CAMBRIDGE, MA—The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has released a new Policy Focus Report, Preserving Affordable Homeownership: Municipal Partnerships with Community Land Trusts, by John Emmeus Davis and Kristin King-Ries.

Drawing on insights from 115 community land trusts (CLTs) that were interviewed or surveyed by the International Center for Community Land Trusts, the report explores how CLTs are partnering with public officials to help address the housing affordability crisis. In this innovative model, individuals buy homes on land that is leased from a local CLT and agree to limit the resale price, reducing the upfront cost of homeownership and keeping those homes affordable for one income-qualified household after another.

“There has been a seismic shift in public policy over the last two decades, especially among cities and counties,” said Davis, a city planner who has spent much of his 40-year career providing technical assistance to CLTs and documenting their history and performance. “Public resources invested in helping to expand homeownership were once routinely allowed to leak away when assisted homes resold. Today, a growing number of public officials are prudently committed to preserving those subsidies—and the hard-won affordability of the homes themselves—for many years. Municipalities are partnering with CLTs because they have proven their effectiveness in making that happen. CLTs remain in the picture long after a home is purchased, ensuring that affordability lasts, homes are maintained, and newly minted homeowners succeed. These multi-faceted duties of stewardship are what CLTs do best.”

Preserving Affordable Homeownership builds on the Lincoln Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Report The City-CLT Partnership, coauthored by Davis and Rick Jacobus. In addition, a multimedia case study published by the Lincoln Institute in 2023, Still the One: Affordable Housing Initiatives in Burlington Vermont’s Old North End, features Davis and several colleagues from the Champlain Housing Trust, the largest CLT in the United States.

“The survey of CLTs conducted by the International Center for this report revealed that city and county government partnerships with CLTs have grown in number, variety, and sophistication since the 2008 Policy Focus Report, and a number of state governments are now supporting CLTs as well,” said King-Ries, an attorney whose practice focuses on creating and stewarding homeownership opportunities for people priced out of the traditional real estate market. “This updated report offers insights and tips on what is possible when governments and CLTs work together toward the shared goal of creating permanently affordable homeownership. The report also examines unintended consequences of governmental policies and conditions that make it difficult for CLTs to produce and to preserve affordably priced homes—and offers recommendations for how government officials can work more productively with CLTs.”

Preserving Affordable Homeownership reveals significant trends in the landscape of CLTs and municipal-CLT partnerships, from Los Angeles to Lawrence, Kansas. Among the key findings: more municipalities are starting CLTs, including Tampa, Florida, which set aside part of a $10 million bond for that purpose, and Indianapolis, Indiana, which appropriated $1.5 million to start a citywide CLT.

More cities are also incorporating lasting affordability into housing subsidies and regulations, and many are considering how to more fairly assess and tax the lands and homes in CLT portfolios. State governments are increasingly providing legislative and financial support for CLTs, from Connecticut to Texas.

In addition to identifying trends, the report provides recommendations for successful public-CLT partnerships. “This is a groundbreaking and insightful report,” says Sheila R. Foster, a professor of climate and law at Columbia University and cofounder and director of LabGov, an applied research laboratory focused on urban challenges. “It will make a tremendous difference to practitioners, cities, and policymakers as CLTs are experiencing historic growth and expansion in an increasingly unaffordable housing market.”

About the Authors

John Emmeus Davis is a city planner who has spent much of his 40-year career providing technical assistance to CLTs and documenting their history and performance. He coauthored the Lincoln Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Report The City-CLT Partnership. He previously served as housing director in Burlington, Vermont, and was dean of the National CLT Academy. He is a partner at Burlington Associates in Community Development LLC, a national consulting cooperative. Davis is a founding board member of the International Center for CLTs and editor in chief of the center’s imprint, Terra Nostra Press.

Kristin King-Ries is an attorney whose practice focuses on creating and stewarding permanently affordable homes and farms for people priced out of the traditional real estate market. She represents CLTs and other nonprofits and serves as a consultant to the Agrarian Trust and the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. She is currently organizing a CLT legal collaborative on behalf of the International Center for CLTs. She served as general counsel for Trust Montana from 2017 to 2021.

Lead image: Rebecca Buford, executive director of Tenants to Homeowners, a community land trust (CLT) in Lawrence, Kansas. The CLT has developed permanently affordable housing with support from the city, an example of the growing universe of municipal-CLT partnerships across the country. Credit: Taylor Mah/City of Lawrence.

Two new translations of the Lincoln Institute book Design with Nature Now are hitting international bookshelves this year, and with them, a pair of interactive exhibitions—one in Nanjing, China, and a second in Taipei, Taiwan—have brought the publication’s concepts and projects to life for thousands of attendees.

Design with Nature Now was published in 2019 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ian L. McHarg’s landmark volume, Design with Nature. Published in 1969, that book helped redefine landscape architecture and introduced ecological planning principles aligned with the growing environmental movement. Edited by Penn faculty, Design with Nature Now reflects on McHarg’s enduring influence over half a century later and showcases a variety of visionary environmental design projects taking place around the world. They include a protected 2,000-mile Yellowstone to Yukon wildlife corridor, a 5,000-mile Great Green Wall of trees and shrubs being planted to combat desertification in Africa, and the transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a 2,200-acre urban park and wetland habitat in New York City.

Recognizing that it would be easier for people to appreciate the enormity and scale of such massive projects when the accompanying photographs and maps were measured in feet as opposed to inches, a team at Penn—including coeditor Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, professor and dean of the Weitzman School of Design, and William Whitaker, architectural archives collections manager—curated a series of visually stunning exhibitions at the Weitzman School upon the book’s initial publication in 2019. With the work now being translated into both simplified and traditional Chinese (the former used predominantly in mainland China, the latter in Taiwan), Steiner found partners with Penn connections abroad who were eager to revive and reimagine those installations for new audiences.

The Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA) agreed to host an exhibition in Taipei, where the mayor is a Penn Law School alumnus; Southeast University in Nanjing, China, offered to host as well. Southeast is “the oldest school of architecture in China, and it was founded by two Penn alums, so we have a very close relationship,” Steiner says.

The Nanjing exhibition opened first, running May 31 through July 31, while the Taipei installation was open from September 14 to October 12. The exhibitions drew “thousands and thousands of people,” says Steiner, who attended both openings.

“Both venues were amazing,”  Steiner says, and the settings enhanced the displays of maps and other materials related to the book: “The Nanjing exhibition was held in a kind of shopping plaza on a huge lake by the historic city wall—it’s a major subway stop and a park, a venue where a lot of people get married, so it was just swarming with people,” Steiner says. The Taipei exhibit was housed in a former tobacco factory “in the hippest cultural and arts center of the city,” he adds, at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.

Penn professor and Design with Nature Now coeditor Karen M’Closkey recently returned from a global landscape architecture conference that overlapped with the end of the exhibit in Taipei, and says the dynamic venue helped ensure that the exhibition was packed. “They’ve renovated all these buildings, there are small shops and bookstores,” she says. “It was busy with people the whole time, and on the pedestrian street between the buildings, there were always performances and people selling things. It was a very lively place.”

In Taipei alone, roughly 9,600 people attended the exhibition, says curator Matt Chu, deputy secretary general of the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects. The Taipei exhibition included guided tours, weekend lectures with Taiwanese government officials, and a two-day symposium as the installation came to a close in mid-October.

Over 600 attendees took one of the guided tours offered by TILA volunteers and adjunct professors, Chu says, each tour beginning with a deep introduction to ecological design projects and concepts in the auditorium. “Every tour was packed, and we were so thrilled by positive feedback from the audience,” Chu says.

Themes That Resonate

The 25 large-scale environmental design projects showcased in Design with Nature Now are organized into five major themes: Big Wilds, Rising Tides, Fresh Waters, Toxic Lands, and Urban Futures. The exhibits were likewise split into five thematic categories, but also included a section on McHarg himself, called The House We Live In, and a gallery of works by artist and landscape architect Laurel McSherry, created during her stint as a Fulbright Scholar in McHarg’s homeland of Scotland. In both Nanjing and Taipei, local government agencies augmented the exhibits by connecting the themes to their own environmental efforts around climate change and resilience.

Three of the thematic projects highlighted in Design with Nature Now are located in China—including a focus on Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen—but that’s hardly the only reason the book has found a welcome audience there.

“The importance of nature to Chinese culture is ancient, so I think there’s that historic connection,” Steiner says. “But also in a contemporary sense, it’s the biggest country in the world in terms of population, it’s become majority urban . . . so the issues of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, climate change—they’re not abstract. There’s a lot of interest politically, both in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic, in addressing these issues. I think the five big themes that we identified resonate very much.”

In addition to the larger-than-life reproductions of maps, photographs, and landscapes, the exhibits included 3D models and updated information on projects featured in the book and original exhibit.

In Taipei the exhibit included a three-dimensional model of the city. And one of Chu’s favorite installations in Taipei brought new clarity to a concept introduced in McHarg’s 1969 book. McHarg and his students had famously sliced up contoured landscapes, such as that of Staten Island, New York, into different layers—showing existing land uses alongside hand-drawn maps of the area’s physiography, water table, wildlife habitat, forest cover, and tidal inundation, among other ecological features—in an analog precursor to geographic information system (GIS) mapping.

“In the original exhibition in Philadelphia, they had those 18 Staten Island graphics on the wall,” Chu says. “But I kind of stacked them using transparent panels, so visitors can see all the different layers—the geology, the hydrology, the vegetation, all the layers—the way Ian McHarg explained how nature would influence culture and where development should go.”

Five years after the Penn exhibition, Chu was also able to display updated photos from the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, which has completed early phases of two major projects featured in Design with Nature Now: Freshkills Park in New York, which was once the largest landfill in the world, and Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen. “So it’s kind of a comparison with five years ago, when they were only in the planning phase,” Chu says. “They’ve got North Park, Phase One built in Freshkills Park, and in Shenzhen they got Guiwan Park built. And you can see the process, how it’s come from the planning phase, to design, to building it, and see how designing with nature really came true.”

The exhibits also included video, notes Steiner, with displays including a snippet from a late-1960s McHarg documentary; a film by McSherry that synced the waxing spring daylight hours of Glasgow with cinematic scenes in real time; and previously recorded live-cam footage of wildlife in the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor using an underpass to cross beneath a busy road. “Kids would all be huddled around watching the animals go through the underpass,” says Steiner, who notes that the curiosity went both ways, as bears, coyotes, and other animals came up to inspect the camera at close range.

The Nanjing and Taipei exhibits were such a success that other organizations are already inquiring about hosting the exhibits next year. Steiner says the Nanjing exhibit is slated to move to Shanghai next summer, while in Taiwan, Chu says, “So far we have the Taoyuan City Library and Kaohsiung National Science and Technology Museum expressing their willingness to exhibit next year,” as well as interest from Taiwan’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency.

Chu said the exhibition helped raise the visibility of the landscape architecture profession locally. “Even though Ian McHarg actually came to Taiwan about 40 years ago, to help Taiwan establish its National Parks system, people in Taiwan still associate the profession more with horticulture or gardening,” Chu says. “So this exhibition really opened their eyes [to the idea] that landscape architects can help with things like climate change and biodiversity loss using large-scale planning and design.”

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

Lead image: Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.

In the spirited cultural debate over the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence, the imagined pros and cons have tended toward the sensational. There’s been little mainstream attention paid to the technology’s potential impact on the everyday tasks that keep our cities humming—things like construction permit reviews, development application processes, and planning code compliance enforcement. But the needs in those areas are quite real, and experiments to apply newer AI breakthroughs to these kinds of operations are already well underway. Municipalities large and small, from Florida to New England, and Canada to Australia, have announced AI-related pilots and other exploratory efforts.

While the approaches vary, the challenges are practically universal. Determining whether proposed construction or development projects meet all land and building codes is a detail-intensive, often slow process: It can be confusing for applicants and require extensive back-end work for municipalities and other authorities. The hope is that AI can help make that process—or “the tedious parts of city planning,” as the publication Government Technology bluntly put it—speedier and more efficient, as well as more accurate and comprehensible. Ideally, it would even allow planning departments to streamline and reallocate resources.

But as city officials working with the new technology make clear, there’s a long way to go to get to that point. And given that some of AI’s most publicized moments to date involve embarrassing failures (such as Google’s AI search tool advising users on the benefits of eating rocks and adding glue to pizza), they are proceeding with caution.

There’s often a “hype cycle” between a new technology’s early promise and its eventual reality, cautions Andreas Boehm, the intelligent cities manager for Kelowna, British Columbia, a city of about 145,000. His team is specifically charged with seeking new opportunities to leverage tech innovations for the city and its residents. Despite a lot of chatter, we still haven’t seen many “concrete, tangible examples” of AI as a “transformative” force in planning systems, Boehm says. But we may start to see real results soon.

Canada is experiencing a housing shortage, Boehm notes, and moving faster on new construction could help. The permitting pipeline is clogged with inquiries from current property owners about zoning and code issues for more routine projects. For a few years, Kelowna has been using a chatbot to answer common questions, Boehm says. That has helped, but the more recent “generative” version of AI can handle a much broader range of inquiries, phrased in natural language, with precise and specific responses. So Kelowna began working with Microsoft to build a new and much more sophisticated version of the tool incorporating Microsoft’s Copilot AI functionality, which they now use to aid permit applicants.

Boehm says the Intelligent Cities team and its consultants worked with a range of residents (including those with no permitting knowledge) as well as experienced builders to develop the tool; it can give high-level responses or point to specific code provisions. It has notably streamlined, and sped up, the application process. “It frees up our staff time” because fewer questions need to be addressed by staff early in the process, Boehm says. “So now they can focus on processing applications that are coming in. And often these applications are much better quality because people are using these AI tools as they’re putting these applications together, and getting all the information they need.”

On the other side of Canada, the city of Burlington, Ontario, near Toronto, has been developing generative AI tools in collaboration with Australian property and tech firm Archistar. Chad MacDonald, Burlington’s chief information officer (and previously executive director of digital service), says Burlington, population 200,000, also faces a housing crunch. With little space available for single-family housing construction, the city’s focus is on improving the process of handling larger projects, including industrial and commercial proposals, with an eye toward creating a single platform that would work for all kinds of projects. The system the city is developing aims to integrate not only local zoning and bylaws, but also the Ontario Building Code, which affects all structures in the province.

Testing this system involves checking whether it correctly assesses previously submitted plans whose outcome is known. This process also trains the AI. “Every time we correct an inaccuracy in the algorithm, it actually makes it smarter,” MacDonald explains. “So the next time it gets more and more accurate.” And if the proposed solution to one permit problem could create two more problems in the application, the system is designed to point that out immediately, avoiding a lengthy resubmission process. An “extremely successful” round of testing was completed in May, MacDonald says, and he expects the city’s use of the technology to expand.

MacDonald envisions the technology advancing to the point of creating code-compliant designs. But won’t that put engineers and architects out of business? He counters that it’s vital to keep humans in the loop. “This is about speeding up these really mundane processes,” he says, “and then allowing these very highly educated and specialized experts to focus on the things they really need to focus on.”

In Honolulu, expanding the use of AI tools is part of a more sweeping tech-plan upgrade to address a significant permitting backlog—in 2021, the city’s mayor declared the process “broken” and committed to an overhaul. In 2022, a permit prescreen process involved “an intolerable six-month wait” to reach a reviewer, says Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, director of Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting. The city added an AI bot that was able to review some of the prescreen checklist items in a newly streamlined process, and it helped cut that wait to two or three days. That success helped lead to a more expansive generative AI pilot with Chicago-based startup CivCheck, a relationship Takeuchi Apuna expects to continue.

“We have learned that there are enormous possibilities of AI in our business processes,” she says, “and that the most important piece is the people that are using it.” She emphasizes that this is just part of an overhaul that also includes better staff training and improved communication with applicants. “It’s a value that you must bring and continue to enforce as part of AI in order to get the best results.”

While these early results are promising, AI still presents plenty of challenges and wildcards. Some of the startup’s promising, powerful generative AI tools are untested. And as MacDonald points out, the technology isn’t cheap. There’s also a need to set standards around what data the process collects and how it can be used. (Kelowna, for example, is working with the nonprofit Montreal AI Ethics Institute on policy and guidance issues.) And, of course, there are broader public concerns about giving too much control to an automated tool, however seemingly intelligent and teachable that tool may be. “It’s not going to replace people,” Boehm says. “We’re never going to just issue you a building permit from an AI bot.”

In fact, he continues, that concern could be considered an opportunity, if cities use AI thoughtfully and transparently. Although government is often opaque and thus treated with skepticism by many, AI “is a great opportunity to demystify government,” Boehm says. “It [can increase the] understanding that this is really about people in the end and supporting them.” In other words, in the best-case scenario, AI might improve a knotty but vital bureaucratic process by giving it a more human touch.

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of the Lincoln Institute book City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com.

Lead image credit: PhonlamaiPhoto via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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.

A few years after earning her PhD in public policy from Harvard University, Jenny Schuetz participated in the Lincoln Institute Scholars program, which introduces early-career researchers to senior academics and journal editors. Schuetz now studies housing and land use policy as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; she’s also a lecturer in Georgetown University’s urban planning department, and the author of Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Schuetz discusses the ascent of zoning into the mainstream consciousness, the perplexing direction of climate migration in the United States, and how climate risk is threatening to upend the housing market.

JON GOREY: What was your experience with the Lincoln Scholars program?

JENNY SCHUETZ: When I did it, the focus was on matching up relatively early-career scholars with some of the experienced journal editors in the field and getting information on how you get your work into publications. How do you present it to an editor in a way that’s compelling, and work through the back and forth of the peer review process? And that was incredibly helpful, because it’s sort of a black box when you start out; you send off a paper, and you get back either a “revise and resubmit” or a rejection, but you often don’t really understand why. So getting to talk to some journal editors about what makes a compelling paper and how they think about pairing papers with reviewers was really useful.

I love that Lincoln does this. The cohort of junior people that I went through it with, we’re all now a little gray-haired and middle aged, but we still see each other. And it’s nice to see newer cohorts coming up through this. That’s a great way for the field to transfer knowledge and to help junior people grow.

JG: What have you been working on more recently, and what are you interested in working on next?

JS: A lot of my research still focuses on the role of zoning and land use regulations in restricting housing supply, and this has become a very hot topic in the last five or six years. One of the things that I’m actually doing now is working directly with state governments that are passing state level zoning reforms and trying to get those implemented and turned into more housing production. The implementation piece is really important—you don’t just write a policy and it implements itself, you have to have actual human beings doing things to implement it.

In fact, I’m just getting ready for a workshop in September with the Lincoln Institute, where we’re bringing together state housing agencies from seven or eight different states to talk to one another and share what kinds of challenges they’re running into, what kinds of successes. It’s a great chance for policymakers to talk to their peers in a way that they don’t often get to do, and we get to learn in real time what’s happening on the ground.

The second big piece of my research is looking at the intersection between housing and climate adaptation. There’s quite a bit of research coming out to show that, on average, Americans are moving toward more climate-risky places. We still have this movement away from the Northeast and Midwest toward the Sun Belt, so we are moving to places with extreme heat risk, drought risk, wildfire risk, and then people moving to Florida are moving into hurricane risk.

That’s going to have real repercussions for things like insurance markets, which are already seeing spiking premiums, and our national disaster recovery programs—we’re spending more and more money because we have more and more people and more expensive housing in these risky places. And we really don’t have a good handle on why people are doing this.

JG: What’s one of the most surprising things you’ve learned in your research?

JS: That people are overwhelmingly moving toward risky places at a time when disasters are becoming more and more salient and expensive is counterintuitive. And the reasons for it are complicated. Some of it is people don’t know what it’s like to live in 115 degrees until they move there, or people are overly optimistic [about their exposure to hurricane risk].

But also our policies aren’t designed to send the right market signals. It should be a lot more expensive to buy a house and take on a mortgage and buy insurance in places that are really risky—but our policies don’t allow that to happen, because we’re trying to keep homeownership affordable for middle-income Americans. We want everybody to buy a house and invest in it, and so we have to make it artificially cheap for people to do that, and then it encourages people to buy in the wrong places.

JG: What do you wish more people out there knew about housing?

JS: One of my longstanding beefs has been that the US leans very heavily on homeownership for wealth building. And as a motivation for that, we have not provided good standards of living and protection for renters, and have made renting seem like it’s a second-class option—that you’re a renter only until you can afford to become a homeowner. I think that has led to a lot of subtle discrimination against renters, and a lot of people not taking seriously that we need to make renting a good option.

Most of us will be renters at some point in our lives. We should just make renting a reasonable option for middle-class households for as long as it suits their needs—that should be an okay option for people at all ages and stages of their life.

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

JS: The climate stuff keeps me up at night. One of the chapters in my book was about climate, and I read a lot more than I had previously on this stuff and decided, wow—this needs to be a major focus of my research, because it’s so big and important and it’s not being talked about in productive ways that get us to better policies.

On the optimistic side, there are two things. One is that we are having a lot more national public conversations about housing, whether that’s affordability or insurance premiums. I mean, zoning never got mentioned in broader media discussions or in presidential elections until four years ago, and now it’s on the front page of the newspaper a lot. So I think a broader understanding of some of the problems is really helpful for starting to move forward.

And there is so much policy experimentation and energy at the state and local level, so many cities and states that are trying new things. We’ve done the same thing with our land use for 70 or 80 years, and now suddenly we’re trying new stuff, which is great. There’s a lot of grassroots energy, and much of this is coming from younger households—which are really motivated to fix this problem—and they are getting engaged with local politics in constructive ways, trying to push their local elected officials to do better. So the kids give me hope.

JG: You’ve written at length about accessory dwelling units (ADUs), among other things, and now several states have essentially legalized ADUs statewide. What does it feel like when a policy or idea you’ve written about extensively gets adopted at a high level?

JS: It’s pretty rare that you can see your idea directly show up in policy—policymakers talk to a lot of experts, and they get a lot of opinions thrown at them, so it’s often very hard to trace your immediate impact. But it’s exciting to see ideas take shape. Both to see them translated into policy, but I think, equally, to hear people start talking about them in the ways that we’re framing the problem. I like to say we’ve got two affordability problems: the lack of supply and poor households not earning enough. And that framing has gotten picked up in a lot of places, and they’re talking about it in a more constructive way.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, or a show you’ve been streaming?

JS: I’ve been reading a lot of books about climate and housing, and they’re really depressing. I’ve been streaming “Killing Eve”—I was late to the party on that one—but that’s just fun and escapist. I love spy stories and mystery stories, and that’s a good one. It actually makes me feel like real life is okay, because there aren’t spies lurking in every corner ready to kill me!

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

Lead image: Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution testifies before the US Congress Joint Economic Committee about expanding the supply of affordable housing. Credit: Courtesy of Jenny Schuetz.