Green Dreams, Concrete Realities
Overcoming Climate Hurdles in Mid-Sized American Cities
Eric Scheuch (Yale University)
With the coming of a second Trump administration, local action on climate change will be vital for making progress towards both mitigation and adaptation goals. One under-appreciated potential engine for this progress are mid-sized U.S. cities, which fall between the large cities (New York, LA) whose climate plans dominate the news and the small rural communities that are the focus of much of existing research on the green transition. Over the last two years, I’ve focused on the factors that shape climate policy outcomes in mid-sized cities and what they can teach us about local climate policy more broadly. My paper: “Green Dreams, Concrete Realities” covers the findings from that research. Most prominently:
Mid-sized cities can be outcompeted for sustainability staff and investment by larger cities with higher per-capita budgets and smaller communities with lower costs and more attractive amenities. This competition leads to a pair of negative feedback loops, where lack of green capital and dedicated staff makes it harder to attract new capital or staff:
Figure 1: Negative Feedback Loop – Green Capital
● Breaking these negative feedback loops may require properly spent infusions of outside public or private capital, merely retreating and hoping that nonprofits will fill the resulting governance gap is rarely a solution.
● Coalitions that build across nonprofit, business, and government are highly effective in implementing climate action, as are coalitions that build across racial and age divides and unite climate and housing advocates.
● The physical legacies of industrialization and neglect must be addressed before either climate mitigation or adaptation goals may be realized.
I base these findings on fieldwork in four mid-sized cities in the northeastern United States. That fieldwork carried with it examples of hope–a robust coalition of climate and housing advocates in Hartford, the creation of an Office of Climate and Sustainability in New Haven–but also illustrated how decades of neglect and budgetary challenges stemming from the end of pandemic relief funds pose a challenge to climate progress. I also learned how contextual progress on climate change is: while some lessons generalize, the exact climate challenges mid-sized cities face and the coalitions advocating for and against solutions to those challenges vary widely from city to city and even from neighborhood to neighborhood. This makes case knowledge vital to building durable coalitions for progress on climate change, it was no coincidence that the most successful climate advocates I interviewed either had deep roots in the places they were working or had forged close relationships with those who did.
Another point to emphasize, which generalizes beyond just the scope of this paper, is that while climate change is a new challenge, addressing it is impossible without also addressing decades-old problems of segregation and industrial decay. The intersectional nature of climate, race, and class is manifest in the four cities I studied: consider a map of New Haven, showing the areas likely to flood by 2050 (left) and the income of the people who leave there relative to the city average, with orange or red meaning lower than average:
Figure 2: Flood Vulnerable Areas In New Haven are Lower Income Than The City Average.
Examples of this intersectionality are manifold, from decaying coal plants, to addressing carbon-intensive public housing units. While doing so is a formidable challenge for climate advocates, it is also a formidable opportunity from an investment and a coalitional perspective. From an investment perspective, properly spent climate investments can help address both mitigation and neglect problems. The construction of green housing units on industrial wasteland in New Haven is a perfect example of this. Additionally, coupling addressing climate change to the addressing of more immediate concerns (housing, health) helps bring individuals into the conversation who otherwise might not have participated and makes the potential coalitions behind urban climate policy far broader than they otherwise would be.
In sum, Green Dreams, Concrete Realities discusses the challenges and opportunities that climate policy in mid-sized American cities presents. It highlights the need for sustained targeted investment, the harnessing of local knowledge, and policies that aim to address non-climate challenges at the same time. It also highlights the great work being done in these cities against all odds, and the opportunities that tackling climate change presents to make our mid-sized cities more equitable, safe, and clean places to live.
Thank you to the mid-sized city residents who agreed to interviews for this paper, the logistical support of the Political Science program at Yale, and the useful feedback I received from the editors and anonymous reviewers. There is much more in the paper, which I hope you take the time to read and enjoy.
Eric Scheuch is a PhD Student in the Yale Department of Political Science and a Social Data Scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He is a proud resident of a mid-sized city, New Haven Connecticut.