How to Wean Our Cities From Oil

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Here’s some good news for anyone who wants the US to kick its oil addiction: Property values in outlying suburbs have been ravaged by the housting bust, but closer to downtown, not so much. On the fringes of the District of Columbia, for instance, suburban homes are now worth half their peak values, yet in DC’s walkable inner suburbs and densely built urban neighborhoods, prices are off just 20 percent. Most housing experts now agree that the outer suburbs have been overbuilt and that it’s redevelopment in older urban neighborhoods, places not long ago out of favor, that will lead the eventual housing recovery.

The reason for this is primarily demographic. Between now and 2025, Baby Boomers whose kids have moved out will be looking to move into smaller homes at the same time that their kids, members of Gen Y, the huge “Echo Boom,” start renting their first apartments. As a result, households without children are expected to account for 90 percent of new housing demand. “Our consumer research shows that all of these consumers want to be in a higher density environment than they currently live in,” Shyam Kannan, a real estate consultant with Robert Charles Lesser & Co, told me. “There is a huge pent-up demand for walkable environments.”

A move towards denser living has huge potential to slash our oil use, of course, but it also raises some interesting new challenges that environmentalists should care about. As Christopher Leinberger points out in Atlantic Monthly‘s new Future of the City issue, we’ll need to find creative new ways to fund the kind of public transportation that dense cities require. He proposes bringing back a model, common before WWII, in which developers and governments partner to fund rail lines that then boost private property values. But that’s not the only kind of partnership that we’ll need. It’s also time for environmentalists to set aside their old animosities towards developers and help them win local approval for denser housing, housing that is often fiercely opposed by NIMBYs. I make this case in detail in “Tall is Beautiful,” an article in the May/June issue which is now online.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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