This case study video was named Gold Telly Winner in the 45th Annual Telly Awards in two categories: Documentary: Short Form and Education & Training.
This multimedia case examines the impact of Burlington, VT’s affordable housing strategies on the Old North End (“the ONE”)—a historically low-income neighborhood which boasts a robust stock of affordable housing while facing rising costs of living and demand for housing. It traces the history of Burlington’s efforts back to the 1980s, when the city government under then-mayor Bernie Sanders established programs and policies to produce affordable housing and combat gentrification and displacement.
Still the ONE: Lessons from a Small City’s Big Commitment to Affordability, by Julie Campoli appears in the October 2023 issue of Land Lines, the quarterly magazine of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Map: The Champlain Housing Trust’s 2,569 Rentals and 675 Shared-Equity Homes in Northwestern Vermont
Map: All Permanently Affordable Units in the Old North End
Aurand, Andrew, et al. 2021. 2021 Picture of Preservation. National Low Income Housing Coalition and Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation. https://preservationdatabase.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/NHPD_2021Report.pdf.
Aurand, Andrew, et al. 2022. “Out of Reach: The High Cost of Housing.” National Low Income Housing Coalition. https://nlihc.org/oor.
Cohen, Helen, and Lipman, Mark. 2016. Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Beloved Community (documentary film). https://www.arcofjusticefilm.com/.
Davis, John Emmeus. Ed. 2020. The Community Land Trust Reader. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/community-land-trust-reader.
Davis, John Emmeus. 1990. Building the Progressive City: Third Sector Housing in Burlington. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/40513.
Ellen, Ingrid, et al. 2021. Through the Roof: What Communities Can Do About the High Cost of Rental Housing in America. Policy Focus Report. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-focus-reports/through-roof-what-communities-can-do-high-cost-rental-housing.
Freddie Mac. 2018. Spotlight on Underserved Markets: Affordable Housing in High Opportunity Areas. Policy Brief, Washington, DC: Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. https://mf.freddiemac.com/docs/Affordable_Housing_in_High_Opportunity_Areas.pdf.
Jickling, Katie. 2018. “Ready or Not: Is Gentrification Inevitable in Burlington’s Old North End?” Seven Days. January 17. https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/ready-or-not-is-gentrification-inevitable-in-burlingtons-old-north-end.
Libby, James M. Jr. 2006. “The Policy Basis Behind Permanently Affordable Housing: A Cornerstone of Vermont’s Housing Policy Since 1987.” Montpelier, VT: Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. https://vhcb.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/articles/permanentaffordability06.pdf.
Opportunity Insights. “Neighborhoods Matter: Children’s Lives Are Shaped by the Neighborhoods They Grow Up In.” Online Research Collection. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. https://opportunityinsights.org/neighborhoods.
Quigley, Aidan. 2019. “Who Owns Burlington? The Largest Holdings Are in the Hands of a Few.” VTDigger. November 3. https://vtdigger.org/2019/11/03/who-owns-burlington-the-largest-holdings-are-in-the-hands-of-a-few.
Torpy, Brenda. 2015. “Champlain Housing Trust.” Case Study. Center for Community Land Trust Innovation. https://cltweb.org/case-studies/champlain-housing-trust.
Affordable housing, community land trusts, gentrification and displacement
1980 – 2023
None
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By Anthony Flint, March 17, 2023
In Cincinnati lately, good fortune extends well beyond the Bengals, the city’s football team, which has consistently been making the playoffs. The population is growing after years of decline, companies are increasingly interested thanks to its strategic location, and there’s even talk of southwestern Ohio becoming a climate haven.
But any resurgence in a postindustrial legacy city comes with downsides, as newly elected Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval has been discovering: the potential displacement of established residents, and affordability that can vanish all too quickly.
One of Pureval’s first moves was to collaborate with the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority to buy nearly 200 rental properties in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, outbidding more than a dozen institutional investors that have been snapping up homes to rent them out for high profits. That sent an important signal, Pureval said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast: transitioning neighborhoods will be protected from the worst outcomes of market forces in play in Cincinnati.
“These out-of-town institutional investors … have no interest, frankly, in the wellbeing of Cincinnati or their tenants, buying up cheap single-family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, but overnight doubling or tripling the rents,” he said, noting a parallel effort to enforce code violations at many properties. “If you’re going to exercise predatory behavior in our community, well, we’re not going to stand for it, and we’re coming after you.”
Pureval, the half-Indian, half-Tibetan son of first-generation Americans, said affordability and displacement were his biggest concerns as Cincinnati—along with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other cities hard hit by steep declines in manufacturing and population—gets a fresh look as a desirable location. Cincinnati scored in the top 10 of cities least impacted by heat, drought, and sea-level rise in a recent Moody’s report.
“Right now, we are living through, in real-time, a paradigm shift,” spurred on by the pandemic and concerns about climate change, he said. “The way we live, work, and play is just completely changing. Remote work is … altering our economy and lifestyle throughout the entire country but particularly here in the Midwest. What I am convinced of due to this paradigm shift is because of climate change, because of the rising cost of living on the coast, there will be an inward migration.”
But, he said, “We have to preserve the families and the legacy communities that have been here, in the first place. No city in the country has figured out a way to grow without displacing. The market factors, the economic factors are so profound and so hard to influence, and the city’s resources are so limited. It’s really, really difficult.”
Joining a chorus of others all around the U.S., Pureval also said he supports reforming zoning and addressing other regulatory barriers that hinder multi-family housing and mixed-use and transit-oriented development.
An edited version of this interview will appear in print and online as part of the Mayor’s Desk series, our interviews with innovative chief executives of cities from around the world.
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The show in its entirety can also be viewed as a video at the Lincoln Institute’s YouTube channel.
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: Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval. Credit: © Amanda Rossmann – USA TODAY NETWORK.
Further Reading
A Bid for Affordability: Notes from an Ambitious Housing Experiment in Cincinnati (Land Lines)
Activist House Flippers Take On Wall Street to Keep Homes From Investors (Wall Street Journal)
Meet Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval (SpectrumNews1)
They Told Him to Change His Name. Now Crowds Are Shouting It. (Politico)
Which U.S. cities will fare best in a warming world—and which will be hit hardest? (Washington Post)
Subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts
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By Anthony Flint, June 7, 2023
There’s so much happening today in the world’s cities—from climate change to a massive shortage of affordable housing—that the job of the city planner has become a furiously busy one, requiring a singular talent for multitasking and managing the needs of increasingly divided constituencies.
Planners have traditionally labored largely behind the scenes, but are emerging into a more visible role as they explain their work and try to keep the peace, said author Josh Stephens on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. Stephens interviewed 23 big-city planners for a new book, Planners Across America.
“Planning directors have huge influence over these cities . . . but they’re not necessarily well known. They are not on the level of a mayor or a city council person who are obviously elected officials, and by definition in the public spotlight; they’re not necessarily like a police chief who is always doing press conferences,” he said. “I think one thing that is very clear in these interviews is how earnest planning directors are about mediating, about figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and are willing to tolerate.”
Acknowledging the distrust that has grown particularly in communities of color, over urban renewal, highways through urban neighborhoods, and exclusionary zoning, Stephens said planners realize the importance of “listening to people, especially people who have historically been left out of the planning conversation.”
At the same time, planners must confront established residents fighting growth, in what is presented as a virtuous grassroots rebellion but is actually the manifestation of NIMBYism, standing for “not in my backyard.”
“Many communities are empowered, and some of that power is unevenly distributed to the extent that some communities have louder voices, and some communities will invoke people like Jane Jacobs in ways that are not necessarily beneficial for the city as a whole, or might even be disingenuous,” Stephens said.
As he spoke with planners, Stephens found widespread acceptance of the idea that most cities need a massive infusion of new housing supply including multifamily housing—and even high-end housing—to help bring prices down as a matter of basic economics. That’s been the aim of several statewide mandates requiring local governments to modify zoning.
“We do need to add luxury housing in high-cost places to accommodate the people who can afford it. I think ideally, that frees up space, and frees up capital and opportunity, and sometimes public funds to then also build deed-restricted affordable housing, and hopefully maintain a supply of naturally occurring affordable housing,” he said.
“You look at where the prices are highest, and that’s where you need to add housing. You need to add it at every level. There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as trickle-down housing. I don’t buy that. I live in Los Angeles, and there’s more than enough money to go around. If you don’t build luxury housing, that doesn’t mean that wealthy and high-income people are not going to move to LA. They’re simply going to move into whatever the next best housing is. That pushes people down, and eventually some people are left with no place to live.”
However, he said, there will be more post-pandemic movement, from hot-market cities to legacy cities, for example, suggesting the contours of a national housing market. “People have moved from LA to Phoenix, from San Francisco to Boise or Reno or Vegas, and there are other equivalents around the country. I think it’s going to be really interesting in the next decade to see how this filters out,” he said.
Josh Stephens is contributing editor of the California Planning & Development Report and previously edited The Planning Report and the Metro Investment Report, monthly publications covering, respectively, land use and infrastructure in Southern California. Planners Across America was published by Planetizen Press in 2022.
City and regional planning has been a major focus of the Lincoln Institute for many decades, from the annual gathering of 30-plus professionals in the Big City Planning Directors Institute, held in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, to the more recent promotion of exploratory scenario planning.
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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: Josh Stephens. Credit: Rich Schmitt Photography/Westside Urban Forum.
Further Reading
Five Ways Urban Planners Are Addressing a Legacy of Inequity (Land Lines)
Seven Need-to-Know Trends for Planners in 2023 (Land Lines/APA)
A Day in the Life of the City Planner (Princeton Review)
Subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts
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By Anthony Flint, December 12, 2023
What comes to mind upon hearing Scranton, Pennsylvania? For some, it’s the location of the fictional company Dunder Mifflin, from the TV comedy series “The Office.” Others may know it as President Biden’s hometown. Hard-core urbanists will note that it’s also where Jane Jacobs grew up, before moving to New York City to do battle with Robert Moses.
Ultimately, though, much of what Scranton is about these days is what legacy cities are confronting across the US and indeed all over the world: its postindustrial future, now that the manufacturing industries of yesteryear are long gone.
In the case of Scranton, a railroad crossroads in northeast Pennsylvania, its industrial riches were built on mining and processing coal, as well as iron and steel and textiles, and a heyday of some of the nation’s first electric lights and electrified streetcars, which earned it the moniker the “Electric City.” Though some defense-related manufacturing remains, the city is facing a new frontier. Essentially, Scranton must reinvent itself as a metropolis that was built, beginning more than a century ago, for purposes that no longer exist.
Into this moment comes Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, a transplant from Oregon with an MBA and a stint in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, to help try to forge a way forward. The 43-year-old mother of two was sworn in January 2020 after the previous chief executive resigned and pleaded guilty to corruption charges. She won reelection to a full term in November 2021, and is the first woman to hold the office.
“The Scranton story now is one, I think, of resilience and creativity,” Cognetti said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. The establishment of the coal and textile industries “really set the tone for the type of entrepreneurship that we are still known for and that we’re looking to have more of in Scranton.”
Earlier generations recognized that local economy needed to be diversified, she said, so the city wasn’t tied to an anchor industry that would inevitably diminish. As a result, the city has “lots of educational institutions, we have hospitals, we have healthcare, we have services. We also still have 11 percent of our jobs that are based in manufacturing. . . . There’s a lot of different family-owned, smaller businesses. That’s really important for our economy.”
The efforts at reinvention are readily seen in projects such as Boomerang Park, site of a former gas plant, and in the transformation of the Scranton Lace Factory, which once employed thousands of people churning out curtains, tablecloths, parachutes, and camouflage netting before closing in 2002. The abandoned campus of red-brick factory buildings is now being turned into a mixed-use project with offices, homes, retail spaces, and event venues.
Those kinds of adaptive reuse projects are “unique and really catching people’s attention, so folks want to be there,” Cognetti said. “That’s something that I think we can replicate.”
She has been bullish on Scranton since she went there nearly 20 years ago and ordered a sandwich at a restaurant run by her future husband. She had grown up in Beaverton, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon Clark Honors College with a BA in English literature; she ended up in Pennsylvania working for political campaigns including Barack Obama’s first run for President. She became a senior advisor to the Under Secretary for International Affairs at the US Treasury Department, was an investment advisor in New York City, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School as well.
Before becoming mayor, Cognetti advised the Pennsylvania Auditor General on oversight of public school districts and care for older adults, and served on the Scranton School Board.
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
This interview will be available online and in print in Land Lines magazine, as the latest installment in the Mayor’s Desk series. The first 20 Q&As with mayors from around the world have been compiled in a new book, with an introduction by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
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: Paige Cognetti. Credit: Courtesy photo.
Further Reading
Now the mayor of Scranton, PA, Paige Gebhardt Cognetti’s passion for equity inspired by her time in CHC (University of Oregon Clark Honors College)
Scranton Elects First Female Mayor by Overwhelming Margin (Penn Live)
America’s Legacy Cities: Building an Equitable Renaissance (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)
Remaking Local Economies (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)
How Small and Midsize Legacy Cities Can Pursue Equitable, Comprehensive “Greening” (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)
Subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts
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The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, an alliance of leading US housing organizations convened by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, today released a blueprint for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s 2025–2027 Duty to Serve plans.
As the mortgage business moves increasingly from federally regulated banks to other lenders, Fannie and Freddie play an even bigger role in determining access to affordable housing finance. The UMMC helps to demystify the complicated “secondary mortgage market” and organize the affordable housing community to work more efficiently with Fannie and Freddie.
Every three years, the two Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) are required to create plans outlining how they will comply with Duty to Serve, a federal regulation that requires the enterprises to prioritize and improve affordable housing finance opportunities in three historically neglected markets: manufactured housing, rural housing, and affordable housing preservation.
The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition’s recommendations, “Blueprint 2024,” urges the Enterprises to increase certain loan purchases in DTS markets, develop new, accessible loan products and programs, and evaluate new partnership opportunities. By centering affordable housing experts’ perspectives and synthesizing the most critical action steps, the coalition hopes to expand and enhance the Enterprises’ performance in underserved markets. The coalition will track the plans’ progress and publish a scorecard evaluating the success of the GSEs in adhering to the blueprint and implementing their plans.
“Duty to Serve is one of the most important affordable housing regulations this country has,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition’s new blueprint equips Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the guidance they need to comply with this federal regulation and expand housing finance opportunities in unprecedented, potentially revolutionary ways.”
The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition consists of 32 leading US affordable housing organizations seeking to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable to their founding purpose: to bring housing finance opportunities to American families not traditionally served by the private market. Its members include:
To learn more about the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, visit its webpage here.
Kristina McGeehan is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Image: A neighborhood of manufactured houses, one of the Duty to Serve markets. Credit: motorider via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
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The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.
Oji Alexander is the CEO of People’s Housing+, a New Orleans nonprofit that aims to close the racial wealth gap by developing affordable homeownership opportunities, providing long-term financial stewardship services, and ensuring perpetual affordability through its community land trust and shared ownership arrangements. Alexander participated in the Center for Community Investment’s 2022–2023 Fulcrum Fellowship, a one-year, intensive program for field-level community leaders. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, he explained how the fellowship shifted his perspective on affordable housing, and how People’s Housing+ is working to create generational wealth for New Orleans families.
JON GOREY: What is the focus of your organization, and how did your Fulcrum Fellowship help you build upon that work?
OJI ALEXANDER: People’s Housing+ is the result of a strategic merger between three New Orleans-based affordable housing organizations. My organization was called Home by Hand—we were historically a single-family affordable homeownership developer. Tulane Canal Neighborhood Development Corporation was also a single-family affordable housing developer for homeownership, but their unique wrinkle was in-house financial fitness work and homebuyer training. And the third organization was the Crescent City Community Land Trust, one of the city’s two community land trusts. Three small organizations, two of them Black-led, with similar missions; we partnered pretty often, and it was the same old story of competing for the same limited resources. So we built a larger scale, Black-led organization that’s able to provide a greater breadth of services to our community.
Our mission is African American wealth creation, shrinking the racial wealth gap. We do that through affordable real estate development, as we know homeownership is a reliable driver of wealth creation, and by providing stewardship services. So not only are we building the units, identifying the families, identifying the resources, getting those families into the homes, but really the important work, and what distinguishes us from some of our peers, is that first five to seven years that folks are in their homes, making sure that they understand the asset they have just acquired, how to keep and maintain that asset, and how to grow that asset, with the goal of being able to transfer that asset. We’re also providing resources for folks in our network who have been in their homes for 10 to 15 years, which is a completely different set of services.
I’d always thought of housing as a transactional process—it was always about building more units, numbers, more and more and more. Before Fulcrum, my goal would have been to be the biggest, most productive affordable housing organization for our size—we have developed more single-family housing, I think, than any organization in South Louisiana, other than Habitat for Humanity. What Fulcrum helped me realize is that our organization alone is not the answer, and it’s really helped me think about systems-level change and what we can do—what is our part in the broader affordable housing ecosystem and community development ecosystem? It has completely changed my approach to our work.
Fulcrum also helped me pull myself out of the weeds. I was always proud to know not just the big picture but how a house gets built, start to finish—the nuts and bolts—and Fulcrum helped me take that balcony view and start looking at the broader ecosystem, really incorporating the capital absorption framework and figuring out where we fit within the pipeline of deals.
JG: What are you working on now, and what do you have planned next?
OA: The ‘Plus’ in our name is that we’re also working toward some shared ownership and community ownership projects, where we have partnered with folks who own land but have not had the resources to get the land back into commerce. We had Hurricane Katrina, and we have a lot of families who are still trying to recover from a storm back in 2005—who have blighted property, who are deemed unbankable by traditional lending institutions. So we partner with organizations, lend our balance sheet and our access to resources, to help them get properties back in commerce, in situations where we can incorporate affordable housing as well. We’ve got quite a mountain to climb.
We are also working on our first small, multi-family rental, mixed-use project. It’s the historic restoration of a blighted firehouse that was built in the early 1900s in a neighborhood called Central City, a historically African American neighborhood that is really starting to see the effects of gentrification and displacement. The firehouse will have seven permanently affordable rental apartments upstairs, and a 65-seat early childhood development center downstairs, which is the first cohabitation of affordable housing and early childhood education in the city.
What we’re looking to start working on is more community ownership, shared ownership, shared equity. We’re always looking to provide benefits not just to the direct recipients of our products, but to folks who are already living in the neighborhoods that we’re working in. There are a number of different shared ownership models nationwide, but we’re involved with the Community Investment Trust, which was started in Portland and spun off by Mercy Corps, and is a way for residents of a particular neighborhood to safely invest in commercial real estate. The potential is for them to realize the upside of real estate development in their neighborhood—again, without being direct recipients of some of the new housing that’s going in—but making sure that we’re giving people the opportunity to invest and capitalize on neighborhoods transitioning, as opposed to being displaced by that transition.
JG: Can you talk about the twin challenges of developing not just affordable housing but also climate-resilient housing, in a city that’s particularly vulnerable to climate change?
OA: Because of Hurricane Katrina, we’re in a unique position: we’re talking about rebuilding a city. And conventional wisdom has been, if we’re going to rebuild the city, we’ve got to build a resilient city. We have always approached it from a practical standpoint. For us, it was always about the families, always about the end user—how can we build a resilient home that’s going to have low operating costs. The goal is predictability: You want to have predictability in your payments, whether they be rental payments or mortgage payments, and you want to have predictability in your utility bills. So we’re building with insulation, efficient HVAC systems. We want to make sure that the end user has a building they can afford to maintain. With some of the mitigation features that we build into the houses, people are realizing discounts on their insurance rates.
It’s also predictability that when a storm comes, and you have the opportunity to evacuate, your house is still going to be there when you get home. And this is where stewardship comes in. If you do come home after a storm, and your home does sustain some damage, we’re there to help you navigate the transactions with your insurance company and FEMA and things like that.
We’re a city that sits below sea level, and the way our city deals with water is we try to pump it out faster than it rains. So we’re building green infrastructure and stormwater management into our homes at no cost to our homeowners. Stormwater management is an area where you’re not going to see a lower water bill; it’s really a community benefit. And low- and moderate-income folks generally don’t have expendable income to provide community benefits. So we want to make sure that we’re providing that at no cost.
JG. What do you wish more people knew about affordable housing?
OA: Overwhelmingly, people come to us thinking that there was no way that they could have possibly purchased a home. In addition to what we know about the racial wealth gap from an asset standpoint—those disparities are understood and well known—I think there’s also a gap in the wealth of knowledge that comes along with generational wealth. And a lot of our folks who don’t come from generational wealth just don’t have the understanding of what owning an asset can do for a family.
So if there was something I wish the broader community knew, especially the African American community, who has historically—purposefully, through racist housing practices and policies—been denied access to homeownership, it’s that there’s a pretty simple recipe. And with a little bit of support, in a reasonable timeframe, most folks who have steady work, steady income, can achieve homeownership if they follow that path. Homeownership is not unattainable for folks who do not come from generational wealth.
JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?
OA: What keeps me up at night is really the fact that we have to fight so hard for what should be a basic right, which is shelter. The fact that an organization like ours has to exist. What gives me hope, though, is the compound nature of wealth—the impact that one individual home can have on a family from a generational standpoint. There were folks who were raising kids when we first started working with them. Now those kids are graduating or in college and in certain cases actually inheriting these homes. So we’re actually starting to see the transfer process. You plant the seed, you water it and give it resources, and then you just watch it grow.
JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
OA: It’s not related to housing, but it really is related to the work that we did at Fulcrum. The best book I’ve read lately was called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. A lot of the work that we did in the Fulcrum Fellowship, in addition to the redevelopment framework and leadership training, was on self-care—as nonprofit leaders, we often take self-care for granted, we kill ourselves in these jobs. And the power of what breath can do, the physiological impact that breathing and the way you breathe has on you, is really amazing.
Related Articles
Fellows in Focus: Rethinking Stormwater Management in the West
Fellows in Focus: Designing a New Approach to Property Tax Appraisals
Fellows in Focus: Mapping Our Most Resilient Landscapes
Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Oji Alexander, CEO of People’s Housing+ and a former Fulcrum Fellow, in front of two People’s Housing+ homes. Credit: Courtesy photo.
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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.
Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.
To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.
The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.
There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.
You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown
As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.
The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.
Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP
Climate Displacement on the Rise
In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.
In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.
Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.
Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP
Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities
Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.
Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.
Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.
Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado
‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back
Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.
Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah
Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth
The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.
De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.
However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado
Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends
Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.
Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado
It’s Time to Welcome the Robots
Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.
In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.
With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis
Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.
Febrero 12, 2024 - Junio 14, 2024
Ofrecido en español
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El Diplomado en Estudios Socio-Jurídicos del Suelo Urbano se promueve por séptima ocasión, gracias a la efectiva colaboración entre el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo y el Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de la UNAM. El prestigio del programa se evidencia en la trayectoria de los más de 150 estudiantes egresados, que hoy conforman una red de profesionistas de alto valor, si se mira como el origen de alianzas estratégicas en el entorno laboral, académico y de amistades.
El abordaje de los temas jurídicos, vistos en el contexto de la formación de las políticas y de los conflictos, permite acceder a un conocimiento más profundo de dichos problemas en relación con lo que ofrecen los manuales convencionales de derecho urbanístico.
El programa está dirigido a profesionales que tengan estudios de licenciatura concluidos (o a punto de concluir) en alguna disciplina afín al diplomado que se desempeñen profesionalmente, o tengan la intención de hacerlo, en el sector público, el privado o el social y en actividades vinculadas al desarrollo urbano sustentable. Es una oferta académica única en la región latinoamericana, que cubre la necesidad de fortalecer capacidades institucionales desde una visión que integra economía urbana y derecho urbanístico.
Agradecemos su interés por formar parte de esta red latinoamericana, y le invitamos a atender cuidadosamente los puntos de la convocatoria.
mitigación climática, economía, vivienda, Ley de suelo, regulación del mercado de suelo, valor del suelo, temas legales, gobierno local, salud fiscal municipal, finanzas públicas, políticas públicas, desarrollo urbano, valuación, recuperación de plusvalías
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The coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 30 miles north of Boston, has about 6,000 homes built over the course of five centuries. There are the typical cul-de-sac Colonials, the new townhouses, and both modest and massive waterfront properties. But Ipswich is also awash in historic homes—including roughly five dozen “First Period” houses built before 1725, more than any other community in the United States. Lately, the town’s antique houses have been popular with homebuyers, fetching the kinds of multimillion-dollar sales prices usually associated with new construction.
Ipswich Chief Assessor Mary-Louise Ireland isn’t sure whether it’s a temporary blip or the start of a trend. But she does know one thing: it’s making her team’s task of assigning fair and accurate property tax values to every home in town a bit more challenging.
After all, one of the biggest difficulties for a local tax assessor isn’t just making accurate property valuations—it’s doing so consistently, across all price points, home styles, and neighborhoods. If a $1 million Colonial is assessed at $950,000, for example—or 95 percent of its market value—then a $100,000 condo in the same district should be assessed at $95,000. When that ratio is consistent across a community’s price tiers, the valuations have what’s called vertical equity.
That’s tricky enough to achieve in a homogenous postwar suburb. But when 300-year-old saltboxes share the streets with new luxury townhomes, and storied houses get converted to character-rich condos, making equitable assessments across such a sundry assortment of housing styles gets even more challenging. “We’re three people,” says Ireland, “and we do all of the field work on our own.”
Now, Ireland’s small department is using an innovative—and free—new online tool from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to evaluate and interpret the vertical equity of their assessments. “We don’t have a lot of money for extra tools,” she says. “So having this has been fabulous.”
Evaluating the Valuations
Getting assessments right across the board is crucial to a fair and equitable property tax. But accurately assessing very low- and high-priced properties is notoriously difficult, partly because there are fewer market sales in those brackets. And in recent years, researchers analyzing national data sets have found headline-worthy evidence that lower-priced homes are being over-assessed—and therefore overtaxed—relative to higher-priced properties nearby.
“If assessments are equitable, then low-, medium-, and high-priced properties are all assessed at the same level relative to the market,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy fellow Ron Rakow. “But even though it’s a fairly simple concept, vertical equity is really tricky to measure.”
The International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) has two vertical equity standards in place to guide assessors, says Rakow—former commissioner of the City of Boston Assessing Department—but even those measures are imperfect. The price related differential is a simple ratio most assessors use, but Rakow says it can be imprecise; the coefficient of price related bias is a little more robust, but also more complex—it requires a type of analysis that many small departments don’t have the resources or expertise to conduct.
“Because of the difficulty of measuring vertical equity, there’s no single best, definitive measure,” Rakow says. “So rather than just looking at one indicator, it’s better to look at several indicators to paint a more complete picture.”
Needless to say, that’s no simple undertaking. So the Lincoln Institute partnered with the nonprofit Center for Appraisal Research and Technology (CART) to develop a new online tool to help assessors measure and understand the vertical equity in their own valuations.
The browser-based vertical equity app, which is free to use, instantly analyzes property data that any local assessor already has on hand, evaluating it against six different measures of vertical equity and providing a detailed report. “We wanted to give assessors a tool where they can not only get these measures calculated out, but also get some assistance in interpreting them,” Rakow says.
The new tool, launched in September, simply requires users to upload a data set of assessment records, which are anonymized to protect the privacy of property owners. The tool then runs a calculation based on two main ingredients: time-adjusted sale prices and assessed values.
From there, assessors can see different illustrated measurements of vertical equity in their data set, with customized graphs and explanations, and can download a full PDF of the results.
“If you can upload an attachment to an email, you can now do these complex statistical quality control studies—you don’t have to have a PhD, you don’t even have to have programming experience,” says CART founder and research scientist Paul Bidanset. “There are a lot of different ways to do it that would have been more complicated—but we thought if we could meet people exactly where they were, we would be helping the most people.” (Read our profile of Bidanset, a former C. Lowell Harriss fellow at the Lincoln Institute.)
Ireland says she’s thrilled to have access to such a powerful tool. “It was super simple—I have everything in Excel spreadsheets anyway, and you only needed two columns,” she says. “I can use this really beautiful report to go before the Select Board and say, ‘OK, here’s the data to support what we’ve done.’”
The professional look of the report was impressive, Ireland says—and not something her department of three could have put together on their own with their limited budget. And the illustrated graphs aren’t just useful for communicating vertical equity data to non-assessors. Paired with contextual explanations of what each measurement means and how it’s calculated, they helped Ireland wrap her head around some of the more complex and novel metrics. “I’ve taken all the classes, and we’ve talked about [these measurements], but for some reason it really hit home for me seeing it all put together this way,” she says.
Six Sides to Every Story
The tool provides results based on six approaches. The first looks at the commonly used assessment-to-sale ratio, which simply divides assessed values by their sale prices; the tool then sorts and charts those results into price deciles.
“We basically split all the sales into 10 bins—lowest-priced properties in the first bin and highest-priced properties in the tenth bin—and then we compare that ratio and see if it changes,” Rakow explains. “If we have proportional assessments, the ratio should be the same in each of those bins. But what we commonly see is that the assessment ratios tend to be a little bit higher for the low-priced properties than they are for high-priced properties.”
The coefficient of dispersion analysis plots out how far each property’s ratio is from the median. While that’s more commonly used as a measure of horizontal equity, Rakow says, it still reflects the overall quality of the assessments. “Generally speaking, if you have problems with vertical equity, you’re also probably going to have a pretty high coefficient of dispersion,” he says.
The tool also calculates the price related differential, one of two standards the IAAO uses to measure vertical equity (a PRD between 0.98 and 1.03 indicates vertical equity, according to IAAO guidance); the coefficient of price related bias, which can help users understand patterns in assessment-to-sales ratios at higher price points; and Spearman’s rank-order correlation, which compares rankings of assessments and sales from lowest to highest.
Finally, the tool includes Gini coefficients, which have long been used to measure inequality in economics. It’s only fairly recently that the assessment profession has begun to apply the Gini ranking technique to analyze vertical equity. “We’re really excited about these,” Rakow says. The Gini ranking not only offers an overall indicator of equity in the assessments, “but it also can point to where in the price distribution you’re actually having problems,” Rakow says. “It’s great to know whether or not the assessment distribution is equitable or not, but it’s even more important, if it isn’t, to know where to start looking and where you may have some issues.”
While any one of these six measurements in isolation might provide an imperfect analysis of vertical equity, Rakow says, they offer a more complete picture when taken altogether. And the app can also help an assessor look more closely at specific data. “If you suspect that the issue may be in certain neighborhoods, or within certain housing styles, you could basically cull your sales file and just feed those types of properties into the app and see whether or not that is in fact the case, and how severe the problem is,” Rakow explains.
Ultimately, the developers of the tool hope that it will make it easier for assessors not just to understand vertical inequity, but to take steps to address it. In future iterations, Rakow would like to add diagnostic elements. One feature currently in development is a geographically weighted tool to highlight areas with the most significant divergences between market values and assessments. “So then you can zoom in and see what’s going on there,” he says. “Maybe there’s a certain style of house in that neighborhood that you’re not capturing right in the model, or maybe it’s very large homes that tend to be in that particular location versus the rest of the community.”
This kind of data could also help assessors make the case for their municipalities to consider targeted tax relief policies, such as a homestead exemption, that can help make assessments more equitable.
Like any good technology, the tool will never truly be finished, Bidanset says: “It’ll always be changing and evolving as the industry evolves, and as we get more feedback, and as the industry comes up with new metrics and better statistics.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Houses in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Credit: Leigh Mantoni-Stewart.