Housing policy is climate policy. If you don't believe that yet, keep reading  – I promise to convince you. 

In the face of the climate crisis, drought across the West, and biodiversity loss around the world, it's time to turn our attention toward our own human habitat. The structures and patterns of that habitat shape so much: how much land is consumed by development, the resources put toward building and maintaining it, how far we have to travel just to live our lives. And all of these things have direct impacts on the climate and on the natural habitats other species rely on. 

I know the instinct some of you have: building anything is an environmental cost. New construction means concrete, disturbed soil, materials with their own carbon footprint. That instinct isn't wrong, but it is aimed at the wrong target. The real question was never build or don't build – Utah's population is growing whether we like it or not. The real question is build here, thoughtfully, or build twice as much, further out, into land that was still wild. 

Here are three policy levers to fight for building thoughtfully. 

Allowing Smaller Lot Size and Flag Lots

Let's start with building connected neighborhoods, and the environmental benefits of stopping sprawl. 

Utah is expected to need more than 840,000 new housing units by 2055. More than half of that is on track to be greenfield development, meaning construction on undeveloped land that's never been built on before, rather than adding new homes in the places we've already built. Market demand through 2055 suggests average gross densities of 3.3 to 5.2 units per acre, depending on the region. On the lower end of that range, that adds up to roughly 127,000 acres, or about 200 square miles, of what was once open land that is now a subdivision. 

That’s about the size of Zion National Park, and nearly twice the size of Salt Lake City. That's the trajectory we're on if we keep building out instead of in. Every home we build in existing neighborhoods instead is land we don't have to take from the desert, the foothills, or the farmland that rings our valleys.

Building ever outward doesn't just cost land. It costs time. Every acre of greenfield development pushed further from the city center is another few minutes tacked onto the school drop-off, the grocery run, the commute to work. And every one of those minutes is spent burning gas: transportation is the single largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, ahead of power plants and ahead of industry, at roughly 28% of the national total. More walkable communities where homes and jobs are close together help combat this. 

Utah's geography makes this even more urgent. With the vast majority of the state's development squeezed into a narrow valley between two mountain ranges, geographically constrained in a way that pushes growth outward into rural counties once it fills in. That's not a neutral shift. It means development creeping into landscapes that are wilder, more water-stressed, and further from existing infrastructure. Reducing minimum lot sizes and restrictions on flag lots (oddly-shaped parcels that let a single lot be subdivided into a driveway-accessed lot behind another) are some of the quiet zoning tools that determine whether a neighborhood welcomes  more people gracefully, or pushes growth further into open spaces and farmland.

In a state watching with grave concern about the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake as its snowpack shifts, lot size is a water policy too. Smaller lots mean smaller private lawns, less turf demanding water in a landscape that was never built to support it. Shared green spaces such as parks and trail systems do the same job for a whole neighborhood that a private yard does for one home, using a fraction of the water: one park or courtyard can absorb the play, the picnics, and the dog-walking that would otherwise be spread across a dozen thirsty lawns. In a region this water-stressed, that's not a minor efficiency,  it's the difference between landscaping that fights the desert and landscaping that works with it.

Diverse Housing Forms

Bigger isn't always better. Smaller, shared, and varied housing forms do double duty for the climate.

There are several climate advantages of accessory dwelling units, starter homes, and small multifamily homes over larger homes. First, the build itself: smaller units require fewer materials, which means a smaller environmental footprint before anyone even moves in. Second, day-to-day life in a smaller, shared-wall home costs less gas, electricity, and water than a single detached home. 

Think of it like mittens versus gloves. A mitten keeps your fingers bundled together, sharing warmth, while a glove separates each finger to fend for itself in the cold. Shared walls do the same thing for a duplex or fourplex: each home that shares a roof and walls huddles against its neighbor's warmth in winter and shade in summer, instead of losing or gaining heat through four exposed walls on its own.  EIA's 2020 national survey found the average detached single home uses 94.6 million BTU of energy a year, while an apartment in a building of five homes or more uses just 33.7 million. Fourplexes or apartment buildings run on about a third of the energy a detached house does.

It doesn't stop at the utility bill. Smaller spaces tend to mean fewer things; with less room to accumulate, there's more incentive to share what you don't need to own individually. A tool library down the hall does more good than four unused drills in four separate garages. 

When a city's zoning code only allows one type of home per lot, it doesn't just limit how many homes get built – it locks out every one of these lower-footprint forms before they're even considered. And it isn't just an environmental win, it's who gets to live somewhere at all. Smaller, varied homes serve many purposes in our community: as starter homes for a young family, a place for an aging parent who wants to stay close and downsize, an apartment a teacher or a nurse can actually afford near the school or hospital where they work. Every duplex a zoning code allows is one more household that gets to live in the community they choose, instead of commuting in from wherever was cheap enough.

Eliminating Parking Minimums Near Transit

Then there's the land we've quietly dedicated to cars before we've even asked if we need to.

Every parking space a city requires a builder to provide, is land that isn't homes, isn't a park, isn't a business. It's an opportunity cost, paid in asphalt. It's one more patch of impermeable surface in a place that can't afford more: pavement doesn't soak up rain or snowmelt the way soil does, so every excess lot we pour means more stormwater runoff and less water finding its way back into the ground. And the cost isn't just environmental, even a basic surface parking spot runs $3,000 to $8,000 in construction costs alone, real dollars that come straight out of the pocket of future occupants, whether or not they have a personal vehicle. That's money that could better be used on paying the mortgage or rent, put toward other household expenses, or spent at local businesses who need community support.

Eliminating a parking minimum doesn't eliminate parking. Local builders will still build it; they just have the flexibility to decide how much their project actually needs, instead of following an arbitrary one-size-fits-all rule written decades ago for a different city. That flexibility matters most in walkable neighborhoods, where people can get to a corner store or a coffee shop without needing a car for every trip. Allowing for flexibility doesn’t create chaos, it lets the neighborhood reflect how people already live in it.

A transit-rich neighborhood can add more people and produce less driving overall, because the trips it adds are shorter, more of them are walked or transit-served, and the residents who choose to live there have the option of a lower-car lifestyle in the first place. The measure that actually matters for climate isn't spots per block, it's vehicle miles traveled per person, and that number reliably drops in walkable and transit-rich neighborhoods even as they grows.

Fewer mandated parking spots also means less incentive to drive for every errand, which is its own quiet climate win. Every trip that becomes a walk, bike, or bus ride instead of one by car means fewer emissions and less need for more pavement.

Closing Thoughts

Zoom all the way out, and this stops being about zoning or costly parking mandates and starts being about something much more human: how far we have to go to live our lives.

I know the feeling that living somewhere quiet, green, and spread out is the environmentally virtuous choice. More grass, more trees, more distance from traffic and noise. But that feeling is measuring the wrong scale. What feels green on a single lot can be the opposite once you zoom out to the whole system: the water the lawn drinks, the miles that distance requires driving, the wild land that space was carved from in the first place. The neighborhoods that actually take the least from the planet aren't the quiet, spread-out ones; they're the more compact, connected, and  walkable ones, the ones that ask less of the land precisely because they ask more of each other.

Change these land use patterns, and you change how far someone has to drive to get milk, or to see their mom. Let people move into neighborhoods near their families, so a visit doesn't mean an hour each way on the freeway. Build neighborhoods where a kid can bike to a friend's house without an adult behind the wheel. Build new housing options where it's easy to know all your neighbors because you share a great courtyard. These policies are still about transit, number of homes, and zoning code, but underneath it all, they're really about the shape of a life. A life that takes less from the land around it, and gives more back to the people living it.

Sources

1. The Impacts of Minimum Parking Requirements: A Research Synthesis (2026) — https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7kp8x4fq

2. Utah Parking Modernization Guidebook — https://wfrc.utah.gov/Studies/ParkingModernization/UtahParkingModernizationGuidebook.pdf

3. The Water-Land Use Integration Guidebook for Central Utah — https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=cwel_water_smart

4. Utah Resource and Infrastructure Housing Capacity Analysis — https://envisionutah.org/land-housing-capacity

5. EIA 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey, Table CE1.1 — https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/c&e/pdf/ce1.1.pdf