The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

Oji Alexander is the CEO of People’s Housing+, a New Orleans nonprofit that aims to close the racial wealth gap by developing affordable homeownership opportunities, providing long-term financial stewardship services, and ensuring perpetual affordability through its community land trust and shared ownership arrangements. Alexander participated in the Center for Community Investment’s 2022–2023 Fulcrum Fellowship, a one-year, intensive program for field-level community leaders. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, he explained how the fellowship shifted his perspective on affordable housing, and how People’s Housing+ is working to create generational wealth for New Orleans families.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your organization, and how did your Fulcrum Fellowship help you build upon that work?

OJI ALEXANDER: People’s Housing+ is the result of a strategic merger between three New Orleans-based affordable housing organizations. My organization was called Home by Hand—we were historically a single-family affordable homeownership developer. Tulane Canal Neighborhood Development Corporation was also a single-family affordable housing developer for homeownership, but their unique wrinkle was in-house financial fitness work and homebuyer training. And the third organization was the Crescent City Community Land Trust, one of the city’s two community land trusts. Three small organizations, two of them Black-led, with similar missions; we partnered pretty often, and it was the same old story of competing for the same limited resources. So we built a larger scale, Black-led organization that’s able to provide a greater breadth of services to our community.

Our mission is African American wealth creation, shrinking the racial wealth gap. We do that through affordable real estate development, as we know homeownership is a reliable driver of wealth creation, and by providing stewardship services. So not only are we building the units, identifying the families, identifying the resources, getting those families into the homes, but really the important work, and what distinguishes us from some of our peers, is that first five to seven years that folks are in their homes, making sure that they understand the asset they have just acquired, how to keep and maintain that asset, and how to grow that asset, with the goal of being able to transfer that asset. We’re also providing resources for folks in our network who have been in their homes for 10 to 15 years, which is a completely different set of services.
 

I’d always thought of housing as a transactional process—it was always about building more units, numbers, more and more and more. Before Fulcrum, my goal would have been to be the biggest, most productive affordable housing organization for our size—we have developed more single-family housing, I think, than any organization in South Louisiana, other than Habitat for Humanity. What Fulcrum helped me realize is that our organization alone is not the answer, and it’s really helped me think about systems-level change and what we can do—what is our part in the broader affordable housing ecosystem and community development ecosystem? It has completely changed my approach to our work.

Fulcrum also helped me pull myself out of the weeds. I was always proud to know not just the big picture but how a house gets built, start to finish—the nuts and bolts—and Fulcrum helped me take that balcony view and start looking at the broader ecosystem, really incorporating the capital absorption framework and figuring out where we fit within the pipeline of deals.
 

JG: What are you working on now, and what do you have planned next?

OA: The ‘Plus’ in our name is that we’re also working toward some shared ownership and community ownership projects, where we have partnered with folks who own land but have not had the resources to get the land back into commerce. We had Hurricane Katrina, and we have a lot of families who are still trying to recover from a storm back in 2005—who have blighted property, who are deemed unbankable by traditional lending institutions. So we partner with organizations, lend our balance sheet and our access to resources, to help them get properties back in commerce, in situations where we can incorporate affordable housing as well. We’ve got quite a mountain to climb.

We are also working on our first small, multi-family rental, mixed-use project. It’s the historic restoration of a blighted firehouse that was built in the early 1900s in a neighborhood called Central City, a historically African American neighborhood that is really starting to see the effects of gentrification and displacement. The firehouse will have seven permanently affordable rental apartments upstairs, and a 65-seat early childhood development center downstairs, which is the first cohabitation of affordable housing and early childhood education in the city.
 

What we’re looking to start working on is more community ownership, shared ownership, shared equity. We’re always looking to provide benefits not just to the direct recipients of our products, but to folks who are already living in the neighborhoods that we’re working in. There are a number of different shared ownership models nationwide, but we’re involved with the Community Investment Trust, which was started in Portland and spun off by Mercy Corps, and is a way for residents of a particular neighborhood to safely invest in commercial real estate. The potential is for them to realize the upside of real estate development in their neighborhood—again, without being direct recipients of some of the new housing that’s going in—but making sure that we’re giving people the opportunity to invest and capitalize on neighborhoods transitioning, as opposed to being displaced by that transition.

JG: Can you talk about the twin challenges of developing not just affordable housing but also climate-resilient housing, in a city that’s particularly vulnerable to climate change?

OA: Because of Hurricane Katrina, we’re in a unique position: we’re talking about rebuilding a city. And conventional wisdom has been, if we’re going to rebuild the city, we’ve got to build a resilient city. We have always approached it from a practical standpoint. For us, it was always about the families, always about the end user—how can we build a resilient home that’s going to have low operating costs. The goal is predictability: You want to have predictability in your payments, whether they be rental payments or mortgage payments, and you want to have predictability in your utility bills. So we’re building with insulation, efficient HVAC systems. We want to make sure that the end user has a building they can afford to maintain. With some of the mitigation features that we build into the houses, people are realizing discounts on their insurance rates.

It’s also predictability that when a storm comes, and you have the opportunity to evacuate, your house is still going to be there when you get home. And this is where stewardship comes in. If you do come home after a storm, and your home does sustain some damage, we’re there to help you navigate the transactions with your insurance company and FEMA and things like that. 

We’re a city that sits below sea level, and the way our city deals with water is we try to pump it out faster than it rains. So we’re building green infrastructure and stormwater management into our homes at no cost to our homeowners. Stormwater management is an area where you’re not going to see a lower water bill; it’s really a community benefit. And low- and moderate-income folks generally don’t have expendable income to provide community benefits. So we want to make sure that we’re providing that at no cost.
 

JG. What do you wish more people knew about affordable housing?

OA: Overwhelmingly, people come to us thinking that there was no way that they could have possibly purchased a home. In addition to what we know about the racial wealth gap from an asset standpoint—those disparities are understood and well known—I think there’s also a gap in the wealth of knowledge that comes along with generational wealth. And a lot of our folks who don’t come from generational wealth just don’t have the understanding of what owning an asset can do for a family.

So if there was something I wish the broader community knew, especially the African American community, who has historically—purposefully, through racist housing practices and policies—been denied access to homeownership, it’s that there’s a pretty simple recipe. And with a little bit of support, in a reasonable timeframe, most folks who have steady work, steady income, can achieve homeownership if they follow that path. Homeownership is not unattainable for folks who do not come from generational wealth.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

OA: What keeps me up at night is really the fact that we have to fight so hard for what should be a basic right, which is shelter. The fact that an organization like ours has to exist. What gives me hope, though, is the compound nature of wealth—the impact that one individual home can have on a family from a generational standpoint. There were folks who were raising kids when we first started working with them. Now those kids are graduating or in college and in certain cases actually inheriting these homes. So we’re actually starting to see the transfer process. You plant the seed, you water it and give it resources, and then you just watch it grow.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

OA: It’s not related to housing, but it really is related to the work that we did at Fulcrum. The best book I’ve read lately was called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. A lot of the work that we did in the Fulcrum Fellowship, in addition to the redevelopment framework and leadership training, was on self-care—as nonprofit leaders, we often take self-care for granted, we kill ourselves in these jobs. And the power of what breath can do, the physiological impact that breathing and the way you breathe has on you, is really amazing.

Related Articles

Fellows in Focus: Rethinking Stormwater Management in the West

Fellows in Focus: Designing a New Approach to Property Tax Appraisals

Fellows in Focus: Mapping Our Most Resilient Landscapes

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

Lead image: Oji Alexander, CEO of People’s Housing+ and a former Fulcrum Fellow, in front of two People’s Housing+ homes. Credit: Courtesy photo.

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning. 

Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.

To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.

The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.

There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.

You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown

As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.

The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.

Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP

Climate Displacement on the Rise

In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.

In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.

Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.

Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP

Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities

Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.

Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.

Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.

Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back

Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.

Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah

Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth

The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.

De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.

However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado

Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends

Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.

Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

It’s Time to Welcome the Robots

Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.

In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.

With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis

Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.

The coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 30 miles north of Boston, has about 6,000 homes built over the course of five centuries. There are the typical cul-de-sac Colonials, the new townhouses, and both modest and massive waterfront properties. But Ipswich is also awash in historic homes—including roughly five dozen “First Period” houses built before 1725, more than any other community in the United States. Lately, the town’s antique houses have been popular with homebuyers, fetching the kinds of multimillion-dollar sales prices usually associated with new construction.

Ipswich Chief Assessor Mary-Louise Ireland isn’t sure whether it’s a temporary blip or the start of a trend. But she does know one thing: it’s making her team’s task of assigning fair and accurate property tax values to every home in town a bit more challenging.

After all, one of the biggest difficulties for a local tax assessor isn’t just making accurate property valuations—it’s doing so consistently, across all price points, home styles, and neighborhoods. If a $1 million Colonial is assessed at $950,000, for example—or 95 percent of its market value—then a $100,000 condo in the same district should be assessed at $95,000. When that ratio is consistent across a community’s price tiers, the valuations have what’s called vertical equity.

That’s tricky enough to achieve in a homogenous postwar suburb. But when 300-year-old saltboxes share the streets with new luxury townhomes, and storied houses get converted to character-rich condos, making equitable assessments across such a sundry assortment of housing styles gets even more challenging. “We’re three people,” says Ireland, “and we do all of the field work on our own.”

Now, Ireland’s small department is using an innovative—and free—new online tool from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to evaluate and interpret the vertical equity of their assessments. “We don’t have a lot of money for extra tools,” she says. “So having this has been fabulous.”  

Evaluating the Valuations

Getting assessments right across the board is crucial to a fair and equitable property tax. But accurately assessing very low- and high-priced properties is notoriously difficult, partly because there are fewer market sales in those brackets. And in recent years, researchers analyzing national data sets have found headline-worthy evidence that lower-priced homes are being over-assessed—and therefore overtaxed—relative to higher-priced properties nearby.

“If assessments are equitable, then low-, medium-, and high-priced properties are all assessed at the same level relative to the market,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy fellow Ron Rakow. “But even though it’s a fairly simple concept, vertical equity is really tricky to measure.” 

The International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) has two vertical equity standards in place to guide assessors, says Rakow—former commissioner of the City of Boston Assessing Department—but even those measures are imperfect. The price related differential is a simple ratio most assessors use, but Rakow says it can be imprecise; the coefficient of price related bias is a little more robust, but also more complex—it requires a type of analysis that many small departments don’t have the resources or expertise to conduct. 

“Because of the difficulty of measuring vertical equity, there’s no single best, definitive measure,” Rakow says. “So rather than just looking at one indicator, it’s better to look at several indicators to paint a more complete picture.”

Needless to say, that’s no simple undertaking. So the Lincoln Institute partnered with the nonprofit Center for Appraisal Research and Technology (CART) to develop a new online tool to help assessors measure and understand the vertical equity in their own valuations.

The browser-based vertical equity app, which is free to use, instantly analyzes property data that any local assessor already has on hand, evaluating it against six different measures of vertical equity and providing a detailed report. “We wanted to give assessors a tool where they can not only get these measures calculated out, but also get some assistance in interpreting them,” Rakow says.

The new tool, launched in September, simply requires users to upload a data set of assessment records, which are anonymized to protect the privacy of property owners. The tool then runs a calculation based on two main ingredients: time-adjusted sale prices and assessed values.

From there, assessors can see different illustrated measurements of vertical equity in their data set, with customized graphs and explanations, and can download a full PDF of the results.

“If you can upload an attachment to an email, you can now do these complex statistical quality control studies—you don’t have to have a PhD, you don’t even have to have programming experience,” says CART founder and research scientist Paul Bidanset. “There are a lot of different ways to do it that would have been more complicated—but we thought if we could meet people exactly where they were, we would be helping the most people.” (Read our profile of Bidanset, a former C. Lowell Harriss fellow at the Lincoln Institute.)

Ireland says she’s thrilled to have access to such a powerful tool. “It was super simple—I have everything in Excel spreadsheets anyway, and you only needed two columns,” she says. “I can use this really beautiful report to go before the Select Board and say, ‘OK, here’s the data to support what we’ve done.’”

The professional look of the report was impressive, Ireland says—and not something her department of three could have put together on their own with their limited budget. And the illustrated graphs aren’t just useful for communicating vertical equity data to non-assessors. Paired with contextual explanations of what each measurement means and how it’s calculated, they helped Ireland wrap her head around some of the more complex and novel metrics. “I’ve taken all the classes, and we’ve talked about [these measurements], but for some reason it really hit home for me seeing it all put together this way,” she says. 

Six Sides to Every Story

The tool provides results based on six approaches. The first looks at the commonly used assessment-to-sale ratio, which simply divides assessed values by their sale prices; the tool then sorts and charts those results into price deciles.

“We basically split all the sales into 10 bins—lowest-priced properties in the first bin and highest-priced properties in the tenth bin—and then we compare that ratio and see if it changes,” Rakow explains. “If we have proportional assessments, the ratio should be the same in each of those bins. But what we commonly see is that the assessment ratios tend to be a little bit higher for the low-priced properties than they are for high-priced properties.”

The coefficient of dispersion analysis plots out how far each property’s ratio is from the median. While that’s more commonly used as a measure of horizontal equity, Rakow says, it still reflects the overall quality of the assessments. “Generally speaking, if you have problems with vertical equity, you’re also probably going to have a pretty high coefficient of dispersion,” he says. 

The tool also calculates the price related differential, one of two standards the IAAO uses to measure vertical equity (a PRD between 0.98 and 1.03 indicates vertical equity, according to IAAO guidance); the coefficient of price related bias, which can help users understand patterns in assessment-to-sales ratios at higher price points; and Spearman’s rank-order correlation, which compares rankings of assessments and sales from lowest to highest.

Finally, the tool includes Gini coefficients, which have long been used to measure inequality in economics. It’s only fairly recently that the assessment profession has begun to apply the Gini ranking technique to analyze vertical equity. “We’re really excited about these,” Rakow says. The Gini ranking not only offers an overall indicator of equity in the assessments, “but it also can point to where in the price distribution you’re actually having problems,” Rakow says. “It’s great to know whether or not the assessment distribution is equitable or not, but it’s even more important, if it isn’t, to know where to start looking and where you may have some issues.”

While any one of these six measurements in isolation might provide an imperfect analysis of vertical equity, Rakow says, they offer a more complete picture when taken altogether. And the app can also help an assessor look more closely at specific data. “If you suspect that the issue may be in certain neighborhoods, or within certain housing styles, you could basically cull your sales file and just feed those types of properties into the app and see whether or not that is in fact the case, and how severe the problem is,” Rakow explains.

Ultimately, the developers of the tool hope that it will make it easier for assessors not just to understand vertical inequity, but to take steps to address it. In future iterations, Rakow would like to add diagnostic elements. One feature currently in development is a geographically weighted tool to highlight areas with the most significant divergences between market values and assessments. “So then you can zoom in and see what’s going on there,” he says. “Maybe there’s a certain style of house in that neighborhood that you’re not capturing right in the model, or maybe it’s very large homes that tend to be in that particular location versus the rest of the community.” 

This kind of data could also help assessors make the case for their municipalities to consider targeted tax relief policies, such as a homestead exemption, that can help make assessments more equitable.

Like any good technology, the tool will never truly be finished, Bidanset says: “It’ll always be changing and evolving as the industry evolves, and as we get more feedback, and as the industry comes up with new metrics and better statistics.”

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

Lead image: Houses in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Credit: Leigh Mantoni-Stewart.

What comes to mind upon hearing Scranton, Pennsylvania? For some, it’s the location of the fictional company Dunder Mifflin, from the TV comedy series “The Office.” Others may know it as President Biden’s hometown. Hard-core urbanists will note that it’s also where Jane Jacobs grew up, before moving to New York City to do battle with Robert Moses.

Ultimately, though, much of what Scranton is about these days is what legacy cities are confronting across the US and indeed all over the world: its postindustrial future, now that the manufacturing industries of yesteryear are long gone.

In the case of Scranton, a railroad crossroads in northeast Pennsylvania, its industrial riches were built on mining and processing coal, as well as iron and steel and textiles, and a heyday of some of the nation’s first electric lights and electrified streetcars, which earned it the moniker the “Electric City.” Though some defense-related manufacturing remains, the city is facing a new frontier. Essentially, Scranton must reinvent itself as a metropolis that was built, beginning more than a century ago, for purposes that no longer exist.

Into this moment comes Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, a transplant from Oregon with an MBA and a stint in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, to help try to forge a way forward. The 43-year-old mother of two was sworn in January 2020 after the previous chief executive resigned and pleaded guilty to corruption charges. She won reelection to a full term in November 2021, and is the first woman to hold the office.

“The Scranton story now is one, I think, of resilience and creativity,” Cognetti said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. The establishment of the coal and textile industries “really set the tone for the type of entrepreneurship that we are still known for and that we’re looking to have more of in Scranton.”

Earlier generations recognized that local economy needed to be diversified, she said, so the city wasn’t tied to an anchor industry that would inevitably diminish. As a result, the city has “lots of educational institutions, we have hospitals, we have healthcare, we have services. We also still have 11 percent of our jobs that are based in manufacturing. . . . There’s a lot of different family-owned, smaller businesses. That’s really important for our economy.”

The efforts at reinvention are readily seen in projects such as Boomerang Park, site of a former gas plant, and in the transformation of the Scranton Lace Factory, which once employed thousands of people churning out curtains, tablecloths, parachutes, and camouflage netting before closing in 2002. The abandoned campus of red-brick factory buildings is now being turned into a mixed-use project with offices, homes, retail spaces, and event venues.

Those kinds of adaptive reuse projects are “unique and really catching people’s attention, so folks want to be there,” Cognetti said. “That’s something that I think we can replicate.”

She has been bullish on Scranton since she went there nearly 20 years ago and ordered a sandwich at a restaurant run by her future husband. She had grown up in Beaverton, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon Clark Honors College with a BA in English literature; she ended up in Pennsylvania working for political campaigns including Barack Obama’s first run for President. She became a senior advisor to the Under Secretary for International Affairs at the US Treasury Department, was an investment advisor in New York City, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School as well.

Before becoming mayor, Cognetti advised the Pennsylvania Auditor General on oversight of public school districts and care for older adults, and served on the Scranton School Board.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This interview will be available online and in print in Land Lines magazine, as the latest installment in the Mayor’s Desk series. The first 20 Q&As with mayors from around the world have been compiled in a new book, with an introduction by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Further Reading

Now the mayor of Scranton, PA, Paige Gebhardt Cognetti’s passion for equity inspired by her time in CHC (University of Oregon Clark Honors College)

Scranton Elects First Female Mayor by Overwhelming Margin (Penn Live)

America’s Legacy Cities: Building an Equitable Renaissance (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

Remaking Local Economies (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

How Small and Midsize Legacy Cities Can Pursue Equitable, Comprehensive “Greening” (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

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

Lead image: Paige Cognetti. Credit: Courtesy photo.

More than 30 reporters, editors, podcasters, and Substack writers attended the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s 2023 Journalists Forum, engaging in two days of conversations about the problem of housing affordability and the impact of current policy interventions.

The 2023 Journalists Forum: Innovations in Affordability was held November 17–18 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University (JCHS) and TD Bank. The annual convening bridges the media and academic inquiry, allowing journalists to hear new ideas and network with each other.

Researchers, scholars, practitioners, and appointed and elected officials shared perspectives on recent policies aimed at increasing the supply of housing. The group considered statewide zoning mandates that require cities and towns to allow more multifamily development; tax policies that can help manage runaway land prices and real estate speculation (with Detroit’s efforts to establish a land value tax serving as a case study); local strategies to outmaneuver institutional investors; and calibrating the home financing system to help close a stubborn racial wealth gap.

Local Strategies, a Nationwide Crisis

Arthur Jemison, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, kicked off the proceedings by describing Boston’s “all of the above” efforts to address affordable housing, a major issue for the entire region.

On the supply side, Jemison said, the city is looking to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as of right in the city’s Mattapan neighborhood to start, coupled with low- or zero-interest financing programs for residents, and to upzone transit-oriented neighborhoods citywide through a “Squares and Streets” initiative.

The city is also pursuing “a very deep tax incentive” for property owners who convert vacant office buildings to residences, Jemison said. Global architecture firm Gensler surveyed downtown Boston, “and they found about 60 great candidates for office-to-residential conversion,” he said. “We think that maybe 10 percent, maybe 15 percent of those buildings could be and will likely be converted with this incentive.”

Daniel McCue, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, then set the stage for the next two days of discussions by detailing worrying trends in home prices and rents, pulled from the JCHS’s annual State of the Nation’s Housing assessment. Home construction hasn’t kept pace with demand since the Great Recession, McCue explained, but low interest rates kept monthly mortgage payments somewhat affordable even as home prices climbed amid the scarcity.

That dynamic, though, has changed.

“Over the past two and a half years, we’ve seen prices go up 40 percent nationwide,” he said. “That’s combined with a rise in interest rates that has really ratcheted up mortgage costs,” adding $1,200 a month to the average homebuyer’s mortgage payment. “That’s the carpet getting pulled out from under you if you’re a millennial, maybe even a Gen Z-er.”

Zoning Reform

As more states from California to Connecticut pursue statewide zoning reform in an effort to boost housing production, density, and affordability—prompting backlash from local governments seeking to retain control over land use—the issue of upzoning mandates and the impact of increased density was deftly taken up by a panel including Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute; Jenny Schuetz, senior fellow at Brookings Metro; Patrick Condon, professor of urban design at the University of British Columbia; and David Garcia, director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

Moderator and urban policy writer Diana Lind asked Grogan to start by explaining why some states are looking to override local zoning rules. Housing is often a regional problem, Grogan said, “but most of the tools that we’re given to address that problem are at a local level.” In a sense, she noted, that geographic mismatch creates more of a politics problem than a policy one.  

“We’ve created this system of perverse incentives—particularly for the more affluent, higher opportunity places—where current residents, even if they acknowledge the need for more affordable housing and more housing supply more broadly at a regional level, it’s really in their best interest to keep the gates up,” she added. “If housing supply is low, property values remain high. . . . It’s great for them, it’s terrible for the region.” 

As a result, Grogan said, there are now quite a few states either passing or actively discussing statewide zoning policies that generally aim to do one of three things. “First, they try to boost overall housing supply. Second, they try to increase the amount of inexpensive and below-market-rate housing. Third, they try to build housing in strategic places, like near transit.”

Unfortunately, explained Schuetz—who recently coauthored a Lincoln Institute Policy Download on implementing state housing reforms—it will take a while before anyone can measure the impact of such interventions, and even longer for new housing to materialize.

Developers need to wait for their municipality to write and pass new state-compliant zoning rules before they can apply for permits, she explained, and some communities—like those in Massachusetts that have pushed back on the state’s MBTA Communities Act—put up a fight. “It’s not unusual for it to take three to five years from the state law passing until you actually have local zoning that’s compliant,” Schuetz said.

“We would like to think, ‘Oh, the state now legalized a bunch of new housing, you can build apartments near transit stations, so how many apartments are getting built?’ And of course the answer is, well, so far, none—because we don’t actually have local zoning in place,” she said. “It’s going to take a couple of years before we start seeing even the early stages, like developers requesting permits for these apartments.”

That said, while some communities may push back or even sue the state in response, many others acknowledge the problem and are willing to comply. And state policies can give cover to local officials who want to upzone but fear political blowback.

“​​A forward-looking mayor or city council can go to their voters and say, ‘Hey, the state is telling us we have to allow apartments, we have to allow duplexes. We know that we have an affordability problem, that many of the kids who grew up here can’t move back to the community because it’s so expensive, so we’re going to take this opportunity and lean into the idea and figure out on our terms what works for us to comply with the state mandate,’” Schuetz said. 

Condon, who has studied housing affordability in Vancouver for decades, raised a contrarian point: There are lots of good reasons for zoning reform and increasing density, he said, but affordability is not one of them.

“We have doubled the number of people per square kilometer in the city since 1970; there is no other center city that I’ve been able to find in North America that’s come even remotely close to the addition of new supply,” Condon said. “If adding supply was going to reduce prices, Vancouver should have the cheapest housing in North America. It now has the most expensive housing in North America.” 

And so the question, Condon continued, is why the additional supply didn’t help affordability. “The answer seems to be that land prices absorbed all the benefit of that new supply,” he said. “Because the capacity of those parcels was increased in terms of the financial return, it’s reflected in this tremendous rise in land value.”

Condon pointed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as one community taking the right approach: Its 100 percent Affordable Housing Overlay allows extra density in exchange for assured, permanent affordability. “The wrong thing is just to increase allowable density and think that that’s going to solve the problem,” he said. “The right thing is to figure out ways to capture that new land value increase in the context of rebuilding these neighborhoods.”

Municipalities should insist on affordability “to discipline the land market, which is out of control,” Condon concluded. “A lot of the initiatives that we’re talking about today do the opposite—they unleash the land market. It’s a fundamentally different philosophy of how to solve the problem.”

The impacts of increased housing supply can be subtle. Grogan pointed to Minneapolis, where Pew Research has been tracking rents since the city legalized triplexes on all residential lots and did away with parking requirements. While rents increased 31 percent nationwide between 2017 and 2023, they were up just one percent in Minneapolis. “It’s very, very, very early in their experiment of increasing density, but they are finding that their rent prices are not increasing as steeply as other places in the country,” she said.

As the conversation turned to California, where some 200 new statewide housing policies have emerged since 2016—including preempting local zoning to allow ADUs by right on nearly all residential lots— more evidence was available to analyze. The Terner Center at UC Berkeley has been tracking the passage of California’s zoning interventions and housing laws, Garcia said, and the results have been mixed.  

Legalizing ADUs has been a success, for example, but has proven no match for the larger problem. “ADUs now make up almost 20 percent of new homes permitted in California,” Garcia said, “which seems like a good thing, but also is a little bit scary, because it means the rest of the market is not working.”  

Other policies out of Sacramento now require communities to prove they’re planning for significant new housing, and make it more difficult to skirt that obligation. Changes to the state’s density bonus law, meanwhile, allow developers to build higher in exchange for more affordable units, and a bill called Senate 35 allows affordable housing developers to bypass local approval and the “infamous” California Environmental Quality Act.

“Is it working? My very simple answer to that question is not yet, but maybe,” Garcia said. California used to build 200,000 housing units per year, he said. “More recently, even with all of these state-level changes, California hovers at around 100,000 units per year,” he said. “Last year we had 120,000 units. That’s an increase, that’s good—but it’s still lagging well behind the 180,000 units California needs to be building per year.”

Tax Policy

Cities and towns are also considering the effects of their tax systems on housing affordability. A panel including Jay Rising, chief financial officer for Detroit; Nick Allen, a researcher based at MIT; Joan Youngman, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute; and former Boston assessor Ron Rakow examined Detroit’s proposal for a land value tax to lower residential taxes and encourage development.

About 17 percent of Detroit’s 138 square miles lies vacant, said Rising, and owners of unproductive land pay very little property taxes. “This is incentivized speculation,” he said. Taxing land more than buildings will also lower the property tax burden for many homeowners who have stayed in Detroit and seek to raise their families there. The city, which needs permission from the Michigan state legislature to implement the land tax, is trying to “protect public revenues and public services by making it fairly revenue-neutral. That’s how we got to where we are today.”

Detroiters “are paying the highest property tax rates in the nation, particularly on the housing investments that they own,” said Allen, coauthor of a Lincoln Institute study on the feasibility of splitting the tax rates for land and buildings. “A land value tax, in some ways, is just a neutral tax. Some economists have called it the least bad tax. It taxes an asset that doesn’t move, that when you tax it, it doesn’t chase that asset away. It raises revenue to fund the types of services that cities are providing.”

The theory is that landowners will build housing or make other improvements rather than pay taxes on vacant land. Many are holding on to the land expecting to sell at a higher price, but that speculation is based on an unearned windfall. “If you have a piece of bare land in the middle of Manhattan, you have wealth, but not because of anything you did. It’s because society has grown and there’s demand around you,” said Youngman, author of A Good Tax.

A well-functioning property tax based on market value is also critical to greater equity, the panelists agreed, with many jurisdictions designing property tax relief programs and homestead exemptions to lessen the tax burden in targeted circumstances.

“In terms of tax equity, it’s really important to . . . have a good and solid assessment system where assessments are kept up to date and with targeted exemption programs to make sure that we’re only giving relief where needed, and ensuring that we’re having adequate revenues for our communities,” said Rakow, who analyzed Boston property taxes to test for regressivity.

Policies that are less effective include some urban agriculture exemptions and broad-based tax caps like Proposition 13 in California, the panelists agreed. “The dirty little secret with assessment caps is that far more people pay more in taxes than they would if there were no cap at all,” said Rakow.

Institutional Investors

In one of the liveliest discussions at the workshop, the issue of institutional investors—large companies that are buying, flipping, or charging high rents for properties in weak real estate markets and elsewhere—was subject to a thorough examination.

Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, appearing on video, touted the use of a Port of Cincinnati bond issue to outbid institutional investors for control of nearly 200 properties across several neighborhoods.

“We have an aging built environment, aging buildings and aging single-family homes. That reality, combined with the fact that we’re an affordable city in the national context, has made us a key target for predatory institutional investors,” Pureval said. “Like other cities, we’ve seen a trend of bad-acting out-of-town corporations coming in to buy up huge swaths of single family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, and then jacking up the rents overnight. This practice contributes to pricing legacy communities out of their neighborhoods. It hurts the well-being of the tenants who are being neglected and it has a negative impact on our entire housing market.

“[We] jumped at the chance to get these houses back into the hands of local homeowners,” he said. “Local governments are inherently limited in terms of both resources and our ability to move markets, but I believe that this program has been a strong piece of evidence for the value there is in thinking outside of the box and in leaning in and testing innovative ideas.”

The success in Cincinnati was the result of a thoughtful organization of public finance structures that can be replicated in other communities to preserve affordable housing, said Robert J. (RJ) McGrail, who leads the Accelerating Community Investment initiative at the Lincoln Institute.

The extent of property ownership by institutional investors, covered by many news outlets as a key facet of the housing affordability crisis, can be documented using increasingly sophisticated mapping and data technology, said Jeff Allenby, director of innovation at the Center for Geospatial Solutions.

“What we can do with this information . . . is begin to look at a lot of different pieces and really dig into things like transaction history, layer on other information from the city [including building code violations] . . . to begin to tackle what I call data fusion,” Allenby said. CGS has developed an approach that uses this data to map property transactions, in some cases revealing swaths of institutional ownership in a single neighborhood.

David Howard, CEO of the National Rental Home Council, a DC-based nonprofit trade association that represents the single-family rental home industry, countered that property ownership by institutional investors is a small fraction on a national basis, though he acknowledged it is more concentrated in certain metro areas. While there are some bad actors, he said, outside investors are simply meeting market demand—fueled by a slowdown in construction of starter homes.

“It’s becoming harder and harder to purchase single-family homes. They’re harder to finance. They’re more expensive. There are significant inventory challenges. There’s excess demand for single-family rentals,” he said.

Home Financing

On the second day of the conference, Dan D’Oca of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design explored how innovative design can promote affordability, summarizing a recent report published by the GSD and the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The presentation was followed by another lively discussion about home financing. After the Community Reinvestment Act and the financial crisis of 2008, a reset has been in the works, with new programs and policies intended to help both individuals and neighborhoods access capital and to help close the racial homeownership gap. But there is disagreement on how much can be accomplished with policy tweaks versus a more radical reassessment of the $12 trillion mortgage market.

NPR reporter Chris Arnold opened the discussion by noting that if zoning reform and other measures increase housing supply—“as the ice floe breaks up,” as he put it—clearly evident barriers remain for financing homeownership, particularly for low-income families and communities of color.

Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, applauded incremental changes that could make it easier for more people to enjoy wealth-building through homeownership, including down payment assistance, making the application process easier, improving the credit score and appraisal process, and making it possible to get financing for ADUs, manufactured homes, and property purchases through community land trusts.

Majurial (MJ) Watkins, community mortgage sales manager at TD Bank, cited the use of special purpose credit programs to expand access to home finance—though there is concern such outreach could trigger a legal challenge on the basis of reverse discrimination.

Jim Gray, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, which is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, noted that about 70 percent of all mortgages end up with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. “The way we change the system is primarily through Fannie and Freddie because they control such a big part of the market,” he said. “If you want to get a system that now recognizes your rent credit in your credit score, well, when you get Fannie and Freddie to do it, that’s when the system changes. That’s why we at the Lincoln Institute feel like it’s so important and we hope that you all will pay more attention to what Fannie and Freddie are doing and how they’re continuing to evolve our mortgage market.”

Also important, he said, are the Duty to Serve rules that govern the GSEs and, as a result, shape the lending criteria used by non-bank lenders, an increasingly prevalent category of mortgage providers that are not subject to provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act.

Will incremental measures be sufficient? Not really, said Chrystal Kornegay, director of MassHousing, an independent, quasi-public agency created in 1966 and charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts.

“The current housing finance system is a total creation of the government. When you think about all of the injustices and inequities in that system, it is a total creation of the government. It was all done with intention,” she said. “When we ask questions around why there are homeownership gaps, should you buy a house now, the question is really much more about what can the government do to create a system that’s equal for everybody. They created this system that’s unequal; they can also create a different system.”

Kornegay described the MassDreams program, which was supported with American Rescue Plan Act funds and designed to expand homeownership opportunities for people in communities disproportionately affected by COVID by providing down payment and closing cost grants. By providing funds directly to buyers, she said, “all of a sudden, we had 64 percent of people who bought houses were people of color. Seventy-five percent were at 100 percent of area median income and below. It just goes to show what the power of money can do for people who make good decisions.

“What if we, the government, all of us, decided that we wanted to have . . . a whole system for people of color to actually buy houses?” Kornegay said. “We could do that. We know how to do that . . . [but] it’s not going to happen if we don’t make the federal government make it happen.”

Herbert emphasized the important role that housing owned by nonprofits and the public sector can play in expanding homeownership. “We’ve got 11 million renters paying more than half their income on housing, and we think that we’re going to fix zoning and make a little innovation in financing and solve this? No,” said Herbert. “We’ve got to get enough housing for those 11 million people to be able to afford housing, and it’s got to be outside the private market. Because most of that increase in price is land prices. If we get that out of the market, and you have good housing that’s well-financed, over time, we can actually start to have housing for those 11 million people.”

He also noted that the terms “public housing” and “social housing” don’t fully capture the concept of mixed-income, permanently affordable developments. “We need to have this conversation. We need to have a name for it that doesn’t make people think it’s socialist or Swedish,” he said.

A final session reviewed some of the approaches the Lincoln Institute is currently taking to help address the housing affordability crisis in the United States, followed by the traditional concluding roundtable, facilitated by Paige Carlson-Heim from the TD Charitable Foundation and TD Bank’s Shelley Silva, who earlier in her career ran the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

The journalists shared their perspectives on the challenges of being on the housing beat, given the complexities of the different elements of the story, from the dire needs of an aging population to increasingly visible homelessness, to the potential of new forms of government-enabled social housing.

Stories flowing from the Journalists Forum continue to appear, including a dispatch by Josh Stephens in the California Planning & Development Report, “Does Density Lead to Affordability?,” based on the first session on zoning reform; and an editorial encouraging a proposal for legalizing basement apartments in New York City by Mayor Eric Adams in Crain’s New York Business.

“The mayor is in good company,” the editorial states. “As discussed at a recent Lincoln Institute of Land Policy conference on innovations in affordable housing, municipalities across the nation are considering ADUs, which can include apartments fashioned out of garages and other structures, as solutions to housing shortages. One speaker pointed out that the high cost of constructing an ADU, which some local analysts say could run about $400,000, and the fact that federal programs such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae don’t help with financing, were major hindrances to getting them into the legal housing stock, with only about 772,000 created across the country since 2015.”

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

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: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy President George W. McCarthy welcomes participants at the start of the 2023 Journalists Forum. Credit: Dakin Henderson.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy launched the second round of the Accelerating Community Investment initiative’s Community of Practice (ACI CoP) in November, kicking off with a convening in Sante Fe, New Mexico. ACI improves the practice of public finance by creating opportunities for public development, housing, and infrastructure finance agencies to engage in skill building and peer learning with philanthropies, mission-aligned investors, and the broader capital markets, with the goal of increasing investment and its impact on communities across the nation. 

Through this initiative, the Lincoln Institute connects participants in local community investment ecosystems to each other and their peers elsewhere—helping to form partnerships that create new, community-led investments in underserved places and people. The ACI CoP, first launched in 2021 with approximately 40 agencies and institutions from 14 states, has expanded to 100 participants now representing 18 states across the country. 

“My team’s participation in the Lincoln Institute’s ACI CoP over the past three years has been transformational,” said Laura N. Brunner, president and CEO of the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority. “It is difficult to say whether the education or the relationship building has been more impactful, because both far exceeded our expectations. The technical content contributes to our ability to move from ‘good to great,’ and the friendships and perspectives of fellow members allow us to benchmark ourselves against others and enjoy the comfort of safe spaces to learn.” 

ACI seeks to increase the availability of capital in the right places, at the right times, and for the right purposes. The initiative includes field research, a national CoP focused on peer learning and skill development, and technical assistance and support for participants to develop and deploy impactful mission-aligned investment opportunities. These opportunities create a more fertile environment for investment in community and economic development, housing, and more, for the benefit of residents and communities.  

“Our work in ACI, focusing on deepening the skills of public finance practitioners and creating connections with values-aligned impact capital holders, is helping to drive new investments that improve the quality of life in underserved communities across the country,” said Robert J. “R.J.” McGrail, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute and initiative director for ACI. “These public finance leaders not only have the capacity to tap large pools of capital and leverage public funding, but they can also help impact-minded and values-aligned investors channel new capital to communities where it will create deeper impact.” 

“Over the last few years in the Accelerating Community Investment initiative, we’ve seen the benefits of bringing together new civic coalitions to tackle local problems,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute. “Whether we’re trying to meet the challenge of supplying adequate affordable shelter to residents, preparing to support a low- or no-carbon fleet, or adapting our cities to endure the climate crisis, we need unprecedented multisectoral cooperation to deploy unprecedented volumes of financial and human resources. When the public, private, and civic sectors bring their respective knowledge, discipline, and creativity together, the results can be magical.”   

More information about ACI and a complete list of CoP participants can be found on the Lincoln Institute’s website. 

Kristina McGeehan is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Realtor Gabriella Beale stopped for lunch at a cafe in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, this summer, on her way to show her buyers a home in nearby Larchmont, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and early 20th-century houses. Then a late August downpour dumped more than two inches of rain on the city, forcing Beale to cancel the showing—because she could no longer get to the house. She watched helplessly from the cafe as flash flooding filled the road outside.

“I couldn’t even get to my car because part of the road essentially became a river,” Beale said. This wasn’t a hurricane, or even a tropical storm—just a rainy Monday in this low-lying city of 238,000. Situated between the Elizabeth River and Chesapeake Bay, Norfolk is experiencing the fastest relative sea-level rise on the East Coast—more than two inches just since 2012—so there isn’t much room for extra water. Parts of the city flood even without rainfall during king tides, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that the city’s dozen or so annual “sunny-day flooding” incidents could double as soon as 2030.

The encroaching water hasn’t gone unnoticed, Beale said: more buyers ask about flooding than in years past, even in neighborhoods outside the 100-year floodplain. She dutifully counsels all her clients on flood risk, discussing insurance costs, personal safety, and the potential drop in future resale value. Some buyers want nothing to do with a floodplain house, but others don’t mind the risk—or can’t afford to be picky. Beale acknowledges that she can’t make decisions for them. “People have different ideas of what level of flood risk they’re comfortable with, and it’s not really up to me to say, ‘This is a bad house.’”

By the time the stormwater finally subsided on that rainy Monday, Beale’s car was toast; she wasn’t sure it could be repaired. “I can tell that story, and some buyers still want to live in that neighborhood,” she said. Indeed, her buyers rescheduled their showing for the very next day.

* * *

BEALE’S CLIENTS are hardly alone in their pursuit of risky real estate. Even as climate change delivers more intense and more frequent storms, wildfires, and heat waves, home buyers across the United States continue to move into areas at greater risk of climate impacts like flooding, wildfire, drought, and extreme heat—in fact, they’re doing so at a faster pace.

That the climate is changing, and not for the better, is hard to miss. The US experienced a record 23 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in just the first nine months of 2023; the previous annual record of 22 was not even three years old, set in 2020. The number of buildings destroyed by wildfire in California each year has spiked 335 percent since 2009, according to First Street Foundation, a research nonprofit seeking to make climate risk data more accessible. Nationwide, we’re now losing an average of more than 17,000 structures a year to wildfire, a number that is forecast to top 33,700 by 2053—meaning we can soon expect to lose the equivalent of Daytona Beach, Florida, or Asheville, North Carolina, to fire every single year.

Yet home buyers still don’t seem to factor in climate risk when they make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. We keep building and buying homes in the fire-prone “wildland-urban interface” where town meets wilderness, and moving closer to the water, not away from it.

The most flood-prone counties in the US had 384,000 more people move in than out in 2021 and 2022, according to a Redfin analysis, roughly double the net increase of the prior two years. That includes Lee County, Florida, which gained 60,000 net new residents in two years even as Hurricane Ian destroyed nearly 10,000 homes in 2022.

Counties facing the greatest wildfire risk, meanwhile, netted 426,000 new residents in that time. And those most threatened by heat collectively gained 629,000 net residents—including Maricopa County, Arizona, where 76,000 newcomers sweltered in temperatures that topped 110º Fahrenheit for 31 straight days last summer and left hundreds dead.

And yet, the housing market in Maricopa County has been almost as hot as the sidewalks that gave residents third-degree burns in July: median home prices rose a staggering 64 percent in four years, from $290,000 in June 2019 to $475,000 in 2023, as more residents moved in. Prices in Florida’s Lee County rose 70 percent in that time, compared to 40 percent nationwide. Accounting for likely long-term flood damage—to say nothing of drought or wildfire risk—a study published in Nature Climate Change estimated that the residential real estate market in the US is collectively overvalued by as much as $237 billion.

The disconnect is largely driven by short-term affordability concerns, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “People are leaving places like San Francisco because their rent is too high, and then they’re moving to places like Tampa or Las Vegas because they can actually afford to buy a home there,” Fairweather said. “But what they’re not thinking about is how their housing expenses might change in the future, how the value of their home might change in the future, and also how the livability of those places might change in the future.”

Where the planet is sending us flashing red “stop” signals, home buyers and developers seem to see green lights. Why? And what will it take to get them to heed the stop signs?

Tell Me About It

One reason a driver might recklessly blow past a stop sign, putting themselves and others in danger, is if the sign itself isn’t visible—if it’s concealed by overgrown foliage, for example.

Sometimes warnings of flood or fire risk aren’t immediately obvious to home buyers, either.

“One thing that we’ve learned is that information is just so critical,” said Patrick Welch, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “Even though there is so much information out there about climate risks, it’s not necessarily that accessible—people don’t know about it.”

In 23 states, for example, home sellers aren’t typically required to disclose a home’s flood history to potential buyers, including in vulnerable coastal states like Florida, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Only two states, California and Oregon, require some disclosure of wildfire risk. And often such notices are confusing or reach buyers too late for them to act on the information—after the home inspection, for example, or buried in a stack of forms signed at the closing.

Getting clear, accurate risk assessments into home buyers’ hands can help them make more climate-informed decisions about where they choose to live, Welch said.

“Disclosure of risks is very uneven across states,” agreed Margaret Walls, senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. In fact, disclosure rules can even vary within a state, which is how Walls and her colleagues were able to isolate the impact of disclosing fire risk on home values in California in a new working paper. 

California requires home sellers located in a moderate, high, or very-high Fire Hazard Severity Zone to disclose that fire risk to buyers—but only if the home falls within a state responsibility zone, meaning the state manages wildfire prevention and response. In areas where the local jurisdiction is responsible, sellers aren’t required to disclose moderate or high fire risk.

That allowed Walls to compare homes that share the same level of fire risk—as well as school districts, walkability, and other location-based amenities—but have different disclosure requirements. By comparing years of sales data for neighboring homes on either side of the disclosure divide, the researchers were able to show that homes with a disclosed fire risk sold for an average of 4.3 percent less than similar nearby properties with undisclosed risk.

In other words, buyers who were made aware of the risks seemed to adjust their behaviors in a rational way—exactly what you’d hope to see in a well-functioning market. “We can’t expect markets to work and prices to reflect something unless we have all the information,” Walls said.

The effect of risk disclosure on sale prices seems to be strengthening as fire seasons intensify. The eight largest wildfires in California history have all occurred since 2017, burning more than 4 million acres, and 2020 was the state’s worst fire year on record. “We found a stronger effect in the more recent years,” Walls adds. “It’s getting more salient to people after these bad fire years.”

Past research has found that strict flood disclosure rules yield a similar price penalty of about 4 percent. In the absence of flood disclosures, though, home buyers can still get some idea of a home’s flood risk from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA’s flood maps aren’t perfect—they’re based on historical flooding, for one thing, not future climate models—but they’re freely available. Anyone can access them online, though Beale says most home buyers don’t think to do so until she recommends it. And even then, it’s hard to get a price quote for flood insurance without applying for coverage. In fact, because lenders require borrowers to purchase flood insurance on homes located within a FEMA high-risk floodplain, loan officers are often the ones breaking the bad news about flood risk and insurance premiums—typically very late in the process.

“Usually at that point, the buyers can’t get out of the contract,” Beale said. The average annual flood insurance premium nationwide was $888 in 2022, “so that’s not a huge impact if you’re spreading it out over 12 months,” she notes. But rates can vary dramatically by property, even cresting five figures. “If it comes back at $10,000, and you can still technically afford the house according to the lender … you can’t walk away.”

Major real estate sites Redfin and Realtor.com have started incorporating First Street’s climate risk data on their property listings—right alongside other typical home buyer concerns, such as school districts and taxes. And getting that information to a home buyer early in the process makes a real difference, according to a new working paper Fairweather coauthored.

Redfin started publishing flood risk data sitewide in February 2021. But before that, in late 2020, the brokerage leveraged a soft launch of the new feature to conduct a three-month experiment among 17.5 million users. Half of them saw detailed flood risk data and “Flood Factor” scores on the homes they searched, while the other half did not. That randomized flood risk information “had a significant and meaningful impact on users’ search behavior,” and influenced every stage of the home buying process, from initial search to making offers to the final purchase. Over time, buyers who encountered high Flood Factor scores on their initial home searches gradually adjusted their searches toward—and were later more likely to bid on—less flood-prone homes than were users who didn’t see flood risk information.

“Increasing information to home buyers, especially at the moment they’re buying a home, would help them make a different decision when it comes to taking on climate risk,” said Fairweather. 

A Reckoning in the Insurance Market

One way markets traditionally communicate risk is through insurance rates; higher premiums quite clearly reflect a greater likelihood of losses. But right now, the home and flood insurance markets are struggling to adapt to a range of issues, with the costs of climate change-fueled disasters, reconstruction, and fraudulent claims all on the rise.

For decades, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has underpriced coverage, indirectly subsidizing homeowners in flood-prone areas by making it less expensive to live there than it should be. This is evident through simple math: The NFIP is $20 billion in debt, as premiums have failed to keep up with the actual cost of damages incurred.

FEMA took a step toward correcting that imbalance by implementing Risk Rating 2.0 in late 2021, a new methodology that better aligns premiums with an individual property’s flood risk. However, Congress capped NFIP rate increases at 18 percent a year to ease the impact on existing policyholders. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that median flood insurance premiums would still need to almost double, from $689 to $1,288, for the program to be actuarially sound, and that roughly one in 10 properties insured by the NFIP will eventually require at least a 300 percent rate hike. In Naples, Florida, for example, the average annual flood insurance premium among 1,568 policyholders was $2,228 in 2022; FEMA calculated the risk-based cost of those policies should average almost four times as much: $8,067 per year.

Meanwhile, private insurers (whose homeowner policies generally don’t cover flood damage) are increasingly finding it difficult or impossible to provide coverage at fair but profitable rates as windstorms and wildfires grow more destructive, and as reconstruction gets more expensive.

State Farm announced in May that it would no longer write new homeowner policies in California, where it is the largest insurer, citing “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure” and historically high construction costs. Soon after, Allstate announced that it would do the same, making permanent a pause on new policies instituted in 2022. More than a dozen insurance companies have pulled out of Florida and Louisiana in the past two years, leaving homeowners scrambling for coverage.

Insurance companies could theoretically just raise their rates enough to offset increased costs. But insurance is something of a necessity—lenders won’t approve a mortgage without it, and four in five home buyers rely on a home loan to finance their purchases. So, to protect consumers, big insurance premium hikes often must be approved by state regulators. And in California, insurers can only use past losses, not future risk estimates, to justify rate increases. That makes it hard for insurers to price their coverage accurately or profitably as risk intensifies. 

As Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, told KQED, the price of home insurance in California no longer matches the risk. “Our insurance system kind of pretends that climate change doesn’t exist, and that’s not workable anymore,” he said.

The price signals that private insurers ordinarily provide through premium adjustments are crucial to a functioning real estate market, “because that is ultimately how decisions get made,” University of Pennsylvania economist Benjamin Keys told Penn Today. “When there are incentives for the choices that homebuilders make, that homeowners make, that’s going to reshape where we live and where we build. When we don’t get that price signal, that distorts our perceptions of risk.”

A report by First Street Foundation asserts that millions of US homes face more climate risk than their insurance rates would indicate, creating a “climate insurance bubble” in the market. “You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns,” First Street Head of Climate Implications Jeremy Porter told Grist. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.” In that respect, it makes some sense for home insurers like State Farm and Allstate to stop writing new policies in the most high-risk areas—doing so could help dissuade developers from building in places most likely to burn.

But millions of people already live in high-risk areas. And when those homeowners can’t get insurance on the private market, they must turn to state-run plans that offer less coverage at higher prices. These public options are meant to offer policies of last resort, but their role is growing; in Florida, the public Citizens Property Insurance Corporation is now the state’s largest insurer, according to the First Street report, with 1.3 million policyholders. The number of homeowners on California’s state-run FAIR Plan more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, to nearly 273,000.

“I worry that a larger state role in insurance markets will bring political pressure to keep premiums low without reflecting the growing climate risks,” Keys said. “It’s challenging for a state-backed plan to raise rates aggressively on homeowners in that state. There’s real political tension.” State-run plans also transfer financial risk to taxpayers: Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation expects to turn a profit in 2023, but lost more than $2 billion in 2022. That’s one reason Florida is phasing in a new law over the next four years requiring all Citizens policyholders to obtain flood insurance as well.

In September, California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara announced emergency steps aimed at stabilizing the state’s wobbly home insurance market by the end of 2024. Under these new rules, insurers will be permitted to consider climate change and future catastrophe risk when setting premiums. However, they’ll also be required to cover a percentage of high-risk homes, to start transitioning homeowners off the FAIR Plan and back into the private market. That could well be enough to draw insurance companies back, Keys says: “When an insurer leaves a state, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to write insurance policies. It means that they don’t want to write insurance policies under the current regulatory environment and with the current limits on premiums. They want to make a profit.”

As insurance rates rise to account for increased climate risk, one way to ease the impact on homeowners (without artificially suppressing premiums) is for insurers to offer discounts when property owners invest in preventative risk-reduction measures—such as raising a home’s mechanical systems above the base flood elevation, or clearing fire-fueling vegetation from around a house. A new California initiative called “Safer From Wildfires,” introduced in late 2022, requires insurers to recognize and reward fire resiliency measures by offering discounts to homeowners who create five-foot ember-resistant zones around their homes, for example, or who invest in upgraded roofs, windows, or vents.

“By incentivizing policyholders to implement wildfire-resistant measures, insurance companies can create a win-win situation,” the First Street report notes. That could create a positive cycle, reducing the frequency and severity of wildfire losses—and the resulting financial burden on both insurers and communities—while potentially preserving home values.

Change the Lending Landscape

As the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that back most mortgages in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wield tremendous influence over the real estate market—and could also help home buyers heed climate risk.

The GSEs already require borrowers purchasing a high-flood-risk home to secure flood insurance as a condition of their mortgage. But they could, in theory, take more aggressive steps to dissuade risky home purchases, such as requiring a bigger down payment on high-risk properties, charging higher interest rates on such loans, or factoring climate risk into valuations. Fannie Mae has started enlisting climate analytics companies like First Street to figure out how and whether it can fairly incorporate climate risk into its underwriting and lending guidelines. 

It’s a delicate exercise, however. Adjusting valuation or lending criteria to make it more difficult or more expensive to get a mortgage in flood-prone areas would very likely devalue the affected homes. And it’s not just expensive beach houses. Due to historical discrimination and redlining practices, low-income households and people of color are disproportionately represented in the most flood-prone areas. These are some of the very communities Fannie and Freddie have been trying to better support through their “Duty to Serve” mandate. 

“It’s really a double-edged sword,” said Ellie White, senior associate on the buildings team at RMI. Like the Lincoln Institute, RMI is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC), which seeks to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable for bringing housing finance opportunities to families not traditionally served by the private market.

“A main roadblock of incorporating climate risk information into the valuation of a property revolves around this challenge of ensuring that we’re not devaluing properties in already high-risk, low-income, historically disadvantaged communities,” White said. “So I think the GSEs are very cautious, and rightfully so, about what it would mean if we had wide-scale incorporation of those physical risks into the valuation of property.”

The stakes are uniquely high in the US, where homeownership has long been a primary engine of wealth creation. “If not done correctly, this could really completely wipe out families’ generational wealth, and it would disproportionately impact low-income communities,” Welch said. “It’s a really complicated, tricky issue.” Local governments that rely heavily on property taxes could also see major shifts in their tax base if climate risk were fully reflected in home values. While municipalities can typically offset potential revenue loss by adjusting tax rates when property values decline, large shifts in the distribution of tax burdens can create political challenges.

But the GSEs could do other things, like using risk research and data to guide policy, and helping homeowners in high-risk areas pay for resiliency upgrades like elevating structures. “The GSEs can take more action on the community engagement front, to support educational programs and raise awareness of these risks and resilience solutions among home buyers,” White said.

In a letter to Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Sandra Thompson in August, the UMMC made a wide range of policy recommendations. Among them: requiring the disclosure of both climate risk and energy performance on existing homes backed with GSE mortgages, and requiring new homes backed by GSE loans to meet more energy-efficient building codes. The latter would reduce long-term ownership costs for home buyers, while also reducing financial risk to the GSEs.

Zoning for the Future

Figuring out how to protect, insure, or move residents of existing neighborhoods that face increased climate risk is a thorny problem without many satisfactory solutions. But at the very least, experts say, we should stop creating more at-risk residents, and focus new development in climate-resilient places. 

“New construction has been increasingly going in places with high climate risks, particularly when it comes to wildfire risk and drought risk,” Fairweather said. “And it’s exurban sprawl that is to blame. Because of single-family zoning, people build more and more into places that aren’t naturally equipped for climate change—they’re building into the forests in inland California, they’re building into the deserts, which don’t have access to water.”

Communities should instead be trying to shift development away from high-climate-risk areas, and encouraging more density and affordable housing in safer areas, says Michael Rodriguez, research director at Smart Growth America. “Climate-informed zoning can easily overlay with a lot of other priorities that a city has,” he said, such as transit-oriented development.

Right now, land markets clearly aren’t sending the right signals about climate risk, Welch said, but planners and elected officials could help correct that at a local level. “Updating zoning codes and land use regulations to reflect climate risks, whether it’s wildfire or flooding, are relatively simple ways that local governments can start to move the needle on this,” he said.   

Back in Norfolk, Virginia, city leaders have taken the lead on climate-informed zoning. Over the past decade, Norfolk has adopted a pair of new land use plans: the short-term PlaNorfolk2030, and the long-term Vision 2100, along with accompanying zoning overlays.

The long-range plan divides the city into four color-coded sections. Red zones, which include the naval base and the downtown district where Beale watched stormwater surge through the streets, are densely developed and economically important, but very vulnerable to flooding; the plan calls for investments in flood protection and mitigation in these areas. Yellow zones indicate flood-prone residential and historic areas, where a resilience overlay will discourage new development but support existing residents’ adaptation efforts. Low-risk green zones are where the city wants to invest in denser, transit-rich neighborhoods. And purple zones, which also have a lower flood risk, are slated for infrastructure investments and lower-density development aimed at preserving housing affordability. 

Such a climate policy can influence land use and real estate decisions in a couple of ways, Rodriguez said. “It might work through literal policy incentives and disincentives, in a tangible sense, like money or regulations,” he said. “But then there’s also the signaling aspect. The city government has now put out a map, and that map in itself can send a signal that can have market impacts.”

Some people worried that, by officially declaring some places risky and others preferable for development, Norfolk’s plan could spook home buyers and investors and sink home values in the high-risk areas. But Rodriguez and his colleagues compared years of sales and permit data before and after the Vision 2100 plan was released, and, as they describe in a new working paper commissioned by the Lincoln Institute, there was no statistical impact on home prices.

That could be the result of the unusually strong pandemic real estate market during the years studied, the authors wrote, or a general lack of climate concern among area home buyers at the time. But it may offer some assurance to hesitant communities: Enacting climate-informed zoning to guide future development doesn’t necessarily have to wreak havoc on existing home values, at least in the short term.

“It’s a long-term solution—it’s not going to change the development patterns or reduce the risk today or tomorrow,” Welch said. “But it’s going to slowly incentivize and push development into less risky areas. And I think one of the takeaways from that study was that you can do this and not immediately crash the local housing market or cause a panic.”

Norfolk’s experience also showed that an inclusive process can ease perceptions of malicious remapping. “You’re drawing lines on the map, and you’re saying, ‘Build here, don’t build there,’” Rodriguez said. “That feels weird, and it feels a little bit like redlining in a historical context of planning. And that feels doubly weird when we know that a lot of the places facing the most climate risk tend to be poor, and tend to have more people of color. . . . There has to be a lot of community input and communication as to what it means to have climate-informed zoning to try and mitigate some of those concerns.”

In that sense, while Norfolk’s policy lacks “teeth” and the city has yet to implement follow-up measures such as density bonuses or the transfer of development rights (which would allow landowners in vulnerable zones to sell their development rights to builders in a low-risk zone), the city has already taken a huge step. “They were one of one of the few communities out there that did anything like this,” Rodriguez said.

States and municipalities have other levers they can pull, too—some more drastic than others.

In water-stressed Arizona, for example—where the Colorado River is overdrawn, and depleted underground aquifers are projected to eventually run dry at current usage levels—state officials recently announced a moratorium on new residential construction that relies on groundwater in the Phoenix metro area. 

Even without placing an outright ban on new construction in high-risk areas, communities can, through zoning and other regulations, effectively stymie risky new development by refusing to fund or permit new streets, water service, and other key infrastructure in high-risk settings. The federal government uses a similar approach to protect sensitive coastal ecosystems through the Coastal Barrier Resources Act. The CBRA doesn’t explicitly outlaw development in those areas, but dissuades it by withholding federal support for things like infrastructure, flood insurance, and disaster relief. That disincentive has proven remarkably effective, research commissioned by the Lincoln Institute has shown, reducing development by 85 percent.

It’s worth noting that Norfolk didn’t outright ban new construction in high-flood-risk areas, either. But it did set stricter building codes in those zones, which can help the city’s built environment adapt to climate risk by accomplishing two things at once. “To the extent that you do build there, at least you’re going to build something that’s more resilient,” Rodriguez said. Meanwhile, higher design standards can add cost and complexity to construction in vulnerable areas, creating a disincentive to build there, and encouraging developers to locate projects on safer sites instead.

Local governments can also charge higher taxes or impact fees to discourage building or buying in high-risk areas—for example, raising water and sewage rates in water-stressed areas, or funding wildfire prevention efforts with a higher tax on fire-prone properties. “Higher fees in risky areas serve two purposes,” write Brookings Institute researchers Julia Gill and Jenny Schuetz. “They encourage price-sensitive households to choose safer locations, and they also provide local governments with more revenue to upgrade the climate resilience of infrastructure.”

All of these policies could help point home buyers toward making better, more rational decisions. But where we choose to live sometimes defies reason.

Beale, the Norfolk realtor who counsels all her buyers about flood risk, understands why some of them still choose a high-risk home. For some, it’s straightforward economics. “If a buyer can only afford $150,000, and they want a detached house, Norfolk’s going to be it—and it’s maybe in a flood risk area,” Beale said.

But for others, it’s a deep-seated desire that isn’t so easily erased by rising insurance rates or flood disclosure forms. “These are beautiful neighborhoods” of century-old Colonials and tree-lined sidewalks, she said. “It’s not all about money. It’s this perceived dream of homeownership—this ideal of, ‘What do you want your life to be?’”

Unfortunately, the one thing that does seem to break through and change home buyer behavior is witnessing a weather disaster. Beale says many buyers still shy away from particular streets because they remember driving past flood-ravaged houses there after a bad storm.

After all, no one’s ideal dream of homeownership involves fleeing a fire or wading through floodwater. Fairweather expects attitudes to shift as risk increasingly becomes reality for more people. “I think experience will be a teacher,” she said, “as there are more hurricanes and more fire events. I think more homeowners will start to worry about it when they see it in real life.”

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

Lead image: Tidal flooding in Norfolk, Virginia. Credit: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant via Flickr.

En sus tres décadas como director del Scenic Hudson Land Trust, Steve Rosenberg vio olas de personas mudándose de ciudades a Hudson Valley tras acontecimientos importantes: El 11 de septiembre, los huracanes Sandy e Irene, e incluso la boda de Chelsea Clinton en Rhinebeck. Así que, cuando llegó una nueva ola durante la COVID-19, parte de la gran migración de trabajadores de oficina urbanos hacia la zona rural de los Estados Unidos, no fue una gran novedad.

Pero, esta vez, las cosas fueron diferentes en Hudson Valley, un valle que corre a lo largo del río Hudson desde Nueva York hasta Albany. Los precios del suelo y los bienes raíces se dispararon, debido a la afluencia de residentes nuevos y a las presiones más amplias del mercado. En las ciudades y los pueblos de la región, el aburguesamiento había empezado a arrasar con áreas echadas a perder por mucho tiempo a causa de la falta de inversión. Como consecuencia, los residentes de bajos ingresos se sintieron desplazados, las comunidades de personas negras y mestizas se vieron amenazadas, y se dificultó la preservación y creación de viviendas asequibles.

Esta “presión intensa sobre el suelo”, dice Rosenberg, también obstaculizó el trabajo de conservación. Tan solo una década antes, los fideicomisos de suelo pudieron ensamblar con mayor facilidad tres o más parcelas de tierra para crear un área protegida continua que ayudaría a preservar el hábitat silvestre y desarrollar la resiliencia ante el cambio climático. Ahora se necesitarían entre 10 y 12 compras para poder ensamblar una cantidad comparable de superficie, y, por lo general, siempre había ofertas mejores que las de los grupos de conservación.

Debido a que competían con compradores externos por la tierra, las organizaciones de vivienda y conservación de la región enfrentaban desafíos similares, y algunas empezaron a preguntarse si podrían lograr más trabajando juntas. Al mismo tiempo, algunas organizaciones de conservación, impulsadas principalmente por el movimiento Las vidas negras importan, exploraron cómo podrían abordar mejor la justicia racial, la salud pública y la equidad climática, como parte de un tipo de conservación del suelo más centrado en la comunidad. Pero los grupos de conservación y vivienda parecían existir en mundos paralelos, con misiones, objetivos, modelos de financiación y estructuras de gobierno diferentes.

Aun así, Rosenberg divisó un potencial. Cuando se jubiló de Scenic Hudson en 2021, se reunió con Rebecca Gilman Crimmins, nacida en Hudson Valley y profesional de la vivienda asequible en Nueva York, para reunir a un grupo de trabajo de cinco fideicomisos de conservación del suelo y cinco organizaciones de vivienda asequible de la región. Los grupos empezaron a aprender sobre el trabajo de lo demás, para identificar puntos de intersección y trazar un mapa de lugares potenciales en los que podrían asociarse. Combinaron datos sobre clima, biodiversidad y censo con su conocimiento sobre los funcionarios locales, las políticas de planificación y la regulaciones del uso del suelo (RPA 2023). “Las comunidades saludables necesitan tener ambas cosas”: espacios abiertos y viviendas asequibles, dijo Rosenberg. “Estas no deberían verse como mutuamente excluyentes u opuestas”.

A medida que los precios de los bienes raíces se disparan, el clima se desmorona y los Estados Unidos atraviesan una época de reconocimiento del tema racial, grupos de apoyo a la vivienda asequible y la conservación están empezando a explorar cómo pueden trabajar juntos. En 2022, el Instituto Lincoln reunió a profesionales y defensores, incluidos Rosenberg y Crimmins, para debatir sobre el potencial de colaboración entre los fideicomisos de conservación del suelo y los fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios. A través de una serie de debates presenciales y virtuales con el apoyo de la 1772 Foundation, participantes de grupos locales, regionales y nacionales exploraron las barreras que han enfrentado en el camino hacia la asociación, y las oportunidades que tienen por delante.

Preocupaciones compartidas, raíces diferentes

El arquitecto paisajista Charles Eliot, cuyo padre fue presidente de Harvard, fue quien inventó el primer fideicomiso de conservación del suelo de los Estados Unidos, The Trustees of Reservations. Eliot vio cómo las ciudades del país se marchitaban con la contaminación industrial, y previó focos de espacios abiertos de color verde silvestre en todas las ciudades y pueblos. El estado permitió que The Trustees empezara a adquirir y proteger suelo en 1891. En la actualidad, en los Estados Unidos hay 1.281 fideicomisos de suelo que protegieron más de 24 millones de hectáreas. Los fideicomisos de suelo, que en su mayoría operan en entornos rurales y suburbanos, y suelen estar a cargo de voluntarios, protegen los hábitats salvajes, los ecosistemas críticos y los espacios culturales, históricos y naturales, al comprar y gestionar parcelas en su totalidad o al poseer servidumbres de conservación, es decir, acuerdos legalmente voluntarios con los propietarios que limitan el desarrollo y otros usos determinados en una propiedad.

En cambio, el inicio de los fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios (CLT) es más reciente.En 1969, un grupo de activistas de derechos civiles dirigido por Charles Sherrod se propuso generar riqueza y poder colectivo entre los productores rurales negros del suroeste de Georgia. Crearon New Communities, una empresa que combinaba propietarios comunitarios de suelo con propietarios individuales de viviendas, lo que sirvió como modelo para los CLT de hoy en día. La organización se vio forzada a una ejecución hipotecaria de su tierra en 1985, después de que las prácticas discriminatorias del Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos (USDA, por su sigla en inglés) la privaran de subsidios y ayudas fundamentales tras una sequía devastadora. Pero aún está funcionando como una organización educativa y le dio vida un movimiento: hoy en día existen más de 300 CLT en el país. Los CLT aún tienen como propósito servir a las comunidades marginales, y por lo general, poseen suelo a la vez que les dan a las personas la oportunidad de ser propietarias de viviendas y negocios. A pesar de sus orígenes rurales, ahora, la mayoría de los CLT se centran en brindar viviendas asequibles de forma permanente en entornos urbanos.

Estos orígenes diversos condujeron a una variedad de diferencias, como Katie Michels y David Hindin describen en un documento de trabajo elaborado para la convocatoria del Instituto Lincoln (Michels y Hindin, 2023). La tendencia de los fideicomisos de suelo ha sido centrarse en un electorado más rural, blanco y más adinerado, que, a su vez, está a cargo de su dirección, mientras que los CLT suelen estar destinados a personas de color, que son quienes los dirigen. Los recursos disponibles para los grupos también difieren.

“En comparación con los CLT, los fideicomisos de suelo pueden ser organizaciones más ricas y tener un mayor acceso al poder político y recursos financieros”, escriben Hindin y Michels, y advierten que el financiamiento público y privado se suele destinar a la vivienda o la conservación, pero no a ambas. Debido a que ambos grupos necesitan suelo para cumplir su misión, añaden, “algunos fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios y de conservación del suelo locales han tenido experiencias negativas entre ellos y pueden considerarse como enemigos”.

Pero eso está empezando a cambiar. “Estamos empezando a ver que algunos fideicomisos de conservación del suelo y CLT están realmente intentando resolver cómo trabajar juntos”, dijo Beth Sorce, vicepresidenta del sector de crecimiento de Grounded Solutions Network, una organización nacional sin fines de lucro que promueve soluciones de vivienda asequible y fue producto de una red de CLT. A medida que las ciudades se extienden y las parcelas asequibles empiezan a escasear, las organizaciones de vivienda asequible y conservación están empezando a dejar a atrás sus diferencias, dice Sorce, que participó en la convocatoria del Instituto Lincoln: “Tenemos un objetivo en común de una lugar realmente saludable y habitable. Quizás, en lugar de que todos intentemos adquirir tierras de forma individual, podríamos trabajar juntos para resolver cómo hacerlo de un modo más ecológico para nuestra comunidad”.

Fideicomisos de todo el país “están brindando muchos beneficios a nuestro medioambiente, así como a las vidas y el bienestar de las personas”, comentó Forrest King-Cortes, director de conservación centrada en la comunidad de Land Trust Alliance (LTA), una colación nacional de fideicomisos de conservación del suelo. LTA contrató a King-Cortes, quien también participó en la convocatoria del Instituto Lincoln, para coordinar sus esfuerzos para poner a las personas en el centro del trabajo de conservación. King-Cortes ve “más oportunidades de tener diálogo con otros movimientos como el movimiento de vivienda asequible”.

A medida que estas conversaciones continúan, los participantes están identificando muchas formas posibles de colaboración, desde el intercambio de ideas e información hasta esfuerzos para impulsar una reforma política de forma conjunta. En algunos casos, los grupos están adoptando medidas en el terreno. En Ohio, la Western Reserve Land Conservancy, que trabajó mucho tiempo con bancos de tierras locales para adquirir propiedades inmobiliarias para el espacio público verde, está empezando a asociarse con CLT para una planificación conjunta coordinada por la comunidad que incluirá la vivienda asequible. En Mount Desert Island, Maine, donde hay restricciones de vivienda y los costos llevan al 54 por ciento de los trabajadores a vivir fuera de la isla, Island Housing Trust, un CLT, se está asociando con Maine Coast Heritage Trust en un proyecto de 24 hectáreas que combina la conservación de humedales con el desarrollo de viviendas asequibles para los trabajadores. Y en un suburbio de Seatle con predominio de personas negras y desarrollo acelerado, Homestead Community Land Trust y la organización dirigida por la comunidad Skyway Coalition se están asociando para proteger el espacio verde y la capacidad de pago, mientras evitan el aburguesamiento.

Un modelo colaborativo en Athens, Georgia

Mientras quienes defienden la vivienda asequible y la conservación exploran oportunidades de colaboración, pueden aprender de organizaciones que incorporaron ambos objetivos en su misión. Muchas personas consideran que Athens Land Trust es la estrella guía en la intersección de estos mundos.

A principios de la década de 1990, Nancy Stangle y Skipper StipeMaas estaban desarrollando una comunidad intencional rural, Kenney Ridge, en 53 hectáreas del condado de Athens-Clarke, Georgia, unos 320 kilómetros al norte de Albany, donde nació el movimiento CLT. El plan era que Kenney Ridge incluyera lotes privados para propietarios de viviendas, una casa de hacienda y jardines comunitarios, y espacios abiertos comunes conservados. Pero a medida que desarrollaban la iniciativa, se dieron cuenta de que separar más suelo para conservación también encarecía los lotes privados, porque el costo de construir rutas, tuberías de agua y cloacas se dividía entre los lotes, y a mayor conservación menor era la cantidad de lotes, y por tanto, menos propietarios de lotes había para afrontar los costos. “Veían esta tensión entre el desarrollo de tipo medioambiental y la asequibilidad”, dijo Heather Benham, directora ejecutiva de Athens Land Trust. Además, el aumento del precio estaba excluyendo a algunos de sus amigos.

En esta época, un día Stangle estaba llevando a sus hijos al zoológico en Atlanta cuando su auto se rompió. Una mujer paró y ofreció llevar a Stangle a su oficina, donde podía usar el teléfono. La mujer trabajaba en un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario, Cabbagetown Revitalization and Future Trust.

Después de repasar el modelo del CLT, Stangle y StipeMaas decidieron crear una organización que funcionaría como un fideicomiso de suelo y como un CLT, y así nació Athens Land Trust.

Durante los primeros años, Athens Land Trust funcionó principalmente como un fideicomiso de conservación del suelo. Luego, en 1999, uno de los miembros de la junta compró un baldío en un barrio de Athens con tradición histórica de personas negras y lo donó al grupo. El gobierno local otorgó un subsidio para viviendas asequibles y la organización construyó su primera vivienda.

Las dos alas de la organización siguieron creciendo (el fideicomiso llegó a poseer 8.375 hectáreas de servidumbre de conservación, que provenían de orígenes diversos, desde granjas a las afueras de Athens, hasta plantaciones de pino y montañas en el norte de Georgia, y construyó y reacondicionó viviendas dentro de la ciudad), pero permanecieron prácticamente separadas. “Básicamente, cuando atendíamos el teléfono, era bastante claro si alguien llamaba por una cosa o por otra”, dijo Benham. Quienes llamaban solían ser familias negras de ingresos bajos interesadas en viviendas, o agricultores blancos que deseaban proteger el suelo que habían poseído por generaciones.

A principios de la década de 2000, estas facetas de trabajo paralelas empezaron a intersectarse. Un miembro de la junta mencionó que en uno de los baldíos en el barrio se estaban llevando a cabo actividades con drogas. ¿Podría el fideicomiso de suelo transformarlo en un jardín comunitario? “Cuando estás protegiendo granjas, hacer jardines no parece un salto tan grande”, dijo Benham. “Eso se convirtió en un proyecto, y luego, simplemente siguió creciendo”.

Otros barrios empezaron a comunicarse con nosotros a fin de iniciar proyectos similares. El grupo se asoció con la universidad local para crear una red de jardines comunitarios y una granja urbana donde los vecinos pudieran cultivar alimentos para vender, complementando sus ingresos. El subsidio del USDA brindó financiamiento y la ciudad también ofreció algunas tierras. Para maximizar el beneficio que obtiene la comunidad del suelo, Athens Land Trust empezó a organizar clases de jardinería y jornadas de cultivo, programas para jóvenes relacionados con las habilidades agrícolas y un mercado de productores rurales en un barrio de personas negras con ingresos bajos. Estas actividades apoyan los objetivos de Athens Land Trust de fomentar el desarrollo económico y el empoderamiento de la comunidad, dice Benhma. “La oportunidad económica en torno al mercado de los productores rurales y el desarrollo de pequeños negocios”, comenta, entreteje las parcelas en “el ecosistema y la economía de los barrios”.

Punto de encuentro de la conservación y la justicia

A medida que crecía el trabajo urbano de Athens Land Trust, sus dirigentes también empezaron a aplicar una perspectiva de equidad en su trabajo de conservación rural, e identificaron poblaciones desatendidas por esfuerzos previos de proteger las tierras agrícolas. En abril de 2023, el fideicomiso del suelo estaba cerca de alcanzar un trato para la primera servidumbre de conservación en una granja en posesión de personas negras en Georgia. A lo largo de los Estados Unidos, un 97 por ciento de granjas y un 94 por ciento de hectáreas de granjas pertenecen a productores rurales blancos. Muchos propietarios de tierras negros carecen de un derecho claro (un legado de reglas injustas de herencia de bienes inmuebles) y no pueden donar o vender las servidumbres de sus tierras. Por otro lado, es entendible que quienes ganaron la lucha para obtener un derecho claro duden a la hora de transferirlo. Benham añade que los mecanismos de puntuación utilizados por el Servicio de Conservación de Recursos Naturales del USDA para determinar si una parcela debe conservarse tienden a favorecer a las granjas ubicadas en suelos agrícolas de primera calidad. “¡Vaya sorpresa!: la mayoría de los productores rurales negros no obtuvieron las tierras de mejor calidad”, señala.

Benham cree que Athens Land Trust logró tender un puente entre ambos mundos porque su objetivo fundamental es darle a la comunidad el control de las tierras y el desarrollo. Dejando de lado la visión estricta hacia la vivienda o la conservación, el fideicomiso y otras organizaciones afines “pueden tener más marcos, vocabulario, prácticas y formas de interactuar en común” con el movimiento de justicia medioambiental que con los fideicomisos de conservación del suelo, explica. Esto también se refleja en la filantropía: los financiadores que parecen entender cómo se alinean el trabajo de vivienda y de conservación de los fideicomisos son quienes reconocen su “trabajo de sostenibilidad”, similar a la justicia social, “en barrios de bajos ingresos”.

En el sur del Bronx, Nueva York, un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario creado en 2020, funciona con un modelo híbrido similar, y trabaja para preservar la capacidad de pago de la vivienda y proteger el espacio abierto, lo que incluye la red de jardines comunitarios del barrio. South Bronx Community Land and Resource Trust surgió del trabajo de Nos Quedamos, una sociedad de desarrollo comunitario local que comenzó en la década de 1990 como resistencia de base a un plan de renovación urbana que habría desplazado a una comunidad de ingresos bajos, en su mayoría latina. Comprometidos con el “desarrollo sin desplazamiento”, desarrollo impulsado y controlado por la comunidad, Nos Quedamos ahora tiene una cartera de viviendas asequibles. Lanzó el CLT para “crear y fomentar una comunidad más saludable al equilibrar el uso del suelo, la capacidad de pago, la accesibilidad a los servicios y espacios abiertos, la sostenibilidad y la resiliencia medioambiental, la escala y el carácter comunitario”. Tiene como objetivo ser una entidad centralizada que sea propiedad de la comunidad.

Julia Duranti-Martínez, que trabaja convarios CLT en la organización para el desarrollo comunitario nacional LISC y es miembro de la junta directiva de East Harlem/El Barrio CLT en la ciudad de Nueva York, recomienda que las conversaciones sobre colaboración “den prioridad a los grupos que surgen de la organización de justicia medioambiental”. En un mercado de bienes raíces donde el suelo es costoso y escaso, los grupos de conservación y vivienda compiten por parcelas, y los parques nuevos suelen verse como presagios de aburguesamiento, los proyectos de desarrollo comunitario que han navegado estas tensiones con mayor éxito se han visto impulsados por el mismo objetivo fundamental que el movimiento de justicia medioambiental, explica Julia, y asegura que las “comunidades de color, indígenas y negras son las que realmente están en condiciones de tomar decisiones”.

Duranti-Martínez agrega que, históricamente, el marco de los CLT ha tenido más en común con los grupos de justicia medioambiental que con el movimiento ecologista. “La promoción de estos modelos de administración comunitarios no se opone a la vivienda asequible”, comentó, simplemente porque “una comunidad saludable” tiene “todos los tipos de espacios: vivienda asequible y digna, espacio comercial asequible, espacio verde y espacios culturales y comunitarios”.

Hacia adelante

A pesar de las ideas prometedoras de colaboración y entusiasmo para estas iniciativas, sigue habiendo obstáculos culturales e ideológicos. Históricamente, para los fideicomisos de suelo, el éxito se ha medido por el número de hectáreas protegidas y los dólares recaudados, pero estas mediciones convencionales “no capturan realmente todo el impacto” de los proyectos más complejos y pequeños, dijo Michels. Proteger el especio verde y construir viviendas en dos hectáreas podría llevar la misma cantidad de tiempo, esfuerzo y recursos que conservar 4.000 hectáreas rurales, señala, lo que significa que existen algunos marcos ideológicos en relación con la conservación que deben cambiar.

Los colaboradores potenciales también deben avanzar con determinación y esmero. Según muchas parte involucradas en este trabajo, la participación significativa e inclusiva de la comunidad será clave para lograr combinar con éxito objetivos de espacio abierto y vivienda asequible, ya sea que ese esfuerzo esté ocurriendo dentro de una sola organización o como parte de una colaboración entre grupos. “La conservación tiene mucho que aprender sobre cómo incorporar a las partes interesadas de la comunidad como tomadores de decisiones dentro de nuestras organizaciones”, dice King-Cortes de LTA. A pesar del interés cada vez mayor de ampliar el trabajo del movimiento, “muchos de nosotros no estemos listos, diría, para formar parte de asociaciones con grupos para la vivienda asequible hasta que no hayamos hecho nuestro trabajo: hasta que hayamos aprendido sobre las raíces del movimiento de vivienda asequible, los lazos con el movimiento de derechos civiles”.

Sin embargo, los grupos de conservación también tienen un caudal de recursos y experiencia para ofrecer. Para los CLT, “sin lugar a duda, el mayor obstáculo para poder expandirse es el acceso al suelo y al dinero”, dijo Sorce de Grounded Solutions Network. Las asociaciones suelen ser útiles para cerrar la brecha, y los grupos de conservación también podrían ayudar en este sentido. “Podrían agruparse para adquirir una parcela más grande, parte de la cual se destinará a conservación, y parte a vivienda”.

De hecho, este tipo de sociedad podría beneficiar a ambos sectores. “Todos están luchando para recaudar fondos”, dijo King-Cortes. “Todos están intentando sacarle el mayor provecho a lo que tenemos. Pero, si trabajamos juntos en la planificación, creo que ambos movimientos pueden lograr más o aprovechar al máximo los recursos”.

Tener éxito en eso demandará esfuerzo, porque la mayor parte de la financiación para la conservación y la vivienda se ha separado históricamente, como apuntan Michels y Hindin. “Todos los programas y financiamientos apoyados por políticas públicas están estancados”, confirmó Rosenberg. Un grupo para la vivienda que quiere ejecutar una iniciativa de desarrollo con caminos, parques o jardines comunitarios, por lo general, puede conseguir financiación para construir las viviendas, mientras, por otro lado, los grupos de conservación solo pueden conseguir financiamiento para conservar suelo.

Sin embargo, existen excepciones a la regla. En Vermont, en 1987, los grupos de conservación y vivienda se organizaron para crear una fuente única de financiamiento público, el Vermont Housin and Conservation Trust Fund, administrado por la Junta de Conservación y Vivienda de Vermont (Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, VHCB). Michels, que trabajó en VHCB por muchos años, dice que representa un modelo potencial de colaboración. Se cultivaron relaciones y se logró un entendimiento entre las dos comunidades, y tanto los profesionales como los gestores de políticas llegaron a ver que los objetivos dobles se complementan, no compiten, lo que refuerza una tradición de uso del suelo de casi 100 años de antigüedad de asentamiento compacto rodeado por un paisaje de trabajo.

Todos los años, una coalición de grupos de conservación y vivienda asequible ejercen presión en la legislatura del estado para obtener financiamiento del VHCB. El resultado es “muchas relaciones forjadas entre dichas comunidades de práctica, y cada una sabe en qué trabaja la otra”, dijo Michels. VHCB invirtió en proyectos con ambos elementos en muchos pueblos, y garantizó la disponibilidad de viviendas asequibles y espacios abiertos. “Existe una versión de colaboración que no implica trabajar en conjunto en una misma parcela”, pero se puja por el mismo resultado, dice Michels; cuando una oportunidad se presenta en una parcela, se aprovecha al máximo.

De regreso en Hudson Valley, el grupo de trabajo de Rosenberg está tomando como modelo la Ley de Preservación Comunitaria (Community Preservation Act) de Massachusetts. Los votantes en Massachusetts pueden elegir que su municipalidad aplique un recargo a los impuestos prediales, lo que, luego, puede usarse para financiar la conservación, vivienda asequible, recreación en espacios abiertos y preservación histórica. La legislatura de Nueva York autorizó que algunas municipalidades voten por una tarifa local de transferencia de bienes raíces para crear un fondo de preservación comunitario, pero la recaudación solo puede apoyar la conservación, no la vivienda.

Identificar las reformas políticas que podrían ayudar a realizar su trabajo y acordar en una declaración de propósitos compartidos han sido prioridades para el grupo de Hudson Valley, que continuó sus exploraciones con apoyo de la Regional Plan Association, el patrocinador fiscal del proyecto, y el Consensus Building Institute. “En realidad, existen algunas colaboraciones que ya están comenzando”, dijo Rosenberg. Kingston Land Trust, que estudia y fomenta el modelo de fideicomiso de suelo comunitario desde 2017, se asoció con el grupo para la vivienda asequible regional, RUPCO, para lanzar una CLT como parte de su iniciativa Land for Homes (Suelo para Viviendas). Además, la organización trabajó con estudiantes graduados en la Universidad de Columbia y Bard College para desarrollar una visión de vivienda regional, y una guía para la colaboración entre grupos de conservación y vivienda (Kingston Land Trust 2021). Mientras tanto, The Chatham, una empresa de conservación del suelo de Columbia, con sede en Nueva York, cumple la función de patrocinador fiscal de otro CLT nuevo.

Y, dentro del grupo de trabajo, uno de los fideicomisos de conservación del suelo identificó una parcela agrícola de 46 hectáreas para la venta en el pueblo de Red Hook que “define la entrada a la comunidad”, dijo Rosenberg. Red Hook, tiene un fideicomiso de preservación comunitario que apoya la conservación, y Scenic Hudson y otros grupos están activos allí desde hace mucho tiempo.  Pero, tras expandir, hace poco, su sistema cloacal público, Red Hook también estuvo considerando desarrollar más viviendas asequibles, y, en el caso de estos bienes inmobiliarios, repeler a los compradores privados interesados en desarrollar la parcela completa.

Las condiciones parecían favorables. Así que dos de las organizaciones de vivienda del grupo de trabajo y dos de los fideicomisos de suelo se reunieron con funcionarios locales para debatir sobre la colaboración con el pueblo en torno a un proyecto que alcanzaría ambos objetivos: conservar las tierras agrícolas y construir algunas viviendas asequibles. Ahora, el pueblo planea comprar la tierra, trabajar con uno de los fideicomisos de suelo para implementar una servidumbre de conservación en la mayor parte de esta y separar el resto para viviendas que uno de los grupos para la vivienda asequible construirá. “Ese proyecto aún no se implementó, pero está avanzando”, dijo Rosenberg. “Es muy emocionante”.

COLOQUIO DEL INSTITUTO LINCOLN SOBRE FIDEICOMISOS DE SUELO COMUNITARIOS Y DE CONSERVACIÓN DEL SUELO

Durante 2022, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo coordinó un trabajo de investigación de un año sobre el potencial de colaboración entre los fideicomisos de conservación de suelo y fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios. Con el apoyo de Peter Stein de Lyme Timber Company y un subsidio de 1772 Foundation, el instituto reunió a un grupo de expertos en conservación y vivienda asequible para realizar una serie de reuniones, lo que culminó con un coloquio y un documento de trabajo (Michels y Hindin, 2023).

El coloquio ha servido como fuente de información para iniciativas en curso para fomentar prioridades en materia de conservación y vivienda asequible. En febrero, en la cumbre del Con-necticut Land Conservation Council (Consejo de Conservación del Suelo de Connecticut), los coautores del documento de trabajo, Katie Michels y David Hindin, aconsejaron a los defensores y líderes de los sectores de conservación y vivienda que consideren agendas compartidas y objetivos de políticas futuras. En marzo, Jim Levitt, director de Recursos de Suelo y Agua Administrados de Forma Sustentable del Instituto Lincoln, moderó un panel principal titulado “Affordable Housing and Land Conservation: Not an Either/Or” (Vivienda asequible y conservación del suelo: no es una o la otra) en la reunión anual de la Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition; el panel incluyó un participante del coloquio.

“Para prosperar, las comunidades necesitan viviendas asequibles permanentemente y suelo conservado permanentemente que brinde espacios verdes, infraestructura verde y hábitats respetuosos de la biodiversidad”, dice Chandni Navalkha, directora asociada de Recursos de Suelo y Agua Administrados de Forma Sustentable del Instituto Lincoln. “Al trabajar de forma más colaborativa, estas comunidades de práctica tienen un potencial único para aprovechar sus décadas de éxito y experiencia para implementar proyectos con múltiples beneficios y objetivos que enfrentan los desafíos más urgentes de las comunidades”.

Audrea Lim es escritora en la ciudad de Nueva York y su trabajo ha aparecido en el New York Times, Harper’s y Guardian. Su libro Free the Land (Liberar el suelo), sobre la mercantilización del suelo y alternativas en los Estados Unidos, será publicado por la editorial St. Martin’s Press en 2024.

Imagen principal: Estudiantes de posgrado de la Universidad de Columbia trabajaron con Kingston Land Trust en un proyecto que prevé nuevos modelos de vivienda asequible en inmuebles de propiedad comunal, incluidos departamentos de densidad media. Crédito: “(E)CO-Living: Towards a More Affordable and Green Kingston” ([E]COVida: hacia un Kingston más ecológico y asequible) de Yiyang Cai, Kai Guo, Lingbei Chen, Wenyi Peng. Urban Design Studio II, primavera de 2021, Facultad de Arquitectura, Planificación y Preservación, Universidad de Columbia. Profesores: Kaja Kühl (coordinadora), con Lee Altman, Anna Dietzsch, Shachi Pandey, Thaddeus Pawlowski y asociados, Zarith Pineda, Victoria Vuono. Socio local: Kingston Land Trust.

Referencias

Kingston Land Trust. 2021. “An Affordable Eco-Dwelling Roadmap: A Guide for Land Trusts and Housing Organizations to Collaborate on Inclusive, Holistic, and Sustainable Affordable Housing Developments”. Kingston, Nueva York: Kingston Land Trust and Bard College MBA in Sustainability. https://kingstonlandtrust.org/sites/KingstonLandTrust.org/files/inline-files/Affordable%20Eco-Dwelling%20Roadmap%20KLT%20v.5.28.21_0.pdf.

Michels, Katie y David A. Hindin. 2023. “Building Collaboration Among Community Land Trusts Providing Affordable Housing and Conservation Land Trusts Protecting Land for Ecological Value”. Documento de trabajo. Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. (Enero). https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/building-collaboration-among-community-land-trusts-providing-affordable.

RPA (Regional Plan Association). 2023. Hudson Valley Affordable Housing and Conservation Strategy. https://rpa.org/hudson-valley-affordable-housing-conservation-strategy.

Tiene tanto sentido, al menos en los papeles: un último cambio de las normativas en el lugar de trabajo ha dejado a muchos edificios de oficinas del centro mitad vacíos durante gran parte de la semana, así como a las tiendas de delicatessen, kioscos y cafeterías que por mucho tiempo dependieron de los dólares de los trabajadores que llegaban a diario. A medida que las vacantes aumentan, los valores de los inmuebles comerciales disminuyen, lo que podría afectar las rentas por tributos inmobiliarios. Mientras tanto, en los barrios más residenciales, fuera de aquellos adormecidos distritos del centro, una grave escasez de viviendas disparó los precios por encima de niveles sostenibles para compradores de propiedades e inquilinos por igual.

Entonces, ¿por qué no transformar algunas de esas oficinas vacías en las tan necesarias viviendas, y traer más personas (y consumo) al centro, a la vez que se propician beneficios en cuanto al clima y la sostenibilidad gracias a la reutilización de edificios y la generación de densidad urbana?

Esa es la pregunta que se están planteando en las ciudades en todo el mundo, a medida que los calendarios de trabajo remoto e híbrido pasan de ser una excepción a ser una regla para una parte considerable de la mano de obra. Pero, si bien la reutilización adaptativa de las oficinas como residencias parece ser una solución prometedora, la realidad es más complicada.

Según un análisis de Gallup de junio de 2022, más de la mitad de los trabajadores estadounidenses, unos 70 millones de personas, pueden realizar sus trabajos de forma remota, y un mero seis por ciento quiere volver a trabajar en una oficina a tiempo completo algún día (la mayoría dice que, si el empleador lo exigiera, buscaría otro empleo). Gallup predice que más de la mitad del personal con capacidad de trabajar remoto trabajará en un esquema híbrido en el futuro, y un 22 por ciento trabajará siempre fuera del establecimiento en los próximos años (Wigert y Agrawal, 2022).

A medida que los acuerdos de trabajo remoto e híbrido no solo se aceptan sino que también se esperan, las empresas están consolidando la cantidad de espacio de oficina que alquilan mientras intentan hacer que trasladarse hasta el lugar de trabajo valga el esfuerzo para el personal. A menudo eso se traduce en alquilar menos metros cuadrados en un edificio más costoso con terminaciones nuevas y de calidad superior, e instalaciones de última generación, lo que, en el ámbito de los bienes raíces comerciales, se conoce como espacio de clase A.  

Esto obliga a las oficinas menos atractivas de clase B o clase C, que representan la mayoría de los espacios de trabajo construido, a tener que luchar para encontrar y mantener inquilinos. En todo el país, la tasa de vacantes de las oficinas superó el 17 por ciento en el cuarto trimestre de 2022, frente a un 12,1 por ciento a fines de 2019, según la empresa de bienes raíces comerciales, CBRE.

Esta tendencia no muestra señales de atenuarse, y a algunas ciudades les está yendo peor que a otras. CBRE calculó que, a finales de 2022, la tasa de vacantes comerciales en San Francisco será del 27,3 por ciento (antes de la pandemia era tan solo del 4,8 por ciento). Phoenix finalizó el año con casi el 24 por ciento de sus oficinas desalquiladas, frente a un 14,4 por ciento a finales de 2019 (CBRE 2023).

Y los distritos comerciales del centro, en particular, están tambaleando. Este ya es el tercer trimestre consecutivo que las oficinas del centro presentan niveles de vacantes superiores (17,6 por ciento) a los de las áreas urbanas (17,2 por ciento), lo que invirtió la tendencia histórica. A fines de 2019, la tasa de vacantes para los edificios de oficinas céntricos fue del 10,2 por ciento.

En la región de Upper Downtown de Denver, la tasa de vacantes de oficinas ya estaba aumentando antes de la pandemia y, para mediados de 2022, había alcanzado un 21 por ciento, explica Laura E. Aldrete, directora ejecutiva de Planificación y Desarrollo Comunitario. Pero los dirigentes de la ciudad están eligiendo ver esta situación como una oportunidad. “Hay una crisis de viviendas asequibles integrada a eso”, dice Aldrete. “Entonces, ¿cómo podemos crear una variable positiva de dos negativas?”.

Diversificar

Avanzada la pandemia, Aldrete notó algo mientras caminaba por la ciudad de Querétaro, México: en momentos en los que muchos centros estadounidenses aún parecían misteriosamente vacíos debido al cierres prolongados de oficinas, la ciudad de Querétaro estaba viva. En México, también habían cerrado muchos lugares de trabajo, pero el centro de la ciudad estaba lleno de personas, incluidas familias con niños pequeños. “Es una ciudad de la década de 1500 que tiene una serie de plazas públicas, con calles peatonales y residencias, oficinas y [tiendas] minoristas, y estaba prosperando”, relata Aldrete.

Vio un patrón similar emergente en secciones del centro de Denver. El distrito comercial central de la ciudad, Upper Downtown, es una vuelta hacia la era de la renovación urbana (edificios de oficinas de hormigón, calles de sentido único, espacios de estacionamiento) y aún tiene que despertar del sueño inducido por la COVID. Pero Lower Downtown (o “LoDo”), un barrio histórico con usos múltiples cuyos depósitos alguna vez vacíos se convirtieron en loft y restaurantes en las décadas de 1980 y 1990, permaneció bastante activo durante la pandemia. Lo mismo ocurrió con el barrio de Union Station, que experimentó su propio renacimiento de uso mixto en la década pasada, con la renovación, de gran repercusión mediática, de la estación de tren que puso una mayor foco en los parques y las viviendas de ingresos mixtos. “Hoy en día, en comparación con Upper Downtown, aquellos dos barrios céntricos siguen prosperando”, comenta Aldrete.  

Incluso antes de la pandemia, Aldrete pudo ver que el ambiente de oficina “de nueve a cinco” de Upper Downtown había perdido la vitalidad que buscaban los empleados del siglo XXI. “Históricamente, todos los bancos y las empresas de gas y petróleo se han peleado por tener una dirección en la 17th Street”, dice Aldrete, un tramo de Upper Downtown llamado “La Wall Street de las Rocosas”. Pero cuando BP estaba buscando una sede regional siete años atrás, la empresa ignoró la 17th Street y prefirió una ubicación cerca de Union Station. La COVID atacó, “y se hizo muy evidente que no teníamos un barrio [en Upper Downtown] . . . no había nadie”, dice. La pregunta que surgió es la siguiente: “¿Cómo podemos pensar en transformar nuestro distrito comercial central en un distrito barrial central?”.

Denver está elaborando un programa piloto en el que invitará a cinco propietarios de inmuebles a trabajar con la ciudad para convertir sus edificios de oficinas infrautilizados en residencias. Aldrete alentó a los propietarios del edificio histórico Petroleum, que está ocupado a medias, entre otros, a participar, debido a que ya tenían planes de transformar la torre de oficinas en más de 100 departamentos. Espera que unos pocos proyectos piloto puedan abrir camino a otros en el futuro. 

“En el mercado inmobiliario, los primeros son los que asumen el mayor riesgo”, explica Aldrete. “Una de las funciones que el gobierno municipal puede desempeñar es trabajar con el sector privado . . . ¿Cómo nos presentamos como buenos socios para acompañarlos en el proceso?”.  

El barrio ya tiene espacios de entretenimiento y quizás el mejor acceso al transporte público de la ciudad, incluidos colectivos y el metro ligero, comenta Aldrete, pero carece de otros servicios esenciales que atraerían a residentes por tiempo completo, “el corazón de toda comunidad”. Así que, al mismo tiempo, Denver está trabajando con socios de la comunidad para encontrar otras formas de crear un centro “que sea un barrio completo”, desde estrategias para atraer más establecimientos para el cuidado de las infancias y aumentar la cubierta de árboles afuera de las transformaciones residenciales, hasta la activación de espacios de venta minorista en planta baja a través de programas como PopUp Denver, que brinda a los empresarios locales vidrieras sin costo de alquiler por tres meses.  

Sostener el centro

La reutilización adaptativa presenta desafíos logísticos, pero también posibilidades, como el potencial de revivir los centros en dificultades y sostenerlos de una forma nueva, explica Amy Cotter, directora de estrategias climáticas en el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. “Mucho se ha escrito sobre la evolución del espacio de oficinas como una sentencia de muerte para los centros de nuestras ciudades”, comenta Cotter, explanificadora que se centra en las políticas urbanas y la resiliencia climática. Pero convertir el exceso de espacio de trabajo en viviendas ofrece el panorama de una población que mantiene la ciudad activa y económicamente saludable las 24 horas de todos los días de la semana, “diferente de cuando teníamos distritos comerciales centrales con una población durante el horario de oficina y habitantes de los suburbios que venían a trabajar”, añade. 

Las rutinas urbanas de las últimas décadas se volvieron predecibles e insostenibles, señala Cotter: “Durante el día, están los trabajadores de oficina que estacionan y comen en restaurantes, y luego, por la noche, hay propietarios de condominios y habitantes de departamentos que estacionan y salen a comer a restaurantes”, comenta. “Bien, ¿qué pasaría si no existiese ese recambio? ¿Qué pasaría si fuera siempre la misma población, no solo que trabaja, vive, come y se recrea en el mismo espacio, sino también que evita viajar todos esos kilómetros en auto, y, quizás, hasta evita tener un auto?”.  

Suena un poco utópico, admite Cotter, pero no es impracticable. Después de todo, la reutilización adaptativa no es nada nuevo. Como consecuencia de la caída de la fabricación nacional a fines del siglo XX, las industrias y fábricas textiles vacantes en el Noroeste y en el Medio Oeste se redestinaron a estudios de arte y loft residenciales muy demandados. La merma en la asistencia a las iglesias dio origen a condominios reformados con techos de catedrales reales. Y, según un estudio publicado en enero por el Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force (Equipo de Trabajo de Reutilización Adaptativa de Oficinas) de la ciudad de Nueva York (ciudad de Nueva York, 2023), en Bajo Manhattan, las iniciativas de revitalización que comenzaron a mediados de los noventa y se aceleraron después del 11 de septiembre dieron lugar a alrededor de seis millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina que se transformó en unas 17.000 viviendas.  

Readaptar una estructura, en lugar de demolerla y reconstruirla, evita que llegue más carbono a la atmósfera y más desecho de construcción a los vertederos. Según la Agencia de Protección Ambiental, en 2018, en los Estados Unidos se generaron 600 millones de toneladas de desecho de construcción y demolición, más del doble de nuestro desecho sólido municipal, y un 90 por ciento de este vino de la demolición de edificios existentes (US EPA 2022). Mientras tanto, los materiales de construcción convencionales emiten cantidades excesivas de carbono; la producción de acero y hormigón, por separado, representan al menos un ocho por ciento de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero. 

Este es el motivo por el que la reutilización adaptativa “casi siempre ofrece ahorros medioambientales en comparación con la demolición y la construcción nueva”, según el Laboratorio de Políticas e Investigación del Fideicomiso Nacional para la Preservación Histórica, que advierte que los edificios más nuevos necesitan entre 20 y 30 años de operaciones de alto rendimiento para, finalmente, compensar el impacto climático inicial de su construcción (Frey, Dunn y Cochran, 2011). Mantener intactos los cimientos y la estructura de los edificios a la vez que se le hace un lavado de cara a la fachada y se modernizan la calefacción, refrigeración, aislamiento y otros sistemas tiene el beneficio añadido de mejorar de forma radical la eficiencia energética del funcionamiento del edificio, lo que reduce el consumo de energía en hasta un 40 por ciento.   

Además, puede ser económico. Si bien las transformaciones de oficinas pueden complicarse, Robert Fuller, director y jefe de estudio de la sede de Nueva York de la firma de arquitectura mundial Gensler, explica que “en comparación con demoler y construir de cero, por lo general, implican un menor costo por unidad que una construcción nueva”. CBRE calcula que el costo de acondicionar un edificio de oficinas para transformarlas en departamentos en Alexandria, Virginia, sería de US$ 213 por pie cuadrado, en comparación con US$ 275 por pie cuadrado si se construyera de cero. Además, el proceso puede acelerarse: algunos desarrolladores le contaron a Urban Land Institute que la reutilización puede ahorrar de seis a 12 meses de tiempo de construcción (Kramer, Eyre y Maloney, 2023).  

La apatía de mediados de siglo

Lo que hace que el movimiento actual de reutilización sea más desafiante que la transformación de fábricas e iglesias es el tipo de edificios de oficinas que hay que transformar. Gran parte del espacio comercial vacante hoy en día se encuentra en torres de las décadas de 1960, 1970 y 1980, cuadradas y sin ningún tipo de glamour.

“Aún no se las considera realmente edificios históricos”, señala Fuller. Además de sistemas envejecidos, estos monolitos de mitad de siglo suelen tener plantas extensas de una cuadra de profundidad, que hacen que el corazón del edificio se encuentre elevado, a más de 10 o 15 metros de la ventana más cercana (que no puede utilizarse), así como fachadas monótonas y poco acogedoras.

Muchos edificios de Bajo Manhattan que se reformaron tras la catástrofe del 11 de septiembre eran construcciones previas a la guerra con placas de piso pequeñas y aperturas para ventanas con marcos tradicionales, comenta Fuller. “No quiero decir que hayan sido transformaciones sencillas, pero tenían mucho sentido. Algunos de estos edificios de las décadas de 1960 y 1970 . . . definitivamente presentan desafíos”.

De todos modos, los arquitectos pueden resolverlos, en general, se trata de una cuestión de viabilidad financiera. Por ejemplo, Fuller dice: “Si el edificio tiene una placa de suelo lo suficientemente amplia, en realidad, se puede crear un tragaluz en el centro”, y así se atrae la luz diurna hacia el corazón del edificio.

Ese espacio también puede reutilizarse de otras formas. Cuando, hace unos años, Gensler estaba transformando las oficinas de la Franklin Tower de Filadelfia en departamentos, la empresa decidió apilar los servicios nuevos del edificio, como el estudio de ciclismo Peloton, el centro fitnes y el teatro, en el centro del edificio a lo largo de diferentes pisos, y así le dio uso a un espacio que, de lo contrario, estaría ocioso, en el núcleo del edificio. “En lugar de hacer un servicio por piso, algo que suele ser muy común en los edificios residenciales”, explica Fuller, “puedes imaginarte esta columna vertical de servicios que atraviesa todo el edificio hasta arriba”.  

Otro desafío al adaptar los edificios de oficinas más viejos es modernizar el muro cortina, la fachada externa no estructural. El fin de esto no es solo modernizar la estética y mejorar la eficiencia energética, sino también instalar ventanas que funcionen, que suelen faltar en la mayoría de los edificios de oficinas y que la mayoría de las ciudades exigen en las unidades residenciales.

A pesar de presentar estos obstáculos, los edificios de oficinas corrientes aún pueden ofrecer un buen cimiento para viviendas atractivas, así como ubicaciones codiciadas y características estructurales lujosas como los techos altos. Una altura de 3,5 metros de techo a techo no se considera un estándar de clase A para el espacio de oficina moderno, dice Fuller, “pero es muy generoso para un edificio residencial”.

Para ayudar a las ciudades a identificar candidatos potenciales para la reutilización, Gensler desarrolló un sistema de puntuación de propiedad que otorga puntos según la ubicación del edificio, la configuración, el servicio de ascensores y otros factores. “Es una forma de analizar rápido una franja amplia de edificios e identificar a los mejores competidores”, comenta Fuller, porque no todas las torres de oficinas vacantes son aptas para proyectos de transformación razonables.  

Por ejemplo, solo 10 de los 84 edificios que Gensler evaluó en el distrito financiero de Boston alcanzaron el puntaje necesario para merecer que se los considere como objetivos de reutilización (Carlock 2022). Puede que esta no parezca una gran cifra. Pero, incluso si la mayoría de las torres de oficinas de mitad de siglo no califican para la reutilización residencial, convertir tan solo algunas puede generar cientos o, incluso, miles de viviendas nuevas en las ciudades carentes de ellas. “Dados los millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina infrautilizados, incluso un pequeño porcentaje podría ser realmente significativo en lo que respecta a la vivienda”, afirma Fuller.  

Esta es una de las razones por las cuales el Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force de la ciudad de Nueva York está recomendando 11 cambios de políticas que permitirían y fomentarían la conversión de más edificios de oficinas en más barrios (ciudad de Nueva York, 2023). “Queremos garantizar que los edificios de oficinas obsoletos puedan transformarse para darles un uso más demandado, como las viviendas que los neoyorquinos necesitan desesperadamente”, escribe el director de planificación, Dan Garodnick. Algunas de las recomendaciones del equipo de trabajo, posteriores a un estudio de cinco meses, son: flexibilizar las reglas para permitir la transformación de la mayoría de los edificios de oficinas construidos antes de 1991 y ofrecer incentivos de impuestos a la propiedad para apoyar la creación de viviendas asequibles e instalaciones para el cuidado de las infancias en edificios restaurados.   

Y en Washington, DC, donde unos seis millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina permanecen vacantes, y el alcalde Muriel Bowser prometió llevar unos 15.000 residentes nuevos al centro en los próximos cinco años, la ciudad ofrecerá 20 años de exención fiscal a los desarrolladores que transformen edificios de oficina en residencias, siempre que un 15 por ciento de las viviendas se declaren asequibles para quienes ganen el 60 por ciento o menos del ingreso medio de la zona. 

Convertir Calgary

Para mejor o para peor, Calgary, Alberta, le lleva ventaja a muchas ciudades que recién están empezando a explorar las transformaciones de oficinas. Calgary, una ciudad de 1,3 millones, ha tenido sus auges y caídas como capital corporativa de la industria de gas y petróleo de Canadá. Pero la baja de los precios del petróleo crudo en 2014 arrastró con ella al mercado de bienes inmobiliarios comerciales. Los edificios de oficinas del centro de Calgary perdieron alrededor de US$ 16.000 millones de su valor inmobiliario desde 2015, lo que generó una pérdida de recaudación tributaria que afecta a toda la ciudad.   

“Las conversaciones en torno a nuestro problema de vacantes de oficinas comenzó cerca de 2015”, relata Natalie Marchut, gerenta de programa del equipo de estrategia del centro de Calgary. “Las vacantes de oficinas habían empezado a escalar, no veíamos ninguna reabsorción y la situación se tornó alarmante”. Para el momento de los cierres por la COVID en 2020, no quedaban muchos trabajadores de oficina en el centro para enviar a sus hogares. 

Así que los funcionarios de la ciudad trabajaron junto a desarrolladores, empresarios y otros socios para idear un plan. Con alrededor de un tercio del espacio de oficina del centro que permanecía vacante (unos 4 millones de metros cuadrados), la ciudad estableció un objetivo de eliminar dos millones de metros cuadrados de existencias de oficinas en los próximos diez años, idealmente a través de conversiones residenciales.

Pero, como diría Isaac Newton, un objeto en reposo tiende a permanecer en reposo, a menos que se vea afectado por una fuerza externa. A pesar de que convertir un edificio de oficinas ocupado por la mitad en viviendas, por lo general, cuesta menos que demolerlo y reconstruirlo de cero, muchos propietarios de bienes inmobiliarios no tienen la capacidad o el deseo de asumir proyectos de esta magnitud y, en cambio, sucumben a la inercia y permiten que los edificios permanezcan inactivos. “Algo importante que notamos fue que la mayoría de los propietarios de edificios no estaban tomando la iniciativa de reconvertir esas torres de oficinas vacantes por sí mismos”, dice Marchut.  

Así que Calgary decidió ofrecer incentivos financieros para impulsar el proceso. El ayuntamiento de la ciudad aprobó una financiación municipal inicial de US$ 100 millones en 2021, y otra de US$ 53 millones a fines de 2022, para apoyar proyectos de reutilización adaptativa en el centro, lo que permitió reembolsar a los desarrolladores US$ 75 por pie cuadrado de espacio de oficina convertido.   

Incluso con esa tasa generosa, que se calculó para cubrir cerca de un tercio del costo estimado de US$ 225 por pie cuadrado de tales transformaciones al principio del programa, a algunos desarrolladores les resultó difícil hacer que los números cerraran, explica Marchut, dado el aumento en las tasas de interés y la inflación. Pero las dos primeras rondas del programa reunieron muchas más propuestas de proyectos que los fondos disponibles. Los primeros diez proyectos aprobados le restarán más de 300.000 metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina al mercado comercial del centro para convertirlos en unas 1.200 viviendas nuevas.

Una preocupación que solía surgir en los primeros debates es que se suelen imponer tarifas más altas para los bienes inmobiliarios comerciales que para los residenciales. “Este fue un aspecto importante que tuvimos que descifrar, pero, además, hacerle entender a nuestro consejo: al convertirlos en inmuebles residenciales, se les impone una tarifa menor, por lo que no vamos a obtener lo que podríamos recibir si fueran espacios comerciales totalmente ocupados”, explica Marchut. “Sí. Pero no vamos a ver la absorción de 4 millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina. Nunca llegaremos allí”.

En este momento, la situación es tan alarmante, que algunos edificios del centro se valúan únicamente por el valor del suelo, añade. “Por supuesto que se necesitan bienes inmobiliarios comerciales en el centro, y por supuesto que siempre pagarán más a la ciudad en forma de recaudación tributaria, pero no si están todos vacíos”, comenta Marchut. Pero, al eliminar el exceso de existencias se debería reducir la tasa de vacantes, lo que ayuda a estabilizar e, incluso, restaurar el valor del espacio de oficinas restante.

Para acelerar las transformaciones y atraer todas las solicitudes posibles, la ciudad simplificó el programa, de manera intencional, y no incluyó requisitos específicos para la vivienda asequible, por ejemplo. Marchut dice que dejó que la ciudad priorice los proyectos que mejor se alineen con sus objetivos de equidad, clima y planificación.

“Cada proyecto que llega en línea por medio de este programa está haciendo más que solo convertir las oficinas en residencias”, dice Marchut. “Hemos recibido algunos que van a hacer viviendas asequibles . . . tenemos otros que están haciendo mejoras en el espacio público, y esto es opcional. No lo exigimos, pero los postulantes se sientan a la mesa con propuestas verdaderamente sólidas, porque saben que el programa es muy competitivo, así que hacen su mejor apuesta”.

El primer proyecto de conversión del programa, The Cornerstone de Peoplefirst Developments, con planes de terminarse a fines de este año, está creando 112 unidades destinadas a familias, 40 por ciento de las cuales tendrán un precio asequible, explica Marchut. “También están construyendo unidades de tres dormitorios, que escasean en el centro”, señala. Otro proyecto, Palliser One de Aspen, con 176 unidades, planifica incluir un parque público y una pista de patinaje en planta baja.  

La ciudad también está invirtiendo US$ 163 millones en proyectos para el espacio público y de placemaking (creación de espacios), como la renovación de calles peatonales clave y la extensión de RiverWalk hasta West End. “Lo otro que estamos realmente considerando es cómo obtener más espacio para parques”, dice Marchut. “El centro, y en especial West End, carece de espacios públicos abiertos, y si estamos considerando traer a nuevos residentes, familias e infancias, y todo lo que eso conlleva, necesitarán un lugar donde salir y jugar”.  

Una opción que permanece en la mesa para crear más parques en el centro mientras se reduce la saturación de espacio comercial es la demolición de edificios de oficinas vacantes que no pueden convertirse en algo más útil (una próxima etapa del programa también subsidiará otros tipos de transformaciones de oficinas, como locales de arte y de venta minorista). “Estamos explorando el incentivo de la demolición para bienes inmobiliarios muy específicos”, dice Marchut. “Existen edificios de clase C construidos en la década de 1970 que están llenos de amianto, y a su vez, quizás no pueden realmente modernizarse para cumplir con el código de edificación, simplemente llegaron al final de su vida útil”.   

Calgary no enfrenta el tipo de crisis de viviendas que enfrentan ciudades más grandes como Toronto o Vancouver, pero aún se espera que, para 2046, Alberta reciba dos millones de residentes nuevos, en su mayoría población urbana. “Con tales cifras”, dice Marchut, “necesitamos construir más viviendas asequibles, y necesitamos construir más viviendas en el centro . . . y estos proyectos de transformación brindarán tasas de alquiler inferiores a las de las construcciones nuevas”. Esto es algo que ayudará a los habitantes de Calgary actuales y futuros. “Veremos un producto terminado muy pronto”, comenta Marchut. “No veo la hora de finalmente ver que uno abre su puertas y recibe a residentes nuevos”. 

No es (solo) una cuestión de dinero

Más allá de los incentivos financieros, Calgary está dando otros pasos para fomentar las transformaciones. La mayoría de los bienes inmobiliarios del centro, por ejemplo, están exentos de requisitos que permiten el cambio de uso. “Esto ahorra, en promedio, seis meses”, señala Marchut, y elimina el riesgo de que los proyectos queden empantanados o bloqueados por completo. 

Como los desarrolladores necesitan invertir una cantidad enorme de tiempo y dinero en un proyecto incluso antes de proponérselo a la ciudad, el solo hecho de mostrar un apoyo general para las transformaciones implica un impulso importante para la confianza, dijo Marchut. “Obviamente, no se puede garantizar la aprobación hasta que el plan esté definido ante tus ojos y pueda contrastarse con las reglas. Pero una respuesta teórica del estilo: ‘Sí, la ciudad apoya lo que intentas lograr en este lugar’, sirve mucho para reconfortar a los desarrolladores”.

De regreso en Denver, Aldrete no tiene incentivos en dólares para promover la inversión, así que espera que un proceso de aprobación y revisión “más minucioso”, dirigido por un coordinador interno dedicado a las transformaciones de oficinas, reduzca radicalmente el tiempo que les lleva a los desarrolladores hacer avanzar el proyecto. “Básicamente, acortas entre dos y tres meses de cada ciclo de revisión que pueda reducirse, para que salgan a la calle y se empiecen a construir. Esto representa mucho dinero para los desarrolladores”, comenta. “Así es como estamos intentando persuadirlos”.

Fuller dice que, aunque algunas ciudades se adhieren a la reutilización, otras se están quedando atrás. “Este es el momento para cambiar algunas políticas legislativas y de zonificación que podrían ayudar a catalizar este tipo de conversión”, dice, mientras enfatiza que la calidad y la seguridad no deberían sacrificarse. “Hemos llegado a entender que, en realidad, tener una combinación de usos en el mismo lugar es sano para las ciudades, en cuanto a la generación de actividad las 24 horas de todos los días de la semana, y a la vigilancia en las calles y todas esas cosas que sabemos que son buenas. Así que soy optimista respecto a los beneficios que esto conllevará”.

Cotter también es optimista en cuando a que este fuerte incremento de interés pospandémico en las transformaciones de oficinas creará una tendencia duradera. “Se está realizando todo tipo de reutilización adaptativa, lo que les dará a los arquitectos, las empresas de construcción y los funcionarios de códigos de la ciudad experiencia sobre cómo puede hacerse, y sentará las bases para que pueda hacerse con mayor facilidad”, dice Cotter. “¿Y no nos beneficiaríamos todos si nuestros edificios, una vez construidos, pudieran evolucionar con nosotros?””  

Jon Gorey es redactor de personal en el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Imagen principal: Un área común transformada de la Franklin Tower de Filadelfia. Crédito: Robert Deitchler, cortesía de Gensler.

Referencias

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