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: it’s 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.

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.

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 Bogotá’s partial development plan El Ensueño. Credit: Luis Felipe Quintanilla.

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

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.

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.

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