An Interview With Joanna Gubman About Urban Environmentalism

How the California Public Utilities Commission works, and how urban environmentalism can (literally) reshape our country

Last month, I spoke with Joanna Gubman, the Executive Director and Founder of Urban Environmentalists, which is part of YIMBY Action.

Joanna spent the better part of a decade in a few different roles with the California Public Utilities Commission.

We talked about the structure of the PUC, how it works, and what her role was there And we discussed how she decided to focus on urban environmentalism, and how Urban Environmentalists aim to transform cities and towns into inclusive communities.

This interview was lightly edited for clarity.

Image made by DALL-E

Mike: Joanna, welcome, and thank you for joining me! Can you give a little background on how the PUC is set up, what it does, and what role the PUC plays?

Joanna: Yeah. The California Public Utilities Commission is a very unusual agency in California in that it's constitutionally established which means it has a little bit more independence than most state agencies. It can even advocate for legislation. But it exists basically to regulate our essential monopolies. It started as the Railroad Commission and still regulates railroads, but also electric, water utilities, telecommunications, and even Lyft and Uber, which are transportation utilities you could say. The idea is that we cannot do without some of these basic utilities and there's a natural monopoly. And so to the extent that those are privately held, they need to be regulated by some sort of public entity.

Mike: And how did you wind up working there?

Joanna: I had been a policy research fellow in Germany and was in the solar industry there. And when I came back, I was looking at who was doing really interesting energy transformation work here in California. And that was the PUC. The PUC is really where a lot of our clean energy shift is taking place.

Mike: If the PUC does its job well, what happens as a result of that?

Joanna: If the PUC does its job well, we have safe and reliable public utilities that are just and affordable. So every Californian has what they need to thrive from a basic utilities perspective. And utilities do not cost an arm and a leg. The PUC used to be a boring place and over time it has shifted and become more important.

The needs of our society really center on our utility services and addressing climate change. Part of the PUC doing its job is making sure that we transition at a speedy pace to renewable energy, to electric transportation, and to building the infrastructure that we need to make that possible.

Also if it's doing its job, the PUC should be taking on a lot of our structural racism in California and thinking about how to make our disinvested communities invested in again. Everyone should have the same quality of basic services as people who are more privileged.

Mike: Some people might be surprised to hear you mention Lyft and Uber. How does the PUC regulate or interact with Lyft and Uber?

Joanna: I don't know that the PUC has done the greatest job of regulating them and there are a lot of different state agencies and federal agencies regulating different pieces of that puzzle.

The PUC might do things like making sure that Lyft and Uber are picking people up who live in lower income communities or black and brown communities. They might be regulating safety to make sure that background checks are done reasonably for the drivers.

Or they might regulate appropriate disability access. And they might also be looking at the greenhouse gas emission impacts of all of the TNCs.

Mike: Interesting. From an energy perspective, what can and can't the PUC do to change the mix of cleaner vs. dirtier energy?

Joanna: So the Legislature sets the broad framework for what we need to do. Like: we need to be carbon neutral in our electricity system by 2045, or we need to have X percent renewable energy. But then they tend to leave the details of that to the Public Utilities Commission. And I think that's often helpful because it can be too politically charged for the Legislature to come up with very specific rules or too technically challenging for them to come up with the rules. And so they just set the vision and then the PUC can decide how to make that happen.

Mike: So what kinds of people are working for the PUC?

Joanna: It is not the kind place where people punch in and punch out. It's the kind of place where people are truly excited because they believe they're changing the world. So there are a lot of technical people and a lot of public policy types, as well as engineers. People who literally ride the railways and make sure that they're operating correctly. People who inspect electric generation facilities.

So there's a really diverse collection. There are a lot of people who want to dive deep and become an expert on the thing that they regulate.

I rotated around to different positions over time and got a broader perspective. It was a good place to work. And I would say it's one of the more diverse organizations that I've been at. 

Mike: That's cool. What were the different roles that you got to play?

Joanna: I came in as a senior analyst on electric reliability and wildfire. And I worked on how we could keep the lights on as we transitioned to a clean energy system. And then I was a supervisor of a team particularly focused on residential energy programs and low-income energy programs. And then I was an advisor to three different commissioners in succession. There are five commissioners and they vote on the regulations that get written. And they each have a “West Wing” team of four or five personal advisors, and I was one of them.

I helped them bring regulatory concepts from vague notions to the actual regulation: the sausage making of how are we going to word this? How are we going to get to at least three votes? How do we deal with these stakeholders? How do we get internal consensus built around this? That was a super fun room-where-it-happens decision maker position.

And then I was a Judge which is a very similar role, really focused on the process of creating regulation: being the person who writes the regulation that the commissioners vote on.

Mike: Then a year ago you left the PUC to work on Urban Environmentalists. How did you make that decision?

Joanna: At the Commission, I found we kept being focused as a society on technology substitution. Let's take our gas plants and turn them into solar power plants and batteries and wind. Let's take our gas cars and turn them into electric cars. Let's take our gas furnaces and turn them into electric heat pumps.

Those things are great and they need to happen. And they are not enough. What I found that we were really missing in the conversation in environmentalism was a discussion of land use. The way we use land right now is not sustainable.

Somehow we tend to stop at the technologies when one of the most powerful things that we can do, particularly locally, on climate change is to have compact urban forms. If you have a multi-family house, the individual resident dwelling in that house uses about half the energy of a single detached house resident. And if you have infill housing, you're building in a way that means people don't have to drive as much. And our largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions is that we're just driving too much and we cannot electrify fleets quickly enough.

So in addition to having all those new technologies, we need to be living together in more compact communities and legalize density. That also has huge public health and anti-racist benefits to promote desegregation, integration, less air pollution, and less toxic runoff.

There are just so many benefits. What I found at the Commission was, even though I was in decision-making positions, I could only take what's in front of me at a regulatory agency. It was harder to say “we should be doing something entirely different here.”

In order to do that, I felt I needed to leave and be in an advocacy position where I could say “Hey, California Air Resources Board, Energy Commission, other agencies, legislature, local governments: we need to do things differently! Please consider these other alternative policies as well.”

Mike: You mentioned a few different statewide entities and agencies and some local ones. How do you figure out who you need to work with? Who matters in different situations?

Is there a general framework for saying this statewide agency matters the most for some kinds of decisions, and local agencies or local governments matter more for these other kinds of decisions? What's your model for that?

Joanna: It is our vision and our goal. We want to have a complete narrative shift around connecting the dots between environmentalism and land use policy. We want people to see that land use reform is essential to having sustainable just and human-centered communities.

And so where can we go? At the state level, we need to be active wherever we can make that narrative shift happen.

At the state level, one of the things we've been involved in is our Air Resources Board, which does carbon planning. We've submitted comments there to say that in our long term plans for carbon, we need to talk about housing and land use and driving less as real legitimate climate actions. When we do that, it gets built into their planning and then every other state agency takes their lead from our state carbon plan.

Then it can trickle through all of the different government actions that are going to be happening, for the next five years until they do another one. It's a great way to have a kind of ripple effect. And then locally we can see where there is opportunity for narrative change and really substantive impact on people's quality of life. Where do we see receptive local governments and coalitions that we can be a part of to truly make an impact?

We only started in 2019. And we want to shift the whole environmental movement, which is a pretty bold goal. So if there's an existing environmental organization that's thinking about what they want their housing platform to be, let’s make that a little more pro-housing, a little more focused on driving less, maybe a little bit less technology-centric.

And we’ll engage if there's a local government that is open to reform like San Jose (which just adopted a really big parking reform). We were acting there in coalition with a number of other organizations from our local Green Belt Alliance to the nationwide NRDC. We were all working together bringing slightly different perspectives to make that local change happen in a place that was ready for it.

Mike: So you’re working with state agencies, local governments, and other advocacy organizations that may be focused on different aspects of climate.

Joanna: Yes, and also the Legislature — we submit letters of support for particular legislation that we would like to see happen.

And I think part of what we do is bring climate accountability to land use legislation or other land use policies. There may be people already advocating around better quality of life, or solving our housing crisis. But there haven't been very many people advocating for land use reforms for the climate. You cannot say you are a serious environmentalist without having a land use plan. You cannot say that you have a climate action plan if you're not talking about infill housing.

Mike: Is there concrete opposition to a lot of the policies that you are advocating for?

Joanna: Yes. Where we run into difficulty is people who say they are environmentalists — and in California (Urban Environmentalists also has an Illinois chapter, by the way) — we trip all over ourselves to say who is the biggest environmentalist.

And we love big and bold targets for our environmentalism, but when it comes to some of the changes that impact daily life, people become reluctant. So things that take away parking can be very challenging, really major sticking points. All the NIMBYs continue to be NIMBY.

We need housing because it's important for giving economic opportunity and equality, and we need it for the climate so that people don't have to live in places where it's going to be 120 degrees in the future.

Regardless of the reason, people in exclusionary communities tend to like where they live and want to keep it exclusionary and they want to keep their parking. So part of what we do is to bring these issues forward and make it clear that to continue to be NIMBY and to continue to be car-centric is not just, and is not environmentally acceptable if we want to be serious about climate change.

Mike: What are there places either in the US or the world that you look to for inspiration in having succeeded in some of these areas?

Joanna: So I think that it is always a challenge and there will always be people who have privilege, who wanna keep it.

That said, I’ve lived in various parts of Germany: a small town, in Bonn which is a medium sized town, and in Berlin which is a major metropolis. All of those places had slightly different approaches toward urban environmentalism, but they were all vastly more sustainable than similar communities in the United States.

And they have a lower per person carbon emission in Germany as a direct result of how they structure their land use. Everywhere in Germany, there is mass transit that runs. In Berlin, it's every three minutes. If I had to wait five minutes, I was peeved!

And also they have five to six-story housing everywhere. It's not one here and one there. It's not a big skyscraper and then a bunch of single-family homes. It's not a central core and then sprawl. It's simply the whole city is five to six stories uniformly, and that allows them to have more urban green space and park space.

And they have integrated residential and commercial and institutional spaces. I lived in a building that had a school in the back courtyard. As a new parent, I would love to have a preschool in my back courtyard. And so that's kind of a dream. There were multiple corner groceries and bakeries and my street had lawyers and maybe two hair salons and accountants and a really delicious Greek restaurant, and it was actually a quiet residential street with beautiful buildings and lovely street trees. There were parks nearby. It was peaceful and lovely and dense.

So I think there's this possibility of having beauty and an environment that's good for the soul and sustainability. And it was integrated. It was a very integrated neighborhood. There was enough housing that it could be more affordable for people to live in this really lovely neighborhood.

Mike: I can certainly see the appeal and have also enjoyed that sort of environment in European cities. What's the pushback if you want to do that in San Francisco?

Joanna: Part of it is if you haven't lived it, maybe it's hard to imagine. I think we also have a lot of legacy infrastructure that makes it challenging to make that transition. If you don't have existing great transit that runs every three minutes, taking away space from the cars seems scary because people don't necessarily trust that there can be good transit to replace their car commute.

Or if we don't have that much public green space, people may feel they want to have their backyard because they don't know how else they're going to get the green space. But I think there's also a cultural difference that in the United States we’re very focused on privatizing and commodifying goods. And people say, “this is my parking space in front of my house.” Actually, technically it's city land, it's our public space. And it's just as much our public space as Yellowstone. It's public.

We don't think of the parking spot in front of our house as Yellowstone, but it could be a beautiful public space. And I think part of what we have to do as environmentalists is to prove to people that our cities and our public spaces within cities can be vibrant and beautiful and fulfilling and enriching if we allow for it.

Mike: And it seems like maybe at least we've taken a step in that direction with parklets and outdoor restaurant seating.

Joanna: Yes! And it's so much better. And this is a great example of how we would never have done this before because everyone says I want my parking space. Don't take away the parking.

But once we get over the hurdle of all of our public process and deference to the status quo and to status quo power, we actually get car-free spaces people love. It's so delightful. And – Mike you live on the Peninsula – Castro Street in Mountain View has no more cars anymore and it's so delightful.

So we just need to experience it somehow. That's one of the issues that we try to think about and you as well with Effective Government California, is that it's so hard to experiment. How do we make some changes and experience something that's more sustainable and more human-centered and more just, and then say, “okay do you want to keep this or do we want to go back?” And I don't think anyone wants to go back to having cars on Castro Street.

Image made by DALL-E

Mike: Yep. I live in downtown Palo Alto and here University Avenue was open to pedestrians at the height of COVID.

Now it’s closed to pedestrians. There are more outdoor restaurant spaces that were previously parking spots, so that is nice. But the roads are again for cars and not people.

Joanna: Yeah. I know it's tough, but I wonder what else can we do that brings value to more different segments of our society?

Like what if we didn't just have outdoor dining, but we have outdoor mini playgrounds or mini dog run areas or small gathering spaces? If we have some really wide streets, could we put housing down in the center of some of them and break them into two streets?

I don't know. But it would be really cool if we could have that conversation.

Mike: I certainly would love to see more of that. And I hope that we can somehow collectively facilitate those conversations. How do you think about the infrastructure side of things?

You mentioned the pushback that there's not enough infrastructure to have five-story buildings — that people need to believe reliable public transit will also be part of the deal.

Joanna: Yeah. I think part of the issue is actually a lot of these arguments are specious. For example on San Francisco's Great Highway, we're talking about how turning it into the Great Walkway is making it so much slower for commuters.

But people looked it up on Google Maps and they found it was a three-minute difference. Are three minutes really that big a deal?

And likewise, there are sometimes questions about water. Do we have enough water? What about the drought? But if we don't build our housing here in cities, it's going to get built in much less sustainable ways. It's going to get built in really dry inland areas and use way more water in all of those front yards and backyards. It's gonna be a huge climate adaptation challenge for the folks who live there and who are going to be exposed to more wildfires potentially.

So it's not really more sustainable to say that because of the drought, we shouldn't be building here or we shouldn't be building multifamily. It's actually much more water efficient and climate-friendly to be building in our cities. And likewise on transportation.

It’s politically challenging to put in more bus lanes, but it's technically very easy. You have some paint, you have some bollards and you just go do it. And that's a problem with our political system that we aren't able to just go do it, but it's not a technical challenge and it's not really a huge resource challenge.

We put so much money into our highways. If we just took a tiny sliver of the money we spend on cars and put it into having express bus lanes, we would have much better transit service and we could do it very quickly. What Urban Environmentalists does is have the grassroots advocates push for that and say, we need bus lanes.

Mike: Bit of a weird question. Imagine Urban Environmentalists existed four years ago, and you knew there would be a pandemic. Are there things you would have done knowing that everything would shut down for a while and then restart in a way that maybe creates more opportunity?

Joanna: Yeah, so I think on the housing front, one of the things that I would've loved to see is more effort to help people have great housing in urban environments because we've been seeing a lot of people move to suburbia in response to the pandemic. And that is extremely unsustainable.

Remote work isn't actually helpful in reducing our emissions because people end up driving everywhere else like to the grocery store. Whereas before they lived in a city where the grocery store was maybe two minutes away. I wish that we had used some of this time to build more housing, more diverse types of housing.

We should be building four bedroom flats in our cities. If you are a single young person and you really want your own space, we should be building studios in our cities. We should be building more dormitory-style options that are allowing people to live in whatever way they need to live.

Cities are inherently low carbon. I wish there was some discussion of turning hotels into more permanent supportive housing. I wish we had done a lot more of that.

I think it was a really good opportunity with a depressed market to say, great, let us jump in here and have some excellent affordable housing options for people. Another thing that I think would've been great is with all of our streets empty if we could have used more of that time to convert some of that street space into more human-centered uses.

Mike: Thank you. Yeah, lots of ways that we can improve.

Joanna: Yeah, but I think we still can. And I think a lot of people are realizing that they don't actually like living in the suburbs, that it is quite isolating sometimes to live in the suburbs. Some people really like it, but there are a lot of people who are moving back to the cities and I think it's on us to advocate with our cities and advocate with the state to force the cities to be more welcoming and build the housing that people need to live where they want to live.

Mike: What are ways people can get involved with Urban Environmentalists?

Joanna: Infinite, really! Whatever inspires you or anyone else? We are a grassroots organization and we are powered by our volunteers. To tech folks: we certainly could really do with a new website or better analytics to understand how to keep people engaged. We can also use help with technical things, like better slicing and dicing data to understand how people are using our cities and where inequalities are and where environmental injustices are happening.

We love having folks call into planning, commission meetings, or state agency meetings.

Also, folks who like to write. We love having petitions and letter-writing campaigns: folks to help organize that, to leverage everybody else in the organization, to be able to just quickly sign on to something is always great. And organizing events, and speaking at our events.

And of course, donating: we are powered by grassroots volunteers and private individual donors. We also do get some foundation money. We’re excited by people who share our vision and are interested in something that is going to make an impact that wouldn't happen otherwise.

It's like this startup feeling of a little bit more of a risky organization, where we're doing work that nobody else is doing. If I could have just gone to the Sierra Club and done this work, I would've done that maybe, but if they're not doing it.

They're working on changing themselves and we're working with them. But Urban Environmentalists is a place where, if there's something that you see that's not happening, that you really wish existed in the world, we want to be here to support you making that happen.

Mike: So a home for people who want to push cities and California and Illinois to have better land use policies, more density, and communities that are more inclusive?

Joanna: Yeah. And with an environmental focus. So we're a part of the broader YIMBY Action pro-housing network which does all kinds of housing advocacy but is particularly focused on economic opportunity, equity, and the environment. And we're doing really extra on the environment and environmental justice piece. We also love to have folks who want to be focused on electing great people who will do this work from inside of the government.

We don't just want to be calling in and saying, you should do this. We want to be out there endorsing and canvassing for people who already agree with us and get them in office and have them then go do the work. So any folks who want to be involved on the political side are also fantastic.

Mike: Awesome. Are there any other things the world should know about Urban Environmentalists and what you're doing?

Joanna: I'll just return to our mission statement which is that we're a grassroots organization of activists who are working to transform cities and towns into more sustainable, human-centered, and just communities through land use policy reform.

And if folks are excited about that vision and want to be a part of it, we would love to talk to you and I encourage folks to reach out.

Mike: Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been interesting and informative.