Topic: Local Government

Un grupo de participantes realiza una visita de campo. El grupo acaba de bajarse del autobús y se está reuniendo antes de empezar su visita del plan parcial El Ensueño. En el fondo, se ven los edificios altos que el grupo va a visitar.

Financing Sustainable Development in Latin American Cities

By Diego Lomelli and Luis Quintanilla, October 21, 2025

It doesn’t take much to understand the magnitude of the challenge that our Latin American cities are facing in terms of infrastructure financing and sustainable urban development. Despite significant investments in local development projects, the lack of funds for infrastructure financing is currently between 5 and 6.5 percent of the region’s GDP, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), that is, between $355 million and $462 million annually. Approximately 40 percent of this gap falls within the scope of subnational governments. In an increasingly challenging environment for local tax administration, how can subnational governments contribute to closing this gap? One solution lies in urban land value and use policies as levers for development financing, since the valuation of land generated by public action can be impressive—sometimes even greater than the cost of the infrastructure projects that lead to such increases in land value.

Consider, for example, the effect on real estate valuation that is expected to be produced by the construction of the Bogotá Metro: its estimated that homes located at a walkable distance from the planned stations will have an increase in value of up to 11 percent due to the accessibility benefits the project is expected to generate. The total valuation of private property generated by this investment could be used as leverage to finance, at least partially, the cost of the project.

To meet sustainable urban development objectives, it becomes increasingly important to exchange knowledge and experiences regarding the management of this type of public enterprise, planning, and related land use policies, as well as the various mechanisms for recovering capital gains that cities can consider as additional sources for their financing.

In this context, the Lincoln Institute course Urban Financing and Land Policies: A Review from the Colombian Experience was designed to analyze “the main concepts present in land policies through the review of land management and the application of financing instruments in Colombia,” according to María Mercedes Maldonado, one of the course coordinators. The selection of Colombia as the host country has to do with its long-time application of some of these instruments, such as betterment levies—a fiscal policy based on national legislation that celebrated its 100th anniversary of implementation in 2021—and the existence of legal frameworks that provide a basis for the implementation of these tools.

The Colombian experience allows us to evaluate progress, results, learning, and alternatives to contribute to the discussion on the use of these instruments in the context of Latin America, a region in which the Lincoln Institute has worked for over 30 years. The institute has built an extensive network of collaborators, both institutional and individual, who share a common view on the potential of land management as one of the solutions to the various challenges faced by cities in the region.

The Universidad de Los Andes is part of this valuable network, and for the second consecutive year the course was organized at the facilities of this institution in partnership with the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (CIDER, in Spanish) of the Faculty of Social Sciences. The course was led by Erik Vergel, associate professor at the School of Architecture and the CIDER, and specialist in transportation issues and land policies; and Maldonado, a lawyer and specialist in housing, urban financing, and land policies. This alliance, Vergel said, “is one of the most important for the Universidad de Los Andes in terms of internationalization processes, dissemination of new knowledge, and training urban matter specialists in the Latin American and Caribbean region.”

Besides Vergel and Maldonado, the group of professors also included María Cristina Rojas, architect and specialist in economics and urban development; Magda Montaña, lawyer and specialist in taxation; Oscar Borrero, economist and specialist in appraisal and market studies; and Néstor Garza, an economist who specializes in urban and regional economics.

A classroom where course participants pay attention to the speaker.
Participants traveled to Colombia to take part in the course, which included a mix of master classes, group exercises, case study presentations, pedagogical games, and field trips. Credit: Alejandro Barragán, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Los Andes University.

In this course, 45 participants, selected from a group of 301 applicants, had the opportunity to meet in person for five days to exchange ideas and discuss the implementation of different urban financing instruments in their respective countries. The high number of applicants highlighted the interest in training on these topics.

The participants included professionals from different areas, including researchers, public officials, graduate students, lawyers, economists, architects, political scientists, urban planners, engineers, and geographers. They represented 14 countries in the region—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela—as well as Puerto Rico. This diversity of nationalities and backgrounds brought richness to the dialogue and allowed participants to compare their experiences related to urban financing and implementing land management instruments.

The structure and content of the course was designed to stimulate active learning, using peer exchange and practical application of the content studied. The program was composed of a mix of master classes, group exercises, case study presentations, pedagogical games, and field trips.

The thematic content moved from the general to the specific, starting with a review of the general framework of financing and land management instruments in Colombia within a Latin American context. Subsequently, basic concepts of land markets, urban spatial structure and land pricing were addressed, followed by a more detailed study of instruments, such as betterment levies, urban planning obligations, and land readjustment. The program also included sessions to study the application of these instruments in urban mobility and public housing projects.

One of the new features introduced this year was the Urban Tarot activity, a pedagogical game whose development was supported by the Lincoln Institute in 2016, and which was led on this occasion by one of its authors, María Cristina Rojas. This game aims to familiarize participants with different planning, land management, and urban financing instruments through the development of strategies that require the incorporation of these tools to solve problems inspired by Latin American cities.

José Lazarte, one of the participants, commented: “[The course] encouraged an accessible and contextualized reflection . . . integrating technical and practical knowledge in a format that stimulated interdisciplinary dialogue and strategic thinking on urban transformation.” In this regard, Rojas said: “This activity led to a lot of discussion regarding the instruments: which ones are useful, and which ones are not, for a given problem.” The game was very well received by the students and allowed the group of teachers to evaluate the level of understanding of different concepts and tools through the strategies developed by the participants and the reasoning behind them.

A man picks Urban Tarot cards while his peers observe him. The cards are placed face down on a table. A crystal ball shines beside them.

One of the activities of the course was the Urban Tarot game, in which cards representing different planning, land management, and urban financing instruments are used to propose solutions to problems inspired by Latin American cities. Credit: Alejandro Barragán, Faculty of Architecture and Design, Los Andes University.

On the last day, the course concluded with field trips to urban mobility and land management and public housing projects in Bogotá, specifically the Ciudad Bolivar aerial cable and the “El Ensueño” partial plan. These visits allowed for first-hand observation of the application and potential of instruments that had been previously discussed in the classroom.

This connection between theory and practice helps to strengthen learning. By touring projects on the ground, speaking with local organizers, and seeing the results of policies and instruments at work, participants can more clearly understand the challenges, impacts, and potential of the tools analyzed. Finally, the experience in the field created a valuable space to discuss lessons learned and reflect on the feasibility of adapting certain strategies to each participant’s locality.

Among the most positive aspects of the course, the participants highlighted the experience of the teaching team, the variety of applications and instruments presented, the practical exercises of urban planning and capital gains estimation, and the richness offered by peer-to-peer exchange from different countries. “The environment of this course invites us to make joint reflections in the face of the scenarios that occur in different countries,” said Rafael Gómez, one of the participants.

While all attendees said they would recommend the course to others and expected it to have an impact on their work, students asked for more time to delve into the technical, political, and institutional capacities needed for effective deployment of each of the urban instruments presented in the course. In light of these suggestions, the Lincoln Institute will review its specialty courses on these tools to further foster dialogue at the regional level.

Vergel, one of the leaders, remarked that an important insight from the course “lies in the importance of generating spaces of international outreach among professionals in urban issues, allowing for comparative exercises that facilitate the exchange of experiences and knowledge on the coordination between the transport and mobility sector and the housing sector through urban development financing instruments.”


Diego Lomelli is an instructional designer and analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Luis Felipe Quintanilla is a policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Course participants visit public housing built as part of a requirement under Bogotás partial development plan El Ensueño. Credit: Luis Felipe Quintanilla.

This article originally appeared in Spanish in June 2025 as “Formación con propósito.”

Coming to Terms with Density: An Urban Planning Concept in the Spotlight 

September 15, 2025

By Anthony Flint, September 15, 2025
 

It’s an urban planning concept that sounds extra wonky, but it is critical in any discussion of affordable housing, land use, and real estate development: density.

In this episode of the Land Matters podcast, two practitioners in architecture and urban design shed some light on what density is all about, on the ground, in cities and towns trying to add more housing supply. 

The occasion is the revival of a Lincoln Institute resource called Visualizing Density, which was pushed live this month at lincolninst.edu after extensive renovations and updates. It’s a visual guide to density based on a library of aerial images of buildings, blocks, and neighborhoods taken by photographer Alex Maclean, originally published (and still available) as a book by Julie Campoli. 

It’s a very timely clearinghouse, as communities across the country work to address affordable housing, primarily by reforming zoning and land use regulations to allow more multifamily housing development—generally less pricey than the detached single-family homes that have dominated the landscape. 

Residential density is understood to be the number of homes within a defined area of land, in the US most often expressed as dwelling units per acre. A typical suburban single-family subdivision might be just two units per acre; a more urban neighborhood, like Boston’s Back Bay, has a density of about 60 units per acre. 

Demographic trends suggest that future homeowners and renters will prefer greater density in the form of multifamily housing and mixed-use development, said David Dixon, a vice president at Stantec, a global professional services firm providing sustainable engineering, architecture, and environmental consulting services. Over the next 20 years, the vast majority of households will continue to be professionals without kids, he said, and will not be interested in big detached single-family homes.  

Instead they seek “places to walk to, places to find amenity, places to run into friends, places to enjoy community,” he said. “The number one correlation that you find for folks under the age of 35, which is when most of us move for a job, is not wanting to be auto-dependent. They are flocking to the same mixed-use, walkable, higher-density, amenitized, community-rich places that the housing market wants to build … Demand and imperative have come together. It’s a perfect storm to support density going forward.” 

Tensions often arise, however, when new, higher density is proposed for existing neighborhoods, on vacant lots or other redevelopment sites. Tim Love, principal and founder of the architecture firm Utile, and a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, said he’s seen the wariness from established residents as he helps cities and towns comply with the MBTA Communities Act, a Massachusetts state law that requires districts near transit stations with an allowable density of 15 units per acre. 

Some towns have rebelled against the law, which is one of several state zoning reform initiatives across the US designed to increase housing supply, ultimately to help bring prices down. 

Many neighbors are skeptical because they associate multifamily density with large apartment buildings of 100 or 200 units, Love said. But most don’t realize there is an array of so-called “gentle density” development opportunities for buildings of 12 to 20 units, that have the potential to blend in more seamlessly with many streetscapes. 

“If we look at the logic of the real estate market, discovering over the last 15, 20 years that the corridor-accessed apartment building at 120 and 200 units-plus optimizes the building code to maximize returns, there is a smaller ‘missing middle’ type that I’ve become maybe a little bit obsessed about, which is the 12-unit single-stair building,” said Love, who conducted a geospatial analysis that revealed 5,000 sites in the Boston area that were perfect for a 12-unit building. 

“Five thousand times twelve is a lot of housing,” Love said. “If we came up with 5,000 sites within walking distance of a transit stop, that’s a pretty good story to get out and a good place to start.” 

Another dilemma of density is that while big increases in multifamily housing supply theoretically should have a downward impact on prices, many individual dense development projects in hot housing markets are often quite expensive. Dixon, who is currently writing a book about density and Main Streets, said the way to combat gentrification associated with density is to require a portion of units to be affordable, and to capture increases in the value of urban land to create more affordability. 

“If we have policies in place so that value doesn’t all go to the [owners of the] underlying land and we can tap those premiums, that is a way to finance affordable housing,” he said. “In other words, when we use density to create places that are more valuable because they can be walkable, mixed-use, lively, community-rich, amenitized, all these good things, we … owe it to ourselves to tap some of that value to create affordability so that everybody can live there.” 

Visualizing Density can be found at the Lincoln Institute website at https://www.lincolninst.edu/data/visualizing-density/. 

Listen to the show here or subscribe to Land Matters on  Apple Podcasts, Spotify,  Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 


Further reading 

Visualizing Density | Lincoln Institute

What Does 15 Units Per Acre Look Like? A StoryMap Exploring Street-Level Density | Land Lines

Why We Need Walkable Density for Cities to Thrive | Public Square

The Density Conundrum: Bringing the 15-Minute City to Texas | Urban Land

The Density Dilemma: Appeal and Obstacles for Compact and Transit Oriented Development | Anthony Flint

 


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. 

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston stands with his arms crossed, smiling. He is wearing a dark suit and red tie.
Mayor’s Desk

Managing Growth in Denver

By Anthony Flint, September 8, 2025

Mike Johnston, a onetime high school English teacher, became the 46th mayor of Denver in 2023. He took the helm during a period of significant growth in one of the Intermountain West’s most prominent cities, and has been managing the growing pains that come along with that popularity—including high housing costs, homelessness, and municipal budget woes.

The road to the mayor’s office included teaching English in the Mississippi Delta, leading three different schools in the Denver Metro area as principal, and serving two terms in the Colorado State Senate. The Colorado native was also a senior education advisor to President Obama and CEO of Gary Community Ventures, a local philanthropic organization with a focus on education and housing.

Johnston, 50, was part of the Lincoln Institute’s mayors panel at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Denver in spring 2025, along with Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett and Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt. Senior Fellow Anthony Flint caught up with him several weeks later for this interview; their full conversation is available as a Land Matters podcast.

Anthony Flint: Like a lot of booming metropolitan regions, Denver is facing a housing affordability problem. What are the key elements for addressing this crisis?

Mike Johnston: We have folks from all over the country and all over the world who want to move to Denver. And that is a great problem to have. I have friends who are mayors in cities facing very different challenges, with declining populations and lots of vacant buildings. Denver is now, I think, the number two destination for people under age 30 in the United States. That’s driving a lot of economic growth. It also drives lots of housing demand.

We have to add a lot more housing supply, and we think there are three ways to do that. One is to make it faster to build housing. That means an aggressive strategy to make our permitting process take 180 days instead of two to three years. The second is reducing the costs of building. We’re doing more to provide tax abatements and tax programs. We launched a middle-class housing strategy [that provides] property tax abatements for up to 10 years in exchange for a 30-year commitment on deed-restricted affordability for middle-class Denverites. And then, of course, we are investing more in affordable housing. We know the city can’t solve this alone, and the market can’t solve it alone. We have to be aggressive about bringing on a lot more housing, a lot more quickly and a lot more affordably.

The trees and grass of a Denver park are in the foreground. Apartment buildings, mostly red, occupy the middle of the frame, curving toward a distant view of tall office buildings downtown.
The Denver metro region added more than 80,000 residents between 2020 and 2024, leading to higher housing costs. Credit: Pgiam via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

AF: Your campaign to address homeless encampments in Denver triggered a bit of backlash, including some criticism of the expense. Can you explain your approach, and how it might apply to other cities? And is there anything you would do differently?

MJ: When cities have high housing costs, more people can’t afford to pay. That is just a mathematical fact. That means many of the cities that are growing and in high demand, like Denver, San Francisco,  Austin, or Seattle, are the places where we see this struggle. But this problem can be solved by addressing core needs. We set an ambitious goal to try to end street homelessness in my first term. Four years. That seems impossible. Well, we’re two years in now, and we have reduced our street homelessness in Denver by 45 percent. That is … the largest reduction of street homelessness in any city in American history over two years, and we’re very proud. But it’s also a clear sign that we’re halfway through the term and [only] halfway to our goal. We think other cities should be ambitious. And believing that this is a solvable problem, let me talk about the way we’ve done this, which we think is also scalable.

First, we’ve focused on bringing on transitional housing units, which are dignified, individual private units. A lot of these are hotels we’ve bought and converted. They’re tiny home villages that we’ve built. It’s not like a shelter, [where you’re] sleeping on a gym floor with 100 people on a mat. It is a place where you have a locked door, privacy, and access to showers and bathrooms and kitchens. You can store your stuff when you go to work for the day.

And we brought on wraparound services on each of these sites, like mental health support, workforce training, and long-term housing navigation. And once we brought those units on, we went to the encampments in Denver, and instead of sweeping those encampments from block to block, which causes them to just show up in front of someone else’s house or church or hospital, we would actually  move all 50 people or 100 people into housing, then keep that block or region of the city permanently closed to future camping. Two years in, we’ve now closed every encampment in the city. We haven’t had a single tent in our downtown business district for more than a year and a half, and we have cut family homelessness by 83 percent. We’ve become the largest city ever to end street homelessness for veterans. We think it can work for other cities, and we’ll share these lessons with anyone who’s willing to take them on, because we think we should set the expectation in every American city that street homelessness can be a solvable problem.

AF: Turning to transportation: Are you satisfied with the number of people using the light rail network in Denver Metro, and the number of people living in transit-oriented development? Any lessons learned from the relatively light ridership on the free bus on the 16th Street Transit Mall, which is finally concluding its renovation after long delays?

MJ: We’re not satisfied yet, because transit and housing have to be connected strategies. Housing is a transit strategy. So we had this great transit network built. We did not have density of housing around any of those spots. Now we’re undertaking a series of large catalytic investments on our light rail lines so we can build thousands of units of housing along that corridor. We just acquired the largest piece of private property in city history to turn into a 155-acre public park. It is right next to a light rail stop, so we can now add housing density all around that site—beautiful location, and people can get on the light rail and get right to downtown or to a Broncos game or anything else.

We’re building a new women’s soccer stadium also, at a transit-oriented development site … we’re rebuilding in a historically Latino part of North Denver, and that’ll allow us to add about 60 acres of new housing, public spaces, and commercial activation, also all on public transit. So our belief is, you have to actually be deliberate about building real density around your public transit, as much as you want to build your public transit around well-traveled lines of travel.

Part of that is our downtown strategy. You mentioned our 16th Street bus, [which is] free downtown. We’re making the largest investment in our downtown of any city in the country, per capita …. We’re going to add about 4,000 units of housing in our city center, using funds from our downtown Denver authority, because we know that means more people will use that bus every day to get to and from work or to go to see friends. We’re working on filling about 7 million square feet of vacant office space [with residential conversions and recruiting businesses to come downtown] …. We want to make it easy to get downtown and around downtown.

A busy street scene in downtown Denver includes a city worker in a fluorescent green vest, a pedestrian in a brown dress, a red city bus, and orange and white striped road barriers set up for an event.
The 16th Street bus in downtown Denver in 2024. Credit: Elena Treshcheva via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.

AF: Given the current municipal fiscal challenges, what is your thinking about alternative financing systems such as a land value tax or value capture, as seen in the 38th and Blake Incentive Overlay?

MJ: We are interested in every incentive we can find to encourage folks to build more housing. The 38th and Blake Incentive Overlay was really kind of a density bonus, where we allow folks to build higher buildings than what the zoning might allow in exchange for adding more affordable housing. And we are always looking at ways to incentivize folks to add more affordable housing, as I mentioned with our property tax abatement.

We’re also looking at partnership on public land. We’re looking at working with city-owned land, working with Denver public schools that have land, and our regional transit system, if they have land. We’re always looking to contribute public land to incentivize more affordability. We want to do all of the above strategies, but wherever we can add more housing without investing more dollars—that’s a big help.

AF: How would you assess the progress of your climate action plans? Do you see a tangible embrace at the local level for addressing climate change, especially in the context of federal retrenchment?

MJ: We don’t see any change in our city’s commitment to climate action or our conviction that this is an existentially important effort. We’re committed to an aggressive vision to meet our climate goals, which for us is a plan to be entirely carbon free by 2040, to have 100 percent renewable energy. And to make sure we’re driving economic growth. We want to do both.

AF: Can local and state government take over this planet-wide issue and really be effective?

MJ: We don’t believe we should give up here or step away. We’re doing a whole public campaign on behavior change …. We want to encourage people to take more local action now, in the face of federal abandonment of this …. We’re building out charging station infrastructure to make it easier for us to convert our fleet to electric and to get more Ubers and Lyfts and FedExes and Amazons to do the same, and to convince regular residents do the same. We’ll keep building the infrastructure to do this. We’ll keep incentivizing people to do it. We’ll keep changing behavior to do it, and we’ll keep setting our own targets for how our vehicles, our businesses, and our residents try to hit aggressive climate goals—knowing that we’re still all in this together, even if the president doesn’t want to make it a priority.


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

Lead image: Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. Credit: Denver Mayor’s Office.

Graduate Student Fellowships

2025–2026 Programa de becas para el máster UNED-Instituto Lincoln

Submission Deadline: October 10, 2025 at 11:59 PM

El Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo y la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) ofrecen el máster en Políticas de Suelo y Desarrollo Urbano Sostenible, un programa académico online en español que reúne de manera única los marcos legales y herramientas que sostienen la planificación urbana, junto con instrumentos fiscales, ambientales y de participación, desde una perspectiva internacional y comparada.

El máster está dirigido especialmente a estudiantes de posgrado y otros graduados con interés en políticas urbanas desde una perspectiva jurídica, ambiental y de procesos de participación, así como a funcionarios públicos. Los participantes del programa recibirán el entrenamiento teórico y técnico para liderar la implementación de medidas que permitan la transformación sostenible de las ciudades.

Plazo de matrícula ordinario: del 8 de septiembre al 28 de noviembre de 2025

El inicio del máster es en enero de 2026.  La fecha exacta se anunciará antes del 28 de noviembre de 2025.

El Instituto Lincoln otorgará becas que cubrirán parcialmente el costo del máster de los postulantes seleccionados.

Términos de las becas: 

  • Los becarios deben haber obtenido un título de licenciatura de una institución académica o de estudios superiores. 
  • Los fondos de las becas no tienen valor en efectivo y solo cubrirán el 40 % del costo total del programa. 
  • Los becarios deben pagar la primera cuota de la matrícula, que representa el 60 % del costo total del máster. 
  • Los becarios deben mantener una buena posición académica o perderán el beneficio. 

El otorgamiento de la beca dependerá de la admisión formal del postulante al máster UNED-Instituto Lincoln. 

Si son seleccionados, los becarios recibirán asistencia virtual para realizar el proceso de admisión de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), el cual requiere una solicitud online y una copia del expediente académico o registro de calificaciones de licenciatura y/o posgrado. 

Aquellos postulantes que no obtengan la beca parcial del Instituto Lincoln podrán optar a las ayudas que ofrece la UNED, una vez que se hayan matriculado en el máster. 

Fecha límite para postular: 10 de octubre de 2025, 23:59 horas de Boston, MA, EUA (UTC-5) 

Anuncio de resultados: 22 de octubre 2025 


Details

Submission Deadline
October 10, 2025 at 11:59 PM

Keywords

Climate Mitigation, Development, Dispute Resolution, Environmental Management, Exclusionary Zoning, Favela, Henry George, Informal Land Markets, Infrastructure, Land Market Regulation, Land Speculation, Land Use, Land Use Planning, Land Value, Land Value Taxation, Land-Based Tax, Local Government, Mediation, Municipal Fiscal Health, Planning, Property Taxation, Public Finance, Public Policy, Regulatory Regimes, Resilience, Reuse of Urban Land, Urban Development, Urbanism, Value Capture

Events

National Association for County Community and Economic Development (NACCED) Conference 2025  

September 8, 2025 - September 11, 2025

Offered in English

The National Association for County Community and Economic Development (NACCED) will host its 50th Annual Educational Conference and Training in Mesa, Arizona, September 8–11, 2025. NACCED is a supporting organization of the National Association of Counties (NACo), which focuses on the county community and economic development profession.

The Lincoln Institute and Claremont Lincoln University will host a booth during the conference, where attendees will be able to see publications and resources, learn about scholarship opportunities for new degree and certificate students, and get more information about the Lincoln Vibrant Communities program.

On September 10, Lincoln Institute President and CEO George McCarthy will give the keynote speech for the conference, titled “Reclaiming Land, Rebuilding Trust: Who Owns the Land and Housing in America’s Counties? Should We Care?” In his address, he will highlight the shift in land and housing ownership happening across the US and will introduce Who Owns America—an innovative tool tracking landownership at the parcel level.

This event is open to NACCED members only.


Details

Date
September 8, 2025 - September 11, 2025
Language
English

Keywords

Economic Development, Local Government