For years, a certain resident of New Orleans, someone who drives a lot for work, would turn one corner or another and encounter an all-too-familiar sight: a road pocked with potholes and broken pavement. “Look at this freakin’ street,” he would say to himself. Actually, he said something a little more salty than “freakin’,” and eventually converted his repeated utterance into the handle of an Instagram account devoted to documenting, and venting about, the many flaws of the Crescent City’s infrastructure.
Today the account (we’ll just call it LATFS) has more than 125,000 followers—including employees of city and water utility agencies whose accounts it tagged in some snide posts. “I figured I’d just get blocked,” says the account’s creator, who has chosen to remain anonymous. Instead, those agencies started to pay attention to the account—and, in some cases, problems flagged (and mocked) on LATFS promptly got fixed. Today the account’s creator mostly curates submissions from others, and while the account quite clearly is not an official part of New Orleans’ infrastructure maintenance system, it’s hard to deny that it’s part of the conversation. And there may be lessons in that for cities looking to harness citizen input to manage infrastructure maintenance.
The use of technology to strengthen government-citizen communication is of course a long-established practice. The Federal Communications Commission designated 311 for non-emergency government service in 1996. Baltimore was the first city to implement a 311 system that year, and other cities followed, offering an easy way for citizens to report potholes, graffiti, malfunctioning stoplights, and so on. This early version of crowdsourcing soon moved online, evolving into web- or app-based systems that can (depending on the municipality) respond to texts, accept photo or video submissions, and incorporate back-end software that can collect and consolidate service data.
Along the way, private-sector services emerged to develop and provide cities with more efficient and consumer-friendly citizen-connection platforms. SeeClickFix, a pioneer in that category, was created by New Haven entrepreneur Ben Berkowitz and partners in 2007, and acquired in 2019 by CivicPlus, a public sector tech firm with over 10,000 municipal clients. CivicPlus offers a variety of software and services from local government software to websites to an emergency alert system. One of its clients’ top priorities across categories is making these systems work together as seamlessly as possible, says Cari Tate, solutions director at CivicPlus.
For 311-style products, that means getting user concerns to the right part of city government smoothly, and making sure people feel heard. “Residents ultimately want to see their communities improved,” says Tate, a SeeClickFix veteran who came to CivicPlus with the acquisition. “And want to partner with their local governments to do so. But they often don’t know how, or they feel like their comments go into the void.”
Partly that’s a matter of improving functionality. The publication Government Technology surveyed app-store reviews for 75 city and county 311 apps and identified Improve Detroit as one of the most praised. The app, which uses SeeClickFix software, is regularly updated with relevant new features—for example, after flooding in 2021, the city added a tool to file water damage claims.
A national survey of reviews of municipal 311 apps ranked Improve Detroit among the most praised. Credit: City of Detroit.
But partly the effectiveness of a citizen-to-government tech connection may also be a matter of meeting residents where they are, which is increasingly on social media. Over the years, some municipalities have publicized hashtags—like #502pothole for Louisville residents, as an example—that citizens could use to flag problems via popular social platforms like Twitter (now X) and Instagram.
Not surprisingly, users of such platforms don’t need an invitation to sound off about the flaws or blemishes of their local infrastructure. And sounding off in public digital spaces often feels more satisfying than going through official channels. New Orleans, for example, has a 311 service, but it can feel like a “black box” compared to the buzzy camaraderie of Instagram, the creator of LATFS points out. When the latter actually gets results, that fact just heightens the attention. A recent example: A series of images of a fallen stop sign and its citizen-painted replacement caught the attention of a city council member who leaned on city services to make a real fix—and credited LATFS to local media. (A spokesperson for the city’s sewer and water utility says as an entity it does not “actively follow” LATFS in a formal way, but is aware of the account; often the utility is aware of issues before they show up on social media, the spokesperson added, pointing to the official “robust” customer contact phone number as the best way to report an issue.)
One challenge with making practical use of social media accounts is that reactions to fleeting problems may lack context. For actual infrastructure planning, social data is “actually really muddy, not specific,” says Julia Kumari Drapkin, CEO and founder of ISeeChange, a climate risk data and community engagement platform that works with New Orleans, Miami, and other municipalities and utilities. Its approach takes in social media data and uses AI to help craft bigger-picture solutions. As it happens, it has worked with LATFS, asking it to direct followers to the ISeeChange app during flood events, enabling residents to upload real-time reports and photos.
ISeeChange’s software can take in that information and combine it with data from its municipal and utility clients to deliver insights with tangible impacts, Drapkin says. In one recent project with engineering and design firm Stantec, ISeeChange collected firsthand, citizen-provided flood data that helped improve a flood infrastructure project in New Orleans. This resulted in the reallocation of $4.8 million in federal funding, more than doubling stormwater capacity in one low-income neighborhood. On the ground residents, she maintains, can provide the best data.
Social media’s role in reporting infrastructure issues may be somewhat messy, but its sheer popularity makes it hard to ignore. Last year, Tulane University sociology PhD candidate Alex Turvy published an article in the journal Social Media + Society closely analyzing LATFS posts and comments provided to him by the account’s founder, and concluding that it is “an effective and powerful participatory platform for exposing a broad range of systemic problems and their causes.” Boiling user strategies down into categories (shaming, mocking, and exposing), he contends that the account allows residents, through humor, connection, and “in-group knowledge,” to “take back the narrative of their city’s infrastructure challenges” and who is responsible for them. And while there is plenty of anger and snark, resident users also swap explanations and practical information.
Turvy acknowledges both the utility of 311-style systems and the challenge an actual city government would face in trying to corral the disgruntled and profane discourse of something like LATFS. And while similar citizen-driven accounts have popped up elsewhere—Pittsburgh’s PWSA Sinkholes on Instagram is a notable example—many fizzle out if they fail to attract submissions and followers. But even if LATFS is an outlier, cities might still learn from it, Turvy argues.
“The core lesson is that cities need to move beyond treating citizen reports as individual service requests and instead view them as part of a collective narrative on infrastructure issues,” he says. While traditional systems feel transactional, LATFS feels like a shared story. Its success, he continues, “highlights the power of storytelling over service processing.” To encourage that “organic, citizen-driven” feel, cities could work with community groups, communicate more proactively, and clearly demonstrate how citizen feedback is being put to work.
Some of this may seem a bit utopian, but it also overlaps with trends and aspirations for 311-style systems. Cities are looking “to provide a way for residents to actually hear back and to see all of the other things that they’re doing,” says Tate of CivicPlus. Too often, “you see all of the problems, but we don’t see what the city is actually doing.” Cities are increasingly looking for systems with strong data analytics that also “provide visibility, and actually shift that mindset and build trust.”
While LATFS remains a highly irreverent forum focused more on complaints and jokes than on civics or the complexities of infrastructure planning, the city’s engagement with the account has probably softened its original oppositional feel. “We try not to post things that are in the middle of repair, which I get a lot of,” says its founder. “We can’t shame the city for repairing things.” That said, he is also quick to point out that he’s a citizen, not a stealth urban planner or city activist. As he put it: “I’m just a guy posting on Instagram.” But sometimes, that’s exactly the person the city needs to hear from—and wants to engage.
Lead image: This photo of a hand-painted New Orleans stop sign held up with plastic wrap gained notoriety—and inspired the city to install a proper replacement—after it appeared on a citizen-led Instagram account dedicated to flagging necessary infrastructure repairs. Credit: LATFS.
Report from Cairo: For Global Cities, Pressures Just Keep Building
Urban planners, elected officials, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and others came together in the historic metropolis of Cairo in late 2024 to confront the relentless pressures that global cities are facing, at the World Urban Forum 12 convened by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). The theme of the summit was “It all starts at home.”
Growing populations, a continuing housing crisis, and climate change–triggered disasters including floods, droughts, and fires—as well as vast destruction associated with military conflict—have brought new intensity to efforts to support burgeoning urban areas across the globe, particularly in the developing world.
At the closing ceremony, UN-Habitat Executive Director Anaclaudia Rossbach, noting that two-thirds of the world’s population resides in urban areas, highlighted the pivotal role of local governments in shaping cities and human settlements. Rossbach, previously the director of the Latin America and the Caribbean program at the Lincoln Institute, said the conference set new records of engagement, with 24,000 participants from 182 countries.
“The World Urban Forum is a uniquely relevant event for those concerned about the quality and promise of human settlements large and small,” said Enrique R. Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute. “It’s an event that tackles the complex nature of urban issues by embracing a diversity of voices, techniques, and tools. For the Lincoln Institute, the World Urban Forum is a key space in which we can demonstrate how land and land policy can provide effective solutions to address housing, climate, and public health concerns, among other global, national, and local policy priorities.”
At the summit’s Dialogue 4: Localizing Finance and Financing Localization, Silva lauded local government efforts to boost own-source revenues, especially revenues that can be generated through the property tax or land value capture. “A local government’s capacity to leverage and manage own-source revenue not only strengthens its local finances, but also demonstrates to national and multilateral funders that it has the ability to plan, finance, and deliver projects,” he said. “This capacity can help local governments access larger sources of funding for much-needed projects.”
World Urban Forum attendees from around the world explored the Lincoln Institute exhibit space and engaged in discussions about land policy issues during the four-day conference. Credit: Lincoln Institute.
Representatives from the Lincoln Institute delegation participated in panels and training sessions focused on financing local development, climate mitigation and resilience, land value capture, and affordable housing. They also took part in an open house presented by the Center for Geospatial Solutions and a special Urban Library event featuring municipal leaders and the Lincoln Institute book Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems. That event included the governor of Cairo, Ibrahim Saber Khalil, who will be the next local leader interviewed in the ongoing Mayor’s Desk series. Other municipal leaders who participated in the panel, Mayors and Innovators: Replicable Strategies for Local Political and Technological Change, included Manuel de Araujo, mayor of Quelimane, Mozambique; Kostas Bakoyannis, former mayor of Athens; and Marvin Rees, former mayor of Bristol, England.
The issue of climate change remains prominent in any consideration of global cities and their future, said Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute.
“In this unparalleled global conversation about all things urban, the context of a changing climate is ever present,” she said. “City leaders are very aware of their dual roles—both agent and victim of climate change impacts—and eager for levers of change that they can control. I was impressed with their level of engagement in our sessions on land-based climate finance and on preparing for a potential climate-induced population influx, and their commitment to putting ideas and approaches into practice back home.”
New construction on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. The city, which hosted the World Urban Forum in 2024, is home to 22 million people. Credit: Anthony Flint.
Housing inadequacy—affecting an estimated 2.8 billion people worldwide—was the weighty topic at Meeting the Moment: Innovations in Housing Supply to Address Inequality in Cities, where Darla Munroe, director of Research and Cross-Cutting Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute, discussed the affordability of manufactured homes, as well as zoning reform efforts in the US aimed at increasing housing supply.
The Lincoln Institute has been engaged in UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum summits for nearly 20 years.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of theLand Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.
Lead image: Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute, center, meets with Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber Khalil, left, at the World Urban Forum. Khalil will be the next local leader profiled in the ongoing Mayor’s Desk series. Credit: Lincoln Institute.
Seven Need-to-Know Trends for Planners in 2025
By Jon DePaolis, Enero 16, 2025
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This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning.
In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Keep that in mind when you find that your next trip on a long weekend—which could be every weekend as more and more companies move to a four-day work week—will be on a solar—powered plane. Or when you buy your next multitool, which turns out to be made of a plastic that can change its form and properties when it’s heated or cooled.
With a world moving faster than even a 24-hour news cycle can handle, it’s more important than ever for planners to stay one step ahead of the issues and prepare communities as change occurs.
2025 Trend Report for Planners
On January 29, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish the 2025 Trend Report for Planners in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. APA’s Foresight team and the APA Trend Scouting Foresight Community have identified existing, emerging, and potential future trends that planners will want to be aware of and understand so that they can act, prepare, and learn.
The report includes about 100 trends and signals, exploring them in future scenarios, deep dives, podcasts, and more. Here are just a few of the trends you need to know about.
1. More Housing Hurdles: Insurance Costs, Climate Impacts, and Population Shifts
Population is growing much more slowly in the US than in previous decades, and the Census Bureau projects just a 9.7 percent population growth over the next 75 years. The concept of family is changing, too. Single-person households and couples without children now make up more than half of all US households. Single-parent and multigenerational households also are on the rise, as are roommate situations.
Less than one-fifth of US families now fit the traditional “nuclear family” model, and the typical concepts regarding households continue to evolve. But one thing that has not changed in recent years: finding housing that’s affordable is getting more difficult. According to research by Zillow, households need to earn $47,000 more than they did just four years ago to afford a single-family home. Inflation, high interest rates, and the shortage of affordable housing have put the American Dream out of reach for many, with homeownership now almost 50 percent more expensive than renting.
Meanwhile, cities in the Northeast and Midwest are seeing population losses, while states in the South and West continue to gain residents even as climate change impacts are striking those areas the hardest. Relative tax burdens and lower costs of living are likely key factors. In fact, the drastic impacts of climate change are threatening the health, safety, and lives of millions of people, with 34 percent of people in the US living in areas at risk of natural disasters and flooding and 41 percent of rental units vulnerable to climate change.
Climate change–related losses are also generating chaos in the insurance market. Insurance providers are raising rates substantially in many areas and have become reluctant or have refused to insure homes in hazardous areas. Big insurers have pulled out of Florida, Louisiana, and California, a state where insurance giant State Farm stopped accepting applications because of “rapidly growing catastrophic exposure.” (Future scenarios in the Trend Report can help planners explore how this situation could play out in the next 10 years.)
To mitigate insurance market impacts to homeowners, regulators can employ strategies such as mandating insurance industry transparency and forbidding “bluelining,” the increase in premiums or withdrawal of services in high-risk areas by providers. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners recently adopted a National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance to guide regulators and providers alike, and Florida has passed several laws aiming to reduce insurance premiums and provide mitigation grants to homeowners and multifamily property owners.
2. Public Spaces for Shaggy—and Scooby Too
As the need for public, “third places” grows, some cities are reimagining how spaces can adapt or where new ones can be created. This includes factoring in places for pets, especially since more US households have pets than children. The global pet industry is expected to reach nearly $500 billion by 2030. Cities can obtain a “pet-friendly” certification to fetch more tourists, and the number of US dog parks is exploding, with a 40 percent increase in public dog park development from 2009 to 2020. In San Francisco, developers are adding dog-specific areas near housing complexes to attract buyers.
3. Water Is Precious and Under Threat
The Gulf of Mexico is the hottest it has been in the modern era, causing rapidly forming storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton this past year that devastated the US East Coast. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef are the highest they’ve been in four centuries, while heat-driven ocean expansion has caused a third of global sea level rise. In the Persian Gulf, water is scarce and valuable, as growing populations and development reach an all-time high. Globally, a quarter of all food crops are threatened by unreliable or highly stressed water supplies. At the same time, water currents in the Arctic and the Atlantic appear to be slowing down, with the potential to change weather patterns and put food-producing regions at risk.
Meanwhile, large-scale commercial water bottling operations driven by private equity are posing an increasing risk to the stability of local water sources in the US, as is the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that need massive amounts of water for cooling. That is threatening local and regional reservoirs, aquifers, and freshwater sources, and some places are implementing water usage regulations as a response.
4. Could We Evolve to a Post-Work World?
The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in remote work has blurred the lines of traditional work patterns. Take the growing popularity of “workcations” and “bleisure,” which suggest that work and personal life may increasingly overlap. Not everyone likes it; Australia enacted a “right to disconnect” law for workers in August 2024.
At the same time, our relationship with our work is shifting. A 2023 Pew Research Center study uncovered a new trend: only four in ten US workers see their job as central to their overall identity. This shift is reinforced by the idea of viewing a job as a verb (something you do) rather than a noun (something you are, like an accountant or technician).
Attitudes toward leisure are changing, too. If individuals use their free time to pursue personal projects or passions, leisure could replace work as a primary focus in life. With the percentage of Americans older than 65 expected to rise to 23 percent by 2025, these current and future retirees also are seeking to make the most of their next chapter in life.
5. Digital Fatigue (and Pushback) Sets In
Digital fatigue is real. It is showing up in various ways, from a growing distrust of online news and increasing concerns over AI-generated content to disillusionment with online dating. Schools are banning mobile phones in classrooms, and states are restricting children’s access to social apps. The US surgeon general has even suggested that social media platforms should carry warning labels like those on cigarettes. In July, the Senate passed the first major internet safety bill for children in two decades.
These measures reflect a broader effort to balance the benefits of technology with the need to be more conscious about the younger generation’s well-being. For planners, this trend suggests a greater need to balance digital public engagement with face-to-face interactions, fostering meaningful communication and empathy within communities. This includes creating in-person opportunities to engage younger people in planning processes, which can help connect those generations to their communities and each other.
6. Fungus Is the Future
Pop culture may lead you to think an age of fungi marks the last of us, but the ecological and health benefits of fungi should have more than just “mushroompreneurs” jumping for joy. Fungi can help shift us away from fossil fuels, lower cholesterol, help with successful organ transplants, tackle plastic pollution, eliminate micropollutants from contaminated water, and transition to more sustainable food systems. In 2023, US mushroom sales reached $1.04 billion, and the market is projected to triple in the next 10 years. As planners look for nature-based solutions for urban environments, fungi could become a key partner in creating better living spaces for all.
7. Balancing Green Energy Demand with Indigenous Rights
As the interest in renewable energy has spiked, so has the need for mining the raw minerals and metals required by these technologies—with some estimates believing demand will quadruple by 2040. These include lithium, cobalt, and silicon, as well as over a dozen rare earth elements. But mining comes with myriad human and environmental costs, often occurring in and at the expense of disadvantaged areas. This potentially pits government and private interests against Indigenous peoples, primarily through the extraction and exploitation of resources on tribal lands.
More than half of projects to extract energy transition materials are on or near Indigenous land, and Indigenous peoples are directly impacted by over a third of global environmental conflicts, either through landscape, land, or livelihood loss. Some efforts are underway to boost Indigenous sovereignty.
Central to the issue—and potential solutions—are land use and ownership, as well as the ability to apply different lenses to see the points of view and needs of the people these decisions will affect the most. Protecting the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples could reduce the negative impact of environmental conflicts over the green energy transition and provide solutions. One such way is by adopting Indigenous knowledge into existing approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation, like how several Native American nations are reintroducing bison to the US plains to enhance environmental and socioeconomic outcomes.
The 2025 Trend Report for Planners was written by Petra Hurtado, Ievgeniia Dulko, Senna Catenacci, Joseph DeAngelis, Sagar Shah, and Jason Jordan. It was edited by Ann Dillemuth.
Jon DePaolis is APA’s senior editor.
Lead image: Steam rises above the cooling towers of Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Credit: Courtesy of Google.
Storm Surge: How Can Cities and Regions Plan for Climate Relocation?
The day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast in August 2005, Jessica Dandridge-Smith turned 16. But instead of celebrating her milestone birthday at home, she and her family had evacuated from New Orleans, with what remained of her possessions stuffed into a single suitcase. When she eventually returned to the city, the suffering she saw—disproportionately wrought upon Black neighborhoods, and accompanied by a slow federal relief response—angered her. The pain and damage was the work of a violent storm, yes, but she recognized that Katrina had found a ruthless accomplice in centuries of structural racism and policy failures.
So began a two-decade career in community organizing and advocacy. For the past five years, as the executive director of the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, Dandridge-Smith has been working to “actualize water as a human right” in southeast Louisiana, she says. That involves lifting community voices in pursuit of systemic, sustainable changes around water issues—everything from nature-based stormwater solutions and flood-risk reduction to ensuring water access and affordability. One of the questions guiding her work, she says, is, “What does it look like to turn community perspectives into policy?”
Her dedication to answering that question led Dandridge-Smith to Cambridge, Massachusetts, last spring, where the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Massachusetts Amherst convened a two-day roundtable discussion on climate migration.
The event’s roughly two dozen attendees came from all corners of the United States, representing research and academic institutions, community-based and other nonprofits, municipal governments, utilities, and regional planning agencies, among other organizations. During their time together, they shared lived and learned knowledge and unique perspectives from their communities. And they talked about how to plan and prepare for an inevitability: As the impacts of climate change intensify, making life inconvenient or intolerable in places more prone to drought, wildfire, or flooding, people will increasingly relocate to safer places.
These moves may happen slowly, with forethought, given the means; or abruptly, out of necessity, in the face of disaster. They may take people just up the road, or to places that have been touted as “climate havens,” such as the Great Lakes region or northern New England.
Some attendees, like Dandridge-Smith, came from disaster-prone areas. Others live in receiving communities—places anticipating an influx of newcomers displaced by climate change. “We’ve had stagnant population growth in the county for years and years,” says Mike Foley, who heads up Cuyahoga Green Energy in Ohio, a county-owned utility tasked with creating renewable electricity microgrids. Foley notes that Cleveland had three times as many residents just 60 years ago. “So we’re able to be a receiving community, theoretically.”
Over the course of the two days, however, some recurring themes emerged, as described in a recent working paper. One of the more surprising conclusions that surfaced was a somber one: There’s no such thing as a climate haven—no place is fully, truly sheltered from climate risk.
Where People Go, and Why
Attendees from Vermont, often dubbed a climate haven, recounted how the fear and flooding residents faced during Hurricane Irene in 2011 returned just over a decade later in July 2023, when heavy downpours flooded the state capital and other areas, causing $2.2 billion in damage across northern New England and New York. The same realization would strike again with fiercer clarity the following year, when Western North Carolina, long considered a climate haven with a relatively low risk of drought, wildfire, or sea level rise, suffered catastrophic flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The storm and related flash flooding left at least 96 dead in North Carolina and caused an estimated $53 billion in damage.
These events make it clear that no place can truly be considered immune to climate change, which made all those storms stronger and more damaging. But with projections showing that by 2100, at least 13 million Americans will be displaced by sea level rise alone—to say nothing of wildfire, extreme heat, or drought—some areas do present fewer or more tolerable risks than others. That doesn’t just mean so-called “climate havens” halfway across the country. It can also include crosstown neighborhoods a few miles inland that are less susceptible to flooding, or downtown apartment blocks that are safer from wildfires than those on a city’s outskirts.
Vermont homeowners contend with the damage caused by severe flooding in 2024. Long considered a climate haven, the state has been increasingly affected by extreme weather events. Credit: Office of Sen. Peter Welch.
So what can cities and regions do to prepare for large-scale, climate-induced population shifts? The convening of this cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary group—which may have been the first of its kind dedicated to climate mobility, says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute—elicited valuable insights that can guide planners, elected officials, and researchers attempting to answer that question. “We gained so much from having such a rich variety of perspectives in that conversation,” Cotter says, noting that the participants shared a wealth of hard-earned lessons and engaged in the kind of policy pollination that helps advance both creative and time-tested strategies.
One of the early insights to emerge from the roundtable was the very different needs of people and communities impacted by climate mobility, depending on the context. A Californian who takes a new job in the Midwest after one too many close calls with wildfire is arriving under very different circumstances than a family who just lost their home to a hurricane, for example.
To that end, it’s helpful to distinguish between “fast” and “slow” relocation. The former commonly occurs in a state of urgency after a disaster, as a result of displacement, and can often be temporary in nature. Slow climate relocation, on the other hand, tends to be a more permanent and deliberate decision influenced by myriad factors. These could include typical concerns like job opportunities and housing costs, but also fatigue from successive climate impacts, such as repeated fire evacuation warnings or sunny-day flooding incidents.
That distinction carries major equity implications, Cotter says, and determines what kind of support and resources newcomers and their receiving communities will need. “People who are confronted by crisis have no choice but to relocate. But this slow migration is also happening; it’s poorly understood, and it’s being done by people who have the wherewithal to make a choice to move,” she says.
In most cases, though, people tend to relocate where they can find opportunity, safety, and connection—be that family, friends, or a familiar cultural environment.
Sometimes that brings them only a few miles away, to the nearest safer place within their metro area. Other times, their new home is more distant, but along an existing cultural corridor. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, for example, tens of thousands of residents left the island, many resettling within existing Puerto Rican communities in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts, as this data visualization by Teralytics shows.
“Regardless of whether they’re moving in response to a crisis or because they’re making a choice to avoid a future unlivable situation, people are going where they have relationships,” Cotter says. “And that’s why we’re seeing people move to nearby locations or places that might be distant, or even . . . other places that are also in harm’s way. It’s because that’s where they have relationships or can find something affordable, not necessarily because they’re choosing some place with empirically lower risk.”
Those existing cultural and economic pathways could provide clues about who will migrate where, and inform the kinds of infrastructure—both hard infrastructure like transit, power grids, and water supplies, and soft, or social, infrastructure like health and human services—that communities need to settle newcomers in a sustainable, equitable way.
What the South Can Teach the North
When it comes to displacement and fast relocation, participants agreed that places in the northern United States could learn a lot from their southern counterparts, which have historically dealt with disasters more frequently. The five Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, for example, have experienced as many billion-dollar disasters in just the past five years as the entire Northeast region did from 1980 to 2018 (even adjusted for inflation), according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.
But the changing climate has left the North increasingly vulnerable. After averaging just one or two major disasters a year for three decades, the Northeast is now seeing about seven of them annually. (The Gulf Coast states averaged nearly two billion-dollar disasters per month in 2023.) And because most people tend to evacuate to the nearest safe place where they have family or friends, southern cities and organizations also have lessons to share with receiving communities in the North.
Legal aid nonprofits in the South, for example, have more experience navigating federal disaster assistance programs and securing relief funds for communities and evacuees. Dandridge-Smith and other attendees from the South were also surprised to learn that few participants from the Northeast had solid evacuation plans in place—even if such plans exist on paper, they’re not top of mind in the way they are in more disaster-prone areas—and that regional coordination on such matters is limited.
“That was definitely a wide awakening experience,” Dandridge-Smith says. “Without that emergency preparedness planning—and that requires communication, at every level of government, preparing people in advance and post-event—community members are not going to know how to react.”
New Orleans has always been a challenging place to live, she says, going back hundreds of years. But that redundancy helps build resiliency, at both the municipal and personal level. “Being in Louisiana after a hurricane is an amazing sight, because we’ve done it so many times that there is no panic. There’s sadness, and there’s frustration, and maybe even fear, but I’ve never seen people come together the way that Louisianans do,” she says. “Whatever happens in the future of the climate crisis, Louisianans will still be there, we can survive anything. And that’s not just a testament to our resilience, it is also a testament to learned resilience.”
Louisianans “can survive anything,” says activist Jessica Dandridge-Smith, who says the South can help the North learn more about disaster response and climate mobility. Credit: Courtesy photo.
Dandridge-Smith and others don’t love the way the current climate conversation tends to focus on resilience, since it subtly places a burden on people to endure more hardship than they should have to. But the hard-won tenacity of the New Orleans community helped spark an innovative and potentially replicable initiative she highlighted at the roundtable event.
“After Hurricane Ida, some people didn’t have power for weeks,” Dandridge-Smith explains. “What ended up happening is that people who did have power, whether they were on a different grid or maybe they had a generator, they took extension cords and put them in their front lawn, and people could come and charge their phone or computer, or medical equipment. And a lot of the churches got involved in that as well.”
That inspired a group called Together New Orleans to form the Community Lighthouse program, a coalition of 85 faith-based organizations that will act as community resilience hubs during power outages. Each lighthouse—including churches, temples, mosques, and other institutions across the city—will be equipped with commercial-scale solar panels and backup batteries, so they can act as emergency cooling or heating centers during a power outage and provide food, charging for light medical equipment and communications devices, and other essential services.
After Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in 2021, 85 faith-based organizations formed the Community Lighthouse Project to provide power hubs during emergencies. Credit: Together New Orleans.
After Hurricane Francine caused power outages in September, nine of the first Community Lighthouse locations, four of them completely solar- and battery-powered, served some 2,300 residents. Each pilot location is being equipped with a trained disaster response team—the “human infrastructure” so crucial in these kinds of crises—and can provide aid organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or the Red Cross with a trusted location from which to distribute supplies, food, communications, and other assistance to residents. Such centralized response centers could also be set up in communities receiving evacuees, where newcomers typically need help finding housing, applying for disaster assistance, enrolling their kids in local schools, and generally getting settled and stabilized in a new community.
Affordable Housing and Climate Relocation
While there are still a lot of unknowns around slow migration—for example, what are the tipping points that push people to relocate, and where or how far away do they go?—Cotter contends that housing costs are a central issue. “We’re already seeing climate relocation, but trends show people have been moving toward harm rather than away from it,” she says, often lured by housing affordability. The most fire- and flood-prone counties in the US, particularly those in Texas and Florida, continue to see a net inflow of new residents, according to Redfin.
“Looking at the map of domestic migration and housing cost burdens, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that people are accepting more risk to find a place that’s affordable for their families,” Cotter says. “And that’s a trade-off they’re being forced to make because of policies that leave us with a lack of affordable housing, particularly in low-risk places.”
Americans have been moving to the Sun Belt for decades, ever since home air conditioning became commonplace in the 1960s. The Phoenix metro area, for example, saw its population more than double between 1950 and 1970 (to over 1 million), then double again by 1990 (to 2.2 million), and then double again by 2020 (to 4.8 million)—despite increasingly long and scorching heat waves that now kill hundreds of residents each year. The median Phoenix home sold for $451,000 in October, according to Redfin; that’s around the national average, but less than half the price of homes in San Diego ($950,000) or Los Angeles ($1,040,000).
A sign welcomes visitors to Phoenix, Arizona (pop. 620,000) in the early 1970s. In the decades since, the city’s population has more than doubled, and the metro area population has soared to nearly 5 million. Credit: Hum Images/Alamy Stock Photo.
Meanwhile, in California and other places in the US, as urban sprawl (combined with restrictive zoning and parking rules) pushed new home construction into exurban areas—further into the wildland-urban interface, where nature and humans collide—millions more people moved into areas at risk of wildfire in recent decades, just as climate change was making those fires more frequent and more severe. The LA County wildfires in early 2025 served as a frightening reminder of this truth.
Getting more people to choose relative safety over climate risk, then, means creating more affordable homes and neighborhoods in safer places.
That’s a challenge Maulin Mehta is trying to address as New York director for the Regional Plan Association. In terms of climate mobility, the New York metro area—like many others—could be viewed as both a sending and receiving community. Parts of the city have already succumbed to the effects of climate change—hundreds of New York homeowners participated in voluntary buyout and acquisition programs after Hurricane Sandy, a storm made more severe by climate change—and sea level rise threatens many more homes. Some 52,000 New York City homes would be at risk from a (soon-to-be routine) five-foot flood, according to Climate Central. Yet the economic and cultural gravity of America’s largest metropolis continues to draw a steady stream of new arrivals.
The region is already in the grip of a housing crisis, Mehta says, and climate change will only exacerbate that as more areas become uninhabitable. So creating the conditions to encourage more housing—especially in suburbs that have long used exclusive zoning to stifle growth—is fundamental to the region’s future.
“We’ve been trying to figure out how we can promote zoning reform at scale to facilitate broader housing supply, without concentrating it on specific communities and specific areas that might be more open to development, because one neighborhood is not going to solve the housing crisis for the entire state,” Mehta says. “We’ve seen some more reverse commuting from New York City out to the suburbs, because there’s no place to live in the suburbs. So we’re just trying to figure out, how can we address the practical need for housing more broadly?”
To do that—to get reticent suburban residents to give up exclusionary zoning practices and allow much more much-needed housing—Mehta says the narrative around affordable and dense housing needs to change. “One thing we’ve been trying to do is fundamentally reframe what affordable housing means,” Mehta says. “If you think your single-family neighborhood is going to be overrun with [strangers], people balk at that. But when you see that, ‘Oh, my kid’s teachers can’t even afford to live here, our police officers and firefighters can’t afford to live here’—I don’t think that’s in people’s psyche when they think about affordable housing.”
Most climate relocation to date has been fairly local or regional—which means New York’s climate migrants are as likely to come from Long Island as from, say, Houston. “We can make the case that this is not just about new people coming in, this is about your own neighbors, your own family members that are going to be in jeopardy,” Mehta says. “Part of the narrative change requires people to reframe how they view new types of housing away from it being outsiders, and more about the people that they care about.”
Wires, Pipes, and Pumps—and How to Pay for Them
Housing is critical, but so are the physical landscapes and structures supporting it.
While the Cleveland area could use a population boom and has plenty of nearby freshwater and more affordable housing than most US cities, Foley does worry about the readiness of the area’s aging infrastructure—much of which hasn’t received enough investment over the past few decades—to handle tens of thousands of new residents. After a storm this past summer, he says, some 350,000 people were without power for multiple days. “Our electric grid is still pretty frail in most parts,” he says.
But the region also has a key advantage for growing sustainably: existing rights of way for new infrastructure. While some areas face legal battles when trying to site new renewable energy generation and transmission lines, Foley says, “We’ve got a fairly mature network of legal rights of way that exist, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time and money on lawyer fees to figure out where wires and lines and pipes should be going.”
In that sense, much of the needed work is a matter of upgrading and modernizing service along current corridors that are out of harm’s way. But while having rights of way in place simplifies things, it doesn’t necessarily make it cheap. “We’re going to electrify vehicles, we’re going to electrify home heating systems,” Foley says. “We’ve got this embedded infrastructure in all these homes and buildings that are reliant on natural gas, and to address climate change we need to start electrifying all that stuff—which is expensive, and not simple to do. . . . But then add on top of that a potential 100,000 or 200,000 more people in the region, and that’s a greater stress.”
Since Cuyahoga Green Energy is a newly formed utility, it isn’t yet burdened by the costly upkeep of old or failing equipment, Foley says, “but we’ve got new infrastructure we’re going to have to build.” He hopes the public-private partnership model the utility has developed (along with federal grant money) will help accomplish that in a cost effective way.
A third-party operator will build and own the initial projects “underneath the utility’s auspices, and then we’ll have the right, after the investments have been paid off, to take over and own that infrastructure,” he explains. “So that model may be a way for us, if we get smart about it, to build out the infrastructure of the future without breaking the bank of local government.”
Investments in infrastructure will be critical to addressing climate change, especially in regions expecting an influx of residents, says Mike Foley of Ohio’s Cuyahoga Green Energy. Credit: Courtesy photo.
In Vermont, Green Mountain Power recently expanded its popular backup battery program. The utility offers heavily discounted leases or rebates of up to $10,500 on installed backup batteries if homeowners enroll to share stored energy during peak power surges—for example, during the hottest few hours of a July afternoon. This helps localize and stabilize the overall grid, allows excess solar and other renewable energy to be stored, and reduces the use of more expensive and dirtier “peaker plant” power.
And in New Orleans, the Water Collaborative has been pushing for a stormwater fee, called the Water Justice Fund, to more equitably pay for its massive, aging, and expensive water utility and drainage system.
New Orleans owes its modern existence to 97 drainage pumps, two dozen of which operate every day, Dandridge-Smith says, turning what had once been marsh and swamp into dry—but slowly sinking—buildable land. The pumps are both “a blessing and a curse,” she says.
A partial map of New Orleans drainage pump stations. The city relies on the system of pumps to manage stormwater and floods. Credit: Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans.
For one thing, the pumps are old—one has been in use since its introduction in 1913—and expensive to operate. More than that, fighting nature is a hard bargain. “We were meant to be soft and wet and continually replenished with water. If you drain all the water out, you sink,” she says. Most of 19th-century New Orleans was above sea level; today, some areas of the city sit five feet below sea level.
The water utility system in New Orleans doesn’t just drain the city, it also handles water quality and sewage. “It is so big that it has its own power company,” Dandridge-Smith says. “That’s how big it is in scale, so it’s expensive to run.” And historically, that cost has been funded through property taxes paid by businesses and homeowners, but not by nonprofits and other large landowners.
“We’re a tourism economy. We don’t have high-end tech jobs to pay for this expensive endeavor that is New Orleans,” Dandridge-Smith adds. “So we needed to find a way to fund that, but also fund our way out of the pumps.” The Water Justice Fund, which she hopes to get on the city’s ballot in 2025, would instead charge all city properties a stormwater fee based on their total square footage of impervious surfaces.
The stormwater fee would fund not just the operation and maintenance of the city’s gray water infrastructure, but also neighborhood-scale green infrastructure and stormwater management projects, urban reforestation, blue and green job training programs, insurance innovations, and other more forward-looking investments. Residents themselves helped shape the plan, ensuring greater community buy-in. “The main recommendations came out of a 10-part workshop series where regular residents, ranging from the age of 16 to 82, learned the nitty-gritty, most boring, nuanced things about infrastructure and systems, and helped build out what we know as the Water Justice Fund of New Orleans,” she says.
Seeking Safety, Seeking Justice
In both sending and receiving communities, climate migration is fraught with justice issues. Why was someone in harm’s way to begin with? How much assistance goes to homeowners rather than renters? How can communities resettle newcomers without displacing existing residents?
The modern-day topography of climate risk and mobility has to some extent been shaped by centuries of injustice. Historically “redlined” neighborhoods—those areas mortgage lenders once deemed too risky to write loans in, based on the racial makeup of residents—carry a higher risk of extreme heat and flooding today. People of color continue to experience disproportionate exposure to harmful environmental hazards like toxic chemicals and air pollution because of where they live.
Many of the New York City neighborhoods identified as the most vulnerable to extreme heat are the same neighborhoods once deemed undesirable or hazardous by federal lenders, a categorization whose negative economic impacts have affected generations of residents. Credit: City of New York Heat Vulnerability Index.
Even after the Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal, many places employed exclusive zoning rules, large minimum lot requirements, and other tactics to effectively keep residents out based on race and income. Those who managed to build generational wealth through homeownership despite these obstacles now face the possibility of losing their homes to climate change.
Dandridge-Smith’s parents, for example, own properties that have been passed down from various family members over the years. “In a normal scenario, I would acquire that wealth one day and be able to sell it, care for it, or rent it out,” she says. “But I think about how, not just myself, but everybody in Louisiana is going to lose generations of wealth building” if the region succumbs to flooding. “Knowing the history of this country and how they’ve treated Louisiana in particular, we will be blamed, and we will not be protected or cared for. And I have a hard time grappling with that, because I know it’s not right—but it’s what’s going to happen,” she says.
In New York, Mehta says, home prices are so high that a low-income homeowner who accepts a voluntary buyout may not end up with enough money to buy another home without taking on a new mortgage. “If that’s how we build wealth as a society, and now we’re telling folks in areas at risk—who may live there because of historical policies that have pushed them to be there—that this asset of yours is no longer viable? If a buyout program doesn’t guarantee a one-to-one exchange of your existing house for a safer house?” Mehta says. “We’re not creating enough opportunity for low-income homeowners in general, and if we’re now saying even those assets they do have need to be sunsetted, what’s the strategy? Renting will work for some people, but what if they wanted to pass this on to their kids?”
Mehta says communities and planners need a thoughtful framework to make the kinds of hard choices that await. “It’s only going to get harder, and if we’re not proactive about it now, we’ve seen what happens,” he says. “We wait for the disaster, chaos ensues, people’s communities get erased or displaced, and we repeat that cycle over and over, which is to the detriment of the whole region.”
Planning and Policy Tools
As the roundtable event wrapped up, participants shared suggestions about what types of policy tools, planning approaches, and research could help ensure communities are better prepared for a world beset by climate movement.
Cotter says the inherent uncertainty around climate relocation—whether, when, and how many people will move, where to, in what circumstances, and how a massive influx or exodus could displace or destabilize communities—lends itself to exploratory scenario planning (XSP). This planning technique helps communities consider a range of possible futures and prepare for the unknown. (The Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning Conference, in January, will include workshops on disaster recovery and resilience, among other topics.)
With more thoughtful, community-driven, and cooperative planning, Cotter hopes this disruptive challenge could also present an opportunity. “What are the planning approaches that can help leverage this phenomenon for positive, transformational change?” she asks. “To both facilitate people moving out of harm’s way, when they make that decision, and then for places to receive them in an equitable manner without causing burdens on existing residents?”
Cotter says land policy tools such as the transfer of development rights (TDR)—in which the owners of an at-risk property could sell their legal right to build a bigger structure to an owner in a safer location who wishes to build a taller-than-permitted development, for example—could also help play a role in thoughtfully redirecting development and creating more housing in safer areas.
New York City has allowed this practice for decades in certain scenarios. For example, owners of historic Broadway theaters who agreed to preserve their properties as entertainment venues could sell their forfeited “air rights” to nearby developments. Arlington, Virginia, allowed owners of historic garden apartments to sell unused development rights to other builders, in exchange for preserving the apartments as affordable housing for at least 30 years. And the TDR market in Seattle has helped preserve 147,500 acres of would-be sprawl in King’s County, redirecting development from forest and farmland to downtown. While TDRs have traditionally been used to preserve open space or historic landmarks, there’s no reason they couldn’t be employed to create more affordable and climate-resilient housing.
“Quite frankly, one of the best things you can do to prepare for an influx of population is to make sure that you’re building housing and infrastructure out of harm’s way, making your existing built environment and infrastructure more resilient, because then it will serve both your existing population and any newcomers better,” Cotter says.
Whether or not climate change delivers an influx of new residents to a community, making investments in preparedness is never a wasted effort, she adds.
“Housing out of harm’s way, sound and adequate infrastructure, disaster response—all of these will serve your existing population well,” Cotter says. “And if you do get an influx of population, you’ve got the stage set to do what governments should do: ensure that your residents and your business owners have what they need to thrive—and that includes being safe in the face of a changing climate.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Cars evacuate ahead of a hurricane. Credit: Darwin Brandis via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.” “Yes, sir.”
“Are you listening?” “Yes, I am.”
“Plastics.” “Exactly how do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
With apologies to my millennial friends, I can’t help but date myself with this iconic example of unsolicited advice given by Mr. McGuire to Benjamin in The Graduate. It captures the thing that bugs me the most about policy think tanks—their habit of providing wholesale unsolicited advice. Think tanks often conjure questions they presume to be relevant, analyze them, and then dispense policy recommendations to unknown audiences.
There’s nothing less appealing than unsolicited advice—and unsolicited policy advice, even when well-intentioned, undermines the recipient’s problem-solving journey and often results in frustration. The advice typically focuses on the desired outcome, not the process one must undertake to get there. Even worse, the adviser bears no responsibility for the outcome. Offering solutions without investment, the adviser risks nothing while the recipient grapples with the potential consequences of acting on the counsel. How exactly was Benjamin supposed to manifest the potential of plastics?
We’ve been known to do this at the Lincoln Institute. Take the example of land value capture: For decades, we’ve advised local governments to use this land-based financing tool to mobilize revenue that can help pay for urban infrastructure. We’ve suggested to municipal funders that they should underwrite loans against future revenue captured from land value increments. We’ve written papers to introduce governments and funders to the concept, described multiple land value capture tools they can use, and produced case studies of best practices in places like São Paulo. But we haven’t often dug in with practitioners to help them decide which land value capture tools are best for their circumstances and learn with them as they adopt and deploy them. That is about to change.
Before I explain how, let me suggest that another useless kind of advice is the “best practice.” Advocating “best practices” to solve complex social, economic, or environmental problems ignores the context surrounding the challenge at hand, does not account for the resources or capacities of people and organizations trying to adapt someone else’s successful approach, and often leads to frustration and inefficiency when the prescribed solution doesn’t align with reality. Best practice thinking stifles innovation and creativity, discourages exploration and experimentation, and often overlooks more appropriate and effective solutions. And who knows if the practice is “best” anyway?
The world is dynamic, and context matters. Relying solely on established norms promotes passive acceptance rather than fostering an environment where individuals question assumptions and actively engage in solving problems. Rather than blindly adhering to “best practices,” a better strategy for tackling complex problems lies in understanding context and adopting a principles-based approach. This champions adaptability and encourages customized solutions to address the unique nuances of each challenge. It compels individuals to weigh various options and make informed decisions grounded in evidence and logic.
So how does this relate to the work of the Lincoln Institute? This fall, with our partner Claremont Lincoln University (CLU), we launched the Lincoln Vibrant Communities program. This new undertaking embodies our best thinking about how to traverse the gap between theory and practice. It prioritizes leadership, action, collaboration, and tangible results. It is a bold and innovative initiative that seeks to transform the way we work, learn, and act together to solve the vexing challenges that cities of all sizes face.
Many communities, particularly those facing economic hardship, lack the capacity (financial and human resources) to implement ambitious development plans. Bureaucratic red tape, outdated regulations, and deeply ingrained power structures impede progress and stifle innovation. Frequently, a lack of trust between residents and local leaders, coupled with limited opportunities for meaningful participation, undermines the effectiveness of development initiatives. More often than not, pressure to produce immediate results leads practitioners to focus on quick fixes rather than long-term, sustainable solutions.
Over the coming decades, we will train a new generation of leaders and equip them with the skills, tools, and resources to transform their cities. We will help these leaders engage cross-sector teams in their communities that can work with residents to take ownership of their futures by solving complex problems collectively. Lincoln Vibrant Communities will furnish the training, tools, resources, and support needed to turn ideas into reality.
And we intend to deliver at scale. Our new initiative draws inspiration from the best leadership development and challenge-based training programs we’ve seen, including the Center for Community Investment’s Fulcrum Fellow and Community Catalyst programs and NeighborWorks America’s Achieving Excellence program. It draws on the superpowers of both CLU and the Lincoln Institute—adapting CLU’s leadership training curriculum and relying on the institute’s deep well of research, policy tools, and expertise.
Lincoln Vibrant Communities begins by identifying and training emerging leaders from diverse backgrounds and sectors. These individuals will complete an intensive six-month leadership development program focused on understanding the complexities of urban challenges, building collaborative leadership skills, developing strategic planning and implementation capabilities, and learning how to leverage community assets and resources. After completing their training, these leaders will return to their respective cities and recruit diverse teams of people representing the public, private, and civic sectors. This cross-sector collaboration is vital for addressing complex challenges that demand multifaceted solutions.
Each team will identify a major challenge their city faces. This could encompass a range of issues, from economic revitalization and affordable housing to environmental sustainability and public safety. The teams will then return for comprehensive team-based training over an additional six months that will equip them with tools and policies developed by the Lincoln Institute; this training will provide a framework for addressing their challenges and building sustainable solutions. With the guidance of experienced coaches, the teams will develop detailed action plans. The teams will then return to their communities and embark on the journey of implementing their plans. Throughout this 18-month process, the teams will receive ongoing support and, most important, coaching from the program to ensure they stay on track and overcome any obstacles they may encounter.
Lincoln Vibrant Communities has the potential to be a game-changer in the field of community and economic development. By traversing the space between theory and practice and empowering local leaders to act, the program is designed to produce concrete improvements in participating cities. By tackling major challenges head on, the teams will make a real difference in the lives of local residents. Additionally, the program will build the capacity of local leaders and communities to design solutions for complex challenges that can be deployed again and again. The skills and knowledge gained through Lincoln Vibrant Communities will have a lasting impact, enabling communities to continue making progress long after the program concludes.
This program will culminate in a growing, curated network of dedicated community problem-solvers. Our approach cultivates innovation by prioritizing comprehension and adaptation over rote implementation. It nurtures a spirit of continuous learning, prompting individuals to reflect on their experiences and refine their problem-solving strategies.
Lincoln Vibrant Communities is not just about solving problems; it is about building a movement of empowered leaders who are committed to creating vibrant, sustainable, and equitable cities. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, we can unleash the full potential of our communities and create a brighter future for all.
George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: The Lincoln Vibrant Communities program is designed to equip local policymakers with the capacity and conviction to address complex social, environmental, and economic issues. Credit: CLU.
Lincoln Vibrant Communities Fellows Program Spring 2025
Submission Deadline:
February 18, 2025 at 11:59 PM
The application deadline has been extended to February 18, 2025 11:59 PM.
Please join Claremont Lincoln University and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy program staff working on Accelerating Community Investment (ACI), Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC), and I’m HOME for a webinar to learn more about the Lincoln Vibrant Communities Fellows Program on Thursday, February 6, 12–1:00 p.m. ET.
Fellows participate in a six-month hybrid program that includes immersive in-person training and events that are complemented by online leadership curricula, individual and group coaching, expert webinars, and peer networking. Upon completion, fellows earn an Advanced Practice Graduate Certificate in public sector leadership (Executive CLU Core: Advanced Engagement for Exceptional Leaders – Lincoln Vibrant Communities), with nine credits that can be applied to future graduate degree programs.
Who Should Apply
Current, emerging, and aspiring US public sector leaders
Community leaders working with the US public sector
Business and industry leaders working with the US public sector
Tishaura Jones was sworn in as the 47th mayor of St. Louis—and the first Black female mayor in the city’s history—on April 20, 2021. Described as a history maker on a mission, Jones served two terms in the Missouri House of Representatives, was selected as the first African American woman in Missouri history to hold the position of assistant minority floor leader, and was also the first African American woman to serve as treasurer of St. Louis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Hampton University and a master’s degree in health administration from the St. Louis University School of Public Health. Jones is also a graduate of the Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She spoke with senior fellow Anthony Flint earlier this year for the Land Matters podcast. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Anthony Flint: For those rooting for a rebound for legacy cities, St. Louis has been a bit of a roller coaster, from the renaissance of Washington Avenue to the post-COVID downtown doom loop and continuing population loss. What’s your assessment of the city’s strengths and weaknesses at this point?
Tishaura Jones: I would say that in the past three years, we have been laser focused on doing the nonsexy work to lay the foundation for future growth. And that is, the work within City Hall to make City Hall easier to navigate, easier to participate in, and easier to understand. And then adding different pieces that are looking to the future. We just opened an Office of New Americans because we realized that part of population growth is going to come from our refugees and other international citizens who choose St. Louis as a home who may be fleeing violent situations. We’ve accepted refugees from Afghanistan, from Ukraine, and back in the ’90s, we accepted refugees from Bosnia. So we have the largest Bosnian population outside of Europe. Knowing those things and knowing those pieces of the puzzle, also looking at our severe population loss of African Americans, we are laying the groundwork to make sure that St. Louis is equitable and a city that everybody can participate in; we’re focused on rebuilding areas and investing in areas that haven’t seen investment in decades.
AF: Speaking of investment, we’ve been looking at the Inflation Reduction Act and how it is pumping billions for clean energy manufacturing into economically distressed areas, including St. Louis. Do you consider the region part of a potential new “battery belt,” and can this clean energy transition be a savior?
TJ: I would say partly. We haven’t seen a lot of companies investing and exploring that technology. We only have one company that has taken advantage of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to expand its business. Where we see the most growth is in defense and geospatial, as well as advanced manufacturing. Those are the areas and industries that we have focused our attention on.
AF: Tell us more about the investments that are going on. With the backdrop of federal funding, you also have the $250 million NFL settlement from the loss of the Rams. There seems to be an unprecedented amount of funding and an approaching deadline for spending it. How are you managing that?
TJ: We received almost $500 million in ARPA funding, which is really large for a city our size. We’ve made intentional decisions to put that money out in communities that haven’t seen investment in decades. For St. Louis, that’s North St. Louis, which is 99 percent African American, and a part of Southeast St. Louis, which is about 60 to 65 percent African American. Both of those areas have high levels of poverty, high levels of vacancy, and also high levels of crime. So we are making intentional investments in those areas, bringing back business and industry, building new homes. There are places where a mortgage hasn’t been generated in a neighborhood for 10 or 15 years . . . we’re trying to rebuild a market in order to build more new market-rate and affordable homes.
“Where there is no vision, there is no hope,” reads a newly painted mural of George Washington Carver in North St. Louis. The mural is part of a major investment of federal funds in the area that will include affordable housing, infrastructure improvements, and other projects. Local advocates urged that Carver be depicted facing north: “That’s where development needs to happen.” Credit: City of St. Louis via Instagram.
The Monarch at MLK was an old electrical plant that sat vacant for decades. We are turning that into a world-class workforce development hub, co-located with companies that will be producing their products on site. Our Office of Violence Prevention will go there, and our Workforce Development Agency . . . our Economic Empowerment Center will also go there, which is going to help entrepreneurs either start or grow their businesses, as well as our Land Reutilization Authority, our land bank. They have a lot of equipment that they use to maintain our vacant lots; we have about 7,000 vacant lots that we are currently maintaining.
We’re co-locating essential services in the community so people don’t always have to come downtown to City Hall. We hope that this facility is going to be a hub of activity, and we also own 15 acres around it, so we’re going to build up around it as well, with a daycare center and housing and other amenities.
AF: For all the physical planning and placemaking that is part of the mayor’s job, what are the key elements of addressing violent crime, which understandably is on the minds of so many residents?
TJ: The year before I came into office, which was a pandemic year, we had 263 homicides. As of the end of 2023, that number is down to 158. That’s a 40 percent decrease. Crime is also decreasing in other categories. . . . It’s because of several things that we put in place. It’s not just one thing. We started by opening a new Office of Violence Prevention, where we work with community organizations because people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution.
We provide grants and technical assistance to community organizations on the ground who are doing this violence prevention work, employing trusted messengers, taking care of mental health, substance abuse. We also started a cops-and-clinicians program where we pair an officer with a mental health professional to be deployed to certain calls. We’re trying to deploy the right professional to the right call. That program alone has saved us thousands of man hours and millions of dollars because we’ve diverted people from emergency rooms, we’ve diverted people from jail and entering the criminal justice system. . . . Also for the first time in our city’s history, I hired a police chief from outside of the city. He’s been in several cities, Wilmington, Delaware, Chicago, and started his career in New York. He applies business practices to policing . . . and deploys our resources—which are finite—based on what the data is telling us. In his first full year being police chief, homicides were reduced 20 percent. We’re not quite where we want to be, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction with all of these pieces working together.
AF: I want to turn to infrastructure, which plays a role in the overall vibe of the city. Have you seen any difference in the results of the infrastructure plan from two years ago, which included some small but important things like sidewalk repair, lighting, and trimming weeds?
TJ: Yes. I sit as the chair of our local metropolitan planning organization, the East-West Gateway [Council] of Governments. Most of our infrastructure dollars flow through there for our various transportation projects. But we also, as a city, set aside almost $50 million to repave our major thoroughfares. And we currently have about $300 million in projects going on, whether it’s repaving our major thoroughfares or our side streets. Great Rivers Greenway is building the Brickline Greenway—think of Atlanta or Denver, where they have those greenways that are bike and ped paths. We will be expanding ours to connect our major parks. So in about five years, you’ll be able to ride your bike from the Arch all the way to Forest Park, and then to a park on the south side called Tower Grove Park, to a park on the north side called Fairground Park. It’ll all be connected through a series of bike and ped pathways.
The Brickline Greenway, currently under construction in St. Louis, will connect 14 of the city’s neighborhoods with more than 10 miles of bicycle and pedestrian paths. Credit: Great Rivers Greenway.
We’re hoping to also start construction on expanding transit, taking advantage of the money that’s available through the Department of Transportation, expanding our light rail. Then we’re also going to apply for funding to redo our airport. So in about five to seven years, St. Louis is going to have a new airport, a new transit line, new bike and ped pathways, and a whole host of infrastructure projects will be almost finished or at completion.
AF: How can a city like St. Louis contribute to the effort to combat climate change while at the same time, needing to build resilience to manage extreme heat, for example?
TJ: Today, as we are recording this interview, it’s about 100 degrees outside, which is normal for August in St. Louis, but it’s not normal for those who have respiratory problems. We also received a multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government to plant more trees to make sure certain neighborhoods are not heat islands. Just with the disinvestment that happened in certain portions of our community, there weren’t trees replanted. We’re going to be planting more trees, hopefully cooling down the city as we do that. We’re also part of the Bloomberg Sustainable Cities Initiative, where we will be employing about three to four people for the next three to four years to identify other sustainability projects and how those intersect with economic justice.
AF: A lot of the mayors that we’ve interviewed have talked a little bit about the stress and heavy weight of the job. I’d like to ask you, on a personal level, how do you manage all of these challenges day to day?
TJ: The answer I usually give is that I rely on three things: Jesus, my Peloton, and bourbon, and not always in that order. But I think I have a fourth weight that’s on my shoulders, which is I’m a single mom of the most adorable and probably the tallest 17-year-old you’ll ever see. He is about 6′ 8″, and he’s a junior in high school. So I also have to juggle that in addition to being mayor. I would say I do it all by the grace of God. I feel like this is the work that God called me to do, and because of that, it doesn’t feel like work. I really enjoy and love what I do. I love being able to see in real time the changes that we’re making—either brick and mortar or the lives that we’re changing. So that is the job satisfaction that helps me rest every night.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.
Lead image: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones takes a selfie at City Hall with local middle school and high school students. Credit: St. Louis Mayor’s Office via Facebook.
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New Report Explores How City-CLT Partnerships Preserve Affordable Homeownership
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.”
“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.