Housing and city planning has a crucial role in carbon emissions.Carbon emissions in return fuel the global warming which are more and more intensive and severe. Many citizens and municipalities oppose the reconstruction and redesign of current housing. They usually use broken window fallacy. The argument was used first by Feredric Bastiat, 19th century economist. It simply means that spending money on items that have been destroyed does not lead to economic gain. Destroying current houses to replace with more energy efficient ones does more harm than good. That is because a lot of emissions have already been produced while building the house in the first place. These emissions, which are already injected into the atmosphere, are a form of sunk money and do not affect our current status. We should be more worried about the new emissions, destroying and reconstructing will produce new emissions. According to this argument, conserving what already exists, rather than adding to the building stock is more beneficial. The idea resonates with the basin intuition, the first suggestion of the city of San Francisco to the builders is “build less, reuse more!”
According to the World Green Building Council, 39 percent of annual emissions are produced by the buildings, but 28 percent comes not from the constructions but from the operating buildings. Of course, operating buildings are the stock of 40 to 50 years of construction, But the amount of carbon produced by the operating buildings is so high that it is worth rethinking and investigating this general intuition. The broader question is how a redesigned city with replaced buildings affect the way in which people work, shop and especially travel. For example, research has shown that in Britain, replacing semi-detached housing near public transportation centers with blocks of flats, would have a significant improvement of the level of emissions over the next 60 years of the building operation. Therefore, there exists at least some cases that “broken window fallacy” does not work in the emission regards.
Source: Economist
