apartments as – New apartment buildings are often electric-heated, helping cut emissions without new climate rules, while also tackling America’s housing crunch.
For a country where Democrats and Republicans often seem to argue past each other. they are oddly aligned on one basic idea: the United States needs to build more housing.. The reasons vary by voter and ideology.. Some see new homes as job engines and local-economy boosters.. Others emphasize affordability, arguing that more supply can drive down housing costs and reduce homelessness.
But neither side has been focused on a quieter climate advantage embedded in that push for construction. New apartment buildings can be a fast track to reducing building emissions, largely because of what many already have inside: electric heating.
A new report argues that apartments are “an almost automatic form of building decarbonization.” The reasoning is straightforward.. Three-quarters of new apartments are heated electrically. which means they can be powered by rooftop solar or cleaner electricity from the grid instead of relying on furnaces and boilers that burn natural gas.. That matters in the middle of a political fight over climate policy. as the Trump administration and the Republican Party have tried to roll back climate progress even as their housing push could end up reinforcing parts of it.
Deep-red Montana, for example, has recently passed a flurry of bills aimed at building more multi-family housing. “Apartments are the climate solution hiding in plain sight,” said Alan Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, which authored the report.
The case for apartments is not just about politics or convenience.. The buildings themselves tend to use energy differently than detached houses.. Neighbors share walls, floors and ceilings, which can provide strong insulation.. Units are also often smaller, meaning there is less air to heat and cool.. In practical terms. the report notes that the typical resident of a downtown high-rise emits one-third as many greenhouse gases as a resident of a detached house in the suburbs.
Those efficiencies have long made electric heating attractive to builders.. For decades, apartment construction has often favored electric resistance heating such as baseboard heaters rather than gas furnaces.. One driver has been economics: wiring electric systems can be cheaper than installing gas lines and the methane-related infrastructure required by furnaces.
Amanda D.. Smith. a senior scientist at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown who was not involved in the report. said she understood the logic well from a development perspective.. “If I am building something with the intention of renting it. I really want to minimize my upfront costs. ” she said.. “Often electric water heaters and electric heaters for space heating make sense from that perspective.”
The trend has become deeply rooted over time.. The report says 68 percent of apartments built since the early 1970s have been heated with electricity.. And when it comes to likelihood, living in a building can shift the odds.. It notes that if you live in an apartment. you are 60 percent more likely to be in an all-electric setup than a neighbor in a house.
There is also a reason that electric buildings offer room to improve.. Heat pumps. which move warmth from outdoor air into a home rather than generating it by burning fuel. are around three times more efficient than typical space heaters.. Over recent decades. heat pump technology has advanced enough to extract useful heat even when outdoor temperatures are near freezing. helping them spread in colder regions.. Maine installed 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule, and almost two-thirds of households in Norway use them.
In the United States, heat pumps have started appearing more often in apartments and other multi-unit buildings.. The report says that after they were quite rare in the decades following the 1950s. heat pumps have been incorporated into 18 percent of these structures in the Northwest since 2010.. More broadly, it adds, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces for several years.
What is changing now is not just efficiency but installation.. Traditional heat pumps typically rely on an outdoor unit connected to an indoor one. a setup that can be complicated in multi-unit housing.. Newer designs aim to make that easier.. One product from a company called Gradient. the report says. fits like a saddle over a window sill and plugs into a regular outlet. with installation taking less than a half hour.. Another coming this winter combines the outdoor and indoor components into a single attached unit on an interior wall. exchanging air with the outside.
Smith framed the opportunity in plain terms: “Making retrofits simpler will be a game-changer.”
The climate benefits can expand further as the country heats up.. Heat pumps can also reverse in summer to provide cooling, and that matters more as extreme heat threatens health.. The report points out that heat kills more people each year in the United States than all other forms of extreme weather combined.
Electrification can also change what kinds of appliances make sense.. Once a building’s heating and cooling rely on heat pumps. it becomes less logical to maintain a gas connection just for cooking.. Matt Casale. managing director of states and regions at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. which was not involved in the report. said it would not make much sense to pipe in gas for stoves that might only be used a few times a week.. “If you’re building a building and you’re heating and cooling with heat pumps. it doesn’t really make sense to hook it up to the gas system to pipe a tiny bit of gas in for people to cook on their gas stoves a couple of times a week. ” he said.
In that scenario, induction stoves become the natural complement.
Beyond ordinary heat pumps, the report also highlights a developing pathway known as networked geothermal.. Instead of pulling warmth from outdoor air, these systems use liquid pumping underground.. Because the earth’s temperature changes less than the air, they can be even more efficient for heating.. If all buildings in an area are connected to such a network. Casale said. there would be no need to pipe gas into the neighborhood.. “It’s a real community-based energy system, and you’re using energy that’s literally homegrown,” he said.. “It’s right under your feet.”
There is an additional emissions lever that has less to do with heat technology: density.. Apartments pack more people into the same footprint as single-family housing.. If buildings are located near everyday essentials such as grocery stores, residents can walk more and drive less.. And when routes cannot be reached on foot. the report argues. robust public transportation can carry residents where they need to go. further reducing emissions.
Still, advocates warn that “big apartment buildings” alone will not fix everything.. Cécile Faraud. head of the clean construction program at C40. a global network of climate-focused mayors who was not involved in the report. said the structures should also include mixed uses. with homes above commercial spaces such as markets and doctors’ offices.. “So you can access care, you can access education, you can access your needs in terms of shopping,” Faraud said.. “But also in terms of health, so being able to exercise in parks, etc., and access to nature.”
The environment around those buildings also matters.. Green spaces can lower local temperatures, support residents’ mental health, and provide habitat for native plant and animal species.. The report points to an approach it calls “agrihoods. ” where working farms are surrounded by multi-family housing. allowing residents to enjoy or sell produce.
Faraud also emphasized something many cities know but often delay: building new housing is not enough by itself. She said cities need to retrofit older structures to improve energy performance, such as by adding double-paned windows and better insulation.
Even with all the environmental advantages, apartment construction can be blocked by zoning.. The report says buildings of at least four stories are currently allowed on less than 1 percent of residential land in all but 10 Oregon cities. and that even Portland. often seen as progressive. has a 14 percent figure.. “The main thing that we need to do is re-legalize apartments in a much larger area of our cities. ” Durning said.
Reform of that kind, the report argues, falls largely on cities and states rather than the federal government.. But the larger point is that a bipartisan push for more units could produce a win that reaches beyond housing.. As Smith put it. even amid today’s highly fractured politics. many people can agree on the basic goal: “I think most people are willing to say: We want people to have homes.”
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