HuffPost: Halt All Housing Construction to Stop Climate Change

Left-wing proposals to stop climate change are often ridiculous and extreme, but Huffington Post contributor Lance Hosey’s “modest” proposal was downright laughable.

Hosey, an architect and chief sustainability officer, decried the impact that building construction has on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. In order to limit such pollution, on Nov. 14 Hosey advocated a nationwide moratorium [1] on new buildings for “a few years.”

Such a moratorium would strike an egregious blow against free enterprise and property rights. It would also damage the home building industry which creates many jobs and other related businesses.

Hosey contradicted himself, calling the proposal “modest” as well as “radical change.”

“For the building industry to stop building is radical, to say the least. But in the face of new knowledge about the state of the climate, radical change is exactly what we need,”
he wrote.

This proposal would have a disastrous impact on the building industry, which Hosey admitted is “worth hundreds of billions of dollars.” In August 2013, the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) estimated that [2] three jobs are created for every single-family home built and that each new home generates an average of $90,000 in tax revenue. These numbers don’t even include non-residential construction which, while smaller, comprises a $303.4 billion industry.

Hosey is clearly willing to jeopardize our economy for his environmental agenda.

In his view the moratorium would have a huge benefit. “Virtually overnight, blight and sprawl would disappear, and the state of communities would dramatically improve,” he claimed. However, the reality of stripping people of their right to choose to build a property when and where they want, as well as crushing an industry would be far from the utopian fantasy he suggests.

Hosey is a Chief Sustainability Officer for the architectural firm RTKL and serves on the Committee on the Environment for the American Institute of Architects. He regularly touts environmental causes and “sustainable” building plans.