Municipios grandes y pequeños, desde Florida hasta Nueva Inglaterra, y desde Canadá hasta Australia, han anunciado proyectos piloto relacionados con la IA centrados en las tareas cotidianas que mantienen a nuestras ciudades en constante movimiento.

“Se trata de acelerar estos procesos realmente mundanos, y luego permitir que expertos con un alto nivel de formación y especialización se centren en lo que en realidad necesita concentración”.

No va a reemplazar a las personas. Nunca vamos a emitirle un permiso de construcción de un bot de IA”.

En el animado debate cultural sobre los riesgos y las posibilidades de la inteligencia artificial, las ventajas y desventajas imaginadas se han inclinado hacia lo sensacionalista. Se le ha prestado poca atención masiva al potencial impacto de la tecnología en las tareas cotidianas que mantienen a nuestras ciudades en movimiento, como las revisiones de permisos de construcción, los procesos de solicitud de urbanización y el cumplimiento del código de planificación. Pero las necesidades en esas áreas son bastante reales, y resulta que los experimentos para aplicar los últimos avances de la IA en este tipo de operaciones ya están en marcha. Municipios grandes y pequeños, desde Florida hasta Nueva Inglaterra, y desde Canadá hasta Australia, han anunciado proyectos piloto relacionados con la IA y otros esfuerzos exploratorios.

Si bien los enfoques varían, los desafíos son prácticamente universales. Determinar si los proyectos de construcción o urbanización propuestos cumplen con todos los códigos de suelo y edificación es un proceso detallado, a menudo lento: puede ser confuso para los solicitantes y requerir un extenso trabajo de fondo para los municipios y otras autoridades. La esperanza es que la IA pueda ayudar a que ese proceso, o “las partes tediosas del planeamiento de las ciudades”, como lo expresó sin rodeos la publicación Government Technology, sean más rápidos y eficaces, así como más precisos y comprensibles. Lo ideal sería que incluso permitiera a los departamentos de planificación racionalizar y reasignar recursos.

Pero, según explicaron con claridad los funcionarios de la ciudad que en verdad están trabajando con la nueva tecnología, hay un largo camino por recorrer para llegar a ese punto. Y, dado que algunos de los momentos más publicitados de la IA hasta la fecha han involucrado fracasos avergonzantes (como la herramienta de búsqueda de IA de Google que asesora a los usuarios sobre los beneficios de comer rocas y agregar pegamento a la pizza), la mayoría está procediendo con cuidado.

Suele haber un “ciclo de exageración” entre la promesa temprana de una nueva tecnología y la eventual realidad, advierte Andreas Boehm, el gerente de ciudades inteligentes de Kelowna, Columbia Británica, una ciudad de alrededor de 145.000 habitantes. El equipo de Boehm se encarga de buscar nuevas oportunidades para aprovechar las innovaciones tecnológicas para la ciudad y sus residentes. Aunque se dice mucho, aún no hemos visto muchos “ejemplos concretos y tangibles” de la IA como una fuerza “transformadora” en los sistemas de planificación, dice Boehm. Pero es posible que pronto comencemos a ver resultados reales.

Boehm señala que Canadá está experimentando una escasez de viviendas, y un avance más rápido en las nuevas construcciones podría ayudar. El proceso para obtener permisos tiene incluso más obstáculos con las consultas de los propietarios actuales sobre la zonificación y los problemas de código para proyectos más rutinarios. Durante algunos años, Kelowna ha usado un chatbot para responder preguntas comunes, dice Boehm. Eso ha ayudado a liberar un poco de tiempo, pero la versión generativa más reciente de la IA puede manejar una gama mucho más amplia de consultas, redactadas en lenguaje natural, con respuestas precisas y específicas. Así que Kelowna comenzó a trabajar con Microsoft para crear una versión nueva y mucho más sofisticada de la herramienta que incorpora la funcionalidad de IA Copilot de Microsoft, que la ciudad utiliza hoy en día como ayuda para quienes solicitan permisos.

Boehm dice que el equipo de Ciudades Inteligentes y sus asesores trabajaron con varios residentes (incluidos aquellos sin conocimientos de permisos) y con constructores experimentados para desarrollar la herramienta, que puede dar respuestas de alto nivel o señalar disposiciones específicas del código. Ha agilizado y acelerado el proceso de solicitud de forma notable. “Libera el tiempo del personal” dado que el personal debe hacerse cargo de menos preguntas al principio del proceso, dice Boehm. “Así que ahora pueden centrarse en el procesamiento de las solicitudes que están llegando. Y, a menudo, la calidad de estas es bastante mejor porque las personas utilizan estas herramientas de IA a la hora de crear las solicitudes y, así, obtienen toda la información que necesitan”.

En otra parte de Canadá, la ciudad de Burlington, Ontario, cerca de Toronto, ha estado desarrollando herramientas de IA generativa en colaboración con Archistar, la firma australiana de tecnología y bienes raíces. Chad MacDonald, director de información de Burlington (y antes director ejecutivo de servicios digitales), dice que Burlington, con una población de 200.000 habitantes, también enfrenta una crisis de vivienda. Con poco espacio disponible para la construcción de viviendas unifamiliares, su enfoque está en mejorar el proceso de manejo de proyectos más grandes, que incluyen propuestas industriales y comerciales, con una perspectiva hacia la creación de una plataforma única que funcione para todo tipo de proyectos. El sistema que la ciudad está desarrollando tiene como objetivo integrar no solo la zonificación y los estatutos locales, sino también el Código de Edificación de Ontario, que afecta a todas las estructuras de la provincia.

Probar este sistema implica verificar si realiza una evaluación correcta de planes ya presentados cuyo resultado se conoce. Este proceso también entrena a la IA. “Cada vez que corregimos una inexactitud en el algoritmo, en realidad lo hace más inteligente”, explica MacDonald. “De este modo, cada vez se volverá más preciso”. Y si la solución propuesta a un problema de permiso podría crear dos problemas más en la solicitud, el sistema está diseñado para señalarlo de inmediato, y así evitar un largo proceso de reenvío. En mayo, se completó una ronda de pruebas “extremadamente exitosa”, dice MacDonald, y espera que el uso de la tecnología por parte de la ciudad se expanda.

MacDonald prevé que la tecnología avance hasta el punto de crear diseños que cumplan con el código. ¿Eso no dejará a ingenieros y arquitectos fuera del negocio? Él responde que, en realidad, es vital que haya personas en el proceso. “Se trata de acelerar estos procesos realmente mundanos”, dice, “y luego permitir que estos expertos con un alto nivel de formación y especialización se centren en lo que en realidad necesita concentración”.

En Honolulu, ampliar el uso de herramientas de IA es parte de un plan más amplio para usar la tecnología a fin de abordar una importante acumulación de permisos. En 2021, el alcalde de la ciudad declaró que el proceso estaba “roto” y se comprometió a una revisión. En 2022, un proceso de preselección de permisos implicó “una espera intolerable de seis meses” hasta alcanzar un revisor, dice Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, directora del Departamento de Planificación y Permisos de Honolulu. La ciudad agregó un bot de IA que pudo revisar algunos de los elementos de la lista de preselección en un proceso recientemente simplificado y ayudó a reducir la espera a dos o tres días. Ese éxito ayudó a dar paso a un piloto de IA generativa más expansivo con CivCheck, la empresa emergente con sede en Chicago, una relación que Takeuchi Apuna espera que continúe.

“Hemos aprendido que las posibilidades para la IA en nuestros procesos de negocio son enormes”, dice, “y que la pieza más importante es la gente que la usa”. Enfatiza que esto es solo parte de una revisión que también incluye una mejor capacitación del personal y una mejor comunicación con los solicitantes. “Es un valor que uno debe aportar y seguir aplicando como parte de la IA a fin de obtener los mejores resultados”.

Si bien estos primeros resultados son prometedores, quedan muchos desafíos de y cuestiones inciertas de la IA. Algunas de las empresas emergentes que prometen poderosas herramientas de IA generativa no se han probado. Y, como señala MacDonald, la tecnología no es barata. También es necesario establecer estándares en torno a la recopilación de datos y la privacidad. (Kelowna, por ejemplo, está trabajando en cuestiones de políticas y orientación con el Montreal AI Ethics Institute, una organización sin fines de lucro). Y, por supuesto, existen preocupaciones públicas más generales sobre cederle demasiado control a una herramienta automatizada, por muy inteligente y capaz de recibir entrenamiento que sea. “No va a reemplazar a las personas”, dice Boehm. “Nunca vamos a emitirle un permiso de construcción de un bot de IA”.

De hecho, añade, esa preocupación podría considerarse una oportunidad, si las ciudades usan la IA de manera reflexiva y transparente. Aunque el gobierno a menudo es opaco y, por lo tanto, muchas personas lo tratan con escepticismo, la IA “es una gran oportunidad para desmitificar al gobierno”, comenta Boehm. “[Puede ampliar la] comprensión de que, al final del día, en realidad se trata de las personas y de apoyarlas”. En otras palabras, en el mejor de los casos, la IA podría mejorar un proceso burocrático complicado pero vital al darle un toque más humano.

Rob Walker es periodista; escribe sobre diseño, tecnología y otros temas. Es autor de Tecnociudad: 20 aplicaciones, ideas e innovadores que cambian el panorama urbano. Publica un boletín en robwalker.substack.com

Imagen principal: Crédito: Phonlamai Photo vía iStock/Getty Images Plus.

This essay appears in the Lincoln Institute book City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape.

So, what have we learned? Because the conflicts and collaborations compiled in this book are a mere dress rehearsal for the next wave of disruptions poised to crash upon cities, led by AI and climate change (which are increasingly entwined). More important than the legacy of any single project contained within these pages are the overarching lessons ensuring we won’t get fooled again.

First, governments must build their capacity to assess, deploy, and regulate urban tech. They should become comfortable with forecasting the impacts of nascent technologies before they pose a problem—or potentially hold the solution to pressing needs. For example, consider the contrast between the way Uber and Lyft ran roughshod over regulators for more than a decade and cities’ far more proactive stance toward autonomous vehicles. Having internalized the former’s externalities through increased congestion, reduced transit ridership, and higher pedestrian fatalities, cities have rightly kept a tighter grip on the wheel this time around.

Demonstrating this kind of hard-won wisdom, New York City passed a law overseeing the use of AI in hiring decisions just months after the launch of ChatGPT. The mayor’s office quickly followed that by announcing a Department of Sustainable Delivery, which would be the first agency of its kind devoted to tackling the thorny issues raised by the skyrocketing number of e-bikes and e-commerce deliveries—including curb congestion and an epidemic of battery fires. But employers have overwhelmingly shirked the AI law, while even designated battery charging hubs have been fined for unsafe practices. There are still limits to what one city can do.

Which is why cities must work together to share tough lessons, find strength in numbers, and scale promising technologies. With more than 200 members in 40-plus states, Next Century Cities was a model for joint advocacy on behalf of public infrastructure. Over time it was joined by new peer networks such as the Open Mobility Foundation, an international city-led developer of open-source standards and software for managing vehicles and curbs. “You cannot negotiate with an Amazon or an Uber city by city,” former Paris Deputy Mayor Jean Louis Missika once told me. “You have to say the rules of the game are the same in Singapore and Paris.”

The only way for cities to set those rules is to invest in building digital infrastructure themselves. One reason Sidewalk Toronto’s cautionary tale still resonates is that the public-private partnership overseeing the project failed to define what it wanted from its Alphabet-backed vendor. While privacy concerns grabbed headlines, Waterfront Toronto’s dereliction of duty is more troubling. When public agencies lack technical sophistication, they risk ceding control of public assets and data to private companies, which may prioritize profitable enclaves over inclusive deployment. Building public-sector capacity is critical to ensuring urban tech innovations benefit all residents, not just a privileged few.

But it’s also essential to do so democratically, in conjunction with residents, and this is where public officials and agencies have repeatedly stumbled—whether folding in the face of implacable NIMBYs or failing to persuade marginalized communities their best intentions aren’t stalking horses for gentrification. CoUrbanize and pandemic-era virtual planning meetings hinted at the potential for new forms of cocreation, now being realized through generative AI tools such as UrbanistAI and Betterstreets.ai, which enable nonexperts to visualize exactly (more or less) what they want. Whether the matter at hand is new bus routes or bike lanes or berms against flooding, assuring public buy-in is crucial to meeting cities’ climate goals in time for them to matter.

If the last decade of urban tech has been a dress rehearsal, then the curtain is now rising on the most momentous decade of change most cities have ever had to face. “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” the British architect Cedric Price famously asked. Finally it is our turn to formulate what we demand from our technologies, versus the other way around.

Greg Lindsay is a nonresident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives lab, Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab, and the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of AlphaGeo and remains a senior advisor. Most recently, he was a 2022–2023 urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and AR at urban scale.

Lead image: A fleet of electric buses waits to be exported from China to Chile. Credit: Yutong Bus Co., Ltd.

That we need more affordable housing—a lot more of it—is hardly in dispute. Attainable housing is the foundation of economic and social stability for American families, and by most estimates, the shortage of available, affordable homes in the US numbers in the millions.

And yet actually building more of the affordable housing that everyone seems to agree we need remains a challenge in communities across the country, as theoretical support crashes headlong into real-world resistance and constraints.

In a December webinar hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, experts dove into the devilish details to address two of the thorniest questions that tend to haunt housing discussions: Where can we locate affordable housing? And how do we pay for it?

Mapping Public, Buildable Lots

In the first of two sessions, Jeff Allenby, director of geospatial innovation at the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), shared how CGS is leveraging technology to help local policymakers get the data they need to act on housing.

“We’ve developed a unique, rapid, and robust method to unlock critical information about America’s housing stock,” Allenby said, describing Who Owns America, a unique analysis CGS developed to help local leaders understand and act on emerging issues like out-of-state investor ownership or locating underutilized lots in parcel-by-parcel detail. “It’s the same type of sophisticated insights the private sector uses to profit from residential housing, but instead we put these insights in the hands of policymakers so they can protect and preserve affordability.”

CGS cleans and standardizes parcel-level ownership data, fusing it “with authoritative sources like deed information, corporate structures, and census data to fill in gaps and paint a richer picture all in one place,” Allenby explained. “There’s never been such a severe shortage of homes in the United States,” Allenby said. “To address it, we need more housing—affordable housing—built close to where people work and where they want to live. But the big question we’re trying to answer is, where do we build it?” he added. “For us, the answer starts with data—building an inventory of available land in your area.”

Researchers and officials from across the political spectrum have expressed a growing interest in siting new housing on city- or government-owned property. That prompted CGS to evaluate all the government-owned lots across the country and their potential to support new housing, explained Reina Chano Murray, associate director at CGS. “We were curious: How much land is government owned, and how much of an impact can it truly have?” she said.

Murray demonstrated how the CGS team identified over 270,000 acres of buildable, transit-served lots owned by government agencies in major metro areas—enough acreage to support nearly two million homes at the relatively low density of seven units per acre. Most of that land, Murray noted—237,000 acres—is controlled by local governments, making them uniquely positioned to act. “Ultimately, the ability to turn these housing opportunities into reality rests with local policymakers,” she said.

The process began with identifying publicly owned land at all levels of government and scouring parcel records for keywords that would indicate government ownership, such as “Department of Transportation.” Many records are not so straightforward or standardized, though. Murray said her team has encountered “over 50 different ways to spell USA or United States of America, and the variations in naming conventions only increase” at the local level.

From there, the team winnowed the data further to include only census tracts in urban areas and economic centers — where the most housing demand exists — and further still, to areas within a quarter-mile of a transit stop with hourly service or better at rush hour. Murray’s team then removed parks and other green spaces, vital infrastructure, and public buildings, such as administrative offices, schools, community colleges, and hospitals.

To narrow it down to truly buildable lots, they excluded places located in flood hazard areas and chose parcels of at least 20,000 square feet where any existing structures occupied no more than 5 percent of the lot. “We now have a clear and data-backed answer that indicates significant opportunity for addressing the affordable housing crisis using government-owned land,” Murray said. “Our analysis identified over a quarter of a million acres of prime, development-ready land in transit-accessible, urban neighborhoods.”

Murray then presented findings from another inquiry. In response to so-called “YIGBY” laws (Yes In God’s Backyard) passed in California and Arizona—which make it easier for churches, temples, mosques, and other faith-based organizations to build housing on their properties—the Boston-based Lynch Foundation commissioned CGS to determine how much affordable housing could be built on land owned by faith-based organizations in Massachusetts.

After identifying about 7,000 properties owned by faith-based organizations statewide, a team of 15 students at Boston College “virtually visited” each site through a custom application, using Google Street View to examine each parcel and answering basic survey questions, such as whether there was developable space on-site or additional buildings not used for worship. CGS confirmed 1,973 faith-based parcels deemed to have over 203 million square feet of total developable space. At seven homes per acre, Murray said, “That’s enough land to build over 140,000 units of affordable housing in Massachusetts alone.”

The effort took less than two months to complete, from start to finish—showing plenty of potential for religious institutions to alleviate the housing shortage and for technology to help policymakers quickly and accurately identify buildable land that has been hiding in plain sight.

Funding the Future

If locating land is the first step, finding the financing to build housing on those lots is the next challenge. Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow R.J. McGrail welcomed three partners affiliated with Lincoln’s Accelerating Community Investment (ACI) initiative to discuss funding strategies for affordable housing development.

Laura Brunner, president and CEO of the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority, kicked things off on a positive note. She explained how Cincinnati, like other Midwestern cities, has been a prime target for institutional investors whose playbook involves outbidding first-time buyers to purchase single-family homes, then renting them out, often at inflated rates, locking residents out of homeownership opportunities.

But in 2022, the Port learned about a portfolio of almost 200 investor-owned rental houses that were being auctioned out of receivership. With a goal of restoring homeownership opportunities for the city’s low- and middle-income residents, the Port issued both taxable and tax-exempt bonds to enter a $15.5 million bid on the portfolio—and won.

“We first went to our nonprofit partners to ask if they would support us, and what we heard back was, ‘Yes, you have a mandate, a moral imperative to do this. We have to save these homeownership opportunities,’” Brunner said.

The plan was to rehab the vacant homes and sell them at prices affordable to buyers earning 80 percent of the area median income (AMI), while stabilizing the existing tenants and getting them prepared for eventual homeownership through home-buying education and financial counseling.

“We issued these bonds really confident that we were going to be able to take 200 homes and put them back into homeownership from rental without any subsidy, which is unheard of—all the new home construction we do requires a significant amount of subsidy,” Brunner said.

But while the receiver had claimed 10 of the properties were vacant, at least 60 of them turned out to be unoccupied—and in very bad shape. The Port has thus spent more money than expected to get the vacant houses ready for resale (and, at a local appraiser’s suggestion, to perform essential upgrades that most low-income homebuyers can’t afford to do themselves, like installing air conditioning). “When we found out the condition the houses really were in, we did need subsidy,” Brunner said. “But we’ve been successful . . . raising a number of grants that allow us to continue to keep the price down as much as possible.”

To date the Port has rehabbed and sold half of the 60 vacant homes at an average price of $150,000. “These are low- and moderate-income Black and brown neighborhoods [where residents] have basically not had an opportunity to purchase a home because such a high percentage were owned by these investors, and so we’re suppressing the sales price as much as we can,” she said.

The Port, which has also created affordable housing through a local land bank it’s managed since 2011, requires homebuyers to occupy its homes for at least five years before reselling. And after more than a decade of doing so, their efforts are creating real neighborhood wealth, Brunner said.

“We’ve done it long enough now that we’ve had about 30 people that have subsequently sold their house, and what we found is that those homeowners had a profit of 52 percent,” Brunner said. “So it proves that, even in these deeply distressed neighborhoods, we are making a market and . . . there’s wealth creation opportunity, which is what we’re all about.”

Plugging Gaps with Flexible Funding

MassHousing, the state housing finance agency for Massachusetts, also views homeownership as a way to help close the racial wealth gap, said Executive Director Chrystal Kornegay. “We sell tax-exempt and taxable bonds and use the proceeds of those bonds to lend to low- and moderate-income homebuyers,” she explained, as well as to developers of rental housing to ensure they keep a portion of their units affordable.

But when MassHousing conducted a study on where people of color were buying homes in Massachusetts, the organization noticed a pattern: Not only was new housing not being built at the pace it was two decades ago, Kornegay said, “but where it was being built was not the places in which people of color lived.” In response, the agency is trying to ensure some of its programs, such as down payment assistance for first-time buyers and incentives for affordable housing developers, are used more often in communities where people of color want to live.

Kornegay then discussed how zoning is often perceived as the primary obstacle to getting more affordable housing built but said that financing has become an even bigger hurdle in recent years, due to higher interest rates and other market conditions.

“Getting access to capital has become a huge barrier,” she said, noting that over 20,000 already-permitted units in Massachusetts have stalled out in development “because the capital stack for those deals just didn’t make sense anymore.”

Most large-scale, multifamily buildings in Massachusetts are permitted through the state’s comprehensive permit law, known as 40B, Kornegay said. And since those projects require at least 20 percent of the units to be affordable, at 80 percent of AMI, “they have affordability built into them,” she said. So Massachusetts created a flexible financial product geared specifically toward such projects, available through MassHousing, called “Momentum Equity.” While not a subsidy, it’s designed to blend with private financing and inject the extra capital needed—up to 25 percent of a project’s equity—to get more of those developments off the sidelines and into production. (Equity financing refers to an investment-style ownership stake, as opposed to a loan that is paid back at agreed-upon terms.)

A second new product, which can be paired with Momentum Equity funding, is called the FORGE loan. “We’ve created this product along with Freddie Mac, in which MassHousing as a lender would put up 10 percent of the total loan amount and serve in the first loan-loss position,” Kornegay explained, thereby securing more favorable lending terms. “These products together really can make an impact in the capital stack and get a bunch of units into construction in the next six to 12 months.”

Tapping Federal Funds Outside of HUD

Greg Heller, director of housing and community solutions at the global consulting firm Guidehouse, described how the two major pandemic relief acts passed by Congress provided a huge influx of federal money that could be used for housing over the past few years—and how more funding exists, if communities know where and how to look for it (and if the funds survive possible freezes or cuts enacted by the Trump administration).

Federal pandemic relief funding provided “new sources of capital that could be applied for things like eviction prevention programs, for things like housing and counseling, and first and foremost for gap financing for either tax-credit projects or non-tax-credit projects,” he said. “Everybody all over the country was trying to figure out how to harness and use these new financing sources.” About 10 percent of the $350 billion that cities and counties received in local recovery funds through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) went to housing, he added—money that needs to be spent by 2026.

What’s interesting, Heller added, is that none of that money came through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). “Obviously, HUD continues to play a leading role . . . but all of these sources came through Treasury, and Treasury started to play a significant role in creating guidance around these programs and understanding how to blend and braid and layer this financing with conventional HUD entitlement sources.”

With ARPA funds hitting their obligation deadlines in 2026, Heller said, “the question is what comes next? And the answer is the funds in the Inflation Reduction Act.”

While ARPA funds were very flexible and could be used for a broad range of activities, he said, the IRA funds are funneled through specific programs at different agencies, including the US Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Treasury, as well as HUD.

“They all have different program guidelines, they all have different definitions of things like low-income disadvantaged communities, and so again it falls on cities, states, counties, to figure out how to harness these programs and use them to fill capital gaps for affordable housing, because it’s one-time funding,” he said. But the scale of the funding makes it worth wrestling with the complexity of the programs, he added.

The EPA, for example, has made $27 billion in funding available through three sources: the $7 billion Solar for All program, the $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, and the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund. “The latter two are flowing through awardees which are coalitions of green banks and CDFIs who are developing their product and starting to close loans and get those funds out on the street, and a lot of that is going to affordable housing,” he said.

The Solar for All program works through designated state entities and regional nonprofits, who aren’t as accustomed to housing finance. But Guidehouse has been working with state housing finance agencies to find ways to also tap into these funds, which can be used to help cover costs associated with rooftop solar installations and building electrification, for example.

“There’s a huge opportunity, for not just financing [on-site] energy generation, but also a range of other costs within the projects to get them solar-ready,” he said. “So those are tremendous opportunities for gap financing for affordable housing projects.”

Heller also urged attendees not to overlook home energy rebates from the Department of Energy, even if they’re more commonly associated with single-family homeowners who want to install a heat pump or insulate their attic, for example.

“These are actually huge opportunities for financing affordable multifamily [housing],” he said. “It’s $8.8 billion, and 10 percent of every state’s rebate assistance has to go to low-income multifamily . . . so there’s a huge focus on low-income multifamily, and there’s categorical eligibility for a whole range of subsidized affordable housing programs, including LIHTC, public housing, HUD and FHA multifamily programs, and a variety of others.”

“Then finally there are a range of tax credit programs that were amended through the IRA to make them more flexible and more available for affordable multifamily projects,” he said.

Of course, Heller acknowledged, some of those programs could see cuts or changes in the Trump administration. “There’s uncertainty [about] how that’s going to impact the programs and their guidance and availability moving forward, and I don’t think anybody has the answer on all of that quite yet,” he said. But the administration has shown an interest in financing more affordable housing, so there could be new opportunities as well, he added. “There will continue to be new programs that everyone has to sort of, in real time, figure out how to pivot and harness those funds and get them into projects that need them.”

Where There’s a Way, There’s a Will?

Wrapping up the webinar, Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. McCarthy reflected on how a huge national challenge—such as building an extra million homes per year on top of the 1.4 million a year we’re already constructing—can feel unassailable. “[And yet] we produced 2.4 million units of housing in 1972—a much smaller economy, a much smaller population,” McCarthy noted. “So it’s not that we can’t do it.”

As the presenters made clear, he said, buildable lots and funding options do exist—it’s a matter of showing people how to put the pieces together. “We have CGS ready to map it out for you, we have R.J. ready to show people how to blend public, private, and civic capital,” he said. “If we have the money, we have the land, we have the financing, what is missing? And what’s missing, of course, is the political will.”

And even that may not be the immovable obstacle it once was. Citing 12 states from across the political spectrum that have stepped in to preempt local zoning “to make sure that it’s possible to build housing where people have been preventing it from being built,” McCarthy said, “it’s not as if we don’t have some kind of bipartisan support for taking this on.”

With the land, money, and knowledge necessary to address our housing shortage, McCarthy concluded, “we just have to summon the real political will to get it done—and that’s a less daunting task than people would have you believe.”

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

Lead image: The Boston Housing Authority’s Old Colony redevelopment project has used federal funding to convert distressed public housing into safe, affordable, energy-efficient rental units. Credit: Andy Ryan Photography via BHA.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.”

At the Urban Planning & City Solutions for Climate Mobility panel, Cotter acknowledged “the increasing difficulty of people to remain in precarious places” and offered ways that communities anticipating a potential influx of climate change–induced relocation can plan and prepare for that future, drawing from the recent working paper “Insights for Receiving Communities in Planning Equitable and Positive Outcomes Under Climate Migration.”

The Lincoln Institute continued to expand the knowledge base and create new resources on the topic of land-based climate finance. Economist Cynthia Goytia, lead author of the recently published working paper “Examining Opportunities and Challenges for Implementing Land-Based Financing Instruments for Funding Climate Action: A Study of Land Markets and Flood Risk Pricing in Different Contexts,” explored the ways cities can recoup the costs of resilience through value capture, at the session Financing Strategies and Smart Solutions for Cities Worldwide.

Luis Quintanilla, program analyst at the Lincoln Institute, led a training workshop on value capture and participated in Financing Urban Infrastructure: Innovative Options to Attract Investors. In collaboration with the Cities Forward initiative, the session Overcoming the Project Implementation Gap to Address Urban Sustainability and Resilience revealed the opportunity and benefit of land value capture for climate action.

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 the Land 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.

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. 

Four-day workweek pilots introduced globally and in the US show that reduced hours can lead to higher productivity and greater life satisfaction. Workers think so, too. About 80 percent said they would be happier and just as productive dropping a day from the traditional schedule, according to the 2024 Work in America study. 

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.

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.

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.”

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 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).

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.”

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.

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.

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.