Green Jersey

Greening the suburbs

Alex Williams has a great story in today’s New York Times about the impact of suburban life on the environment. People moved to the suburbs in the ’50s and ’60s because they wanted to live greener, Williams points out — but seeing greenery and living greenly have proven to be two very different things. Urban dwellers leave much less of a carbon footprint than those rocking the suburbs — add up the carbon cost of a longer commute and a bigger home that consumes more resources (not to mention the stuff it takes to keep that lawn green) and you’ll see why. In numbers: The average New York City resident produces 7.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, compared to 24.5 metric tons for the average American, Williams says.

In a blog post on Williams’ story, Andrew Revkin of Dot Earth shares this from the Sustainable Home Blog:

In 1946, when the American post war housing boom started, the average house was 1,100 square feet and housed 5 people. Fifty years latter, in 1996 the average house would grow to 2,200 square feet and house 2.6 people and by 2007, fueled by easy credit, the average American home would would become the equivalent of a Hummer, “weighing in” at super-sized 2,400 square feet.

So Americans like to live large. What now? As Revkin writes in his post, experiments are under way that could help improve suburbia. One project turns old malls into walkable villages. There are plenty more modifications people can make at home — changing lightbulbs to CFLs (and, perhaps soon on a larger scale, LEDs); running washers and dryers only when they’re full; even taking shorter showers. People looking to move can build anew, and green; those looking to stay can do a green retrofit with the help of green-minded home renovation companies.

No need to trade the 4-bedroom house for a city condo just yet.