En São Paulo, Brasil, entre rascacielos corporativos, tiendas de lujo y hoteles de alta gama del barrio Vila Olímpia, se encuentra un complejo de viviendas de interés social de 272 unidades. Construido en el terreno de la antigua favela Coliseu, el altísimo edificio de condominios no es solo un hogar nuevo y más seguro para cientos de familias de bajos ingresos que vivieron en el asentamiento informal durante décadas, en medio de incendios, inundaciones y ratas. También es, según sus promotores, una prueba de que la inversión en un vecindario no necesariamente significa el desplazamiento de los residentes, y de que las viviendas de interés social se pueden construir incluso en la zona más cara de una ciudad.

En marzo, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo invitó a un grupo diverso de investigadores y profesionales de todo el mundo a participar en un viaje de estudio de cuatro días junto con algunos miembros del personal del instituto. El viaje de estudio, que combinó sesiones en el aula con visitas de campo, permitió a los participantes explorar de primera mano este reconocido ejemplo de recuperación de plusvalías. También llamada captación de la plusvalía, la recuperación de plusvalías se refiere a un conjunto de políticas que le permiten a una comunidad recuperar y reinvertir las plusvalías del suelo generadas por la inversión pública u otras acciones gubernamentales, como una nueva estación de transporte o un cambio en los requisitos de zonificación.

“En São Paulo, tenemos al menos dos buenos ejemplos de asentamientos informales que se mejoraron en lugares donde el suelo es muy caro”, explica Paulo Sandroni, un economista que desarrolló el curso en conjunto con la urbanista Camila Maleronka. “Tuvimos la idea de presentarles y explicarles a los demás los instrumentos que usamos; primero, para recuperar las plusvalías, y, segundo, para garantizar que las personas de asentamientos informales sigan viviendo en el mismo lugar, pero ahora en cómodos apartamentos”.

El proceso funciona de la siguiente manera: La ciudad elige un área para realizar una intervención pública como parte de una “Operación Urbana”. Los emprendedores inmobiliarios que deseen construir estructuras más grandes de lo permitido en esa zona pueden comprar Certificados de Potencial Adicional de Construcción, o CEPAC, que se venden en el mercado público de valores. Por ende, es el sector privado quien determina el precio en última instancia. Los ingresos de esas subastas de CEPAC luego financian obras públicas y viviendas de interés social en el mismo vecindario.

Sin embargo, el hecho de que sea posible recuperar las plusvalías y reinvertirlas en viviendas de interés social no significa que suceda inevitablemente, en especial, en vecindarios caros. “La comunidad de Coliseu tuvo que luchar contra muchas adversidades y muchas fuerzas, ya sea de emprendedores inmobiliarios, de vecinos que no querían que se quedaran allí e incluso de algunos miembros del gobierno”, dice Sandroni. “Pero los líderes de este movimiento dijeron: ‘Tenemos derecho a estar aquí. La legislación nos dio las herramientas para quedarnos aquí, y hay dinero para construir estos edificios’. Fue un maravilloso ejemplo de desarrollo urbano inclusivo”.

Las herramientas de recuperación de plusvalías de São Paulo han sido el foco de muchos estudios de casos; pero ver los resultados en persona, in situ, ayudó a materializar el concepto para muchos participantes de organizaciones como la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE), el Banco Europeo de Reconstrucción y Desarrollo (BERD) y el Centro para el Financiamiento de Viviendas Asequibles en África, entre otros.

“Lo que vi en São Paulo me sorprendió mucho”, dice Line Algoed, una antropóloga urbana de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “Sabía sobre la recuperación de plusvalías, pero nunca había visto los resultados en persona. No sabía nada sobre los CEPAC y los otros instrumentos utilizados en São Paulo, que posicionan a esta ciudad como referente del urbanismo innovador”.

Los resultados en São Paulo no fueron perfectos, agrega Algoed, “pero es muy bueno ver que el gobierno local está tratando de mitigar las consecuencias de la especulación inmobiliaria desenfrenada”.

Hiro Ito se unió al curso interesado por los mecanismos financieros que podrían ayudar a las ciudades a pagar infraestructura climática. Ito es el gerente de programa del Plan de Acción para Ciudades Verdes del BERD, donde trabaja con gobiernos municipales para identificar inversiones y políticas que puedan ayudarlos a prepararse para desafíos ambientales y el cambio climático. “Hemos desarrollado planes de acción con 47 ciudades”, indica Ito. “Pero muchas de esas acciones, sobre todo las relacionadas con la naturaleza o la adaptación al clima, no se están implementando”, muchas veces por falta de fondos.

“Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza, la protección contra inundaciones y la mitigación del efecto isla de calor urbano no son proyectos que usualmente generen ingresos”, explica Ito. “Esperamos que esta sea otra forma de fortalecer las finanzas municipales para que las ciudades de todo el mundo puedan aprovechar en mayor medida esos espacios”.

En un recorrido a pie que incluyó tanto el edificio Coliseu como el icónico puente Octavio Frias de Oliveira de São Paulo, Ito quedó impresionado con el alcance y la escala de las inversiones de la ciudad, y se preguntó si un método similar de recuperación de plusvalías podría funcionar en Ankara, Turquía, donde el BERD ayuda a financiar la construcción de una nueva línea de metro. Al regresar del viaje, Ito y sus colegas comenzaron a estudiar cómo implementar una herramienta de financiamiento con base en el suelo para la Municipalidad Metropolitana de Ankara, ya que hay varios terrenos de propiedad pública que podrían urbanizarse en la zona. “¿Podríamos introducir mecanismos como los CEPAC para recaudar a partir de esa reurbanización? En última instancia, es para cubrir el costo de las ampliaciones del metro, pero potencialmente las áreas de regeneración urbana podrían traer otros beneficios sociales y medioambientales”.

Ito valoró que los instructores del curso, Sandroni y Maleronka, también explicaran algunas de las deficiencias, limitaciones y desafíos del enfoque de São Paulo. Reconoce que alcanzar un éxito similar depende de ciertas condiciones.

“La idea de aplicar este método en Turquía surge porque la población urbana está creciendo y hay una fuerte demanda de viviendas adicionales. Tiene sentido para algunos emprendedores inmobiliarios comprar derechos adicionales”, dice Ito. “Pero no todos los países donde opera el BERD tienen una tendencia demográfica similar”, agrega, y señala que los mercados inmobiliarios de las ciudades más pequeñas de Bulgaria o Rumanía, por ejemplo, pueden no ser lo suficientemente fuertes como para sostener el financiamiento con base en el suelo. “Pero nos gustó mucho este enfoque basado en el mercado para determinar el precio… me pareció una forma muy inteligente de aprovechar al máximo el espacio”.

Lo que más llamó la atención de Kecia Rust, fundadora y directora ejecutiva del Centro para el Financiamiento de Viviendas Asequibles en África, fue la afirmación del Estado de que los derechos de aire son un bien público.

“El enfoque general que hizo que sean posibles Coliseu y otras inversiones en viviendas de interés social, así como también la entrega del icónico puente de São Paulo, el monorraíl, las carreteras, los carriles para bicicletas y otras inversiones en obras públicas proviene de una filosofía subyacente de que los derechos de propiedad privada pueden extenderse en términos de longitud y latitud, pero no en altura”, escribió Rust en una entrada de blog que reflexiona sobre el curso. “Los derechos de aire son un bien público, que el sector público vende para generar ingresos para invertir en obras públicas y viviendas de interés social”, continuó. “La ciudad no tiene que endeudarse cuando invierte en la construcción de carreteras, puentes y viviendas de interés social”.

“Creo que el desafío clave que enfrentamos en el contexto africano es que realmente no tenemos los datos o la capacidad de gestión a nivel local para llegar a hacer lo que se está haciendo en São Paulo”, dice Rust. “Pero lo que vi y entendí fue muy inspirador”.

Varios miembros del personal del Instituto Lincoln también se unieron al curso, muchos de los cuales, fuera del equipo de América Latina, nunca habían tenido la oportunidad de ver en persona este prominente ejemplo global de recuperación de plusvalías. “Esta idea de desarrollo sin desplazamiento, de cómo salvaguardar o reducir el riesgo de desplazamiento cuando se invierte en las comunidades, es un tema que está en primer plano en gran parte del trabajo que estamos realizando en el instituto”, dice Enrique Silva, director de programas del Instituto Lincoln. Silva invitó intencionalmente a miembros del personal de todos los sectores de la organización: “Esta idea de aprender juntos, compartir y aprender e intercambiar, es algo que me encantaría que sucediera con mayor frecuencia”.

Jon Gorey es redactor del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Imagen principal: El complejo de viviendas de interés social Coliseu, de 272 unidades, rodeado por los edificios más altos del distrito Vila Olímpia de São Paulo, es un ejemplo de recuperación de plusvalías. Crédito: Ciudad de São Paulo. 

El Instituto Lincoln ofrece una variedad de oportunidades para investigadores que se encuentran transitando momentos tempranos y medios de sus carreras. En esta serie, hacemos un seguimiento de nuestros becarios para conocer más sobre su trabajo. 

Con una maestría en Planeamiento Urbano y un doctorado en Antropología, hace tiempo que Adriana Hurtado Tarazona se interesa por la relación entre el comportamiento humano y la organización urbana y, en especial, cómo y dónde eligen vivir las personas. Luego de recibir una beca para estudiantes de posgrado del Programa para América Latina y el Caribe (ALC) del Instituto Lincoln, dedicó años al estudio de megaproyectos de viviendas de interés social en las afueras de ciudades de Colombia; esto le permitió pasar mucho tiempo conversando con las personas que vivían allí, para conocer cómo experimentaban la comunidad y el entorno construido. 

Hoy, Hurtado Tarazona es profesora adjunta de Planificación, Gobernanza y Desarrollo Territorial en el Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre Desarrollo (CIDER) de la Universidad de los Andes en Bogotá, Colombia. “Doy un curso introductorio sobre instrumentos de planificación del suelo, así que todavía sigo hablando de lo que aprendí gracias al Instituto Lincoln en un curso al que asistí en Quito allá por 2005”, comenta.

En esta entrevista, que se editó por razones de longitud y claridad, Hurtado Tarazona analiza por qué la vivienda debería tratarse como una política social en lugar de una política económica, comparte opiniones sorprendentes de los residentes de viviendas de interés social y, además, explica por qué puede ser mejor otorgar dinero para que las personas mejoren su vivienda antes que subsidiar la compra de viviendas nuevas.

JON GOREY: ¿Cuál es el enfoque general de su investigación? ¿Y cómo cree que contribuyó en ese trabajo la beca del Instituto Lincoln?

ADRIANA HURTADO TARAZONA: Recibí la beca para la tesis de maestría en 2006. Estaba analizando el impacto en el valor del suelo de un sector de la infraestructura de los sistemas de transporte público masivo en autobús (BRT, por sus siglas en inglés) en Bogotá: el TransMilenio. Ese era uno de los primeros estudios que se realizaban porque, en ese momento, el TransMilenio se había implementado hacía solo cuatro años, por lo que era muy nuevo. Buscaba documentar los cambios en el espacio urbano en el área circundante a las dos grandes estaciones, desde la perspectiva del mercado del suelo y desde la perspectiva de los residentes en la zona.

Me encantó participar del programa, porque conocí a muchos de los profesores y las profesoras vinculados con el programa de América Latina. Disfruté mucho la experiencia. Y, hace tres años, una de mis estudiantes recibió la misma beca que yo había recibido casi 20 años antes. Fue interesante participar de nuevo desde un lugar diferente, acompañar a mi alumna y ser testigo de cómo ella pudo experimentar los beneficios de la beca.

JG: ¿En qué está trabajando ahora y en qué le interesaría trabajar a futuro?

AHT: Ahora estoy trabajando en cuatro proyectos de investigación. Dos de ellos están relacionados con el tema principal de mi tesis doctoral, que es la vivienda de interés social y, más específicamente, la producción y expansión urbana de megaproyectos de vivienda de interés social en las fronteras urbanas. Uno de los proyectos que finalizaremos este año con la Universidad de York en Toronto se llama “Periferias verticales”. Analizamos el impacto subjetivo de vivir en la periferia, pero también el impacto en el planeamiento urbano y la gobernanza del proceso de metropolización, en el que las viviendas de interés social traspasan los límites de las ciudades colombianas. El otro proyecto se enfoca en el impacto económico del acceso a las viviendas de interés social. Analizaremos puntualmente cómo los hogares administrados por mujeres tienen que modificar su economía doméstica a fin de poder mantenerse al día con los costos para acceder por primera vez a una vivienda de su propiedad.

El tercero es el proyecto de infraestructura del cuidado de personas, liderado por la Universidad de Washington en Seattle. Se trata de un proyecto comparativo entre Belfast, Belo Horizonte (en Brasil) y Bogotá. Estudiamos historias sobre el cambio urbano en general y, en Bogotá, nos centramos en cómo el cuidado se convirtió en un foco de la política urbana, lo cual no sucedía hasta hace muy poco, y analizamos el nacimiento del sistema de CUIDADO distrital como una infraestructura urbana. Tenemos reglamentaciones nuevas que entienden que la infraestructura del cuidado está al mismo nivel que la del agua, el alcantarillado y las carreteras, lo cual es muy interesante, e intentamos documentar qué condiciones posibilitaron este cambio.

Y el último proyecto en el que estoy trabajando con el Instituto Lincoln se trata de una beca de investigación pequeña que recibí el año pasado. Quien está a cargo de la investigación es de Brasil y, junto con Argentina, Bolivia, Perú y Colombia, estamos tratando de hacer un análisis comparativo de las intervenciones que buscan apoyar la densificación.

JG: ¿Hay algo que la haya sorprendido o que le haya resultado inesperado durante toda su investigación?

AHT: Les he preguntado a muchas personas si están contentas con sus viviendas a nivel general y la primera sorpresa fue desde una perspectiva urbanística. Quienes se dedican al urbanismo de forma local no suelen ver con buenos ojos estos megaproyectos de viviendas de interés social periféricos, masivos y estandarizados, porque se ubican lejos de la ciudad, están desconectados y presentan problemas de accesibilidad. Yo sabía eso y, entonces, me enfoqué en el trabajo de campo con esa perspectiva crítica en mente.

Sin embargo, cuando me senté con las personas, lo primero que me dijeron fue: “No, a mí me encanta esto. Me encanta el orden. Me encanta que todo sea estándar”. Lo que los urbanistas veían como una “ciudad inhabitable” o un “no-lugar”, a la gente le parecía bien: “Me gusta porque está planeado, es ordenado, es prolijo”. Eso fue lo primero que me sorprendió.

Y me sorprendió porque estas personas habían vivido en casas construidas por sí mismas en las que tenían más espacio y más flexibilidad en el uso de los espacios, además de que estaban mejor ubicadas en la ciudad. Pero, después de pasar más tiempo con ellos, me di cuenta de que se trataba de una cuestión de prioridades: como el mercado de viviendas no les permitía comprar en ningún otro lugar, eligieron ser propietarios a pesar del tiempo que debían pasar viajando, a pesar de estar lejos de la familia, los amigos y las redes de apoyo.

Sabían lo que estaban perdiendo, pero se trataba de una elección consciente de prioridades: “Estoy eligiendo esto, por sobre esto otro”. Y lo que priorizaban era la estabilidad de tener su propia casa, aunque fuera pequeña, estuviera lejos y costara mucho. Esta elección se relaciona de forma directa con las oportunidades de movilidad social que brinda este país, que se centran en el acceso a la propiedad. Ser parte de la clase media nueva en Colombia significa más que nada tener tu propia casa en las áreas formales de la ciudad, no en los barrios informales.

JG: En lo que respecta a su trabajo, ¿qué la mantiene despierta por la noche? ¿Y qué le da esperanza?

AHT: Lo que me preocupa es que la política de vivienda en Colombia, y creo que también en otros países, sigue la lógica del mercado inmobiliario, es decir, que la única forma de resolver el problema de la vivienda es construir viviendas nuevas y venderlas a hogares de bajos ingresos mediante subsidios. Pero también hay otras alternativas; existen muchas formas de abordar el problema de la vivienda.

En las ciudades colombianas, incluida Bogotá, el déficit cualitativo de vivienda es tres veces mayor que el déficit cuantitativo de vivienda. Esto significa que la cantidad de hogares que necesitan mejorar su vivienda es tres veces mayor que los que necesitan viviendas nuevas. Sin embargo, nuestra política de vivienda otorga todos los recursos y toda la atención a la construcción de viviendas nuevas. Si bien existen programas de mejora de viviendas en los vecindarios, no reciben suficiente presupuesto, no tienen la atención necesaria y no se los considera una manera legítima de resolver el problema de la vivienda.

Entonces, quisiera que cambie el enfoque y que se empiece a brindar más atención y más recursos para mejorar lo que ya tenemos, la ciudad que ya está construida. Esto sería beneficioso tanto para el medio ambiente como para la economía de las personas. Tiene muchas ventajas, pero por supuesto que es un proceso más lento. No involucra cifras muy grandes, ni es funcional al interés de los sectores inmobiliario y financiero.

Lo que me da esperanza es que hay ciertas intervenciones que están dando buenos resultados. Una de ellas es el apoyo a la densificación en barrios de origen informal. Se trata de programas que reconocen que hay barrios de origen informal, con viviendas construidas por quienes las habitan, que son más antiguos y que tienen una buena ubicación en la ciudad, por lo que ya tienen acceso a la infraestructura y los bienes y servicios urbanos, pero necesitan apoyo para crecer en altura.

Entonces, tenemos un programa que ofrece ayuda para reforzar la estructura y subsidios para que las personas construyan un segundo piso en sus casas. Esa unidad nueva la pueden ocupar ellas mismas, si son muchas, o pueden alquilarla a otras personas para tener una fuente nueva de ingresos. Opino que es un programa muy innovador, porque mejora la seguridad estructural de las casas y fomenta una mayor disponibilidad de viviendas, mientras que posibilita que los hogares de bajos ingresos obtengan ingresos nuevos a partir de la construcción de unidades nuevas.

El Estado está apoyando un proceso que sucedería de todos modos, con o sin su ayuda. Pero, con la intervención del Estado, las condiciones son mejores y más seguras, se trata de otra manera de invertir recursos públicos para solucionar el problema de la vivienda. De todas formas, estos son proyectos piloto de escala pequeña. En el futuro, quiero trabajar para buscar la manera de ampliar este proyecto y lograr que la mejora de la vivienda y el vecindario ocupe un lugar más central en la política urbana.

JG: ¿Puede hablar de la relación entre la antropología y el planeamiento urbano?

AHT: En todos los proyectos de investigación, intento pensar los procesos urbanos desde un punto de vista de la estructura, pero también de las experiencias de las personas, y creo que haber estudiado antropología y urbanismo me permite combinar esos enfoques. Es una combinación muy fructífera para observar los procesos desde diferentes perspectivas. Cuando se trata de temas técnicos, como los instrumentos de gestión del suelo o la recuperación de plusvalías, resulta útil conversar con quienes están pasando por ese proceso para tener más contexto sobre la situación.

Desde que hice la tesis de la maestría, tengo curiosidad por saber cómo entiende la gente el valor del suelo. En los contextos que analicé, las personas están muy preocupadas por los cambios en el valor del suelo de sus propiedades, pero las formas de lidiar con esos cambios o con la posibilidad de que esos cambios ocurran son muy diferentes.

Por ejemplo, para su tesis, mi alumna analizó desde una perspectiva etnográfica cómo las personas lidian con la incertidumbre que generan los retrasos en un plan de renovación urbana, cómo entienden el posible incremento del valor del suelo de su hogar y de qué forma esa aspiración de obtener una ganancia genera tensiones en la vida diaria respecto a otros valores del hogar, como el valor de uso.

Y me encontré con la misma situación en cuanto a las viviendas de interés social, es decir, la tensión constante entre pensar el hogar como un lugar para vivir y pensarlo como una inversión de la que quisieran sacar provecho. Esas dos narrativas, esos valores, están siempre en tensión, incluso si se trata de hogares de muy bajos ingresos, e impactan no solo en los comportamientos de la gente, sino también en el comportamiento de la comunidad, e incluso en cómo se relacionan con las instituciones públicas y la ciudad.

Esa es mi inquietud principal, y por eso combino hablar con las personas, estar con las personas y pasar el rato con ellas, con tareas más técnicas como analizar documentos, leyes, reglamentaciones y datos cuantitativos.

JG: ¿Sobre qué aspecto de las viviendas de interés social le gustaría que más personas entendieran?

AHT: Debemos entender que las políticas sobre la vivienda tienen que ver con las políticas sociales y no con las políticas económicas. En Colombia, así como sucede en otros países latinoamericanos que todavía no han caído en la hiperfinancierización, tenemos la oportunidad de evitar seguir la misma dirección que los Estados Unidos, España y otros lugares en los que la crisis de la vivienda está en su peor momento. Todavía no llegamos a ese estado.

JG: ¿Qué libro puede recomendar que haya leído hace poco o cuál es su programa de televisión favorito?    

AHT: Disfruté mucho la lectura del libro Préstamos fallidos, personas fallidas de Melissa García-Lamarca sobre personas endeudadas en Barcelona. Se trata de los impactos subjetivos de vivir endeudado y, además, de cómo la deuda no solo tiene que ver con un problema económico, sino también con un problema moral.

Estoy intentando vincular ese concepto con nuestro proyecto nuevo. Estoy empezando a leer análisis económico feminista y análisis económico antropológico, para entender en profundidad qué implica vivir con deuda y, en especial, una deuda por la vivienda, y qué impacto tiene en diferentes aspectos de la vida cotidiana. Porque la deuda no solo se limita a las hipotecas: las personas de bajos ingresos aquí tienen que recurrir a todo tipo de deudas, formales e informales, para cubrir el costo de vida. La deuda puede ser con un pariente, con el banco o puede ser una hipoteca, pero también puede haber deudas usurarias, como prestamistas o personas que cobran tasas de interés altas a hogares de bajos ingresos.

En cuanto a la televisión, intento ver contenido que no esté relacionado con estos temas. Estaba viendo Silo, una serie futurista distópica sobre una sociedad que vive en un edificio altísimo, pero bajo tierra: ¡algo muy deprimente! De todas formas, me gusta lo postapocalíptico.

Jon Gorey es redactor del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Imagen principal: Adriana Hurtado Tarazona de la Universidad de los Andes en Bogotá, Colombia. Crédito: Foto de cortesía. 

This article is reprinted with permission from Bloomberg CityLab, where it originally appeared.

At the American Institute of Architects conference this year in Boston, those dressed in black—long the unofficial uniform of uber-creative design professionals—seemed to be outnumbered. The architects prowling the convention center were more likely to be sporting button-down Oxfords or Patagonia, on their way to such sessions as “Next-Level Roofs: Energy Efficiency, Embodied Carbon, and Code Compliance.”

An architectural trend can’t be based on a wardrobe census, of course, but a shift toward more practical, sustainability-oriented work was palpable. And increasingly, that means working on retrofits, rather than creating snazzy new structures. AIA billings survey data in 2022 revealed that architects for the first time were earning more revenue for commissions on existing buildings than new construction. Recent Pritzker Prize wins by Lacaton & Vassal and David Chipperfield represent high-profile recognition of advances in restoration and renovation. Rules are being put in place to encourage adaptive reuse, as in Los Angeles, or to promote a circular economy and limit demolition, as in San Antonio. Those ordinances are alongside financial incentives offered by several local governments for converting office buildings to residential use.

So while some may still dream of becoming the next Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, many design professionals these days seem to be singularly—almost soberly—occupied with reworking blueprints, as part of the quest to make the built environment as green and socially responsible as possible.

“The most urgent thing that’s on our plate right now is climate action, and that we have to decarbonize very rapidly,” said Carl Elefante, author of the recently published Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future and the architect credited with coining the phrase that the greenest building is the one that is already built.

It might be called the Retrofit Revolution. Or, more dramatically: the End of Architecture. At least as we knew it.

“Architecture’s long capital-P Project of exploring ever-more-complicated forms has finally come to an end. The heroic pursuit of formal complexity for its own sake feels like a bygone thing,” writes editor Jack Murphy in the May issue of The Architect’s Newspaper. “Architects should still make things, but perhaps they should be making maintenance plans or organization charts or business plans or adaptive reuse scenarios or affordable housing. Making form is necessary but easy; it’s the rest of the stuff that is hard.”

Does this mean nobody can build anything new, much less have any fun anymore? Not necessarily. It’s a safe bet there will always be a place for contemporary design—just as long as it’s green.

“There is only one crucial divide in architecture: architecture that is dependent on heavy fossil fuel inputs, and architecture that isn’t,” writes Barnabas Calder, historian of architecture at the University of Liverpool. In this context, style is beside the point.

The more critical distinction with this baseline specification of sustainability is that existing buildings, and all their embodied carbon, generally have an edge over new construction. So not only architecture but related fields like urban design, landscape architecture, planning, engineering, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work “are all duking it out, so to speak, to get a share of this emerging market sector,” said Lori Ferriss, executive director of the Built Buildings Lab.

Increasingly, advances in technology in the field are geared toward retrofits, including determining the all-important issue of cost (it can often be cheaper to renovate versus demolish and build anew, though that’s not always the case). The CARE Tool (Carbon Avoided: Retrofit Estimator) is used by builders to help measure the environmental benefits of renovations. The global design firm Gensler has developed software called Conversions+ that can help determine the viability of converting office buildings to residential use, through a cost-conscious algorithmic analysis of elements such as floor plates, window and elevator locations. A company called Existing Conditions, exhibiting at the AIA convention, offers laser scanning and radar sensors so renovators can know the location and condition of the guts of any building, from pipes to rebar.

And accordingly, much of the brain power in architecture is being devoted to things other than creating sculptural elements that are interesting to look at. The work is almost by definition not showy, in the sense that it’s more likely to be rethinking the arrangement and quality of spaces on the inside of existing buildings, rather than the appearance of facades and exteriors. Some of the best energy and innovation in the field is likely to be found not in starchitect-led firms but ones like Gensler, a roll-up-the-sleeves operation that just won the National Building Museum’s 2025 Honor Award. The company, spurred on by the need for reinvented workplace interiors post-pandemic, has excelled in what This Old House viewers might recognize as the gut rehab. Similarly, a rising star is Annabelle Selldorf, is best known for projects like her expansion of New York City’s Gilded Age Frick Collection.

“Architecture is becoming less about individual expression and more about collective responsibility,” said Harry Cliffe-Roberts, Gensler’s building transformation and adaptive reuse leader.

All kinds of design innovations, whether in new construction or retrofits, are being celebrated more for broader societal goals, like affordable housing. The winner of the Single-Stair Design Competition, for example, was recently honored at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Providence, Rhode Island. Outdated codes requiring multiple egress in multifamily projects four stories and higher have been identified as a major contributor to higher housing costs; the problematique is how to configure stairways to maintain access and safety.

A little bit nerdy, to be sure, but part and parcel of the new ethos.

As to the next logical question: Have US architecture schools kept up? A handful of institutions have prided themselves on weaving practical elements into the curriculum, from zoning to finance. It’s a bit of a subjective assessment, but those that worship a little bit less at the altar of form include Northeastern, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Miami.

At the Rhode Island School of Design, Liliane Wong, author of Adaptive Reuse in Architecture: A Typological Index, has catalogued 50 conversion and reuse projects worldwide, including buildings such as the TWA Hotel at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, the Caixa Forum in Madrid, and the New Museum in Berlin.

“Let’s say I’m a design professor at a top university—I’m so erudite, you can hardly understand a single word I say. Is there a pedagogy of building reuse that would interest that guy?” said Elefante. In creating that pedagogy, he said, retrofit-minded professors ask, “What are the different ways that you can intervene with an existing building? Wouldn’t this be a cool design? It’s sort of the fox guarding the henhouse on getting the designers who scorn existing buildings for their architectural character, to actually understand retrofit as something that could be an interesting design challenge.”

Those who emphasize reuse are up against a stubborn tradition, in both firm culture and design education. “There’s always been a professional bias toward building new,” said Hillary Brown, author of Revitalize | Resettle: How Main Street USA Can Provide New Beginnings for America’s Climate Displaced. “It starts in architecture school where the studios mostly emphasize new form making. The journals seem to prefer new construction … that needs to change.”

Altogether, the prospects don’t look good for architect as artist. It’s not just the technological advances of artificial intelligence, which is poised to do the work of humans just as in the fields of medicine, journalism, and law. Pattern language playbooks provide step-by-step instructions for traditional ways of building. At Northeastern, an initiative called Equitable Zoning by Design offers visualizations of residential buildouts in areas being considered for rezoning. The idea is to conjure an easily repeatable urban design that will make dense multifamily development more acceptable to wary neighbors.

All sensible, though it does raise an uncomfortable question. With all the new software and off-the-shelf guides, who needs creative types to make aesthetic judgements?

Shaking up established frameworks is never easy, as George Clooney, playing the journalist Edward R. Murrow, recognizes in the opening monologue of Good Night, and Good Luck: “This just might do nobody any good.”

What seems likely is that the top architecture schools may have students learn about Le Corbusier as historical artifact—but disabuse their graduates of any notion of operating like him. With an eye toward being that much more employable, the next generation of architects may well demand it.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Lead image: In Boston, this former office building at 31 Milk Street is slated for conversion to 110 residential units. Credit: Jimmy Emerson via Flickr.

In São Paulo, Brazil, wedged among the sky-scraping office towers, luxury retailers, and high-end hotels of the Vila Olímpia neighborhood, sits a 272-unit social housing development. Built on the site of the former Coliseu favela, the high-rise condo building isn’t just a safer, new home for hundreds of low-income families who lived in the informal settlement for decades, enduring fires, floods, and rats. It’s proof, advocates say, that neighborhood investment doesn’t have to result in resident displacement, and that social housing can be built even in the most expensive area of a city.

In March, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy invited a diverse group of researchers and practitioners from around the world to join several of its staff members for a four-day study tour. Blending classroom sessions with site visits, the study tour allowed participants to explore firsthand this well-known example of land value capture. Sometimes called land value return, land value capture refers to any set of policies that allows a community to recover and reinvest increases in land value that result from public investment or other government action, such as a new transit station or a change in zoning requirements.

“In São Paulo, we have at least two good examples of slums that were upgraded in places where land is very expensive,” explains Paulo Sandroni, an economist who co-developed the course with urbanist Camila Maleronka. “We had the idea to present to people and explain the instruments that we used—first, to capture land increment value, and second, to maintain the people living in slums in the same place they were living, but now in very good apartments.”

The process works like this: The city chooses an area to receive some public intervention as part of an “Urban Operation.” Developers who wish to build larger structures than what’s allowed in that zone can purchase Certificates for Additional Construction Potential, or CEPACs, which are sold on the public stock exchange—meaning the private sector ultimately sets their price. The revenue from those CEPAC auctions then funds public works and social housing in the same neighborhood.

But just because it’s possible to capture and reinvest land value increments into social housing doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, especially in pricey neighborhoods. “The community of Coliseu had to fight against many odds, many forces, from developers, from neighbors that didn’t want them to stay there, including some people from the administration,” Sandroni says. “But the leaders of this movement, they said, ‘We have the right to be here. The legislation gave us the tools to stay here, and there is money to build these buildings.’ It was a wonderful example of inclusionary urban development.”

São Paulo’s value capture tools have been the focus of many case studies—but seeing their results in person, in place, helped bring the concept to life for many participants, who hailed from organizations like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, among others.

“I was really struck by what I saw in São Paulo,” says Line Algoed, an urban anthropologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “I knew about land value capture, but I had never seen the results in person. I didn’t know about CEPACs, and the other instruments used in São Paulo—it puts this city at the forefront of innovative urbanism.”

The results in São Paulo haven’t been perfect, Algoed adds, “but it is so good to see that the local government is trying to mitigate the consequences of unbridled land speculation.”

Hiro Ito joined the course with a curiosity about financial mechanisms that could help cities pay for climate infrastructure. Ito is the program manager for the EBRD’s Green City Action Plan, where he works with municipal governments to identify investments and policies that can help them prepare for environmental challenges and climate change. “We’ve developed action plans with 47 cities,” Ito says. “But many of those actions, particularly those related to nature or climate adaptation, are being left unimplemented,” often due to a lack of funding.

“Nature-based solutions, flood protection, mitigation for urban heat island effect—these projects are not traditionally revenue generating,” Ito explains. “Hopefully this will be another way to strengthen municipal finances so that cities around the world can do a lot more in those spaces.”

On a walking tour that included both the Coliseu building and São Paulo’s iconic Octavio Frias de Oliveira bridge, Ito was impressed with the scope and scale of the city’s investments—and wondered whether a similar land value capture tool could work in Ankara, Turkey, where EBRD is helping to finance the construction of a new metro line. Right after the trip, Ito and colleagues began studying “how we could potentially implement a land-based financing tool for the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality,” he says, since there are several publicly owned sites that could be developed nearby. “Could we introduce mechanisms like CEPACs to collect fees from that redevelopment? Ultimately, it’s to cover the cost of the metro extensions, but potentially those urban regeneration sites could incorporate other social and environmental benefits.”

Ito appreciated that the course instructors, Sandroni and Maleronka, explained some of the shortcomings, limitations, and challenges of São Paulo’s approach as well. He recognizes that similar success hinges on certain conditions.

“We are testing this in Turkiye, because the urban population is growing, so there’s a strong demand for more housing—it makes sense to some developers to buy additional rights,” Ito says. “But not all of the countries where the EBRD operates have a similar population trend,” he adds, noting that the real estate markets of smaller cities in Bulgaria or Romania, for example, may not be strong enough to support land-based financing. “But we did really like the idea of this market-based approach to set the price … I think that was a very clever way of getting the most out of the space.”

What resonated most with Kecia Rust, founder and executive director of the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, was the state’s assertion that air rights are a public good.

“The overall approach that made Coliseu and other social housing investments, as well as the delivery of São Paulo’s iconic bridge, the monorail, roads, bicycle paths, and other public works investments possible, comes from an underlying philosophy that private property rights can extend in terms of longitude and latitude, but not in height,” Rust wrote in a blog post reflecting on the course. “Air rights are a public good, which the public sector sells to generate revenue to invest in public works and social housing,” she continued. “The city doesn’t have to go into debt when it invests in the construction of roads, bridges, and social housing.”

“I think the key challenge we face in an African context is that we don’t really have the data or the management capacity at local city level to do the extent of what we saw being done in São Paulo,” Rust says. “But what I saw and understood was so inspiring.”

Several Lincoln Institute staff joined the course as well, many of whom, outside of the Latin America team, had never had the chance to see this prominent global example of land value capture in person. “This whole idea of development without displacement, of how to safeguard or de-risk displacement when you invest in communities—that’s a topic that is front and center with so much work that we’re doing at the institute,” says Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute. Silva intentionally invited staff from across the organization: “This idea of learning together, sharing and learning and exchanging, is something I would love to see happen more.”

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

Lead image: The 272-unit Coliseu social housing complex, surrounded by the taller buildings of São Paulo’s Vila Olímpia district, is an example of land value capture. Credit: City of São Paulo.

Owning property and leaving it to one’s family has long been considered fundamental to the American dream, a cornerstone of generational wealth. The United States has one of the world’s most established private real estate markets, and individuals and investors alike expect that their property rights will be protected.

Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans own property in a state of precariousness and vulnerability that echoes informal settlements elsewhere in the world. The homes they’ve lived in for years, often inherited from parents or ancestors without a will, confer upon them the responsibilities but not the legal protections of homeownership. Such properties can easily be subject to a forced sale with little warning. Many owners of this type of property, commonly referred to as heirs property, may not realize just how tenuous their claim to their home or land is, until they’re at risk of losing it.

Heirs property exists all over the country, in both rural and urban settings—though it’s most widespread across the South—and disproportionately impacts Black Americans, who for generations have experienced discrimination and exclusion from the kinds of legal and financial systems that undergird the formalized processes of homeownership.

Indeed, the exploitation of heirs property is seen as a major reason Black Americans suffered more than 11 million acres of involuntary land loss between 1910 and 1997, representing more than $325 billion in lost wealth. Developers from North Carolina to Florida have managed to pry heirs property from Gullah Geechee descendants of enslaved West Africans, who were among the first African Americans to own substantial land holdings. In places like Hilton Head, South Carolina, such family land has been converted into valuable coastal real estate—in most cases, without the consent of the rightful owners.

In January, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy convened more than two dozen legal experts, practitioners, and community advocates to discuss challenges associated with heirs property. “Researchers know the problem very well, and have experience with local communities,” says Xinrui Shi, associate director of comparative law and land policy at the Lincoln Institute. “But we can help them connect the dots on the policy side—we see the connection of heirs property to the property tax, disaster management, economic development, and systemic injustices. So the objective of the conference was to bring these different types of expertise together to see how land policies can help address the challenges at a systems level.”

Fractional Ownership and Forced Sales

Heirs property creates two big vulnerabilities “that often intersect and interact with each other,” says Heather K. Way, director of the Housing Policy Clinic at University of Texas School of Law.

The first is fractional ownership. When multiple family members inherit a property together, each heir gets an “undivided interest” in the property—meaning they own a share of the whole thing, not a specific, divisible portion of it. As generations pass, the number of co-owners can grow exponentially—from, say, four children, to 13 grandchildren, to 42 great-grandchildren.

That fractionated ownership makes heirs property highly vulnerable to a forced sale, Way says: “Under our partition laws, any outside party can acquire any of the heirs interest in the property, and file a partition action.”

A partition action is simply a legal mechanism to sever co-ownership in this type of situation; it’s up to a court to decide whether a property can be physically divided in proportion to everyone’s share. While 10 acres of open land can potentially be split evenly among five heirs, there’s no fair way to divvy up a house. “For properties in urban areas or smaller lots, that‘s going to inevitably lead to a forced sale of the land,” Way says.

What that means is that a distant relative with a small interest in an inherited property can file a partition action to essentially cash out their share of the estate. But it also means a developer can seek out such heirs and purchase their shares, with the intent of filing for partition. In either case, partition can result in a forced sale of the entire property—often at auction, for pennies on the dollar—even if other descendants are actively living there and caring for the property.

Mavis Gragg, North Carolina-based attorney and cofounder of HeirShares, recalls the case of two brothers she worked with, aged 18 and 23. They were living in their grandmother’s home, where they had been raised. But when the grandmother died, the brothers ended up co-owning the house with her widower, who moved away and remarried. He filed a partition action, but the brothers couldn’t afford to buy him out. Since the house couldn’t be physically, equitably divided, “the partition action actually triggered a possibility of homelessness for the kids,” Gragg says.

“The fact that we have inheritance laws is speaking to the American dream,” she adds. “Owning something, taking care of your family, you have so much more agency when you own real estate. But our laws fall short of actually making it successful across generations.” (Listen to a 2024 interview with Gragg on the Land Matters podcast.)

Tangled Titles

Heirs property usually, though not always, involves a second vulnerability: a clouded or tangled title, meaning there’s no legal paper trail showing who inherited the property.

“Heirs property owners are highly susceptible to loss,” Gragg says. “But the real challenge for most families with inherited property is that they don‘t have a clear ownership history.”

Someone who’s living in an inherited family home is, in a sense, experiencing land informality. When an occupant’s name doesn’t match the property’s deed, and they can’t prove ownership, “they face tenure insecurity, lack of access to capital, and barriers to obtaining insurance or other forms of protection,” says Semida Munteanu, associate director of valuation and land markets at the Lincoln Institute.

While they’re still responsible for paying taxes and maintaining the property, it can be difficult for heirs property occupants to access assistance, such as property tax relief programs designed to help low-income homeowners stay in their homes. A homestead exemption, for example, can reduce an owner occupant’s property tax burden by thousands of dollars a year—but only if they can prove ownership.

“Tax relief programs are designed to prevent people from being forced out of their homes due to high property tax bills, but most programs have homeownership requirements for eligibility,” Munteanu says. “When you can‘t prove that you‘re the owner through traditional means, such as a recorded title deed, then you may not have access to the relief.”

And that, Way says, makes heirs property owners more susceptible to another form of land loss: property tax foreclosure. In studying the prevalence of heirs properties among tax foreclosures in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, Way found a striking connection. “In Tarrant and Dallas counties, over half of the property tax foreclosures are heirs properties, which is really stunning.”

Lost Opportunity

Even if a property is not forcibly sold through partition or through tax foreclosure, heirs property owners can lose out on wealth in other ways.

It’s difficult to get a home equity loan or home insurance with a clouded title, for example, or to sell the property at market value. (Most buyers, and their lenders, will insist upon a clear title.) Any meaningful action, like refinancing the mortgage or replacing the roof, requires the written consent of every single heir. And it’s difficult to access home improvement loans or even most home repair assistance programs when one’s name doesn’t match the deed. That can make it harder to modernize or weatherize a property, or to keep up with necessary maintenance.

Theoretically, a lender could extend a loan secured by heirs property, says Cassandra Johnson Gaither, research social scientist at the USDA Forest Service. “But practically speaking, that’s not likely to happen,” she adds, when there are potentially dozens of heirs all over the country. “Because the creditor would have to get the agreement of all of the co-owners—and in many cases, that is next to impossible to do, even if the lender was willing to.”

“We know that one of the impediments heirs property owners face is being able to maintain their property and to keep it in good condition,” Way says. State and local programs provide billions of dollars in home repair assistance to low-income homeowners, “but in the vast majority of cases, those programs are off-limits to heirs property owners with tangled titles,” Way says.

Often that’s just the result of policy inertia, she adds, with program rules rooted in the understandable caution of the city lawyers who drafted them. But Way says it’s important to consider the intersectionality between heirs property and other issues in our communities.

“If you‘re barring the ability of heirs property homeowners to access home repair assistance, they‘re not going to be able to repair or maintain their homes, and those are the homes that are eventually going to become abandoned and vacant,” Way says. “And that‘s going to create all sorts of other costs and impacts for cities in the long run, in terms of tax delinquencies, code enforcement costs, demolition costs. So not only does that result in robbing that family of their greatest asset by not facilitating their ability to repair or maintain their home, it‘s going to have all these ripple effects and direct costs to cities and to communities in the form of abandoned and vacant properties.”

Johnson Gaither stresses that many heirs property owners take very good care of their parcels. But the uncertainty of ownership status can often make heirs property owners reluctant to invest time or money in a property—which can increase risks for the broader community, and not just in urban areas.

“Broadly speaking, because of the insecurities around this kind of property ownership, owners —if they even know that they have an ownership interest in the property—are probably less likely to invest in it,” Johnson Gaither says. “If they‘re not investing in the property, they‘re not, say, managing for wildfire. They‘re not clearing the understory if they have forest land.”

The US Legal System: A Fixer-Upper

At the January conference, attendees discussed some of the ongoing efforts to remedy heirs property issues, and what more can be done.

One legislative effort to address some of the worst impacts of partition sales is the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), now adopted by 23 states and introduced in six more. Under the UPHPA, when one heir or co-owner seeks a partition, the remaining co-owners have a right of first refusal—a chance to organize and buy out the lone petitioner. If a buyout isn’t possible, the court must take into account sentimental value and family legacy, and give real preference to dividing the property rather than selling it. And if a sale is deemed necessary, the property must be appraised for its fair market value and sold on the open market, rather than at auction. Some states have modified the law further—as in New York, where only heirs, not investors, can start the partition process.

Another policy states can readily adopt is to allow heirs property owners to provide alternative proof of ownership to qualify for property tax relief or other assistance. Texas, for example, now allows heirs to submit an affidavit along with other documents as proof of ownership in their application for a homestead exemption.

When it comes to disaster relief, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) since 2021 has allowed heirs property owners to submit a statement of ownership to access individual assistance recovery funds. (After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up to $165 million in relief funds went unclaimed due to title issues.) But some longer-term relief is administered through block grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which has yet to make such a change—though some states, including Texas and Louisiana, now accept sworn affidavits and other documentation as proof of ownership for these funds.

States can also make it easier for homeowners to pass on their property—more akin to designating a beneficiary for a 401(k) than drawing up a will, which involves cumbersome, costly processes for both generations. In order for a will to be effective, heirs have to file it through probate court, which can take a lot of time and money, says Francine Miller, senior staff attorney at Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems. “But there are tools, and they’re different in every state, to transfer real property without it having to go through a will,” she says.

More than 30 states now permit either a transfer-on-death deed (TODD) or a lady bird deed (so called because President Johnson reportedly used this method to transfer property to his wife), “where you can literally sign a deed to a person, and it doesn’t take effect until you die, and then it doesn’t have to go through probate,” Miller says. “They have to file that with the land records in order to transfer the title, but that’s a whole lot easier than probate.”

Of Trust and Trusts

For legal reforms to work as intended, they need to consider input from impacted communities, says Josiah ‘Jazz’ Watts, community engagement director for Vulnerable Communities Initiative and justice strategist for One Hundred Miles. “You can technically and legally do a lot of things to help people,” he says, “but if you do not understand the dynamics of families, it could all be in vain, and it may not have the positive impact that it needs to have.” Some Gullah Geechee residents, for example, pushed back against a loan program in the 2018 Farm Bill that accepted heirs property as collateral, concerned that it could lead to further loss of ancestral lands.

In researching cases where heirs property owners had gone through the title clearing process, Johnson Gaither heard similar sentiments. “The supposition is that once these titles are cleared, that should enable people to move more into the economic mainstream,” Johnson Gaither says. While people who had a cleared title were, unsurprisingly, more likely to assume loans, “a good number of them were not interested in getting loans,” she says. “They didn’t want to get into a situation where their property might be taken away from them—that was really stressed.”

Clearing a property’s title can be costly—if it’s even possible to do. Pew Charitable Trusts estimated the average cost of resolving a tangled title in Philadelphia to be $9,200. Legal aid organizations and law school clinics can offer heirs property owners free or discounted services, but their capacity and reach is limited. “Being able to find strong legal partners, good attorneys that you can trust, in small rural towns—that can be extremely difficult,” Watts says.

But in some of the communities he works with along the Georgia coast, “once a year they will have an estate planning clinic,” he says, with partners such as the Georgia Heirs Property Law Center, Georgia Legal Services, or Atlanta Legal Aid. “Those partnerships are incredible success stories,” he adds. “We have had partnerships with private law firms, through their pro bono departments, and then also with great attorneys like Veronica McClendon, who has done work on Sapelo Island and in other places for families, where she’s helped them to secure their estates, and also fight against unfounded claims on their on their family land.”

Such education and outreach is also crucial to preventing the creation of more heirs property. The Initiative on Land, Housing, and Property Rights at Boston College School of Law, for example, has partnered with the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance to include a session on estate planning as part of the organization’s first-time homebuyer curriculum.

While creating a will or a transfer-on-death deed is an important baseline step for homeowners, Gragg says entity-centered forms of estate planning, such as living trusts or LLCs, are better suited to ensuring property stays in a family for generations. “If we’re thinking about multiple generations of real estate ownership, individual wills are not enough,” she says, because they only apply to a single transfer. Even if every family member makes a will—which is rarely the case—that only secures the home for a single generation.

“Think about conservation easements,” she explains. “The reason we make them perpetual is because we want to ensure that certain things happen over time. That requires very specific conditions, it’s a comprehensive strategy.” Instead of relying on a patchwork of individual wills, an entity-centered model lays out a plan for the property itself under a single, broader umbrella.

Forming a trust or family LLC is more expensive than a basic will, but Gragg says these are investments worth making. “The reality is that it can cost thousands of dollars to [set up a trust],” Gragg says. “But I think paying those thousands of dollars is a much better deal than losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in value because you lost ownership due to a partition.”

It can be difficult for families—and, for that matter, legislators—to discuss death and the uncertainty of the future. But heirs property experts say these conversations are essential.

“I always tell families, especially matriarchs and patriarchs,” Watts says, “that today, right now, you have the power to craft what the legacy will be for your family. For your name. For your land.”

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

Lead image: View from a home on Sapelo Island, Georgia. Over the last couple of decades, descendants of the formerly enslaved people who established communities on the small island in the late 1800s have fought to reestablish their rights to the land. Credit: Wirestock/Alamy Stock Photo.