In a downtown Boston conference room, the nonprofit and quasi-public organizations made their best pitches, presenting innovative initiatives or new pilot programs for which they were seeking capital investment. In the audience were two dozen or so colleagues and industry experts, but also a handful of impact investors from philanthropic foundations and mission-oriented lenders. 

It was almost like an altruistic episode of Shark Tank—if the entrepreneurial guests were pitching affordable housing and community resilience projects instead of new businesses, and the investors were seeking to do the most good with their funds instead of maximizing profits.

The Boston event was the latest Investor Challenge hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Accelerating Community Investment (ACI) initiative, launched in 2021. These roundtables emerge from ACI’s community of practice network, which now includes more than 100 member organizations in 18 states, as well as a network of more than 50 investors. The participants are a blend of public, community, and private or philanthropic actors based in those places, explains ACI Director Robert “R.J.” McGrail.

With a particular focus on public finance opportunities, organizations in ACI’s communities of practice learn from and share knowledge with each other on an ongoing basis in two-year cycles. In addition to general gatherings that have taken place in more than a half dozen cities—from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Santa Fe, New Mexico—when members in a region reach a point where they’ve developed a promising new pilot program or feel ready to scale up an existing initiative, McGrail says, then ACI convenes a more targeted event, in either a lab format or an investor challenge.

ACI Labs are “about expertise and solving for a problem—digging deep for a couple of days, almost like a co-design lab activity,” McGrail explains, while investor challenges aim to connect projects with purse strings. “That’s where we have near-term investable programs or initiatives, a room full of experts and investors who know impact investing, and ask them frankly, ‘What do you think, and are you interested? What would make you more interested?’”

Previous investor challenges have taken place in New Orleans, Cincinnati, Austin, Tucson, and Santa Rosa, California. At the October event in Boston, attendees learned about innovative and potentially scalable housing, climate, and community development projects underway in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Maggie Steeple Church introduced the Massachusetts Community Climate Bank, a new loan program offered through the state’s housing finance agency, MassHousing, to help low- and middle-income homeowners electrify, decarbonize, and retrofit older houses and multifamily buildings.

Katy Easterly Martey from the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority explained efforts to open a childcare facility in a majority-minority neighborhood in Manchester, which would support local microbusinesses, better prepare kids for educational success, and bolster social infrastructure as the city attempts to recruit biotech companies and workers. 

Leslie Reid of the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation (MHIC) described the organization’s Regional NOAH (Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing) Fund, which is based in part on a similar, successful program in Boston. Reid described the loss of older, smaller, more modest homes as a hole in the housing bucket. “Even as we produce new housing, if we’re losing unrestricted affordable housing as we build, the bucket is leaking,” she said.

And Marcos Marrero showcased some of the programs at MassDevelopment, including its Transformative Development Initiative (TDI), which takes a relationship-based approach to community resurgence, dedicating an economic fellow to work on-site in a neighborhood for three years. The program has continued to grow and expand since its inception a decade ago. In that time, Marrero said, MassDevelopment has managed to leverage $45 million in capital to attract $490 million in investments to 28 districts, including $168 million in public funds and $314 million of private investment.

Pointing to Progress

The morning after the pitch session, conference participants gathered in a new pocket park along Shirley Avenue in Revere, about five miles north of Boston—one of MassDevelopment’s TDI districts. The tiny corner park, with native plants, trees, and picnic tables, may seem like a small thing, says McGrail, who, before joining the Lincoln Institute, helped co-design the TDI program at MassDevelopment a decade ago. “But that was an empty corner lot, and now it’s a place where that community can gather,” he says. “It’s an amenity for half a dozen businesses that are within walking distance, and it’s a relatively low entry point to the bigger kinds of investments.” 

TDI Fellow Laura Christopher led the group on a walking tour down Shirley Avenue, pointing to new community-led developments that prioritized longstanding residents and small business owner-occupants to shield them from displacement.  

Through a public-private “Build On Your Business” initiative that provides technical assistance and seed funding, Christopher explained, small businesses that are important to the community are encouraged to develop housing on top of their single-story commercial spaces, stabilizing cultural vitality, creating neighborhood wealth building opportunities, and expanding housing options in the community. “If you’re trying to stop displacement and keep your residents, you need to keep the businesses, too,” Christopher said. 

McGrail says the on-the-ground assistance that a dedicated TDI fellow like Christopher brings is invaluable in helping a community define its shared priorities and find ways to achieve them. “Resources alone can’t help a place achieve its dreams,” he says. “We were standing there looking at a very big, mixed-income, mixed-use new construction across the street. The last time I was on Shirley Ave., probably in 2018, none of that type of new construction was there.”  

Capital Connections

Unlike a Shark Tank episode, partner funders at ACI events aren’t generally jumping over each other to invest in a program based solely on a short presentation—but they do return to their colleagues with new initiatives and proposals to consider. And even if the convened investors don’t end up directly funding the programs presented, McGrail says, much of the value is in the connections made. “The goal to date has been to socialize the opportunity and to increase the possibility of new-to-market capital coming into these projects,” he says.  

Still, some participants, such as Finance New Orleans and the Port of Cincinnati, have received grant support as a direct result of participating in the ACI initiative, he adds. “It’s fair to say that we’ve begun to see capital align toward the places that participate in the ACI network as a result of these events, and that we have absolutely been able to provide them with a chance to meet new-to-their-market investors that they would not otherwise have been able to meet—and to benefit from those investors’ expertise, too,” McGrail says.

For programs seeking capital, the investor challenges are not just about getting in front of asset holders. The investors have valuable feedback to share as well, which can help ACI partners rethink the way they’re framing a nascent program’s impact or return to make it more attractive to future investors. 

“Those questions they asked Maggie are going to make those Massachusetts Community Climate Bank loan products better,” McGrail says. “The questions they had for Leslie, from MHIC, are going to make their Regional NOAH Fund a better investable opportunity. In fact, it might be easier for some local bank, national foundation, or other asset holder to buy into that fund or participate in that loan pool because some person asked a thoughtful question at an ACI investor challenge—and that’s a confirmation of the ACI model’s value. Ultimately, we want to help increase capital flows and community impacts.”

ACI Events Since 2021 Launch

ACI Community of Practice Convenings: Austin, Texas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Santa Fe, New Mexico; New Orleans, Louisiana; Santa Rosa, California; Jackson, Mississippi; Cincinnati, Ohio 

ACI Labs: Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana (with Grounded Solutions Network) 

ACI Investor Challenges: New Orleans, Louisiana; Cincinnati, Ohio; Austin, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; Santa Rosa, California; Boston, Massachusetts 

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Participants in the recent investor challenge held by the Lincoln Institute’s Accelerating Community Investment initiative listen as TDI Fellow Laura Christopher describes redevelopment in Revere, Massachusetts. Credit: Jon Gorey.

It doesn’t take much to understand the magnitude of the challenge that our Latin American cities are facing in terms of infrastructure financing and sustainable urban development. Despite significant investments in local development projects, the lack of funds for infrastructure financing is currently between 5 and 6.5 percent of the region’s GDP, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), that is, between $355 billion and $462 billion annually. Approximately 40 percent of this gap falls within the scope of subnational governments. In an increasingly challenging environment for local tax administration, how can subnational governments contribute to closing this gap? One solution lies in urban land value and use policies as levers for development financing, since the valuation of land generated by public action can be impressive—sometimes even greater than the cost of the infrastructure projects that lead to such increases in land value.

Consider, for example, the effect on real estate valuation that is expected to be produced by the construction of the Bogotá Metro: it’s estimated that homes located at a walkable distance from the planned stations will have an increase in value of up to 11 percent due to the accessibility benefits the project is expected to generate. The total valuation of private property generated by this investment could be used as leverage to finance, at least partially, the cost of the project.

To meet sustainable urban development objectives, it becomes increasingly important to exchange knowledge and experiences regarding the management of this type of public enterprise, planning, and related land use policies, as well as the various mechanisms for recovering capital gains that cities can consider as additional sources for their financing.

In this context, the Lincoln Institute course Urban Financing and Land Policies: A Review from the Colombian Experience was designed to analyze “the main concepts present in land policies through the review of land management and the application of financing instruments in Colombia,” according to María Mercedes Maldonado, one of the course coordinators. The selection of Colombia as the host country has to do with its long-time application of some of these instruments, such as betterment levies—a fiscal policy based on national legislation that celebrated its 100th anniversary of implementation in 2021—and the existence of legal frameworks that provide a basis for the implementation of these tools.

The Colombian experience allows us to evaluate progress, results, learning, and alternatives to contribute to the discussion on the use of these instruments in the context of Latin America, a region in which the Lincoln Institute has worked for over 30 years. The institute has built an extensive network of collaborators, both institutional and individual, who share a common view on the potential of land management as one of the solutions to the various challenges faced by cities in the region.

The Universidad de Los Andes is part of this valuable network, and for the second consecutive year the course was organized at the facilities of this institution in partnership with the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (CIDER, in Spanish) of the Faculty of Social Sciences. The course was led by Erik Vergel, associate professor at the School of Architecture and the CIDER, and specialist in transportation issues and land policies; and Maldonado, a lawyer and specialist in housing, urban financing, and land policies. This alliance, Vergel said, “is one of the most important for the Universidad de Los Andes in terms of internationalization processes, dissemination of new knowledge, and training urban matter specialists in the Latin American and Caribbean region.”

Besides Vergel and Maldonado, the group of professors also included María Cristina Rojas, architect and specialist in economics and urban development; Magda Montaña, lawyer and specialist in taxation; Oscar Borrero, economist and specialist in appraisal and market studies; and Néstor Garza, an economist who specializes in urban and regional economics.

In this course, 45 participants, selected from a group of 301 applicants, had the opportunity to meet in person for five days to exchange ideas and discuss the implementation of different urban financing instruments in their respective countries. The high number of applicants highlighted the interest in training on these topics.

The participants included professionals from different areas, including researchers, public officials, graduate students, lawyers, economists, architects, political scientists, urban planners, engineers, and geographers. They represented 14 countries in the region—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela—as well as Puerto Rico. This diversity of nationalities and backgrounds brought richness to the dialogue and allowed participants to compare their experiences related to urban financing and implementing land management instruments.

The structure and content of the course was designed to stimulate active learning, using peer exchange and practical application of the content studied. The program was composed of a mix of master classes, group exercises, case study presentations, pedagogical games, and field trips.

The thematic content moved from the general to the specific, starting with a review of the general framework of financing and land management instruments in Colombia within a Latin American context. Subsequently, basic concepts of land markets, urban spatial structure and land pricing were addressed, followed by a more detailed study of instruments, such as betterment levies, urban planning obligations, and land readjustment. The program also included sessions to study the application of these instruments in urban mobility and public housing projects.

One of the new features introduced this year was the Urban Tarot activity, a pedagogical game whose development was supported by the Lincoln Institute in 2016, and which was led on this occasion by one of its authors, María Cristina Rojas. This game aims to familiarize participants with different planning, land management, and urban financing instruments through the development of strategies that require the incorporation of these tools to solve problems inspired by Latin American cities.

José Lazarte, one of the participants, commented: “[The course] encouraged an accessible and contextualized reflection . . . integrating technical and practical knowledge in a format that stimulated interdisciplinary dialogue and strategic thinking on urban transformation.” In this regard, Rojas said: “This activity led to a lot of discussion regarding the instruments: which ones are useful, and which ones are not, for a given problem.” The game was very well received by the students and allowed the group of teachers to evaluate the level of understanding of different concepts and tools through the strategies developed by the participants and the reasoning behind them.

On the last day, the course concluded with field trips to urban mobility and land management and public housing projects in Bogotá, specifically the Ciudad Bolivar aerial cable and the “El Ensueño” partial plan. These visits allowed for first-hand observation of the application and potential of instruments that had been previously discussed in the classroom.

This connection between theory and practice helps to strengthen learning. By touring projects on the ground, speaking with local organizers, and seeing the results of policies and instruments at work, participants can more clearly understand the challenges, impacts, and potential of the tools analyzed. Finally, the experience in the field created a valuable space to discuss lessons learned and reflect on the feasibility of adapting certain strategies to each participant’s locality.

Among the most positive aspects of the course, the participants highlighted the experience of the teaching team, the variety of applications and instruments presented, the practical exercises of urban planning and capital gains estimation, and the richness offered by peer-to-peer exchange from different countries. “The environment of this course invites us to make joint reflections in the face of the scenarios that occur in different countries,” said Rafael Gómez, one of the participants.

While all attendees said they would recommend the course to others and expected it to have an impact on their work, students asked for more time to delve into the technical, political, and institutional capacities needed for effective deployment of each of the urban instruments presented in the course. In light of these suggestions, the Lincoln Institute will review its specialty courses on these tools to further foster dialogue at the regional level.

Vergel, one of the leaders, remarked that an important insight from the course “lies in the importance of generating spaces of international outreach among professionals in urban issues, allowing for comparative exercises that facilitate the exchange of experiences and knowledge on the coordination between the transport and mobility sector and the housing sector through urban development financing instruments.”

Diego Lomelli is an instructional designer and analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Luis Felipe Quintanilla is a policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Course participants visit public housing built as part of a requirement under Bogotá’s partial development plan El Ensueño. Credit: Luis Felipe Quintanilla.

This article originally appeared in Spanish in June 2025 as “Formación con propósito.”