One of the biggest environmental impacts is driving, so the real key is to have mixed uses near by.
If you have a family and still need to drive your kids to school everyday, because schools are too far away to walk and there's no bus (typical in California), if you need to drive to go to the grocery store, if you need to drive to do everything in your life, then working from home in a less dense area might still involve a very similar amount of driving.
Once vehicle miles travelled is subtracted out, the biggest impact from living in less dense areas is deforestation, reduction of large fauna in ecosystems, etc. A classic example of that is the Santa Cruz Mountains, highly populated by low-density living, but getting in and out is so arduous that most people do not commute much, or even leave their houses for much. A good life for hermits, but it's not for everyone.
I think it would still involve less driving. You don't get groceries every day if you drive to get them. You buy a few days or a week's worth of supplies at a time.
School may be hard to avoid driving if there's no bus or good walking/biking routes, but maybe you can carpool with neighbors who have kids in the same school.
But I think fundamentally a lot of people are just not accustomed to sitting at home. They feel cooped up, and bored. That's not me -- I'd rarely leave the house if I could get away with it. But I know a lot of people feel that way, if they didn't have to go to work they'd go drive somewhere just to be somewhere different for a while.
I totally understand that, and we need to account for people with different desires and needs. I would go crazy in no time in an isolated setting, I really really crave having a lot of density and people around me. But despise driving to do anything unless it's purely recreational driving, which would be fun maybe once or twice a month.
I would love nothing more than to live in a walkable neighborhood, with very few cars, that lets kids roam free without fear of them getting killed by drivers. But that's really hard to come by anywhere in the US.
My theory is that WFH will mostly contribute to creating secondary markets for more industries. Professionals will still want the services a city affords you but not want to pay SF or even Seattle prices. So they’ll end up somewhere under two hours from the nearest metropolis.
But if you get enough people in one place, you’ll get entrepreneurship.
At some point one has to consider costs, scale and political expediency.
WFH and H-WFH would be broadly popular among the electorate and could probably take off with just some changes to the tax code.
Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not), building housing and infrastructure is expensive and at the end of the day it has to be profitable to build. We don't really have the framework to zone municipalities at the Federal level. So now you are talking about leaving it to the individual states... and I think you can see where that goes.
Given all that, yes, fewer miles driven in aggregate is a good and easy win for the environment. Less gasoline consumed, fewer tires and brake pads consumed, less work clothes bought, less meals purchased at lunch, etc.
> Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not)
I wish we stopped subsidizing wealthy folks choosing to live in low density areas. It is intrinsically regressive that poorer people living in sustainable denser areas are subsidizing the infrastructure of the low density suburbs where richer people live. Low density suburbs do not raise enough taxes to support their own infrastructure, from roads, to water management, to electricity, etc.
Want to live in a single family home? Great! But don't expect people poorer than you to bear the cost.
> wealthy folks choosing to live in low density areas
There's no way you're saying this with a straight face, right? People move out of the city because it's significantly cheaper. Rent in a nice two bedroom "downtown" is $3500. You move 15 minutes out of there and you can get 3 bedroom house for an $1800 mortgage that'll never go up.
Source: I did that. I got tired of paying such a huge chunk of my income for living.
It’s cheaper because not enough city housing is built and there are other costs associated with suburban living. IMO, property taxes should increase as density decreases because those less dense areas will cost a lot more to maintain roads, utilities, etc. down the road.
Higher property taxes for less dense areas might make sense for suburbs of big cities, but not beyond that. In the countryside road and other infrastructure is required for agriculture, if some people also choose to live there (and that way reduce prices in cities) it's a win-win.
Look, where I live isn't SF or Vancouver that has the "NIMBYs oppose all new building" problem. If you wanted to build super dense high-rise apartments or skyscrapers both the city and state would throw money at you and give you tax breaks. It's still ludicrously expensive compared to even the closest suburb.
We've gotten more traction building apartment complexes on the edges of the burbs than in the metro area in recent years.
I live in a SFH. It's very unpleasant outside of my home. It's inconvenient, sometime outright dangerous to walk to my local grocery store. There's also constant noise from the cars and the ever present possibility of a car driving off the road. I see a bicycle tribute or two to small children in my local area.
I wouldn't even considering cycling given the speed of cars around there. The local road is used for through traffic despite being one lane in each direction. So it's very frustrating if I want to get somewhere during rush hour, and this is just cars!
If you want to walk to the local gas station, you might have to deal with muddy ground because of the ground being the bottom of a hill in order to get there, although the owner of said muddy ground have filled it in with dirt lately. The sidewalks if they exist, are discontinuous.
Yes, wealthier people live in SFH and the surburb, but it's a questionable in term of quality of life.
I visited the city. In some way, they are more convenient such as access to rideshare scooters and bikes, but also dangerous and automotive centric if less so.
My neighborhood and for miles around me is lower to middle-middle class. All people that wouldn't be able to afford to 1) move and leave their equity behind 2) afford the rents in the denser part of town.
No way there should be incentives for living outside dense areas. Utility, road, and service maintenance costs increase per capita as density goes down, and currently that cost is not borne by people in those areas.
Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not), building housing and infrastructure is expensive and at the end of the day it has to be profitable to build. We don't really have the framework to zone municipalities at the Federal level. So now you are talking about leaving it to the individual states... and I think you can see where that goes.
It's impossible to build if there are restriction on permitting and construction. Also, I would expect land cost to be a significant factor in high density area due to high demand.
I don't really see how any of this (aside from the brief mention of commuting again) has any bearing on the question of whether it's better for the environment.
As in does working from home require someone to move to the suburbs? No. But many people do choose to move into larger housing in cheaper, less dense areas once they start spending more time at home and aren't tied down by a daily commute.
Denser housing can easily be net zero from nearby solar panels. Additionally, denser housing is much more energy efficient, requiring less overall energy, but this is kind of a minor impact. Once we get to solar + batteries powering most of our energy needs, cutting space heating energy needs by 20%-50% doesn't matter much.
When the topic is "tire wear on cars causes significant environmental damage, not just their combustion-engine emissions", praising houses for just their electricity consumption seems a little silly.
The denser the housing the more efficient in almost every way. Even if we had the money the world already doesn't have enough resources for everyone to get a single family home with solar panels, batteries, a tesla and a well, most will have to live in dense cities to survive.
