Abundance Or Sufficiency? Charting A Path To The Future

Lloyd Alter is a small-minded man. Ordinarily, that would not be treated as a compliment, but let me explain, because I don’t mean it the way it sounds. Alter was a primary force behind Treehugger for more than a decade and now lives in Toronto, where he teaches others about the power of thinking small. His focus is not on building Taj Mahals that celebrate the stupendous wealth of a few, but rather on small, efficient dwellings that meet the needs of mere mortals. In his mind, they should consume the fewest resources both in construction and over their useful life. They should be sufficient in every respect but not more than that.

Quite frankly, Lloyd Alter is out of step with how wealthy people think, and he is perfectly okay with that. Let me give you an example. Next door to my condo community in Florida, a family proposes to build a 22,000 square foot dwelling on the beach. Many years ago, my community was severely damaged by a series of hurricanes. At the time it was built, the primary attraction was that owners and guests could walk directly into the ocean from anywhere within the community. When the hurricanes came, the ocean came ashore with a vengeance, bringing thousands of tons of sand with it. Many of the dwellings were uninhabitable for up to 18 months afterward.

In the wake of the hurricanes, a decision was made to create a dune next to the beach to protect the community from future storms. Over the next 20 years, effective dune management has resulted in a robust bulwark against harm from the sea. Dune specific vegetation such as sea oats have a dense root system that spreads throughout the dune and helps it withstand the powerful storms that often sweep up the east coast of Florida.

They also have a way of capturing sand in the air so it gets added to the dune. In that way, our dune is the beneficiary of accretion over time. From an original height of 4 feet and a width of 12 feet, it has grown over the past two decades until it is now 12 feet high and almost 50 feet wide. Today it is the tallest coastal land mass in Saint Lucie County.

That proposed monstrosity next door will be situated right in the area where the dune would be if the prior owners had displayed the same foresight as my community did decades ago. In addition to enormous living spaces, it will feature seven guest quarters, each of them around 1500 square feet with an en suite bathroom, media room, and sitting area, and a sleeping area.

The owner says he and his wife are planning a large family and besides, they have many wealthy friends who may wish to visit without feeling like they are cooped up in a motel. And it will have no stinking dune blocking anyone’s view of the ocean.

Lloyd Alter would be horrified. In his latest blog post, he calls for:

• Less sprawl, which benefits from massive federal subsidies for road infrastructure and fossil fuels
• Less height, where tall skinny buildings often have higher emissions per bedroom than single-family houses
• Less floor area/person and more missing middle/Goldilocks density housing and multifamily designs as are common in Europe.
• Less energy consumption and greater efficiency with the Passivhaus standard, such as the co-housing project in Dunedin, New Zealand.
• Less upfront carbon and more straw and biogenic materials, such as Ecococon prefab straw panels. “The three little pigs got it wrong,” he writes.
• Less complexity. More simplicity. Architect Andrew Waugh recently called for buildings that feature
• “Simple forms. No cantilevers. Not too tall. Use wood.”

Lloyd Alter On Abundance

One of the “must read” books on everyone’s to do list this year is Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The authors have a number of themes but the primary one is that progressives over the past 30 years have been more concerned with erecting barriers to right wing policy initiatives than actually getting things done.

The result of all those restrictions, Klein and Thompson suggest, is the perception that government doesn’t work, a leading complaint of the MAGAlomaniac movement. In other words, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and Democrats have pretty much shot themselves in the foot with their insistence on requiring all government action be fully compliant with every jot and tittle of the progressive agenda.

Wikipedia summarizes the book this way:

“Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.

“Klein and Thompson propose an Abundance Agenda that they say better manages the tradeoffs between regulations and social advancement and lament that America is stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. They present the abundance agenda both as a Third Way policy alternative and as a way to initiate new economic conditions that will diminish the appeal of the ‘socialist left’ and the ‘populist-authoritarian right.’”

One of the major themes of Abundance is that building codes and permitting issues are largely responsible for homelessness. The authors spend a lot of time explaining how liberal ideas on inclusion, racial and gender equity, and compliance with prevailing wage provisions divert money and time away from building new housing units, which drives up the price of those units. The unintended consequence is that few homes for the homeless actually get built, which makes homelessness worse instead of better.

They point to Los Angeles, where almost no new affordable housing units are being built, and contrast it with cities in Texas where they are proliferating. The prime example of the malaise Klein and Thompson write about is the Empire State Building, which was erected from foundation to capstone in the space of one year and three months. Work commenced on March 17, 1930, and was completed on May 1, 1931.

Critics of Abundance point out it is long on rhetoric but short on solutions. Lloyd Alter agrees. His focus in several posts over the years is on sufficiency rather than abundance. One of his passions is sustainable dwelling units that create fewer carbon emissions in the construction phase and much lower emissions over their useful life.

Sufficiency In Transportation

In one article for Treehugger, Alter advocated for more micromobility solutions, such as bicycles and pedestrian pathways, instead of hulking SUVs and pickup trucks. He is a passionate critic of Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario who is hellbent on ripping up existing bike lanes and building more roads that lead to suburbia.

He pointed out that the materials and batteries needed to manufacture one Rivian R1T pickup truck might be put to better use if they were used to make 300 electric bikes instead. “We need smaller, more efficient vehicles that take less energy and carbon to produce and run. Just because it’s electric doesn’t give it a free pass.”

Lloyd Alter is a strong advocate for sufficiency and points out that the richest 10% of people are responsible for that same amount of carbon emissions as the rest of the world combined. To put an even finer point on it, the world’s richest 1% have the same amount of those emissions as the poorest 50% of the human population, according to a recent report from Oxfam.

Alter would argue that sufficiency should be prioritized over abundance and he makes a strong case for that argument. “Less consumption and more fairness and equity. We can’t have abundance in North America when it affects everybody everywhere,” he says. Clearly he is suffering from a woke mind virus and for that he deserves nothing but praise.