and plant a few ornamental trees. This isn't, obviously, "green" in any substantial sense

Way more trees per capita are cut down when we sprawl than if we build infil apartments in existing cities. Multifamily infil is an enormously important way to cut down on our GHG emissions and using a few trees to stop it is, literally, missing the forest for the trees.

One last note - I've heard people argue to protect INVASIVE BLACKBERRY BUSHES at a fully publicly funded, social-housing-and-transition-care-centre project. So no, I'm not interested in your but-developers-make-profit concern trolling, so don't even start, kthxbye

See these commute patterns? Yeah they keep me up at night too

Can we please build more homes where the jobs are? Please???
https://twitter.com/vb_jens/status/1228169263803817984?s=21 https://twitter.com/vb_jens/status/1228169263803817984

Vancouver’s rental vacancy rates are crisis-level low and job growth is steady, which means, you guessed it, people travel from farther out which means even more emissions, not less

We are out of time to keep doing this. We need to let people live more and drive less.