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.

A few years after earning her PhD in public policy from Harvard University, Jenny Schuetz participated in the Lincoln Institute Scholars program, which introduces early-career researchers to senior academics and journal editors. Schuetz now studies housing and land use policy as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; she’s also a lecturer in Georgetown University’s urban planning department, and the author of Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Schuetz discusses the ascent of zoning into the mainstream consciousness, the perplexing direction of climate migration in the United States, and how climate risk is threatening to upend the housing market.

JON GOREY: What was your experience with the Lincoln Scholars program?

JENNY SCHUETZ: When I did it, the focus was on matching up relatively early-career scholars with some of the experienced journal editors in the field and getting information on how you get your work into publications. How do you present it to an editor in a way that’s compelling, and work through the back and forth of the peer review process? And that was incredibly helpful, because it’s sort of a black box when you start out; you send off a paper, and you get back either a “revise and resubmit” or a rejection, but you often don’t really understand why. So getting to talk to some journal editors about what makes a compelling paper and how they think about pairing papers with reviewers was really useful.

I love that Lincoln does this. The cohort of junior people that I went through it with, we’re all now a little gray-haired and middle aged, but we still see each other. And it’s nice to see newer cohorts coming up through this. That’s a great way for the field to transfer knowledge and to help junior people grow.

JG: What have you been working on more recently, and what are you interested in working on next?

JS: A lot of my research still focuses on the role of zoning and land use regulations in restricting housing supply, and this has become a very hot topic in the last five or six years. One of the things that I’m actually doing now is working directly with state governments that are passing state level zoning reforms and trying to get those implemented and turned into more housing production. The implementation piece is really important—you don’t just write a policy and it implements itself, you have to have actual human beings doing things to implement it.

In fact, I’m just getting ready for a workshop in September with the Lincoln Institute, where we’re bringing together state housing agencies from seven or eight different states to talk to one another and share what kinds of challenges they’re running into, what kinds of successes. It’s a great chance for policymakers to talk to their peers in a way that they don’t often get to do, and we get to learn in real time what’s happening on the ground.

The second big piece of my research is looking at the intersection between housing and climate adaptation. There’s quite a bit of research coming out to show that, on average, Americans are moving toward more climate-risky places. We still have this movement away from the Northeast and Midwest toward the Sun Belt, so we are moving to places with extreme heat risk, drought risk, wildfire risk, and then people moving to Florida are moving into hurricane risk.

That’s going to have real repercussions for things like insurance markets, which are already seeing spiking premiums, and our national disaster recovery programs—we’re spending more and more money because we have more and more people and more expensive housing in these risky places. And we really don’t have a good handle on why people are doing this.

JG: What’s one of the most surprising things you’ve learned in your research?

JS: That people are overwhelmingly moving toward risky places at a time when disasters are becoming more and more salient and expensive is counterintuitive. And the reasons for it are complicated. Some of it is people don’t know what it’s like to live in 115 degrees until they move there, or people are overly optimistic [about their exposure to hurricane risk].

But also our policies aren’t designed to send the right market signals. It should be a lot more expensive to buy a house and take on a mortgage and buy insurance in places that are really risky—but our policies don’t allow that to happen, because we’re trying to keep homeownership affordable for middle-income Americans. We want everybody to buy a house and invest in it, and so we have to make it artificially cheap for people to do that, and then it encourages people to buy in the wrong places.

JG: What do you wish more people out there knew about housing?

JS: One of my longstanding beefs has been that the US leans very heavily on homeownership for wealth building. And as a motivation for that, we have not provided good standards of living and protection for renters, and have made renting seem like it’s a second-class option—that you’re a renter only until you can afford to become a homeowner. I think that has led to a lot of subtle discrimination against renters, and a lot of people not taking seriously that we need to make renting a good option.

Most of us will be renters at some point in our lives. We should just make renting a reasonable option for middle-class households for as long as it suits their needs—that should be an okay option for people at all ages and stages of their life.

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

JS: The climate stuff keeps me up at night. One of the chapters in my book was about climate, and I read a lot more than I had previously on this stuff and decided, wow—this needs to be a major focus of my research, because it’s so big and important and it’s not being talked about in productive ways that get us to better policies.

On the optimistic side, there are two things. One is that we are having a lot more national public conversations about housing, whether that’s affordability or insurance premiums. I mean, zoning never got mentioned in broader media discussions or in presidential elections until four years ago, and now it’s on the front page of the newspaper a lot. So I think a broader understanding of some of the problems is really helpful for starting to move forward.

And there is so much policy experimentation and energy at the state and local level, so many cities and states that are trying new things. We’ve done the same thing with our land use for 70 or 80 years, and now suddenly we’re trying new stuff, which is great. There’s a lot of grassroots energy, and much of this is coming from younger households—which are really motivated to fix this problem—and they are getting engaged with local politics in constructive ways, trying to push their local elected officials to do better. So the kids give me hope.

JG: You’ve written at length about accessory dwelling units (ADUs), among other things, and now several states have essentially legalized ADUs statewide. What does it feel like when a policy or idea you’ve written about extensively gets adopted at a high level?

JS: It’s pretty rare that you can see your idea directly show up in policy—policymakers talk to a lot of experts, and they get a lot of opinions thrown at them, so it’s often very hard to trace your immediate impact. But it’s exciting to see ideas take shape. Both to see them translated into policy, but I think, equally, to hear people start talking about them in the ways that we’re framing the problem. I like to say we’ve got two affordability problems: the lack of supply and poor households not earning enough. And that framing has gotten picked up in a lot of places, and they’re talking about it in a more constructive way.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, or a show you’ve been streaming?

JS: I’ve been reading a lot of books about climate and housing, and they’re really depressing. I’ve been streaming “Killing Eve”—I was late to the party on that one—but that’s just fun and escapist. I love spy stories and mystery stories, and that’s a good one. It actually makes me feel like real life is okay, because there aren’t spies lurking in every corner ready to kill me!

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

Lead image: Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution testifies before the US Congress Joint Economic Committee about expanding the supply of affordable housing. Credit: Courtesy of Jenny Schuetz.

Two years ago, the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority pulled off something of a municipal miracle. The agency learned that almost 200 corporate-owned houses in Cincinnati were in receivership and up for sale. Rather than forever forfeit all that single-family housing to yet another institutional investor, the Port launched a bold bid to purchase the homes, with the goal of fixing them up and creating affordable homeownership opportunities for the existing tenants and other Cincinnati residents.

Well into the project, the Port would discover that many of the 194 houses it had purchased were in worse condition than expected, and dozens were vacant. “When we bought the portfolio, we thought there were only going to be 10 vacant, but 60 were vacant, and those were in really bad shape,” says Laura Brunner, the Port’s president and CEO. “So that’s where we’ve been focusing our capital investment, getting those homes ready to sell.”

The Port has now started selling the first of those fixed-up homes—19 of them so far—at affordable prices, to owner-occupants who earn less than 120 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI). The agency also helped stabilize the housing situations of the 130 or so renters in the other properties, addressing a backlog of hundreds of repair requests, helping tenants get current on their rent, and offering them free homebuying and financial literacy education.

Given the state of the houses, repairs and essential upgrades have cost more than double what the Port expected—averaging $96,000 per house so far, compared to a projected $40,000. But the agency has been able to make up the difference with grants so it can still sell the homes affordably, at cost. Unlike a house flipper, the Port only needs to break even to fulfill its debt obligations, not turn a profit.

In reclaiming rental houses from institutional landlords and converting them into homeownership opportunities, the Port is helping low- and moderate-income residents build generational wealth. And the agency’s approach is supporting sustainable growth in other areas of the local economy, too.

Spreading the Wealth

While homeownership itself has historically been an engine of wealth creation for millions of Americans, the real estate market is also a massive driver of economic activity in a community. New homebuyers tend to also buy new home goods, from dishes to lawn mowers, and a whole suite of local service providers participate in a home purchase, from appraisers to contractors.

So as the Port rehabs and sells what it calls its CARE (Creating Affordable Real Estate) Portfolio, it’s been very intentional about involving local businesses throughout the process.

“We’ve been really conscientious in our contracting to use small minority- and women-owned businesses,” Brunner says. With the cost of renovations averaging almost $100,000 per house, “the project size is perfect to really help grow and scale a small business. . . .And we’re not just giving them a contract and hoping they do a good job; we’re doing some technical assistance along the way to help them scale and grow their businesses sustainably.”

Rather than list the homes through an internal real estate agent, as it has historically done to save costs, the Port has partnered with Black-owned brokerages through the Greater Cincinnati Realtist Association (GCRA) to handle at least a quarter of the sales. The Port pays agents a standard commission, which adds some costs, but is essentially just another expenditure supporting local small businesses, Brunner says. “It’s helping to grow the whole ecosystem.”

The GCRA is a local chapter of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, the oldest and largest African American trade organization in the country. “Prior to 1962, African Americans were not allowed to be members of NAR, the National Association of Realtors—or to even be called a Realtor, because that’s a trademarked name,” says Marcus Parrish, president of the GCRA. So in 1947, a group of 12 Black brokers, including Cincinnati hotelier Horace Sudduth, formed their own real estate organization, NAREB, whose agents would be called Realtists. “Our mission is democracy in housing—representing the underserved and providing education and resources,” Parrish says.

Only a quarter of Black households own their home in Cincinnati—less than half the homeownership rate of the city’s white families—and both the Port and Parrish hope that converting investor-owned rental units to affordable homeownership opportunities can help close that gap. “The Cincinnati market is just as challenging as any other market in the nation,” Parrish says. “Low housing inventory just creates a challenge for anybody who’s purchasing, but specifically for our first-time homebuyers and our Black and brown communities.”

A GCRA selection committee chose a handful of Realtists to handle the Port listings, although Parrish and other board members listed the very first batch of CARE portfolio houses themselves so they could get a feel for the process and work through any kinks. Buyers need to prove their income eligibility, and the houses include a deed restriction that prevents owners from reselling them for the first five years.

As for the renovations, the Port isn’t trying to chase HGTV trends or install high-end finishes, Parrish says; they’re focused on making the homes safe, efficient, and functional for first-time buyers. “I listed and sold two of those properties, and for the most part, the updates and rehabs have been good,” Parrish says. “If it needs a new furnace, needs new central air, if the roof is beyond repair, they’re going to do that.”

Early this year, Parrish sold a Port-rehabbed house at its list price of $165,000, and he recalls the ripple effects of the sale: The mortgage lender at First Financial Bank, who helped the Latino homebuyers get a five-figure down payment grant, also belonged to the GCRA, and so did the title company representative. “Everyone involved in the process was a member of our organization,” Parrish says.

That’s important, because Black brokers, agents, and appraisers are underrepresented (and often underpaid) in the real estate industry. Nationally, only 6 percent of real estate agents are Black; less than 2 percent of appraisers identify as Black. “The main thing is, you want to have representation, so the push is to get more African Americans in the real estate profession,” Parrish says.

Rent, Renovate, Replicate

While it renovates vacant houses, the Port is also acting as a landlord for over 100 households. The agency holds its contractors to high standards and offers technical assistance to ensure they succeed; it’s also been careful in its hiring practices.

Brunner says the Port was very close to signing a contract with one property management company until a company representative referred to the renters as “these people,” a rhetorical red flag. “That’s obviously coded for the kind of practices we’re trying to fight against—that ‘these people’ are not trustworthy, just assuming the worst,” Brunner says. “We had to have somebody that we could trust.” They hired a different firm.

In addition to addressing hundreds of repairs that the corporate landlord had ignored, the Port has helped dozens of tenants catch up on back rent—some of them were over a year behind. “We were successful in working with our local community action agency to secure ARPA funding to bring 60 of them current,” Brunner says, adding that “there’s a whole psychological benefit to knowing you’re current. We’ve got a good collection record now, after people were able to kind of wipe the slate clean with grants.”

The Port also hired a local nonprofit called Working in Neighborhoods to offer financial literacy training and first-time homebuyer classes to interested tenants. Many of the renters still lack the financial stability needed to buy a home, and some have been hesitant to engage with these resources. But about 60 of them have participated in the classes, and that’s helping to create a pipeline of potential buyers. “We’ve got maybe half a dozen who will be ready [to purchase a home] in the next six months, and half a dozen who’ll be ready in the next year,” Brunner says.

Even if it takes longer than expected to convert existing renters into homeowners, what the Port has accomplished is remarkable, says Robert ‘R.J.’ McGrail, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and director of its Accelerating Community Investment initiative.

“These are largely stabilized rental households now, and that is an extraordinary public policy outcome,” he says. Selling the rehabbed homes has enabled the Port to pay the debt service on its bonds, buying itself more time to move existing tenants along a track to homeownership. “It’s just win, win, win across the continuum of policy outcomes that you’d like to see from a financial intervention like this.”

Proof of Concept

Could the Port’s approach be replicated elsewhere? “Technically, transactionally, yes,” McGrail says. “There are debt-issuing authorities in other cities that have the powers to execute a financing transaction like this. There are fewer that have the rest of the Port’s powers around taxes and around landholding; they’re also a land bank, so they’re more empowered than your typical municipal financing-only entity. They can do it all in house.”

The Port also had plenty of previous experience hiring construction crews and managing properties, primarily for commercial properties. “That set of tools—the financing, the property management, plus the redevelopment expertise—is a unique set of competencies to have under one roof,” McGrail acknowledges, but there’s no reason this strategy couldn’t be replicated by a more typical financing entity working with civic and nonprofit partners. “You don’t need the one-stop shop to do this. You just need the will to tell three shops to do it together.”

Brunner says the Port has proven that the approach can be replicated and scaled. “We’ve shown that we can recover our costs, that you can buy a house, fix it up, and sell it for what you put into it,” she says. “We’ve established that, even in these poor neighborhoods, there is a market for ownership. And we’ve proven that, even with the highest interest rates in 20 years, many people can still own a home with a lower mortgage payment than what their rent was.”

What’s more, Brunner insists, it must be replicated. “We can all agree that our racial wealth gap is one of the biggest problems in our country,” Brunner says. “We can all agree that homeownership is the most direct way to increase wealth. So how can we not play whatever role we possibly can to make that possible for more people?”

Beyond the economics, she says, “there’s a moral imperative, for those of us in this country who can, to fight back against these institutional investors. It’s not a little thing, just every here and there a bad actor as a property owner; it’s become an epidemic. We cannot just give up on all these poor to moderate-income neighborhoods, and wipe out that potential of first-time ownership, largely for our Black and brown communities. We have to fight back.”

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

Lead image: The Port of Cincinnati bought 194 homes formerly owned by institutional investors in neighborhoods across the city. Credit: Port of Cincinnati.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is the most urbanized region in the developing world, with 81 percent of its population—539 million people—living in cities, according to UN-Habitat. While there are differences in urbanization patterns across the region—for example, countries in Central America are less urbanized, but experiencing one of the fastest urbanization rates in the world, while South America is already home to major cities—poverty and inequality have characterized this growth regionwide, leading to the creation of precarious settlements whose populations face multiple vulnerabilities. These settlements are the result of insufficient access to adequate housing and unjust distribution of wealth and opportunities. The resulting vulnerabilities get reinforced and magnified by external factors such as migration and climate change.

To reflect on and tackle these related challenges, the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) co-organized a one-day workshop in early 2024. This event was part of an emerging initiative led by the Lincoln Institute and MIT that seeks to foster a call to action and build a regional vision that addresses critical challenges and advocates for systemic change.

Rooted in the experiences of team members from both institutions who have worked on these issues in their respective countries—Lincoln Institute LAC Program Director Anaclaudia Rossbach (Brazil), SPURS fellow Agustina Rodriguez Biasone (Argentina), and SPURS fellow Carina Arvizu Machado (México)—the workshop was designed to bridge the gap between academia and practical experience. It was an opportunity, said SPURS program director Bish Sanyal, to “theorize from practice.”

The workshop explored the multifaceted challenges facing vulnerable territories in Latin America and the Caribbean. One in five individuals in the region (110 million people) live in informal settlements. These areas face conditions of poverty and social exclusion, marked by inadequate housing, poor public services, and limited access to urban infrastructure and green spaces. In addition, the region is particularly vulnerable to climate change and has experienced significant migration flows in the past decades. LAC hosts approximately 3 million migrants from other areas and about 11 million internal migrants. Drawing inspiration from four case studies, the workshop explored innovative and integrated approaches that are paving the way for sustainable development and systemic change.

The workshop brought together over 50 individuals from diverse backgrounds, spanning academia, government, nonprofit organizations, and more, with a slate of speakers that included over 20 experts from Latin America and the Caribbean. Among them were former government ministers, executive directors, and professors from institutions such as Oxfam Mexico, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Yale University, The New School, Columbia University, and more.

The real-world cases showcased innovative approaches to addressing urban challenges. From the Neighborhood Integration program in Buenos Aires led by María Migliore (former Buenos Aires minister of Human and Housing Development), to México’s Urban Improvement Program spearheaded by Martha Peña Ordóñez (current head of the planning unit of the Secretariat of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development, SEDATU), passing by the Utopias project for rehabilitation of public spaces in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, implemented by Raúl Basulto (current head of Urban Development of Iztapalapa), and the Manzanas del Cuidado, or care blocks, championed by Maria-Mercedes Jaramillo (former Bogotá secretary of Planning). After participating in discussions about the challenges in the region and exploring the four case studies, attendees imagined and discussed integrated strategies for effective solutions. Participants engaged in lively debates, shared best practices, and explored ways to leverage interdisciplinary approaches for positive impact.

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Participants also explored the relationships among interventions in informal settlements, city planning, and the broader urban system, reimagining the relationship between nature and cities. Rethinking planning scales and alternative territorial governance, such as through elements like water supply and management, was at the forefront of the discussions, especially on the panel about climate change, moderated by Amy Cotter, director of climate strategies at the Lincoln Institute. Looking back to move forward, the panelists and participants drew inspiration from the historical constitution of cities through migration, and past interventions in informal settlements.

The resounding commitment echoed among participants was a determination to forge a more equitable and sustainable future for urban communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. As Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute, mentioned, this workshop was a great opportunity to build upon similar events in the past, such as the 2018 symposium “Slums: New Visions for an Enduring Global Phenomenon,” held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and consolidate a more robust community of practice. The group agreed to continue this journey together, building bridges and creating lasting impact for the vulnerable territories of the region, forging new paths toward systemic change.

Key themes for future discussion based on the reflections at the workshop include:

1. Exploring further the links and interdependencies of informality and informal settlements with migration, climate change and inequality, and the implications and complication of political polarization in the region.
2. Connecting interventions in informal settlements to city planning, and the broader urban system.
3. Reimagining the relationship between nature and cities, considering and integrating indigenous communities and their concepts and practices.
4. Rethinking the scales of planning and alternative territorialities of governances, through alternative elements such as water.
5. Looking back to better move forward, including looking at indigenous knowledge, how migration has affected the growth and development of cities, and previous interventions around informal settlements.

This initiative was made possible thanks in part to a grant from MIT’s Office of Experiential Learning.

Carina Arvizu Machado is a 2024 SPURS fellow at MIT and former Cities Director for Mexico and Colombia at the World Resources Institute, Mexico. She is the former national deputy secretary of Urban Development and Housing for Mexico, sustainable urban mobility consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, and chief of urban projects for Mexico City.

Lead image: Utopía Aculco, part of the Utopía series of 12 parks and public cultural and sports facilities in Mexico City’s Iztapalapa neighborhood. The name doubles as an acronym for Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social (Units of Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony). Credit: Government of Mexico City.

In 1903, Elizabeth Magie, an East Coast office worker, introduced a game designed to illustrate the economic consequences of monopolizing land ownership. An avid follower of Henry George, Magie wanted more people to understand how unregulated rents enriched property owners at the expense of tenants. The Landlord’s Game was played in two rounds: the first involved buying, selling, and renting property, with the goal of making money; in the second round, players who landed on a property paid into a public treasury instead of paying the owner, showing how a land tax could undo the economic and social damage caused by unregulated land ownership.

Magie’s game was a forerunner of contemporary teaching games designed to reveal the consequences, either intended or unintended, of complex systems. For our purposes at the Lincoln Institute, it illustrates the use of land policy as a potential remedy to social and economic challenges. But it also inspired, and was ultimately usurped by, a popular game with a very different message.

The game of Monopoly is iconic. It is also ironic. The original Landlord’s Game was designed to offer solutions to the intrinsic unfairness of consolidated property ownership; Monopoly is a celebration of ruthlessness and greed that promotes unbridled large-scale land ownership. The popularity of Monopoly, now the world’s best-selling board game, helped normalize the idea that unregulated private property was sacrosanct.

More than a century after the invention of The Landlord’s Game, we still struggle to navigate the space between our cultural attachment to unfettered individual dominion over private property and our need to manage land to meet collective needs. A big part of the challenge is that property ownership in the US is still as opaque and almost as unregulated as it was in 1903. How can we regulate something we know so little about?

Property ownership is a matter of public record in the US, but it cannot be determined from any single public source. Our land ownership data is inaccessible, fragmented, and, in many cases, outdated or incomplete. To identify all the US property owned by a single individual or corporation with any certainty, for example, one would need to consult paper records held in 3,142 county offices across the country. Although many counties have digitized property records, the records that do exist are rife with errors and infrequently updated. Some private data providers have tried to compile property records nationally into machine-readable form, but these datasets are expensive, incomplete, and prone to repeat the errors found in the digitized county records. They are also typically tailored for individual use cases, like examining the activity of a particular entity or studying the dynamics of a local market.

It is also very difficult to determine actual property owners from the owners of record. This is because corporate ownership of property can be obscured by the corporate structure itself. The owner of record might be a division of a larger holding company, a managing partner of a national real estate investment trust, or simply a person or corporation doing business under a different name.

To make matters worse, land regulations are similarly opaque and complex. There are more than 30,000 zoning codes in use in the US, dictating how each parcel of land can be developed, and 89,000 local governments across the country that influence how land can be used and taxed. These local governments have overlapping jurisdictions, so different rules can apply to different properties on the same street.

Since joining the Lincoln Institute in 2014, I have wanted to be able to answer simple questions about the state of the nation’s land. For instance, how much prime farmland has been lost to urban sprawl since we began building the interstate highway system? To what extent are natural resources like forests owned and controlled by foreign investors? How many units could be added to the national housing stock if we rezoned and redeveloped abandoned strip malls? As it turns out, finding answers to questions like these was more complicated than I had anticipated. But now, a decade later, we’re making some headway.

In 2023, the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute (CGS) launched Who Owns America℠ (WHOA), a nationwide effort to uncover property ownership patterns with unprecedented ease, precision, and nuance. As a first step, this ambitious data mapping endeavor used best-in-class parcel-level data—optimized for analysis at an aggregate level—to respond to specific questions about the ownership of single-family housing in US cities. Starting with Baltimore, we were able to report block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and across the city the extent to which institutional investors were snatching up single-family homes and converting them from owner-occupied properties to rentals—an increasingly common trend across the country.

Now, dozens of entities—from municipal agencies to national affordable housing organizations—have asked CGS to help them better understand the changing reality of their local housing stock. By equipping organizations like the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America and the Salt Lake County Office of Regional Development with precise and enhanced maps of property ownership, CGS is helping to inform strategies they can use to defend their housing stock—and to track their progress. (Our work was the subject of a recent article in Context, a Thomson Reuters media platform about climate change, technology, and inclusive economies.)

Without an available stock of starter homes, homeownership might disappear as a pathway to “the American dream.” Similarly, our chances of closing racial and ethnic wealth gaps will be greatly diminished if we cannot close racial and ethnic homeownership gaps (which are, incidentally, higher than they were when we passed the Civil Rights and the Fair Housing Acts in the 1960s).

But ownership of the nation’s housing stock is only the tip of a very large iceberg of questions that this data-based approach can help answer. The unique “data fusion” expertise of CGS reflects the interconnected nature of our most pressing challenges. By layering multiple environmental and social datasets with land ownership data, their work stands to enrich our collective understanding of the obstacles we face—and how to surmount them.

For example, by weaving in legal-entity information, which is typically dispersed across hundreds of business registers, we can figure out where corporate investors are the most active—in land or housing. We can better understand the impact of large-scale institutional investors compared to that of small, family-owned LLC holdings. We can determine which corporate investors target their housing purchases in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color; which companies are finding loopholes in development regulations intended to protect water supplies in the parched Southwest; and which out-of-state investors are snapping up local timberlands.

Last month, we got two requests in the same week from practitioners hoping to figure out how much land is owned and controlled by places of worship in their respective states. Drawing inspiration from California’s recently passed SB4, which allows religious organizations and nonprofit colleges to build affordable housing on their property, our partners wanted to better understand the potential of such legislation to engage relatively new players and resources in solving the housing crisis. CGS responded by providing a preliminary analysis estimating the total count of parcels owned by religious organizations, as well as the average and total acreage breakdown by state and county, and is now developing an interactive platform that will make it possible to refine this dataset and investigate potential redevelopment sites.

We’re now contemplating how Who Owns America℠ can help answer many other questions like these—including questions no one has thought to ask yet. The possibilities are endless and exciting.

Understanding property ownership in America involves navigating a complex web of legal, economic, cultural, and historical factors. Balancing private property rights, public interest, and sustainable land use remains an ongoing challenge—in the face of the climate crisis, it might be the biggest challenge of our lifetimes—and the tension between private ownership, government control, and public interest will continue to shape land policies and regulations. But for the first time, it seems possible that better informed and more transparent policies, buttressed by accurate, accessible data, will help to resolve this tension.

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

Image: Segment of a data map produced by the Center for Geospatial Solutions to identify different types of property ownership in Baltimore. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.