How can moving more people to California make the country greener as a whole?

“Triumph of the City” or as I call it, “The economist’s guide to being a city mayor” provides an explanation.

“Triump of the City” explores the idea of the city as an invention, telling short vignettes of great urban centers from Detroit to Singapore, to Dubai. The author Edward Glaeser, dissects the failures and future possibilities of what cities should be. At the core, it’s a celebration of the idea of. city and the benefits that go along with being in a dense and diverse environment. The author grew up in Brooklyn, was educated in Chicago before settling down outside Boston in a suburban home so his view is the of city insider and suburban transplant.

I spend a lot of time thinking about sprawl. Having grown up in southern Florida I can’t help but always return to my childhood and to think how things would have been different if I had grown up in a more urban and educated environment. Don’t get me wrong, Florida is a lovely place, but the aging population, car centric and AC fueled housing stock is not suited for the 21st Century.

My favorite part about the book was a simple explanation of why Houston and Sunbelt communities are actually the biggest polluters, and how California could help make the entire country greener. The bottom line is dense cities with public transit infrastructure and high rise mixed use structures are dramatically more energy efficient than the 3 car garage, manicured lawn and walk in fridge to store Costco bulk purchases.

California’s heavy environmental review of new buildings directly limits necessary growth making prices high. This oversight adds tremendous cost and time to new buildings basically limiting the amount of floor space for homes and offices. This inadvertently makes other places like Houston and Phoenix more affordable options.

Yes it’s important to reign in rampant growth, but there needs to be smart development to increase affordable real estate. Anyone paying rent or a mortgage in the San Francisco Bay Area knows painfully well that the housing shortage is only surpassed by the water shortage.

But what about environmental reviews for farmland which are massively destructive to the environment, local ecosystems and the water supply. California is a net exporter of food to the rest of the nation and the world, accounting for 80% of the water usage in a dry state.

Then why not export the food growing to places in the US that have ample rainfall while importing more people to dense metropolitan innovation capitals? It’s a simple solution but obviously a hard to execute culturally and politically.

What grower in California would let go of precious farmland? Unlikely, until the severity of the drought finally breaks the current status quo.

As a nation, the US would be much greener if more people lived in denser cities. Will there be more dust bowl migration flows in the near future this time out of California?

This is just one of a hundred insights from “Triumph of the City”.

Get the book here http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/0143120549