Among its many consequences, the pandemic ushered in a period of experimental, rapid-fire adjustments to public space. Cities were suddenly tweaking zoning rules to allow more outdoor dining, blocking off streets to give pedestrians and bicyclists more space, and figuring out how to respond to dramatic upticks in food and retail pickup and delivery. It has been a pivotal stretch, in short, for managing the curb. 

Even before the lockdowns began, the increasing popularity of transportation network companies—from ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft to scooter firms like Bird and Lime—had made curb management a rising priority for many cities. “In today’s urban fabric, few spaces are more contested than the curb,” the American Planning Association declared back in the before-times of 2019. 

But the welter of recent experiments, some involving deployment of new technologies, seems even more significant. Consider the case of Aspen, Colorado. Aspen is an unusual municipality, with a downtown business district that is geographically modest, at just 16 square blocks. Nevertheless, it’s extremely busy: the retail and restaurant businesses there rack up a collective $1 billion a year. The inevitable upshot is that demand for curb space—for parking, for deliveries—can outpace supply. And that makes Aspen a useful curb-management lab. 

In February 2020, Aspen joined a group of municipalities exploring pilot programs with a start-up called Coord, one of a number of “smart city” tech companies with a curb-management bent. “I’m a data freak,” explains Mitch Osur, Aspen’s director of parking and downtown services. He figured that at the very least, Coord’s platform—which integrates “smart zones” with a payment app used by delivery drivers (and a separate app for enforcement officers)—could give him fresh insight into how the downtown streets are really being used. 

The city identified what it believed were its busiest loading zones. Starting in November 2020, using these zones required booking space through Coord’s app, at a cost of $2 an hour. While regular street parking in downtown Aspen can cost $6 an hour, the city (like many others) had never previously charged for loading, but figured it was necessary to get delivery fleets’ attention. In the end there wasn’t much pushback; most drivers appreciated being able to capture a time slot. When one shipping fleet manager questioned the scheme, Osur explained that the shipper could use other loading zones, but the data Aspen was collecting would affect policy decisions about curbs across the downtown area. “If you’re not part of the program, your data won’t count,” he added. Moreover, he was sharing data with participants and soliciting their input. The shipper signed on. 

Because the Coord platform tracks actual usage of the smart loading zones, Osur did indeed get plenty of fresh data. Some was expected, some surprising. He figured average “dwell times” were about 30 minutes, and found they were averaging 39 minutes and 13 seconds. The dwell times were longer in the morning and shrank to about 15 minutes after 2 p.m. He was surprised to learn that the busiest days weren’t Monday and Friday, as expected, but Tuesday and Thursday; Wednesday’s loading zone use was half that of peak days. Based on these insights, Aspen is planning to change the rules for some zones, converting them to regular parking at 11 a.m. on some days rather than 6 p.m. (Osur has seen other changes as a result of adopting Coord; drivers have stopped snagging space early and eating lunch in loading zones, a previously routine practice.) 

Coord has run similar pilots in Omaha, Nashville, and other cities. But it is just one entity involved in curb-management experiments. Cox Communications, through its Cox2M “internet of things” division, is testing curbside kiosks that can essentially monitor dwell times in loading zones and present a countdown clock warning drivers not to overstay their time on the curb; the technology can alert city enforcement when drivers linger. Las Vegas is running a pilot program with the technology, which can also be used to manage commercial deliveries, a Cox official told Government Technology. Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, DC, have run pilots with another app, curbFlow, designed to coordinate deliveries from multiple services along particularly busy curb stretches. 

Technology such as video kiosks and app-based location trackers adds both new options and new complexity to the business of managing curbs. Traditionally, defining curb use has involved signage and paint, which are hard to tweak quickly, notes Anne Goodchild, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, whose Urban Freight Lab has focused on public-private efforts to address evolving delivery logistics and planning. 

Perhaps because of the pandemic, cities have been more willing to try new options. Before the pandemic, a curb change would have entailed lengthy public processes. The crisis showed that a more nimble alternative was possible. “We did some things differently,” Goodchild says. “For example, we changed curb allocations literally overnight.” 

The pandemic pushed a fast-forward button on both new patterns of street usage and policy responses to those patterns, says Heather Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. During the pandemic, the organization’s Big City Planning Directors Institute shifted from a twice-yearly gathering to a monthly one (held virtually, of course). The pandemic, she points out, “was a reason to try new things.” 

Hannon has observed a spike in interest in scenario planning for potential futures among U.S. communities since the pandemic began. She also points out that curb management isn’t merely an issue for downtowns or commercial districts, noting that it tilts into residential neighborhoods as well. The demand for home delivery has soared: food-delivery apps doubled their revenues in a six-month period during 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, and e-commerce in the United States grew 44 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year. These trends will only be complicated by the experiments with robots and drones that policy makers increasingly have to accommodate. 

Aspen, meanwhile, has expanded its pilot program, adding new loading zones to the experiment as the number of participating drivers keeps growing. While it is just one experiment in a small city, it overlaps with a singular moment in the way citizens and businesses use technology to interact with planned spaces, opening a window onto how planners and policy makers might think about the future of the curb. “This is totally scalable,” Osur says, referring not to any specific app or technology but to the general idea of cities using new tools to more actively manage the curb. “This is the future.” 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Curb management has become a rising priority in cities including Las Vegas, where Cox Communications is piloting curbside kiosks that monitor dwell times in loading zones. Credit: Courtesy of Cox Communications.

The Babbitt Center’s new Colorado River Basin map is available at no cost as a downloadable pdf and as a hard copy.

Where is the Colorado River Basin? A novice attempting a cursory Google search will be surprised—and perhaps frustrated, confused, or a little of both—to find that there is no simple answer to that question. Winding through seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico—and supporting over 40 million people and 4.5 million acres of agriculture along the way—the Colorado River is one of our most geographically, historically, politically, and culturally complex waterways. As a result, creating an accurate map of the basin—the vast area of land drained by the river and its tributaries—is not a simple undertaking.

Commonly used maps of the region vary widely, even on basic details like the boundaries of the basin, and most haven’t kept up with changing realities—like the fact that the overtapped waterway no longer reaches its outlet at the sea. At the Babbitt Center, we began to hear a common refrain as we worked on water and planning integration efforts with stakeholders throughout the West: people frequently pointed out the flaws in available maps and suggested that addressing them could contribute to more effective water management decisions, but no one seemed to have the capacity to fix them. So, with the help of the Lincoln Institute’s newly established Center for Geospatial Solutions, we embarked on a mapping project of our own.

Our newly published peer-reviewed Colorado River Basin map seeks to correct several common errors in popular maps while providing an updated resource for water managers, tribal leaders, and others confronting critical issues related to growth, resource management, climate change, and sustainability. It is a physical and political map of the entire Colorado River Basin, including the location of the 30 federally recognized tribal nations; dams, reservoirs, transbasin diversions, and canals; federal protected areas; and natural waterways with indications of year-round or intermittent streamflow. We are making the map freely available with the hope that it will become a widely used resource, both within the basin and beyond.

Challenges, Choices, and Rationale

Even though they have few words, maps still speak. All maps are somewhat subjective, and they influence how people perceive and think about places and phenomena. During the peer review process for our new map, one reviewer asked whether our purpose was to show the “natural” basin or the modern, aka engineered and legally defined, basin. This seemingly simple question raised several fundamental questions about what a “natural” basin actually is or would be. This struck us as akin to a perennial question facing ecological restoration advocates: to what past condition should one try to restore a landscape?

In the case of the Colorado, this question becomes: when was the basin “natural”? Before the construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s? Before Laguna Dam, the first dam built by the U.S. government, went up in 1905? The 18th century? 500 years ago? A million years ago? In an era when the human–natural binary has evolved into a more enlightened understanding of socioecological systems, these questions are difficult to answer.

We struggled with this quandary for some time. On the one hand, representing a prehuman “natural” basin is practically impossible. On the other hand, we felt an impulse to represent more of the pre-dam aspects of the basin than we typically see in conventional maps, which often privilege the boundary based on governmental contrivances of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ultimately, after multiple internal and external review sessions, we agreed on a representation that does not attempt to resolve the “natural” versus “human” tension. We included infrastructure, clearly showing the highly engineered nature of the modern basin. We also included the Salton Basin and Laguna Salada Basin, two topographical depressions that were formed by the Colorado. Both are separate from the river’s modern engineered course, and often excluded from maps of the basin. We didn’t choose to show them because we expect the Colorado River to jump its channel any time soon, nor because we presume to accurately represent how the delta looked prior to the 20th century. But from our research, we learned that the 1980s El Niño was of such magnitude that river water from the flooded lower delta reached back up into the dry bed of the Laguna Salada, making commercial fishing possible there. Environmental management of the heavily polluted Salton Sea, meanwhile, is a contested issue that has figured in recent discussions about future management of the Colorado. These areas are not hydrologically or politically irrelevant.

Our map doesn’t attempt to answer every question about the basin. In many ways, our contribution to Colorado River cartography highlights the unresolved tensions that define this river system and will continue to drive the discourse around water management and conservation in the Colorado Basin.

There is no simple definition of the Colorado River Basin. That might be the most important underlying message of this new map.

Zachary Sugg is a senior program manager at the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

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StoryMap: The Hardest Working River in the West

“The mind that is not baffled is not employed.”

– Wendell Berry

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to teach in many different places and contexts, from a vocational high school on the South Shore of Massachusetts to undergraduate and graduate classrooms in New York, North Carolina, England, Italy, and Russia. Though the students and subjects have differed, one thread has emerged: teaching is the best way to learn.

There’s no better way to discover the gaps in your own knowledge than by trying to convey that knowledge to someone else; no better way to understand how people absorb and act upon information than by actively engaging in that process with them. This isn’t a novel concept: the Latin phrase docendo discimus, often attributed to Seneca, means “by teaching, we learn”; the Germans promulgated a pedagogical approach called Lernen durch Lehren, or “learning by teaching.”

What you learn by teaching, first and foremost, is that teaching is more than a “sage on stage” waltzing into a classroom to deliver information from on high. Yes, it requires command of your subject, but it also requires being mindful and present—with an open mind, willing to experiment, and most importantly, listening in order to reframe the discussion when your words aren’t landing well.

Those qualities abounded in our founder, John C. Lincoln. From the earliest days of the Lincoln Foundation, he made education and experimentation a priority. Lincoln was motivated by a fervent belief that the value of land belongs to the community and should be used for the community’s benefit, a concept he first encountered at a lecture by the political economist and author Henry George. He disseminated this idea through his own prolific writing—pamphlets, articles, even a monthly “Lincoln Letter”—and by funding educational institutions.

In 1949, just three years after establishing the Lincoln Foundation, Lincoln penned a letter on behalf of the Henry George School—whose work he funded and whose board he chaired for 17 years—to promote a 10-week discussion course based on George’s work. “The course offers no ready-made panaceas or medicine-man formulas,” Lincoln cautioned. “It attempts, through open discussion and stimulating analysis, to make clear the underlying causes of the problems that face the modern world and to discover the means for solving them.”

That commitment to discussing problems and discovering solutions remains central to our mission. Though we face global challenges John Lincoln could not have foreseen, from climate change to COVID, some of the problems of his era are all too familiar: economic inequality, soaring housing costs, social injustice, and overuse or abuse of natural resources, to name a few.

After John Lincoln’s death in 1959, David Lincoln took the helm of the family foundation. It didn’t take long for David to expand his father’s commitment to education, providing grants to the Claremont Men’s College in California, the University of Virginia, New York University, the University of Chicago, and the Urban Land Institute. A decade later, the Lincoln Foundation established the Land Reform Training Institute in Taipei, now called the International Center for Land Policy Studies and Training and still a partner of the Lincoln Institute. David and his wife, Joan, were also generous supporters of Arizona State University and other institutions. 

Even as he supported education in other venues, David dreamed of establishing a freestanding organization that could conduct its own research on land policy—a place that could develop and deliver courses in partnership with like-minded institutions without being in thrall to them. The establishment of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 1974 represented a bold step, a foray into the active pedagogy that powers our work today and that would, in turn, accelerate our own learning.

In the nearly five decades since David Lincoln took that leap, we have taught—and learned from—students around the world, from undergraduates grappling with the basics to seasoned urban practitioners eager to expand their skills. We’ve delivered courses about land value capture and land markets in Latin America; about valuation and the property tax in Eastern Europe and Africa; about municipal finance and conservation in the United States and China; and much more. During the past decade, our courses and trainings have reached nearly 20,000 participants.

Along the way, we’ve learned a few important lessons. We learned, for instance, that when it comes to land policy education, critical gaps exist. As we prepared to launch a municipal fiscal health campaign in 2015, we conducted a straw poll with the American Planning Association to determine the number of graduate planning schools that required students to take public finance courses. The answer? None. To address this puzzling oversight, we developed a curriculum on public finance for planners, which we have since delivered in Beijing, Chicago, Dallas, Taipei, and Boston, in formats ranging from a three-day professional certificate program to a full-semester course for graduate students.

We’ve also learned that professionals working on land policy have a huge appetite for practical training, and we’ve learned how much people value credentialed courses. As the pandemic set in last year, our staff tried out some new virtual approaches that heightened participation and engagement. These ranged from prerecording presentations that could be viewed prior to live sessions to spreading what would have been a tightly packed, in-person schedule across multiple days. In some cases, we reached more people; a virtual seminar on taxation in Eastern Europe, for example, reached 500 people instead of the 40 who would have attended in person. In other cases, we reached a more geographically diverse pool while intentionally keeping enrollment low to foster engagement and active learning. Even as we begin making plans to return to in-person learning, we have become more adept at leveraging the possibilities afforded by virtual instruction and look forward to enhancing those offerings.

This year, building on what we’ve learned and honoring the Lincoln family tradition of taking leaps, we’re launching our first degree-granting program in partnership with Claremont Lincoln University (CLU), a nonprofit, online graduate university dedicated to socially conscious education. Together we’ve created online, affordable Master in Public Administration and Master in Sustainability Leadership programs, and we are working on a third option—the first Master in Land Policy in the United States—which we hope will follow soon.

These degree programs, which can be completed in 13 to 20 months, represent a way of rethinking advanced education from the ground up. They are specifically designed for working professionals who need to gain practical skills they can implement in their daily lives, while they do their jobs. They are both comprehensive and streamlined. Lincoln Institute staff will design and deliver several courses, using real-world case studies and cross-sector analyses to tackle topics ranging from public finance to civic engagement. This fall, I’ll teach a course on Urban Sustainability, helping students acquire the knowledge and skills they need to diagnose urban challenges, design interventions to make cities sustainable, and mobilize resources to implement those solutions—and I have no doubt that I’ll learn a great deal along the way.

The students who enroll at CLU won’t be there simply to get an advanced degree; they’ll be there to explore issues, discover solutions, and become part of a national movement of lifelong learners. With the climate crisis bearing down in alarming new ways, infrastructure crumbling, and affordable housing an increasingly endangered species, public officials are facing seemingly insurmountable challenges with fewer resources at their disposal. This program will build a growing network of informed, hands-on problem solvers who can use land policy to address our thorniest environmental, economic, and social challenges.

At the Lincoln Institute, we are intent on “finding answers in land.” We don’t claim to have all the answers. We are committed to finding them through our research and through collaborations with partners around the world. Through initiatives like our new CLU partnership, we will continue to teach, to learn, and to experiment—and we will seek to shed, as John Lincoln wrote in 1949, “some new, searching light on the vital questions that concern us all.”

Learn more about the Claremont Lincoln University–Lincoln Institute of Land Policy partnership and current fellowship opportunities by visiting www.claremontlincoln.edu/lincolninstitute75.

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

Image: Claremont Lincoln University headquarters in Claremont, California. Credit: CLU.

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principios de los 70, los tributos inmobiliarios eran uno de los villanos preferidos en los Estados Unidos. Las facturas de cobro de los propietarios estaban por las nubes, en las noticias abundaban las historias de valuadores corruptos, y los legisladores y ejecutores de políticas de todo el espectro concluían que los gobiernos locales administraban mal los tributos inmobiliarios a costa de los residentes a quienes debían atender.

En su discurso del Estado de la Nación de 1972, el presidente Richard Nixon catalogó a los tributos inmobiliarios de “opresivos y discriminatorios”. En la elección presidencial de ese año, los candidatos principales mencionaron dicho impuesto en su campaña. Tras las elecciones, el senador Edmund Muskie de Maine, quien había sido derrotado en la primaria demócrata, encargó una investigación detallada de los tributos inmobiliarios estatales y locales.

“La perpetuación de sistemas arcaicos, injustos (y muchas veces solapados) de tributos inmobiliarios socava la credibilidad de todos los niveles del gobierno”, dijo Muskie en una audiencia del senado en 1973, poco después de que se completara el estudio. “Indigna a todo el país que en una era de tecnología informática casi ningún gobierno pueda administrar los tributos inmobiliarios de forma justa”.

Durante la década siguiente, la tecnología mencionada por Muskie evolucionó de forma drástica. Los grandes avances en la potencia informática y el surgimiento de una generación de valuadores bien entrenados y con habilidades de computación que podían aprovecharla revolucionaron uno de los aspectos más asediantes de los tributos inmobiliarios: la determinación del valor de mercado de cada propiedad. En el núcleo de esta revolución había una pequeña organización fundada en 1974 en Cambridge, Massachusetts, para estudiar y enseñar políticas de suelo.

La tasación de valores inmuebles (también conocida como valuación o avalúo) es tanto un arte como una ciencia, y ha presentado un desafío para los tributos inmobiliarios durante siglos. En Inglaterra, en el s. XVII, los funcionarios gubernamentales contaban las chimeneas y los fogones de cada vivienda para tasarla. Más tarde, un impuesto sobre cada ventana pretendió funcionar casi del mismo modo, pero hizo que la gente sellara ventanas o construyera casas con menos cantidad de aberturas. El parlamento derogó el impuesto en 1851.

Hacia principios del s. XX, los tasadores solían usar uno de tres métodos básicos para determinar el valor de una propiedad; los tres se siguen usando hoy. El primero compara cada propiedad con otras cercanas que se hayan vendido recientemente. El segundo considera el ingreso que recibiría el propietario si alquilara la propiedad. Y el tercero estima el costo en mano de obra y materiales por reconstruir determinada estructura, más el valor del suelo en el que esta se encuentra. 

El tercer método, conocido como “propuesta de costos”, se adoptó mucho en los 20 y los 30. Para calcular el valor del suelo, los tasadores se basaban en el precio de predios vacantes vendidos poco antes en la zona. Estos eran frecuentes en zonas rurales o suburbios nuevos, pero no abundaban en ciudades consolidadas.

“Las ventas de valor territorial son casi imposibles de hallar”, dijo Jerry German, quien empezó su carrera como tasador en Cleveland, Ohio, en 1974, cuando aún se hacían muchos cálculos a mano. “Se colocaba el mapa de la jurisdicción en el suelo o una mesa gigante. Los valuadores miraban el mapa y decían: ‘parece que en esta zona, la tierra se vende más o menos a un dólar por pie cuadrado’ . . . Recuerdo que los valuadores expertos iban por ahí con pequeñas reglas de cálculo en el bolsillo para sacar números”.

Lo que los tres métodos de tasación tenían en común era que los valuadores hacían cálculos individuales para cada propiedad y los registraban a mano en fichas que se solían almacenar en largas filas de archivos. El proceso era vulnerable a errores, incoherencias y corrupción, y no era muy transparente sobre quién decidía el valor de cada propiedad, cómo se hacía el cálculo o quién más podría haber influido en la decisión.

Para cuando German llegó a Cleveland, hacía ya más de una década que un puñado de ciudades había empezado a establecer discretamente las bases para la tasación computarizada. En la década de 1960, los avances informáticos se juntaron con nuevas demandas de datos, porque muchos estados exigían por primera vez que se revelaran los precios de venta inmobiliaria de forma precisa. Los valuadores usaban los datos para identificar las características que afectaban el precio de una propiedad, como superficie, cantidad de baños y ubicación. Las jurisdicciones grandes que podían costear las primeras computadoras (y los asesores con pericia especial para programarlas) ya podían calcular valores inmuebles de forma automática. La nueva práctica, valuación masiva asistida por computadora (CAMA), fue un avance, pero también tenía desventajas importantes. 

“Para un tasador, aparte del costo, lo peor era su inflexibilidad”, dijo German. “Todo estaba programado de forma fija, y cuando . . . lograbas encaminarte y programabas todo, era casi imposible cambiar algo”. 

En 1974, cuando se fundó el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo como una escuela, el primer director ejecutivo, Arlo Woolery, vio una oportunidad. Una de las prioridades de la organización era promover tributos inmobiliarios que funcionaran bien. Si ayudaba a los valuadores a computarizar su trabajo, el Instituto Lincoln podría ofrecer el tipo de asistencia que cambiaría las prácticas locales. 

El Instituto Lincoln organizó el primer coloquio sobre valuación masiva asistida por computadora en 1975. En ese entonces, solo un puñado de las cerca de 13.500 jurisdicciones de los Estados Unidos usaban computadoras para valuación masiva; “no serían más de 400, quizás menos de 200 jurisdicciones”, estimó el experto en tasaciones Richard Almy en un artículo que preparó para el coloquio. Charles Cook, director de educación en el Instituto Lincoln, quien antes había trabajado para una empresa privada de valuación masiva, comenzó a reunir y capacitar valuadores en una iniciativa por mejorar la valuación computarizada y expandir el uso. 

El Instituto Lincoln, al reconocer que, debido al costo y la inflexibilidad del software de tasación, este no estaba al alcance de muchas ciudades y pueblos, a principios de los 80 desarrolló un software llamado SOLIR (Small On-Line Research, “pequeña búsqueda en línea”), que los valuadores podrían usar y personalizar solos con una computadora Radio Shack TRS 80 disponible en el mercado. Este fue un gran avance. Por primera vez, las oficinas locales de tasación que no tenían grandes presupuestos o habilidades de programación informática pudieron acceder a CAMA. El Instituto Lincoln entregaba SOLIR sin costo a valuadores que realizaban un curso de una semana, y durante varios años, lo actualizó con regularidad.

Gracias al proyecto, el Instituto Lincoln se sintió menos como una organización de investigación y más como “un emprendimiento informático emergente”, dijo Dennis Robinson, quien era vicepresidente ejecutivo del Instituto Lincoln y director ejecutivo de finanzas, y hace poco se jubiló. Robinson empezó a trabajar en 1982 como supervisor de desarrollo de software y capacitación. Evocó “una alfombra sucia, arrugada, con manchas de café. Esa era la sala de máquinas. Había un banco de unas ocho computadoras Radio Shack con programadores que se encargaban de SOLIR”.

Los primeros valuadores que usaron el software ayudaron a mejorarlo: probaron las limitaciones y recomendaron nuevas funciones. Por solicitud de estos, el Instituto Lincoln creó un módulo que ayudaba a determinar el valor del suelo separado de cualquier edificio; esta era una función esencial para mantener las tasaciones al día.

Hacia fines de los 80, empresas privadas de software y consultoría estaban incorporando la tecnología de SOLIR a sus propios productos, y el Instituto Lincoln dejó de desarrollar el software. Sin embargo, siguió investigando sobre usos innovadores de CAMA y siguió reuniendo y capacitando valuadores a medida que la tecnología avanzaba. En los 90, los valuadores empezaron a usar software de sistemas de información geográfica (SIG) para desarrollar registros de propiedad según su ubicación. Al integrar estos registros con los sistemas de CAMA, entre otras cosas, podían medir cómo afectaban al valor territorial las características del vecindario, como escuelas o parques. “Tomaron esas herramientas e hicieron cosas muy creativas y sofisticadas”, dijo Robinson.

Hoy, CAMA es esencial para los sistemas de tributos inmobiliarios en los Estados Unidos, Canadá y Europa occidental. Muchos gobiernos de Europa oriental, América Latina, Asia y África también adoptaron alguna versión de la herramienta, y en algunos casos usaron imágenes satelitales o fotografías aéreas para abandonar los registros en papel, que fueron la base de los primeros sistemas de CAMA.

En China, que se prepara para instaurar el primer impuesto sobre la propiedad inmobiliaria, los funcionarios locales de Shenzhen, un centro tecnológico que crece velozmente, hace poco desarrollaron aplicaciones innovadoras de CAMA. Fueron los pioneros de un sistema conocido como GAMA, que combina GIS y CAMA para crear modelos tridimensionales detallados que consideran factores como vistas y el trayecto de la luz y el sonido. Estas consideraciones adicionales pueden provocar diferencias de hasta un 20 por ciento en el valor de los departamentos o condominios de un mismo edificio. 

En total, los avances de CAMA en las últimas décadas crearon una marea de cambios en la administración de los tributos inmobiliarios. “La tasación computarizada puede parecer obvia hoy”, dijo Joan Youngman, miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln. “Pero ofreció la infraestructura necesaria para tasar el verdadero valor de mercado de cada propiedad, y esta es la base de cualquier sistema de tributos inmobiliarios justo y equitativo”.

Will Jason es el director de comunicaciones del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Fotografía: La tasación computarizada, que el Instituto Lincoln ayudó a impulsar en los 70 y los 80, generó un sistema de tributos inmobiliarios más equitativo. Crédito: cortesía de Data Cloud Solutions, LLC.

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