The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work—from building housing in New Orleans to conserving water in the West, from developing new tax appraisal tools to studying how post-pandemic retail patterns intersect with land use.

Exploring the New Economics of Downtown
Economist Lindsay Relihan has spent years studying the connections among cities, technology, consumption, and our shifting shopping habits. We caught up with Relihan, a participant in the Lincoln Institute Scholars Program, to find out what she’s learning in the wake of the pandemic.

Mapping Our Most Resilient Landscapes
As director of The Nature Conservancy’s North America Center for Resilient Conservation Science, ecologist and former Kingsbury Browne fellow Mark Anderson is leading a comprehensive mapping project to document connected, climate-resilient landscapes.

Building Affordable Homeownership Opportunities in New Orleans
After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, housing in New Orleans became scarce and expensive. Fulcrum Fellow Oji Alexander (shown above) is working to expand affordable homeownership opportunities in the city and address the racial wealth gap.

Designing a New Approach to Property Tax Appraisals
Appraising property is a complicated undertaking, but new tools are democratizing and modernizing the field, including an approach developed by Paul Bidanset, a former C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellow at the Lincoln Institute.

Rethinking Stormwater Management in the West
Former Babbitt Center fellow Neha Gupta is a joint assistant research professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. We caught up with her to talk about climate change, urban stormwater, and her favorite cli-fi novels.

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

Lead image: Oji Alexander, CEO of People’s Housing+ in New Orleans and a former Fulcrum Fellow, in front of two People’s Housing+ homes. Credit: Courtesy photo.

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

After earning her PhD in applied economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 2018, Lindsay Relihan was invited to join the Lincoln Institute Scholars program, an opportunity for recent PhDs focused on public finance or urban economics to work with senior academics and journal editors. Now an assistant professor of economics at Purdue University, Relihan has lately focused her work on the question of how remote work is reshaping downtown retail—with many stores following their customers to the suburbs or smaller cities. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Relihan shares what intrigues her about the retail industry and why she’s still bullish on the future of cities.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research and the work you presented at the Lincoln Scholars program?

LINDSAY RELIHAN: Broadly speaking, my research agenda is about trying to understand how technology is reshaping cities.

The job market paper I presented at the Lincoln Institute is all about the rise of online retail, and how online retail was reshaping consumer shopping patterns. The big lesson there is that we often tell this ‘retail apocalypse’ story about online retail, where Amazon opens up and all the bookstores and other kinds of goods stores close. And that’s actually true—but it’s a very limited view of what online retail is doing to the economy, and to the retail economy specifically.

What I find in my work is that when people become online grocery shoppers, they go to the grocery store less, which is that classic substitution effect that we always talk about. But one thing they can do is turn around and use all that time savings from going to the grocery store to go somewhere else instead. And that’s what I find they do: they go to the grocery store less, but they go out to restaurants more. So restaurants can win from the rise of online retail, being something you can do with that extra time that you can’t replicate online. It’s not just restaurants . . . they go out to more salons, and they go out to more entertainment venues, like theaters or bowling alleys, those kinds of things that you can’t do online.

JG: What are you working on now, and what do you have planned next?

LR: Most of the story about work-from-home has focused initially on what it’s doing to things like office real estate. But retail is a big part of the economy, and it’s tied to both where you live and where you work. So if you go into the downtown office less, well, maybe you don’t go to Chipotle for lunch, and maybe you don’t go to happy hour after work, or you don’t go out for coffee—that’s a big part of downtown commerce.

If you’re instead having lunch at home, the question is: Do you go to Chipotle in the suburbs? In which case, Chipotles might just change where they locate. Or, because it’s a lot easier just to make a sandwich, do you just stay home, and that restaurant visit just disappears entirely? We find that people are leaving downtowns for the suburbs, and sometimes we also see people leaving big cities for smaller cities. That’s happening. But these retail establishments are also following the people, in a way that intuition would suggest.

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In that original paper, I ignored the supply side as if stores were not changing anything about their strategies, but we have good intuition and our everyday experience to expect that grocery stores should do something else to compete. And so we’re going to try and figure out what does that response look like? Are they going to change their product offerings, are they going to change their prices, are they going to change where their stores are? So we’re going to try and really trace out that supply side response.

JG: What sparked your interest in studying retail?

LR: It was recognizing that retail is this large, less explored aspect of commercial real estate. And I feel like it speaks to the way that people live their everyday lives, and that’s why I really like it.

I actually came to studying real estate and urban economics through an interest in the residential housing market. I worked with Chip Case at Wellesley, who developed one of the canonical models of house price indices, and I went to work at the Federal Reserve after undergrad and worked in their housing and real estate finance section, and then I went to Wharton to work on housing. And one day, my dissertation chair called me into his office, and—in his French accent—he was like, ‘Lindsay, you cannot be Miss Mortgage, you have to branch out.’ And I was like, okay, fair, but this other thing I’m interested in is still about the everyday of people’s lives, but how space shapes people’s consumption decisions, and the distributional consequences of that.

JG: What do you wish more people knew about economics?

LR: What I say to my undergrads when I’m teaching is the most beautiful economics is something that was obvious in retrospect—that says something true about the way the world works, and illuminates something new to you about the way that the world works in a very intuitive way . . . I think the best example from my work is when you shop online, you get more time, then you can do something else. Good economics makes concrete a lot of our really strong intuitions that will help us to understand how the world is really working so we can make better policy.

Something else I wish people knew is that economics is extremely nonpartisan, when it feels like everything else in the world is super partisan. It’s really about trying to understand people’s incentives and how we should distribute resources to achieve some kind of policy goal, and I think it’s very powerful in uniting people who maybe have very different personal opinions about a lot of things to speak a common language about tools and objectives.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

LR: During the housing boom of the 2000s, there was a big move away from the traditional 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage, toward mortgages that had teaser rates, or interest-only periods, or that could negatively amortize—they just had very exotic, nontraditional features that could allow you to have a cheaper mortgage payment every month than you could get on a standard contract. And what my research on that time period says is that a lot of that was really driven by this need by private banks and lenders who were packaging mortgage-backed securities to continue originating mortgages despite increasing interest rates after about 2003.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that in the current economic climate. We were puzzled back in the mid-2000s—interest rates are rising, why aren’t house prices falling?—and we actually have a very similar situation and discussion today. I think a lot about where in the system we are allowing mortgages to continue to get made, and whether those new mortgages being made today are risky in ways that are reminiscent of what happened in the 2000s.

[What gives me hope is that] every time we’ve had a technology shock, cities as a whole have come out on top. I mean, that’s not to say that individual cities can’t rise and fall . . . but I have hope overall. Every time we invent a new technology that allows easier communication across space, people predict the death of cities. They invented the telegraph, and people were like, ‘Distance doesn’t matter, so cities will disappear,’ or they invented the telephone, and they were like, ‘Cities don’t matter, we can just call each other, why would we ever need to be in person?’ The internet was the same way. And through all of those episodes, cities did the exact opposite, they got denser and became more valuable places to live; what changed was why people wanted to live there, and why cities were super valuable. I think both online retail and work from home have a good chance of following that path. So I am definitely part of the faction that bets long on cities.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

LR: Something I’ve been really into lately is trying to revisit lessons in philosophy. And one book that I read recently that really spoke to me as an urban economist was The Just City by Jo Walton. It’s a science fiction novel that imagines what would happen if you actually tried to set up Plato’s Republic by stealing people from across time that ever wished aloud to live there, and trying to run it in accordance with the way that Plato set down as being the way that cities should be run. So they put up a city that’s just like Plato’s prescription, and then of course, things get very interesting and run amok in ways that I thought were great.

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

Lead image: Lindsay Relihan. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Gregory Davis is deeply familiar with the rising cost of homeownership in the Seattle area. The managing strategist of Rainier Beach Action Coalition, a Black-led community development organization in south Seattle, Davis has watched housing prices soar out of reach for many longtime residents, including some of his own colleagues.

“Some of the young people we’ve hired, they aspire to homeownership. They want homes. They want equity and generational wealth,” he says. Many graduated from high school in or near the community of Rainier Beach, left for college, and returned to the city to begin their professional lives. But in the meantime, Davis explains, increased demand for homes in central Seattle has put pressure on housing prices at the city’s periphery. “We’re paying $65,000 salaries out of the gate, but what’s that going to get you in homeownership?”

The average home value in the Rainier Beach community—which is one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods, with 82 percent of residents identifying as Black, Asian, Latino, American Indian, or multiracial—was $674,000 at the end of 2023, an increase of almost $170,000 over five years, according to Zillow. That’s low relative to the entire Seattle region, where home values hover around $816,000—but it’s nearly double the national average.

Still, Davis says the young adults he works with, most of whom are Black, are optimistic. They know they might not be able to afford a stereotypical single-family home “with the white picket fence and the backyard,” as he puts it, but they’re certain homeownership is possible for them, too. “They know they need to look at things differently,” says Davis. “They’re not limiting themselves to a scarcity mindset.”

Davis’s organization is one of dozens of groups in the Seattle region that have joined together to find creative ways to address some of the barriers that make it especially difficult for Black residents to become homeowners. Called the Black Home Initiative (BHI), the collaborative aims to leverage the power of its network, make innovative policy changes, and utilize new funding in order to help 1,500 Black residents become homeowners by 2027.

The initiative is part of a national program, Connecting Capital and Community (3C), that’s operating in five major cities across the country. Launched in 2021 and run by the Center for Community Investment in partnership with JPMorgan Chase, 3C is an effort to develop and preserve affordable housing while also strengthening racial equity. “In our efforts to advance an inclusive economy, JPMorgan Chase is committed to addressing barriers to housing affordability and homeownership, especially for households of color, through our 3C work,” says Mercedeh Mortazavi, vice president of global philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase.

Each of the five 3C teams is developing strategies tailored to the specific climate and characteristics of the city where they’re based—Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, or Washington, DC—in ways that are designed to be replicated by local governments, funders, and organizations. Like Davis’s young colleagues, the teams are examining their cities’ affordable housing shortages from a fresh perspective, with the hope of coming up with new, more inclusive solutions.

It’s Not Just About New Units

In the US, the vast majority of affordable housing created today is built using federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. The tax credit program is responsible for thousands of affordable units being produced annually, but it has some shortcomings. The units are all rentals, and therefore won’t build long-term wealth for their residents. And the developers and investors who build the projects often don’t live in the neighborhoods where they’re sited; as a result, the income they generate leaves the community.

One of 3C’s key goals is to do things differently. Can the teams find ways to build or preserve affordable homes that also boost racial equity for Black and Latino residents? And can they do it in a manner that affects not only their immediate developments but also the overall system, so that their efforts have a larger impact?

“It’s a real shift away from just counting units as indicators of progress,” says Robin Hacke, CCI’s founder and executive director. “They’re looking at to what extent they’re moving the needle on equity. That’s a big deal.” (Launched as a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy initiative in 2017, CCI became a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in early 2024.)

Given each city’s unique history and context, the five teams’ plans are necessarily quite different. But in the three years since 3C began, they’ve followed a similar process, utilizing a tool called the Capital Absorption Framework.

Developed and championed by Hacke and CCI cofounder Marian Urquilla to help communities address local social and economic issues, the framework is built on three related functions: establishing shared priorities among a range of stakeholders; building up a stream of deals rather than just one-off projects; and strengthening the policies and procedures that can make that project pipeline more effective.

During 3C’s first full year, lead organizations in each city spent months gathering a wide range of players with interest or influence in increasing the affordable housing there: lenders, funders, representatives of public agencies, real estate developers, homebuyer education groups, and grassroots organizations representing residents. Together, the groups examined their city’s housing strengths and weak spots, gradually hammering out a set of shared priorities and a plan of action incorporating those findings. (For a detailed description of the early stages of this work, see Structural Change: 3C Initiative Promotes Housing Affordability and Racial Equity in Five US Cities).

“All five are now in a place where they’re trying to navigate how their strategies can lead to transformation in their communities,” explains Robert Harris, who directs the 3C program. “They’re really thinking, ‘Is this strategy transformative, will it have an impact, and can it be deeply rooted in the communities for 20 or 30 years?’”

Those are big asks, but the teams are moving forward. In Chicago, for example, the 3C collaborative is partnering with developers of color to construct new two- and four-unit buildings that will provide their owners with both homes and rental incomes. Early in the process, the group determined that these units should be affordable to people earning approximately 80 percent of the area median income; to meet that goal, it’s working with the developers and local funders to find ways to reduce some of the projects’ costs.

The Los Angeles team—which includes affordable housing developers and an architect—has already acquired two single family homes in South LA. Taking advantage of California’s new law allowing single-family zoned properties to include up to three additional residences, the team will build two more units on one of the properties. The other is currently zoned for commercial uses, and the plan is to tear down the existing home and develop six new units on that land. The team hopes to design a fractional ownership method that would allow multiple residents to own a property at a lower price.

In Seattle, the team has targeted a large geographic area and is aiming to help more than a thousand households. While its approach is original in many ways, many of the fundamental challenges it’s grappling with are common to the entire 3C program. Mortazavi of JPMorgan Chase describes the Black Home Initiative as an important cross-sector collaboration to increase affordable homeownership for low and moderate-income Black households in the Seattle metro and Puget Sound regions. “By tackling the problem from a demand and supply side while advancing policy changes,” she says, “BHI is advancing a meaningful strategy to drive systems change.”

Changing the Systems Underneath the Structures

“There is a desperate crisis here,” says Darryl Smith, executive director of HomeSight, a Seattle-area community development financial institution and member of the Black Home Initiative. Black families in the state have a homeownership rate that’s about half that of their white counterparts, he says, adding that over 40 percent have zero net worth. Smith identifies a critical challenge: “How do we change the systems that lie underneath the structures here?”

Smith and his organization have been core members of BHI since its early days. Shortly before their work became part of 3C, groups in the region had begun to examine why homeownership there varied so dramatically by race, and what could be done to address that disparity. Even then, it was clear that to have any impact at all, the effort would need to include a broad cross-section of groups focused on housing at a variety of levels.

Their range of expertise made it easy to identify the roadblocks, which exist on both the supply and the demand sides. The upshot of that early effort was a seven-point plan outlining some of the region’s key problems—from a need for better outreach and pre-purchase housing counseling, to improved policies and more low-cost units—and potential ways to solve them. But until that loose Seattle coalition joined 3C, it was a framework without a concrete implementation plan.

After joining the program in 2021, the organizations began to solidify into a more cohesive network, with the local group Civic Commons as the lead organization and $4.45 million in seed funding from JPMorgan Chase allowing for staffing, infrastructure development, and some programming. The initiative’s core team continued to bring in new partners and began to formalize some of those early ideas.

Today, BHI includes around 90 organizations, including local and county governments, regional and national banks, realtor associations, and nonprofits. It covers a roughly 35-square-mile area south of downtown, straddling two counties and multiple jurisdictions. The area is large relative to the projects in 3C’s other four cities; BHI’s leaders want the initiative to include the region’s main Black communities, which are very dispersed.

The team has also taken a comprehensive approach to assessing the local enabling environment and how it needs to change if Black homeownership is to increase.

“We’ve always known that the way we’ll get there is through policy and systems change,” explains Michael Brown, Civic Commons’ chief architect. The work done on the seven-point plan, examining supply and demand issues, was a strong starting point, he says. The team has since taken those ideas much farther.

Rethinking Supply and Demand

To develop its strategy, the group delved into the nuances of supply and demand. The issue of “demand,” for example, involves questions about whether low- and moderate-income people who are interested in buying homes are actually ready to do so. Is their credit where it needs to be, do they have access to strong homebuyer counseling, is assistance with down payments or closing costs available? BHI identified all of these points as opportunities for action.

In response, the team is developing several targeted projects. One is a web-based portal that will serve as a one-stop shop for prospective homebuyers, allowing them to scan the availability of financial assistance, counseling, and other programs targeted to low-income homebuyers. Another is the Black Homeownership Legacy Fund, which provides capacity-building grants to BIPOC-led nonprofits focused on homeownership education and similar activities.

And BHI celebrated a big success in the spring of 2023 when the Washington State Legislature approved the Covenant Homeownership Act (CHA). Passed in response to the racial covenants that governed real estate transactions until the 1960s and made homeownership distinctly more difficult for Black Americans—and that are a major reason for their low homeownership rate today, both in Washington and nationwide—the CHA will provide down payment and closing cost assistance for many Black first-time homebuyers. Members of BHI had actively advocated for the policy, which will benefit residents statewide who are struggling to cover the up-front costs of homeownership.

“It was a great win,” said Brown of the passage of the CHA. “It’s a recognition of the power of history, and of a network.”

On the supply side, the issue is whether enough affordable housing is currently on the market—and how developers and others can preserve the housing that exists and build more. It’s a question all five 3C teams are grappling with.

In Seattle, BHI’s leaders have determined that they can increase the number of affordable homes being built for sale while also supporting Black developers. Building homes requires a variety of loans that developers of color often struggle to get, for reasons ranging from a lack of deep-pocketed personal networks as a source of vital seed money to the discriminatory practices that persist among lenders.

Addressing that challenge, BHI developed Field Order 15, an initiative named for General Sherman’s command at the end of the Civil War to give formerly enslaved people 40-acre plots of land. This effort at reparations was rescinded by Andrew Johnson months after it was issued. The new Field Order 15 program is a reparative fund that will provide developers of color who are building for-sale homes with grants of up to $50,000 for early-stage feasibility work. Participants are then eligible to receive technical assistance and predevelopment loans through the fund at low interest rates.

“We have great Black developers here, but they’ve had to fight against real barriers,” said Smith at HomeSight, who was chiefly responsible for crafting the initiative and securing its early funding. He’s hoping those who come through the Field Order 15 program will be viewed as “vetted” by traditional lenders, and will have an easier time securing funding in the future.

BHI hopes to also help connect Field Order 15 developers with developable properties and potential opportunities. In particular, some team members are currently working with churches that may be open to using some of their land for affordable housing. Smith and others hope to eventually introduce those church leaders to the initiative’s developers, with new for-sale homes as the ultimate product.

The Gift

In addition to JPMorgan Chase’s investment, the Field Order 15 program has received a $1 million commitment from the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, and Amazon has committed $550,000. While many other philanthropists in the region have been focused on area’s intense homelessness crisis, but the initiative’s leaders believe its broad-based network and targeted objectives will gradually draw the attention of more financial supporters.

Even as the group’s leaders navigate the funding landscape, they are also contending with the challenge of wrangling a large, diverse coalition whose members share many key goals but not all, and who answer to various boards of directors.

“Having worked in the network space for many years prior to this, I can say that the hardest thing is clarifying the purpose and shared priority,” said Marty Kooistra, BHI’s project manager. “It’s about cultivating trust, and that’s hard to do.”

It was especially hard in the initiative’s early days, when meetings were still virtual. At the group’s first summit in 2021, over 100 people were present, all on Zoom. These days, the coalition frequently meets in smaller, more manageable workgroups. Still, really understanding what each member can offer and then persuading them to give their all to the larger effort is an ongoing challenge for Smith, Kooistra, and the initiative’s other leaders.

But as in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Washington, DC, the Seattle leaders are certain the work is worth it. For decades, disparate groups have worked to move the needle on Black homeownership with limited success, Kooistra says. The goal now, as BHI’s website puts it, “is to shift our mindset away from working as bright but separate stars and towards working like a highly connected constellation.”

The funding and staffing associated with the 3C program are allowing BHI to develop a large, energetic network with enormous potential to tackle one of the area’s most intractable problems. “We may never get another propitious time like this,” Kooistra added. “BHI is a gift. How will we leverage this gift?”

Amanda Abrams is a freelance journalist based in Durham, North Carolina.

Lead image: Residential neighborhoods surround downtown Seattle. Credit: Mark Hatfield via iStock/Getty Images Plus.