A proposed ordinance that would require all new construction buildings in Los Angeles to be zero-carbon will make developing affordable housing very expensive, according to a California State University (CSU) professor.
“In order to make this work, they're going to need a much larger amount of investment and it’s going to require cutting California off from the rest of the west,” said Robert Michaels, a professor of economics at CSU-Fullerton. “That's not going to work because if that happened, we would find ourselves at the mercy of the weather.”
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman announced the plan last week amid a homelessness crisis that counts some 63,706 unsheltered people in Los Angeles County, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. In the city of Los Angeles, that number was 41,290.
“Making a building all electric means, among other things, that you need a very different set of wiring all over the area because you will be forced to build all sorts of support for the system to maintain reliability in that neighborhood that you wouldn't have before all electric buildings,” Michaels told the Southern California Record.
Buildings in Los Angeles account for 43% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than any other sector, according to media reports, and under Raman’s plan, appliances in new buildings would also have to be energy efficient.
“There's an idea that what will work on this is that all electric buildings will be all backed up by some sort of magical system called batteries but your typical state of the art battery is really only going to work for a few hours unless you get really lucky and solar is able to charge things just perfectly,” Michaels said. “But if you have too cloudy a day, you're going to have big problems. To make this a reality, Los Angeles will need at least a couple of grids where we've just had one.”
As previously reported, the city wants to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2035, which will likely delay affordable housing projects that are current at the planning stage, according to Michaels.
“Anybody who tries to put in a big block of housing is going to have to explain where the power comes from and that's going to put this burden on the shoulders of those people who build and ultimately will occupy that housing unless they find out some way to pass the bill on to existing homeowners and, as we're already starting to see, there's a limit to what the politics will bear,” Michaels added.