When Claudia López took office as Bogotá’s first elected female mayor and first openly gay mayor in January of 2020, she had big plans for the Colombian capital—literally.

Chief among her campaign pledges was a promise to finally update the city’s master plan, or Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (POT), a long-overdue goal that had eluded her predecessors for nearly two decades. López was also determined to address the city’s social debts to women and children, and to produce climate and mobility plans that would advance urban greening efforts and restart progress on the city’s metro system as part of a multimodal public transportation strategy.

Just weeks later, those ambitions took a backseat as a deadly pandemic swept the world, plunging Bogotá and so many other cities into a state of health and economic emergency.

In a matter of months, unemployment and extreme poverty tripled, wiping out two decades of socioeconomic progress. “Nobody wants to be in charge during such a crisis—it’s a nightmare, and it’s hard to do,” says López, who was term-limited out of office in 2023 and is now a 2024 Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow at Harvard University. “But every crisis opens up opportunities that were not there before.”

A citywide sense of solidarity in the face of those punishing pandemic impacts ultimately helped López galvanize support for her updated POT. And embedded within that plan was a simple yet revolutionary idea to improve gender equality—quickly, dramatically, and for years to come.

Caring About Caregivers

In 2020, Bogotá began to build a network of neighborhood Care Blocks (Manzanas del Cuidado). These facilities provide an array of services for nearby caregivers, most of whom are women, including access to free, professional care for their dependents—children, ailing elders, relatives with disabilities—and opportunities to take part in education, counseling, training, or wellness programs. While they are intentionally located in walkable areas, the city has also provided Care Buses for those who live farther away.

The underlying idea, initially conceived by Diana Rodríguez Franco, the city’s former secretary for women’s affairs, was to offer much needed relief, respect, and opportunity for the caregivers whose invisible labor keeps the rest of the city running.

Thirty percent of women in Bogotá, 1.2 million people, are full-time caregivers who average 10 hours a day of unpaid labor. Most live in poverty and haven’t had a chance to pursue an education beyond primary school or start a career, denying them the opportunity for economic autonomy.

“That, in Bogotá, seems normal, because of religion, machismo, cultural norms,” López says. “It’s so ingrained in society that this overburden is normal. So [we are] saying, ‘That’s not normal. That is not ethically normal, it’s not socially normal, it cannot be economically normal—it’s actually counterproductive for society that we lose 52 percent of the labor force. So we’re going to change that.’”

Colombia had passed a first-of-its-kind law in 2010 requiring the government to track the economic value of unpaid care work, finding that the care economy represents 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. A later Oxfam study estimated that, if women received even minimum wage for unpaid care work globally, it would amount to $10.8 trillion a year. “We are the basic economic sector that allows all the other economic sectors to function,” López says.

The crisis of the pandemic quickly brought even greater attention to the importance of caregivers, as offices and other formal workplaces shut down, the city’s informal economy ground to a halt, and children stayed home for remote learning. “We went from 900 or 1,000 full-time caregivers to 1.2 million full-time caregivers in four months,” says María-Mercedes Jaramillo, former secretary of planning for Bogotá and a 2024 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. “So this issue became very tangible.”

Planning and implementing a citywide caregiver support system without an existing model to work from—translating an abstract idea into physical reality—wasn’t easy. But López, Jaramillo, and Franco worked to get the entire city government behind the program. “And when the first Care Block actually got functional,” Jaramillo says, “it really changed, in a very concrete way, the lives of the women who were able to go there.”

Care, There, Everywhere

The Manitas Care Block was the first to open, in the fall of 2020, in Ciudad Bolívar—a low-income neighborhood in the hills of south Bogotá. Laura Mullahy, senior program manager at the Lincoln Institute, says she was “extremely impressed” when she visited the facility this spring as part of a Lincoln Institute course on urban finance and land policy.

“We took the TransMiCable gondola to get there,” Mullahy says, referring to the public cable-car system that connects the steep hillside neighborhoods of Ciudad Bolívar to the city’s bus rapid transit network kilometers below. “Passengers get on and off the gondolas on one floor of the building, and downstairs is the area where government services are offered.”

In addition to professionally provided care and recreational programs for children, elders, and people with disabilities, the free services available to caregivers include medical consultations, legal and psychological counseling, fitness and yoga classes, and educational opportunities. There are even certificate programs for caregivers, intended to formally recognize and elevate the role’s societal status and to train more men in the practice.

Available services also include “a community laundry, a computer center, and urban agriculture,” Mullahy says. “The menu of educational offerings is expansive; a few examples are flexible classes to earn high school degrees, job-oriented training, and financial education oriented toward purchasing a home.”

Nearly 50,000 people live in close proximity to the Manitas Care Block, including 5,416 female caregivers—but it’s not just women who benefit. The facility also serves the neighborhood’s 3,838 children under five years old, 3,516 elderly residents, and 2,448 people with disabilities.

Mullahy was also impressed by the employees she spoke to. “They were extremely passionate about their work—and in general, there was a palpable sense of pride in the Care Blocks, both from the staff and the community,” she says. “We were told that vandalism of both the Care Blocks and the associated transportation infrastructure is very low because the community values the system so much.”

Indeed, the Care Blocks have proven immensely popular, even among the politicians who campaigned to succeed López as mayor. And because the Care system is written into the POT, the master plan guiding the city’s urban development through 2035, its impact will outlast any one mayoral term.

All Part of the Plan

As of June, 23 Care Blocks were operating throughout Bogotá. More than 400,000 residents have received free services, including more than 800 women who have completed their high school diploma. The POT includes budgeting and specific plans to establish 22 more locations by 2035. “It’s not cosmetic, it’s really structural,” Jaramillo says. “The Care Blocks are not a marginal thing in the land use plan.”

López uses a more domestic metaphor: “It’s not just the cherry on the cake, it’s actually a strong part of the cake,” she says. “The Care Blocks are just one aspect of a new epistemology of the city, where we have been introducing a different perspective: the perspective of the oppressed. Except that the oppressed are the majority—more than 50 percent of the population.”

Embedding a social program into the master planning process “is very innovative—it’s a brand-new model,” says Anaclaudia Rossbach, the Lincoln Institute’s outgoing director of programs for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and soon-to-be executive director of UN-Habitat. “They are on the frontier of master plans—I think it’s something that the Global South can contribute to the Global North and to other areas.”

It also cemented into place a long-absent feminist perspective on development. “The cities that we have were not planned by, with, and for women,” Rossbach notes. “Incorporating the Care Blocks into the master plan means incorporating a strong gender perspective about the use of space, and it institutionalizes this social policy.”

Rossbach sees hope in the way Bogotá has successfully put abstract principles into practice. “It’s easy to say we need to plan cities so that they work better for women. But the how is more difficult,” she says. “With the case of Bogotá and the Care Blocks, we have a very concrete example that can inspire other cities. And it can also inspire cities to understand that they can be creative in their own way—that they can create something totally different.”

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

Lead image:
Caption: Former Bogotá Mayor Claudia López, in light purple, celebrates with caregivers who have completed educational programs offered through the city’s Care Blocks. Credit: City of Bogotá Secretary for Women’s Affairs via Instagram.

Housing costs are putting unbearable pressure on household budgets and threatening the American Dream of homeownership. The statistics are sobering. The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) estimates that 40 million households—half of all renters and a quarter of all homeowners—are cost-burdened. The main culprit is a chronic shortage of new housing production, accumulated over the last 25 years and abetted by other factors including the great financial crisis, the pandemic, and extreme global wealth inequality. Starter homes are vanishing as institutional investors buy up tens of thousands of them each year and convert them from owner-occupancy to rentals.

Estimates of the magnitude of the housing shortage range from 1.5 million to 5.5 million units. Zillow estimates that we need 4.5 million new units for families who are currently doubled up—i.e., multiple households sharing a single residence. The shortage of affordable housing is even more acute. The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that the United States needs 7.3 million more affordable housing units to accommodate extremely low-income renters. No matter how we count it, this amounts to one to five years of new production at current rates.

Suffice it to say we need a lot of new housing. Most of it needs to be affordable. And we need to build it where people want to and need to live.

To do that well, we need to understand how housing markets work. Important new research from the JCHS shows that new housing added in suburbs has almost no effect on adjacent urban markets. The authors suggest that “a more targeted approach is required if policymakers want to reduce costs in the least affordable neighborhoods” and “building more housing will make cities more affordable for low- and middle-income families only if the newly built housing is relatively affordable and located near those families.”

At the Lincoln Institute, we’re all about solutions—and our solutions always start with land. The biggest obstacle to building new affordable housing is the cost of land. The primary reason for our chronic habit of building affordable housing where we don’t need it is cheap land. So any solution to the nation’s housing crisis will have to start by identifying land that meets three important criteria: it is appropriately located, available, and affordable. Interestingly, that isn’t as hard as it might seem.

Where is the land we need, and how much housing could we build on it? Using a novel geospatial analysis called Who Owns America®, the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) at the Lincoln Institute can map and count housing potential with precision. When we began thinking about urban land that is ripe for housing development, publicly owned land emerged as an obvious candidate—places like underused urban parking lots and brownfields.

How much prime buildable land (large parcels in transit-rich urban locations) is owned by various levels of government in the United States? The CGS analysis, detailed in a new report published today, estimates over a quarter million acres.

This includes over 237,000 acres of land owned by local government (cities and counties), nearly 34,000 acres of state-owned land, and about 5,200 acres of federal land. These parcels all have at least 20,000 square feet of developable area with no building larger than 1,000 square feet. CGS’s team of geospatial data experts screened out wetlands, parks and other green space, and rights of way.

This is the lowest-hanging of low-hanging fruit. If we developed these parcels to low-density standards (seven units per acre), we could produce more than 1.9 million housing units. If we got ambitious and built out to higher-density standards of 25 units per acre, government-owned land could yield 6.9 million units of new housing.

Skeptics might argue that this land is not distributed where we need it or where people want to live. Interestingly, the states with the largest amounts of buildable public lands are Florida, Massachusetts, Washington, Texas, and California—home to some of the most expensive housing markets in the country. It is stunning to see that many of the places where we need affordable housing most are the places with significant amounts of public land available for development.

There is an additional portfolio of other opportunities to build housing on nongovernment land. For example, redeveloping underperforming urban and suburban malls and strip malls to higher density multi-use standards. This approach, applied to just 30 percent of the estimated total stock of these shopping centers, could add 3.4 million units of housing nationally. Or consider the emerging “Yes in God’s Back Yard” effort allowing multifamily housing to be built on church-owned land as of right. CGS estimates that churches own more than 32,000 acres in transit-rich urban areas. If developed to the more aggressive transit-oriented development standards (25 units per acre), they would yield more than 800,000 units.

Building on prime land owned by various levels of government and by churches could allow our country to completely overshoot even the highest estimates of what we need to address the housing shortage. This does not even include the new housing potential of redeveloped derelict or underperforming malls, accessory dwelling units, or converting Class B office buildings to residential use. And this would all be additive to the “normal” pace of housing development of about 1.4 million units per year.

These are ballpark estimates, offered to suggest that the housing crisis is not an unassailable challenge. It might be hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible.

So what would it look like to take this challenge on? Maybe we can set a goal of adding 7 million new units to our “normal” rate of housing production in the next 10 years. That would mean building an average of 2.1 million units per year for the next decade. Is it reasonable to think we can ramp up housing production by 50 percent? Sure. We completed 2.1 million units of new housing in 1973 when the economy was about one-quarter the size it is today (as measured by real GDP). In 2006, we produced 1.98 million new units when the economy was a little more than half the size it is today. Thus, ramping up production sufficiently to meet this goal is clearly not out of the realm of possibility.

What we need is a new public-private-civic partnership like the one that built the suburbs and millions of units of affordable urban housing after World War II. Assembling the land is the first step. Next, we’ll need to mobilize the financing. At $400,000 per unit (this is the median price of a new house today according to Redfin; per-unit costs would be lower for more modest homes), we’ll need $2.8 trillion to get the job done—about 1 percent of GDP each year for 10 years. This is about half of what we spent for COVID-19 relief, and a lot of the expenditure will be covered by the private sector and recovered through home sales, rent revenues, and land leases. We’ll need to train and employ hundreds of thousands of construction workers. At a full-time job creation rate of 2.9 jobs per house, that will mean about 2 million jobs per year. And we’ll need to work with local governments to streamline the approval process. But the estimated additional $7.8 trillion in tax revenues and fees generated by the new housing should sweeten the pot.

We know how to do these things; we just need the will to take them on. Sure, there are lots of details to be ironed out and real costs involved, but there is also real and precisely measurable opportunity in the land all around us. Finding adequate shelter for our families is critical—and a government created by the people and for the people should not hesitate to find ways to put its own buildable land to work.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead Image: Residential buildings in Tampa, Florida. Credit: DraganSaponjic via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Jacob Frey is an unabashed transplant. While attending law school at Villanova, the Virginia native and professional runner came to Minneapolis to run the Twin Cities Marathon and, as he tells it, fell in love with the city. The day after graduating, he drove the 1,200 miles west to Minneapolis, his chosen home.

He started as an employment and civil rights attorney, became a community organizer, served on the City Council, and was elected mayor in 2017, promptly faced with COVID and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. He was re-elected in 2021 and continued to address police and race relations, as well as the connections among racial equity, affordability, and zoning.

Senior Fellow Anthony Flint interviewed Frey while visiting Minneapolis for the American Planning Association National Planning Conference. Frey later joined the Lincoln Institute and two other mayors from legacy cities—Aftab Pureval of Cincinnati and Paige Cognetti of Scranton—for a standing-room-only APA panel discussion about what’s working in legacy cities.

The interview, which has been edited for length, can be heard in full on the Land Matters podcast.

Anthony Flint: Minneapolis has been a pioneer in zoning reform and banning single-family-only zoning. How is it going? Can you talk a little bit about whether increasing supply is a good path to affordability?

Jacob Frey: There are two critical paths that you need to take simultaneously to achieve affordability. The first is subsidy. It’s bridging the gap between the market rate and the affordable rate, making sure that people who are experiencing homelessness have that next rung on the ladder to pull themselves out. That side of the equation can’t be achieved simply through supply; it requires some government intervention.

About 10 years ago when I first took office as a city council member, I said very clearly that we were going to go to war on surface parking lots. We were going to dramatically add supply and density, and we did. We coupled that with a comprehensive plan which, as you mentioned, got rid of single-family exclusive zoning, allowing duplexes and triplexes in residential neighborhoods, and then also adding density and height along commercial corridors.

All those things have allowed Minneapolis to keep rents down more than just about any other major city in the country. Other cities were seeing double-digit increases, where we were keeping our rent increases to 1 percent and 2 percent. That’s with a whole lot of new people moving in. We’ve dramatically increased supply and it’s helped a whole lot.

For years, we were operating under these prescriptive zoning ordinances that explicitly said, we’re going to keep the Blacks and the Jews in one portion of the city. When that became illegal to do explicitly, we then started to do the same stuff implicitly through the zoning code, making it so that unless you could own a huge home on a huge parcel, you couldn’t live in huge swaths of the city. The tails of those decisions continued to the present. We wanted to push back on that. We’re going for a diversity of housing options in every neighborhood, and therefore a diversity of people in every neighborhood. In the last three years, we’ve built over 1,000 housing units in multifamily buildings on parcels that previously would only allow a single-family home.

We’ve seen a whole lot of progress . . . and then we got sued. We’re going to ultimately win, whether through legislation or through the litigation itself. Everybody should have that opportunity to live in a great city, and we want to create that opportunity for everyone.

AF: For people outside of Minneapolis, who did you get sued by, and what was the rationale?

JF: We got sued by a group of people who said we were doing something that would harm the environment, and I adamantly disagree. One of the best ways to improve the environment, to reduce your individual carbon output, is by living in a great city. Rather than commuting 45 minutes into work from your own single-family home and picket fence out in the suburbs or exurbs, you can walk to the grocery store and take your bicycle to work. If you do take a car, well, it’s fewer miles traveled anyway. The suit is largely saying that we should have conducted an environmental review on this comprehensive plan and the total potential build-out. Let’s be real here. We can’t assume that every single building downtown is going to be 100 stories tall and every single-family home is going to be a triplex, because that is never going to happen. The way they were asking us to calculate this buildout is not operating in reality.

AF: Turning now to transit and mobility, how are you achieving your vision for sustainable mobility in a historically car-dependent metropolis?

JF: Our city was built out at a time when people were largely dependent on cars. To the extent that it was built out prior to that time period, the streets and the grids were shifted to make them car-centric. Of course, we recognize that cars are a way people get around, but we want to add options so people can safely and comfortably take their bike to work, we want to make it so that pedestrians feel comfortable and in fact are prioritized, we want to add public transportation, not just as an option that’s available occasionally, but as a convenient one for getting from point A to point B.

We are adding bus rapid transit wherever we can. We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the number of BRT lines, and over the last 15 years, Minneapolis has grown by about 50,000 people, yet the total vehicle miles traveled and gas emissions have gone down.

We recognize that people are going to take cars and we’re going to try to make those cars as sustainable as possible through electric vehicle charging stations. Right now we’re adding bus-specific transit lanes as well so that you can take the bus and whip by traffic that you would otherwise be sitting in.

AF: What is your assessment of land-based financing to fund transit, redevelopment, affordable housing, and parks? The idea is that government action and investments create value in private land and development. Isn’t it possible to harness some portion of that increase in value and plow it back into the community? Are you a value capture fan?

JF: I think it’s not smart to be pro-value capture, pro-TIF, or anti–value capture, anti-TIF. It is a very important tool and needs to be balanced.

There is a way to enhance a city by using tools such as value capture and TIF to achieve wonderful structures and building and transportation options that would not happen but for government intervention. We’ve been using it in a number of different ways, including one of the most popular policy moves I’d say we’ve done in the last few years, which is to knock down this old Kmart. To take you back: 40 or 50 years [ago] there was a policy decision made to block off Nicollet Avenue and put a big Kmart in a huge parking lot in the middle of it.

It would be somewhat unfair of me to question decisions that were made at that time, because I’m sure 40 years from now, there are decisions I will have made that turn out to be not so smart, but this is one of the worst, in my opinion, urban planning decisions that was made in our city. We found ways to get land control over that former Kmart. We are knocking the building down. We’re opening up the street and breathing new life into this important artery and making sure everything is there, from a park to affordable housing to commercial to market rate. It allows the flow of entrepreneurship and new business growth on that corridor to expand south and north. A big part of what we’re using to achieve this large-scale goal is value capture.

It is a tool that should be used, but it’s also a tool that shouldn’t be used every single time there’s a new building that goes up or a new opportunity to be had. It’s got to be a balance.

AF: A task force is looking at changes to the Metropolitan Council, but in what ways is this pioneering arrangement working? Can or should it be replicable, this idea of regional governance?

JF: You can’t think about any city as living in a vacuum. Mayor Carter [of St. Paul] and I joke that it’s not like we just protect the water on our side of the Mississippi River. We share. Likewise, we share an economy that doesn’t end where the street ends and the boundary starts.

I’ve got a responsibility to the city of Minneapolis, and it helps to have a governing body that has a regional focus. We’ve got a Metropolitan Council appointed largely by the governor that helps us put up light rail that goes through a number of different municipalities. It helps us design bus-rapid transit, helps pay for Metropolitan Transit police. To have that regional focus is not just important; it’s crucial to furthering a regional mindset and goal.

AF: What’s your view on skyways? Current urban planning practices suggest a focus on the street and activity at the street level. Is there a conflict there? Tell us a little bit about the urban design part of your job.

JF: If you’ve got 100,000, 200,000 people coming downtown, and you’ve got two levels of activity, you’re splitting whatever number it is between those two levels.Do I like the splitting of activity? Of course I don’t. Nobody does. I’d rather have a concentration of all that bustle and excitement and vibrancy all on one level. But I use the skyways. During the months where it’s cold, I go in and I grab a sandwich and I don’t feel guilty about it. In fact, I’m really pumped to see the small local business owners that are operating in it.

Skyways have been hit particularly hard in the last few years because of a decrease in the number of workers that come downtown on an annual basis. I will not take any more criticism about the lack of vibrancy downtown or somebody’s favorite sandwich shop closing, from the person that’s sitting on their couch at home in the suburbs. If you care, then you should be supporting that sandwich shop.

If you want to see vibrance and want to see more foot traffic, your feet should be adding to that traffic. We are increasing the numbers pretty dramatically right now. People are definitely coming back, but it’s not happening all in one big burst.

AF: It’s become a bit of a cliche, but there really is no substitute for being in the office.

JF: It’s the unplanned interactions that ultimately help. I’m largely in Minneapolis because of a coincidence. You meet somebody, you get a job, you get an interview, you find a great city that you fall in love with. These things only happen because you were there to have it happen to you.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, contributing editor of Land Lines, and author of Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.

Lead image: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Credit: Office of Mayor Frey.