Transcript

[00:00:04] Anthony Flint: Welcome to Episode 4 of Season 7 of the Land Matters podcast. I’m your host, Anthony Flint. On this show, we’re going to zoom out for a truly global perspective on cities where nearly two-thirds of the planet’s population reside—technically about 55 percent or 4 billion people as of now, but projected to be 68 percent by 2050. However you look at it, that’s a lot of people needing food, water, shelter, community, and economic opportunity.

Our guest is Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency that runs the World Urban Forum. That’s the biennial global conference on sustainable urbanization, bringing together leaders from all levels of government, urban planners, and nonprofit organizations to address the really big issues facing these cities, and in many cases, huge metropolitan areas.

The World Urban Forum was established in 2001, so it’s a quarter-century-old tradition that’s right alongside the World Economic Forum or the COP, Conference of Parties climate summits. The last World Urban Forum, World Urban Forum 13, was held in May in Baku, Azerbaijan. We’re catching up with Anacláudia to get a recap and understand what the most pressing challenges are, and of course, the collaboration that’s going on to find solutions.

We’re joined by my colleague Enrique Silva, Chief Program Officer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and a veteran of many a World Urban Forum. He’s been engaged, among other things, on the role civil society has to play in supporting this rapidly urbanizing planet of ours. Anacláudia, I know it’s been a whirlwind. That may well be a permanent condition for you, but we really appreciate you making time to join the conversation on Land Matters.

[00:02:01] Anacláudia Rossbach: For sure, Anthony. Thank you so much. I’m here because land matters.

[00:02:05] Anthony Flint: The perfect guest! Let’s step back, and if you could provide an overview of World Urban Forum 13 and where it sits, in your view, in the pantheon of these gatherings, and then maybe a little bit about the venue, Baku, and how that was chosen. Tell us about World Urban Forum 13.

[00:02:27] Anacláudia Rossbach: First of all, you mentioned it as being approved by the General Assembly, actually, of the United Nations in 2001, to be a mechanism to engage with stakeholders. It is the primary space that we have at UN-Habitat to liaise with the civil society, with the academia, with local and regional governments, and also even the private sector. This, in Baku, was the 13th edition, and it was record-breaking at many levels.

Perhaps the first is in terms of attendance. It took place at the Olympic Stadium in Baku, which also hosted COP29 back in 2024. We had 58,000 people on the ground with badges. With this number, I think it became the largest UN conference because it was even bigger than the COP. In terms of the broader context, what role it played in terms of really generating change on the ground, because this is what we want at the end of the day, this edition was very strategic because it happened just a couple of months before we meet in New York in July to review SDG 11 and to review the new urban agenda after 10 years.

The new urban agenda is our main document that guides our work. It was endorsed by member states in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016 at the Habitat III conference.

[00:03:53] Anthony Flint: Just let me interject to explain the SDG 11. That’s the Sustainable Development Goal.

[00:03:59] Anacláudia Rossbach: Yes, the sustainable development goals that frame what we call the 2030 agenda. As the name says, 2030 is just around the corner. We have literally four years until the end of this agenda. The United Nations committed to address these sustainable development goals that are related to several aspects of the world we live in, climate being one, but education, health, employment, gender, equality. The SDG 11 is the one that is dedicated to cities and communities. It has to do with housing, informal settlements, land consumption is one aspect, planning, participatory planning, basic services, urban mobility.

What we discussed at the World Urban Forum [is] informing us in this process of going to New York and the assessment of where we are, and to share with member states. The other piece is the new urban agenda that I mentioned before. We are looking at what happened in the last 10 years and what is going to happen in the next 10 years.

One critical aspect of the New Urban Agenda, when it was conceived, was housing. Housing was supposed to be at the center of the New Urban Agenda. Effectively, we are living a global housing crisis. This is why the World Urban Forum brought housing as central theme. Baku was a critical space for us to reflect, to have technical and political discussions on the progress of the new urban agenda, to bring all that to the meeting in New York in July.

[00:05:38] Anthony Flint: Now, I want to ask you more about housing. That was a big theme. I know it’s difficult to summarize, but the declaration on housing, tell us about that, and this re-emphasized focus on housing and basic shelter.

[00:05:53] Anacláudia Rossbach: The Baku call to action is a call to action, as the name says, by stakeholders only. There was no engagement by member states. Stakeholders met, the civil society, the CBOs, the CSOs, the academia, and so on, the different groups, youth, women, persons with disabilities, aging, indigenous. They all met there. The result of their conversations is the Baku call to action, which is a document that is also being brought to New York to inform member states. We need to deal with the housing crisis. It is global.

Informal settlements has been a prevalent form of living, but it is now almost a humanitarian issue because we are stagnated and we might be at the risk of expanding. We have to have a holistic view of the city. We have to go back to the new urban agenda, bring the principles of the new urban agenda of participatory governance, comprehensive urban planning, recognizing that land is fundamental, that land has a social and ecological function, but we need to make sure that people are at the center.

When saying people, it’s people having access to the basics, to water, to electricity, to waste management, integrated to the city, and a roof over their heads. These communities are the frontline, the frontline of climate change, but also human rights violations, evictions, and other forms of issues that are affecting people residing in the most vulnerable spaces in our cities.

[00:07:25] Anthony Flint: Housing is a big issue in the US; affordability, a big issue. It sounds like there’s a more fundamental question of how people can find safe shelter all around the world in these growing cities.

[00:07:40] Anacláudia Rossbach: It is a huge, huge task, and you’re right. Affordability became a global issue. What has been a prevalent feature of the Global South, always the gap between what people’s income and the cost of the house has been always really big. One of the reasons why we have the prevalence of informal settlements because people need to live somewhere, and if they cannot buy a house in the market, if the government doesn’t have money to provide the needed subsidies to cover this gap, they occupy.

Now, it’s an issue in North America. You mentioned the US. It’s an issue in Europe. In Europe, for example, for the first time, the European Union has a dedicated commissioner to housing. For the first time, they have a housing plan. I think the first time after the Marshall Plan, which was actually focused on housing, they have a housing plan for the continent because perhaps there is supply, but there is a mismatch of supply because people cannot access the units at the market, or there is a limitation of supply because the houses have been taken by, for example, tourists in some of the cities that are affected by high levels of tourism, or cities or countries that are attracting retired population, and things like that.

Bottom line, young people, families, they don’t have today the money to buy or to rent a house. In most of the countries, elderly, sometimes they cannot stay where they are, and so they lose their houses. These are all factors that are limiting affordability everywhere.

[00:09:10] Anthony Flint: We will share the declaration about housing in the show notes. I’d like to turn this question over to Enrique with a little commentary. Enrique, if you don’t mind, as a preamble, because you’ve been such a veteran of the World Urban Forum, we noticed that land and land policy is one of the three pillars in the current strategic plan, and we all want to learn more about that. Enrique, may I turn it over to you?

[00:09:37] Enrique Silva: Sure. Thanks so much. First, I want to say how much I’m enjoying, and I appreciate sharing the space with my friend and colleague, Anacláudia, and also to congratulate her and her colleagues for what was, as she noted, an outstanding forum a couple of weeks ago, by all measures. I also want to take a note on the World Urban Forum as a space. I think it’s understated, but the UN-Habitat in creating and offering the World Urban Forum creates probably the singular space for all of us that are interested, care about cities and human settlements to gather and to talk.

Without that space, it’s really hard to think about how we could create a community, even a multidisciplinary, multi-vision on what it means to take care of and advocate for cities. It’s great to see colleagues. It’s great to meet new colleagues and to share the accomplishments that we’re making, but also come together to understand what the challenges are. I also want to congratulate UN-Habitat and Anacláudia’s leadership for not just the forum, but what was behind the forum, as I understand it, is a strategic plan for UN-Habitat that also has housing in the center. That plan offers a systematic way to approach this huge task that we were just talking about.

That, in and of itself, is a contribution. Within that, and now to your question, one of the things that I appreciate and that is innovative about the focus on housing that UN-Habitat is proposing is that it really steps away from housing as pure shelter. It looks at the ecosystem behind housing. It looks at housing from a socioeconomic, cultural perspective. With regards to land, it acknowledges very clearly, and this is important, even though for us in the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, it’s our daily bread, but out in the world, outside of our offices, we do not connect enough the relationship between land, land use, land policy, and housing as shelter, housing as an economic asset, housing as a dignified vehicle for improving our socioeconomic mobility.

That is something that needs to be really celebrated. There’s a space. UN-Habitat, through its plan, through the forum, has given a structured space to understand all of the dimensions of land. In particular, and I think one of the things that we need to look at it in terms of a huge task, is clearly stating that a huge portion of the cost of housing, whether it’s a mansion or a shack, is land, the cost of land.

That forces us to look at what drives the cost of land and how the cost of land affects the availability of land for anyone to put a house on that piece of land. That, for us, is something very important. We are strong allies with UN-Habitat to keep on hammering that message, but also doing the research and demonstrating how the relationship works, and why we need to develop clear strategies, multiple-level strategies, to link the way that we administer and allocate land and how that affects what we could offer as housing.

I’m sure we’re going to talk about informal settlements, but that relationship between land policy, the quality of land, and the availability of land is at the root of the proliferation of informal settlements. My take, and I think the take of many colleagues, if that’s at the root of informal settlements, the solutions to informal settlements also have to go through addressing the role of land.

[00:12:59] Anthony Flint: Anacláudia, do you have anything to add on the matter of land?

[00:13:03] Anacláudia Rossbach: I think in that sense, this … was also unprecedented because we really were able to connect our strategic plan, which has a very sharp focus. It’s access to housing, to land, basic services, the transformation of informal settlements, to the whole structure of the discussion. Of course, we will help the people attending, our people, our staff, but all the partners that attended to come back home with more concrete ideas, insights, and inspiration, and ideas, all that, but concrete examples on how to go back and to implement.

Enrique is right. Land is at the core. The price of land has been impacting all these effects in the market that is generating pressure on affordability. We have to look at that, at the root causes. I’m glad we are partnering with Lincoln to do that. What are the actions? What are the land policies? What are the mechanisms that you can apply at the local level? What are the laws that you need at the national level to help us overcome this challenge?

Also, if we look from the climate lens, which is one of the areas of impact of our strategic plan, and spoiler alert, we are still finalizing our SDG 11 report, but we’re still growing more in territory than in population. Urban sprawl is still bigger than what perhaps we need. This has a strong impact in the environment, in terms of the natural ecosystems, the natural environment, in terms of the infrastructure needed when we sprawl, and the footprint in terms of emissions.

I think at the World Urban Forum, the Baku call to action, we were able to bring all these different perspectives, the economic perspectives of markets, how they’re working, not working, how it’s putting pressure on affordability, how housing is so important for the SDGs, for the socioeconomic challenge that we have, but also the climate perspective. Land is a central aspect of that.

[00:15:00] Anthony Flint: Just following up on land and housing and the issue of informal settlement, you mentioned that we’re still expanding in terms of land at a rate that is a little bit at odds with the actual population, but there’s this sort of spreading out of informal settlement. What is the current view on what to do about that to try to prevent it or curtail it or to work with it in situ that there are improvements that can be made to improve the quality of life in these expanding informal settlements?

[00:15:37] Anacláudia Rossbach: First of all, recognize that they are there because we are talking about 1 billion people. We are at the moment at a crossroad. We have been able to stabilize informality growth in certain regions. However, we have Africa and Southeast Asia receiving about 2 billion people in the next couple of decades, and Latin America also in a crossroads after COVID. In the Global South, we might be at risk of expanding informality if we don’t take action. This is the big picture.

Also, in the Global North, informality also popping up and being recognized. I saw that in Europe. You see vulnerable communities, you have refugees, you have overcrowding. The point is let’s take a picture and let’s recognize they are there, and then having active policies to address that. Understanding that they have been the only option these people found when they moved to a certain city, to a certain metropolitan area.

As I said, they wouldn’t have the money to go to the markets and to a real estate agent and buy a house. The governments wouldn’t have programs that would reach the whole of the population. They go, they find a job, they have aspirations, they go to cities, and they don’t have a place to live. They occupy environmentally protected areas. Sometimes they occupy public land that has been empty or even private land that has been empty.

This is what I mean in terms of recognizing the social function of the land. Many countries, especially in Latin America, they have embedded that in their national legislation. Embedding in the legal regulatory framework that we accept slums are there, informal settlements are there, and the people have the right to stay there and to access services.

Then, of course, from that, embedding in the city planning, from that, making sure that public investments flow into these areas and can generate transformation. Transformation in terms of looking at densities, opening up pathways, roads, looking at drainage solutions, but also looking at public spaces, at green coverage, access to social, to leisure, to cultural amenities, and make sure that these areas are connected up to the city. Embedding in urban planning, embedding in the national development strategies, these are all strategies that we recommend from UN-Habitat.

[00:18:04] Anthony Flint: Enrique, you’ve been tracking this incredibly vast issue of informal settlement for many years. Where do you see things stand at this moment in terms of what most people would say are slums, shantytowns, informal settlement?

[00:18:20] Enrique Silva: I’m glad we’re touching on this subject. It’s one of the things that I appreciated about coming to work at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in particular, its program in Latin America, which, in many ways, was established a little over 30 years ago to understand the relationship between land policy, land markets, and the proliferation of informal settlements or slums, as some call it.

The argument that we’ve developed over that period is to stop looking at informality as merely an issue of poverty and household low income or resources, and to look at it as fundamentally a failure in local governments or local markets to provide land that is of a quality sufficient enough to sustain everyone’s household shelter needs with dignity. That failure manifests itself in governments for markets not investing in infrastructure, water, electricity, or preparing land that’s close to job markets.

Those are land policy issues and decisions that are both public, also market-driven. For us, land policy tries to intermediate public decisions with market decisions. There, our largest, biggest argument is if you want to prevent informal settlements, the sheltering of people in places that are not recognized by law, talk about climate change, are in place because they’re not recognized by law, in ecologically vulnerable or susceptible places. If you want to prevent those, invest in what we call servicing land, which is ensuring that either the public sector or the market conditions land so that people can have housing.

Do it enough, in the quantity enough, it makes the purchase of the land accessible to more income levels. That’s to prevent it. We still argue that the best way, and as Anacláudia was saying, we have a window of opportunity here to prevent additional informal settlement. A strategy for that—it’s not the only one—a strategy for that is to look at how we can allocate and create service land or offer service lands at an affordable price so that people can buy and settle them into it.

As Anacláudia rightfully says, we have to also, first and foremost, recognize what’s already there because of the failures of the past, and we need to address those. There is a land policy component to regularizing informal settlements. Those tend to be, though, costly, much more complicated because you’re dealing with people’s homes that are already established, communities that have built community and developed extremely healthy social, economic ties.

There are ways to do that. We offer land policy and land-based financing opportunities to finance the regularization of some of these informal settlements. For us, in terms of how to tackle the informal sector, informal housing, it’s everything above. All options are on the table. It’s not just preventative. You have to do both. It’s not just about paying for upgrading, but it’s also looking at the different models to secure tenure of the households there. If and when that land is improved upon, those improvements don’t displace them, which happens often.

[00:21:26] Anthony Flint: We are talking about such big issues, and I want to make the final question about a really big one, and my sympathies for both of you to synthesize this, but that is climate change, both mitigation and resilience efforts, and the issue of climate migration. Anacláudia, what came out of World Urban 13 on the climate front?

[00:21:52] Anacláudia Rossbach: Many things. We have a very strong body of research on climate change. To start with some good news, we launched a publication. We reviewed the Generation 3.0 of the indices, the National Determined Contributions, what we call the national climate implementation plans, let’s say so in a more simple language.

[00:22:13] Anthony Flint: This is each nation’s plan for dealing with climate change?

[00:22:17] Anacláudia Rossbach: Exactly. They have to provide, and there is a third generation now. We used AI to analyze this third generation of reports, and we identified that 80 percent of these reports, they have an urban content, and half of them with some elements around housing and or informal settlements. The importance and the role of cities, of urban climate action, of local action is important to address climate change.

What we discussed, in addition to that, is the role of housing in that space. Cities are responsible for 70 percent of the emissions, and if you look at the built environment, it’s 34 percent. If we look at the city, the majority of the buildings are housing. The way we address housing, the way we address the housing crisis, will have strong implications in terms of climate. Why? Two sides of the coin. Mitigation and adaptation.

Adaptation, we spoke about informal settlements already. These are the people building incrementally, low profile, without sophisticated heating, cooling systems, and so on, very climate-friendly. They’re not contributing much to emissions. However, they are the ones being affected most. They are on the front line. Fires, disasters, landslides, floodings, sea level rise, you name it, they are on the front. Addressing issues, addressing informal settlements, making them stronger, resilient, looking at drainage, looking at protecting them from everything that I’m talking about, improving their housing conditions so that they’re more resilient in terms of disasters, of climate events.

This is an important aspect of this intersection, urban development, cities, informal settlements, housing, and climate change. We have 3 billion people living in inadequate situation right now, 300 million homelessness. We spoke about displacement, 120 million. These are the big numbers that we have. People displaced by conflicts, by climate change, and so on. This is happening as we speak. People are losing their houses. In that sense, housing, if we have to address the needs, we have to, A, either recycle existing buildings or build new ones. Recycling opportunities in the Americas, you’ll find some. In Europe, you’ll find some.

Where urbanization is really happening, in Africa and Southeast Asia, we still need to build because you just don’t have buildings to be recycled. The decisions that we take on how, where, and to whom we build will have an impact because if we don’t focus the upcoming buildings, if we don’t connect to the needs, we might exacerbate a mismatch of supply and demands and have unnecessary emissions.

If we look at location, if we keep up with the urban sprawl, we are, as I said, affecting the natural environments, biodiversity, the natural ecosystems, water. Look at metropolitan areas that are facing drought: Cape Town, Santiago, Bogota. The needs for infrastructure will imply more emissions. People move from place to place. This has impact in terms of air quality, in terms of emissions, et cetera. We have to look at location and we have to look at materials and the form and the design of all that.

Here is the intersection of how future urban development will take place, how we are going to transform the existing cities, the existing built environments, especially in the Global North, and how we are going to work with this upcoming needs in the Global South, especially in the areas that are highly urbanized. How we build our houses, how we transform our built environment, how we address informal settlements will have a direct relation in terms of climate. It’s very interesting that we are talking about that today, Anthony, because as we speak, we are here in Nairobi at a conference meeting the IPCC Cities Report authors.

For the first time, we’re going to have an IPCC Cities Report focus on cities. We have been discussing within these days the role that housing plays. In all conversations that we are having here, we all understand housing is a critical aspect. If we don’t deal with that right, we’ll not be able to achieve the 1.5 or above targets.

[00:26:46] Anthony Flint: Looking ahead, there’s going to be another World Urban Forum, the World Urban Forum 14, as I understand it, in Mexico City in 2028. Anacláudia, a brief look ahead to that gathering.

[00:26:59] Anacláudia Rossbach: First of all, I hope to meet you all in Mexico City in 2028. It will be a critical moment because we are going to follow up on the Baku call to action … housing, land, human rights, all is there. The WUF14 will be used as a moment to reflect what happened and to see how action is really taking place and being implemented. We hope also to have strong mobilization towards WUF14. In this last WUF, we had many innovations. We had a practices hub. We had the WUF Academia.

We are organizing the practices, the different segments into more structured coalitions, communities of practice, way of work. We hope to come stronger as a global, let’s say, coalition in Mexico City, have more allies, bring, because it’s in Latin America, the perspective from the Americas, and experiences from the Americas. Also, we brought in Baku for the first time, very strong, the private sector. This is one segment that needs to be part of the conversation. We hope to elevate that in Mexico City.

[00:28:14] Anthony Flint: Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Enrique Silva, Chief Program Officer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Thank you so much for joining the conversation at Land Matters.

[00:28:28] Anacláudia Rossbach: Thank you so much. It was a big pleasure to be with my former colleagues, but forever friends. Lincoln is a key stakeholder. We hope to keep our partnership very strong and towards Mexico.

[00:28:39] Enrique Silva: Rest assured, it’s very strong, and it can keep on getting strong. Wonderful to be here. Thank you.

[00:28:44] Anthony Flint: We have extensive research on global urbanization, informal settlement, climate resilience, all of the big issues facing global cities. Just check out our website. It’s lincolninst.edu. On social media, our handle is @landpolicy. I hope you’ll go ahead and rate, share, and subscribe to Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. For now, I’m Anthony Flint signing off. Until next time.

[00:29:22] [END OF AUDIO]

Transcript

[00:00:05] Anthony Flint: Welcome to Episode 3 of Season 7 of the Land Matters podcast. I’m your host, Anthony Flint. In our Mayor’s Desk series here at the Lincoln Institute, we interview municipal chief executives from around the world. Our latest conversation brings us all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska, a city of about 30,000 people, way up north near Russia, the gateway to the Arctic as it’s known, the second largest city in the state after Anchorage, and a metropolis that has been awarded the title of coldest city in America, having set a record low of minus 66 degrees Fahrenheit.

We’re talking with 44-year-old Mindy O’Neall, who recently replaced an incumbent and campaigned on themes including downtown revitalization, affordable housing, and public safety. She grew up in Iowa and drove a stick shift pickup truck up north, first working as an aide in the Alaska State Legislature, then the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation and the Interior Gas Utility, and also founded Blue Canoe Media, a boutique communications and consulting firm.

She holds a BA in event planning and business communication from Iowa State University and an MA in professional communications from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where her research focused on governance and climate impacts on rural Alaska, including the relocation of Native communities. Prior to her election as mayor, she served on the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and was executive director of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, and also serves on the boards of the Alaska State Homebuilders Association and Alaska Municipal League.

She lives in downtown Fairbanks with her dog, Tito, who, as she pointed out, is the true official dog of Alaska, the mutt. I first met her at a program for mayors at Harvard and followed up with this interview.

For the uninitiated, including those of us in the lower 48, what kind of place is Fairbanks, and why did you want to be mayor?

[00:02:22] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Well, thanks, Anthony, and thanks for inviting me onto the show. I get this question a lot, especially for the uninitiated, as you said. That’s cute. You’re right. Fairbanks really is an exotic place. I would say we’re the land of extremes. We are extremely cold in the winter. We’re extremely warm in the summer. Some people may be surprised to learn that we can get up to 90 to 100 degrees in the summer. The force of the sun, the feeling of the sun, is so direct that it is just something you have to experience. We have exotic animals, grizzly bears, and polar bears. We have extreme industry like mining and gas and oil development. We are definitely a place of extremes.

At the heart of it is the people. It’s these people who have grit and determination, and oftentimes this mindset of abundance, where we have so much, as far as so much light, so much darkness. Then, a lot of times, this mindset of scarcity as well, where we’re at the end of the line, we have three to four days of food security at any given time. There’s things that also come into play that really just demonstrate how much of an extreme environment we live in.

Yes, wanting to be mayor. I’ve been in Alaska for over 23 years. I’m originally from Iowa, so I’m a land dweller from the middle of the United States. I came up here, just like a lot of other folks, looking for adventure. If you’ve ever been to the Midwest, they say, “Why would you ever want to leave the land, the heartland?” I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a year. I just want to go check it out.” After a year, it was painfully obvious that there was so much more to discover to Alaska that I just had to stay. I made my way up to Fairbanks from Anchorage after being there for seven years. I worked in the legislature and started to work for an interior gas utility that brought natural gas to our town.

During that time, I was an untraditional student and went back to our flagship university at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and got a master’s in organizational development. I wrote my thesis on the politics of relocating Alaska Native villages due to climate change. At the time, I didn’t really realize how that was going to inform my career as much as it has, because after being a labor agent for the laborers. I was the executive director for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center. I spent the last four years doing that while also serving on the Borough Assembly.

One of the things that’s interesting about Alaska is we have seven boroughs that are like counties in the lower 48, and then we have cities within those boroughs. Fairbanks has a borough that has a governing body, which is the assembly, and a mayor. Then within the borough, there are two cities that have each their own mayor and each their own governing bodies. Now I am the mayor of the city of Fairbanks. I have a city council that’s a smaller council that’s located within the borough. The borough is about the size of New Jersey, with 130,000 folks in it. The city is 32,000 of those. Then the city located within the borough is the city of North Pole. They have about 2,500 folks in there.

Like a lot of places where you go from city to city in urban areas, you may or may not know what boundary you’re in. That can be sometimes a point of confusion. We always like to joke for a place that’s so against government and against overregulation, we have a lot of government regulating us.

After serving in the assembly for six and a half years, I started my public service during COVID. I think I had been appointed for about six months and then elected about four months before COVID happened. I really learned how to govern in an elected position through a screen. I do think that COVID was obviously and certainly a pivotal point in politics, but even just in the way that we communicate. That’s my passion, my heart and soul, is communication and journalism, and that sort of thing. We had a mayor that was on paper doing a fine job. He had gotten programs started and knew the city really well and led it, but he was very discriminatory to the Alaska Native population here.

After some comments and some blow-ups that he had on social media, I knew that if anybody was going to be able to beat him in an election, that I’d be able to do it. I just believe that public service is a privilege, and somebody who is in office has to have the respect of every population that is within their community. I’ve wrestled with this a little bit coming into office as, well, the last mayor, he wasn’t doing a bad job. He was actually doing a good job, but he wasn’t showing our community the respect.

I think sometimes we miss out on that key piece of public service is showing your community respect, even if you don’t understand them, even if you don’t agree with them. I think that we have lost that on a lot of levels of government these days. I believe in government. I believe that we have government for a reason. When you don’t have good governance, I do think that one of the benefits of being in this position in the last six months is being a female. This is the first time Fairbanks has had a female mayor in about two decades. I’m the fourth one since 1903.

It’s really touching to be able to be, and especially a young female in my 40s, leading this community and being a role model for other girls in our community to see that there’s somebody like them who treats a community with respect and can lead in an environment that is sometimes very hostile and sometimes very male-driven. That’s a long way of saying that’s how I ended up here.

[00:09:02] Anthony Flint: Everybody’s wrestling with affordability these days. One big part of that is housing. What are the policies that can help in your region, whether home buying or renting?

[00:09:14] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: I mentioned at the beginning that Fairbanks is at the end of the line. While that’s true, we also have an abundance of resources that are part of our economy. We have timber, we have renewable energy, we have access to gravel, and alternative methods such as mycelium. While we’re at the end of the road, we have these resources at our disposal to be innovative on how we approach housing. I think that those answers come in local manufacturing of our own resources, innovation, and then also building things like kind of part homes that have been tested for extreme environments.

We suffer from a housing stock that’s from the ’70s. Alaska really got its last big boom during the oil pipeline of the ’70s. What happened was there was such an explosion of Westerners coming up to the state that they built things the way that they knew how to build things, which was without a lot of insulation, built out of whatever they had. We suffer from very inefficient housing. When we talk about what affordable housing is, for us, it really has to include a component of energy efficiency, so we can even afford to heat our homes.

This year, we’ve had one of the coldest winters on record. I think it was the fourth coldest winter on record. We also got a remarkable amount of snow. It’s been very challenging for folks, especially now that oil prices are going up. We have about 1,200 folks in our community that are on natural gas. Everybody else is heating their homes with diesel fuel. If you think about that, we have folks who are getting delivery of diesel fuel to their homes, myself included. I live in the most urban part of our city.

Going back to affordable housing, it really does include this holistic look of what’s going to work and how we can be energy efficient with our housing, but also how we can use our local resources for innovation and how we can manufacture the resources that we have here. Secondly, and this is something that I think is really interesting, is this idea, this concept of building generational wealth outside of homeownership. That’s a model and a tool that I’d really like to explore more as we talk about how we’re building affordable housing in our community.

[00:11:45] Anthony Flint: This is this idea that not everybody has to buy a home. It’s perfectly fine to rent.

[00:11:50] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Perfectly fine to rent, but then the next question is, how do renters gain generational wealth so they’re not just handing over money every month without anything in return? They get a house to live in, but there’s no equity in it after a while. In what ways — and I know there are models out there — when we’re building affordable housing, how can we lower the amount of investment for folks in a way that it might not come back to them for 30 to 50 years, but in 30 to 50 years, they’re on their second or third generation of family where they have security in their family in a form of tangible wealth?

[00:12:34] Anthony Flint: There’s also the community land trust model, where you have this more shared equity, and there’s limits on resale, but you still have it.

[00:12:43] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: I like that. There’s more and more folks talking about how to do this in innovative ways. I think typically building homes and housing has been the game or the business of large, wealthy developers. In our community, we just can’t really afford that. We don’t have enough folks for a large developer to make money here. When we start to rethink about who’s investing in our own community, and who can invest, then we start to, I think, build out that wealth better.

[00:13:17] Anthony Flint: The Lincoln Institute has been helping municipalities identify government-owned land that can be used for affordable housing. Do you see opportunities in that approach?

[00:13:29] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Absolutely, I do. A few facts for you here. 60% of our land in Alaska is federal. 25% is owned by the state of Alaska. It’s about 580,000 acres. 10% is owned by Native corporations, and 1% is private. We have a lot of government land that’s available. Now, about 80 million of those acres are managed for conservation, but that’s still quite a bit of land left for us to use. I think what the Lincoln Institute is doing, exploring these different land-use models, including transportation and other components of community building, is fantastic. I can’t wait to get my hands on more of that information. I signed up for the newsletter.

We have a parking structure that has been mothballed for, gosh, probably five years. The university that used it ended up not needing it. They literally welded the doors shut, and this building has been sitting there deteriorating ever since. Through the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation, who is a statewide housing financing bank, they purchased that parking garage and have put it out for bid for affordable housing. They worked with us, saying, “Okay, we own this now, but it’s right in the middle of your city. What do you want to do with this?” We walked through the options that we have. Do we want senior housing? Yes, we desperately need senior housing. Is this the right place? We don’t think so. Okay. Next option, affordable housing, high-end housing, two bedrooms, apartment. What is it that we need? Through that process, we’ve put out an RFP for a developer to then build two or three stories on top of that parking garage, therefore activating the space using, again, the parking garage for parking, covered parking, which is very important in Fairbanks, Alaska, but also getting units into the downtown core.

That’s one example. There’s a few others that we have ongoing in town, but that’s one example that I’m really eager to see how that plays out.

[00:15:48] Anthony Flint: What are the unique challenges of living with climate change in Alaska, and what, at the state and local level, can be done about it?

[00:15:57] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: They often call the Arctic the canary in the coal mine because we start to see the issues of climate change far beyond and far before the lower 48 or other parts of the world. The Arctic has been saying that something’s happening in our environment for quite some time. I mentioned before what we’ve noticed is we have more wind in Fairbanks, which means that we have more risk for summer fires, wildfires. In the winter, we’ve had more snow than usual.

It’s also been very cold, so colder than usual, which means that our ground will not thaw quickly, meaning that when the temperature gets hot in the air, what’s going to happen? It’s all going to melt into water, but there’s going to be nowhere for it to go because the ground hasn’t unthawed yet. Now we miss out on that water. We get lots of floods, and then we don’t have moisture in the ground, and so it’s more susceptible to wildfires in the summer. That’s just one instance of the cycle of how climate change has affected the interior.

I don’t think that there’s really much we can do about this now. It’s happening. We’re in a cycle of climatic disruption, for sure, but we can plan for it. We can plan for extreme events, so we know what we’re going to do when the power goes out and it’s negative 30 degrees. We know what’s going to happen when our river floods in the middle of our town and we’ve lost access to the hospital or to hotels. We know what to do when we have an ice event because we got three or four inches of rain on top of three or four feet of snow in the middle of winter, and how that affects the animals, the moose. How it affects our ability to hunt and fish and gather berries or medicinal foods.

I think planning is a very big part of how we are prepared because, honestly, you don’t know what’s going to happen from season to season. The other thing is with planning comes money. Alaska is a place where we do not collect sales taxes on a statewide basis. Some municipalities do — we do not, as the municipality of Fairbanks — and income taxes. We pay property taxes, and that’s all we pay. As we address these more and more climatic, dramatic events, it’s costing us more and more to repair the roads, costing more and more to protect the utilities that are above and below ground, and somewhere that’s going to have to come from funding.

We’re seeing less and less investment from the federal government for events like that. As Alaskans, it’s time for us to think really hard about how we want to protect and at what level we want to protect our assets that we have, and what level of commitment that comes from our own pocketbooks.

[00:19:04] Anthony Flint: Yes, leading into that, figuring some of this stuff out at the local level or the local and state level seems to be really important right now. How have you navigated being a mayor at a time when the federal government is reducing funding and more or less withdrawing from being a partner on so many issues?

[00:19:26] Mayor Mindy O’Neall: Yes. It seems like we continue to ask our employees to do more with less. At the same time, the public expects services to be modern. That means we have to invest in technology. A lot of times, we just don’t have the funding for that. It’s a tough spot, I got to say. I have all of these ideas and plans for being mayor. Then you come into the office and you’re like, “Okay, how am I going to make this work with the operations that we already have going, the way we want to provide services and make things more efficient for our public with less and less funding from the state and from the federal government?”

Again, I do think that we’re going to have to look at ways that we contribute to ourselves, and that comes back to the values that we hold as a community. We’re a place where tourists want to be because that’s also a big part of our economy. It’s tough. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I have two and a half more years to go. It’s definitely something I’m working on a lot, and how we do more with less and how we increase, or how we explain the value of good governance with putting our own skin in the game.

[00:20:43] Anthony Flint: Mindy O’Neall is mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska, the latest leader to be interviewed in the Lincoln Institute’s Mayor’s Desk series. We love talking to mayors, and we’ve compiled 20 of these interviews in a book, Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems, which includes a forward by Michael Bloomberg. Otherwise, Mayor’s Desk interviews appear in Land Lines magazine, in addition to most of them being broadcast here on the Land Matters podcast. You can find everything on the Lincoln Institute website. Just navigate to lincolninst.edu.

On social media, our handle is @landpolicy. Please go ahead and rate, share, and subscribe to Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. For now, I’m Anthony Flint signing off, until next time.

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