Musician Curtis Hunter approaches the world with a smile—even if the world doesn’t always return the gesture. But fate seemed to smile on Hunter last June, at least, when he moved into a new senior housing development built on county-owned land in Fairfax County, Virginia.

A few years before, at 58, Hunter had been assaulted near his old apartment building in Seven Corners, suffering a collapsed lung and broken bones. A difficult stretch followed, including a bout of homelessness and another violent attack. But last year, a Fairfax County caseworker suggested Hunter look into a new affordable housing development for seniors, called Belmont at One University. It’s one of several recent projects that have seen Fairfax County leverage the value of its publicly owned land to spur new affordable housing.

A former handyman and touring musician (he played guitar and harmonica in bands that opened for Los Lobos and Donovan, among other acts), Hunter now lives on disability income and says he’s grateful for his new home.

“I appreciate it so much, it’s a very wonderful thing. I really appreciate that they allow my pet,” he says. Unlike three of his former cats—who would accompany Hunter outside, perched on a carpeted platform he would attach to a backpack or bike rack—his latest cat, Sophie, is timid; adopted at nine and a half, she prefers lounging in the window, gazing at the nearby sports complex and neighbors walking along the bike path.

The field house across the street, where Hunter has taken in the occasional lacrosse or soccer game, is part of George Mason University, a public university with about 40,000 students.

One University is located next door to the college, on a 10.8-acre property owned by the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority (FCRHA). The parcel previously held an FCRHA affordable housing complex of 46 townhomes, called Robinson Square. In 2021, those tenants were relocated to temporary housing until the new homes were ready—a step that was not without challenges or misgivings, but which allowed for a fivefold increase in the number of affordable housing units on site.

The property now comprises three new buildings: Robinson, named for the former townhome complex, which holds 120 affordable one- to four-bedroom units for all ages; Belmont, with 120 affordable one- and two-bedroom apartments reserved for seniors aged 62 and older; and Main on University, with over 300 market-rate student apartments.

The three buildings sit on county-owned land leased at a nominal rate for 99 years—the land added an estimated $12 million subsidy to help the projects get built. However, the buildings are privately owned and managed, and thus pay the county hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece in local property taxes.

This kind of arrangement—a ground lease that allows communities to hold onto their land while sharing in the revenue generated by development on that land—is one of several ways  communities are putting public land to use in order to expand affordable housing. And it’s providing new opportunities for tenants of all ages.

Hunter enjoys having college students next door and says some have helped organize social events for the senior residents, from game nights to group walks. “There’s one group, they come over, and they help with getting some of these things together—the art class and the open mic, and they have what’s called ‘Cups and Company,’ where they get people from the two buildings to come down and have tea and cookies together,” he explains. “I appreciate them being there, since I don’t have family and don’t get to see my nieces and nephews.”

This Land Is Your Land

In 2022, Fairfax County doubled its affordable housing target, committing to the addition of 10,000 new affordable units by 2034, with no net loss of existing affordable homes. The original goal of 5,000 affordable homes, set in 2019, was always intended to be “a floor, not a ceiling,” according to the advisory panel that issued the recommendation. While median household incomes are high in Fairfax, at more than $154,000 a year, median home values are more than double the national average, at $760,400, according to US Census data. The county has, in some cases, acquired new land in order to develop transit-oriented affordable housing. But lately, especially after the success of One University, the FCRHA is looking more closely at co-locating new affordable housing with existing public facilities on land it already owns or controls.

“We’re looking at a few public facilities, [including] two libraries,” says Anna Shapiro, deputy director for real estate development and finance at the FCRHA. The libraries’ large parking lots offer the potential to co-locate housing on county-owned sites that are “also really accessible in terms of transportation infrastructure and access to jobs and amenities,” she notes. “That piece is really important for us, because as we’re evaluating these properties, we want to make sure that we’re setting people up for success and not isolating people.”

Positioned on the edge of a college campus, One University is fairly walkable, about a mile from grocery stores and the city center. “I bought a little sit-down scooter that gets me up to the Giant and to the Safeway in Fairfax City,” Hunter says. A network of wide bike paths and sidewalks makes it easy to get around.

The county’s latest co-located affordable housing development, currently nearing completion, is also centrally located—on a pair of underutilized parking lots next to the county’s Government Center offices. Fairfax Crest, as it’s called, will hold 279 affordable units for renters earning 30 to 70 percent of the area median income (AMI). The project is actually a sequel of sorts: The nearby Residences at Government Center were completed almost a decade ago. However, Fairfax Crest includes more amenities, like a public plaza, 15,000 square feet of community space, and a childcare center.

The average two-bedroom apartment in Fairfax rents for more than $2,400 a month, according to Zillow and RentCafe estimates, while income-restricted two-bedroom apartments at Robinson and Belmont currently rent for $1,653 to $2,022 per month. Rents at Fairfax Crest have yet to be announced, but between the income-restricted rents and energy-efficient appliances and construction (including rooftop solar panels) that reduce utility costs, most tenants should not have to spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing expenses—relieving them of the “cost-burdened” status nearly half of US renters experience.

Shapiro was able to tour one of the Fairfax Crest buildings as construction was wrapping up. “We got to go up to one of the units, and I have to say, the views from the top floors of what is an affordable housing development are gorgeous,” she says. “The county has been very clear that just because it’s affordable housing, it shouldn’t look different than our other housing—and we do have pretty high expectations for what people deliver in our county.”

Building Support for Building

While the federal government owns plenty of land, much of it—from military bases to national parks and wildlife refuges—is not particularly sensible for residential development. States and municipalities, however, control over 250,000 acres of buildable land in high-demand, urban areas, according to a 2024 analysis by the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solutions. This includes surface parking lots, vacant lots, and shuttered municipal buildings in prime locations near jobs and public transit.

Still, it takes initiative and money—and, often, some political courage and leadership—to convert municipally owned land to affordable housing or other publicly beneficial uses.

Shapiro thinks the success of One University and other recent projects helped build the necessary confidence and support among county officials to pursue the Fairfax Crest project. “Seeing all those results, I think they said, ‘Okay, let’s do this in our front yard. Let’s make this really visible, and show our commitment very clearly to affordable housing,’” Shapiro says.

The County Board of Supervisors has been “critical in actually making this happen,” she adds, championing the housing affordability issue politically. “Not only do we have this goal of 10,000 net new units in the county, we’re also going to put our money where our mouth is and put our land where our mouth is.”

Fairfax Crest consists of two main buildings, each with its own cocktail of financing and tax credits. As with One University, the buildings are owned and operated by private companies, on land leased from the county for a 99-year term. “We are very, very concerned about keeping long-term control of our county,” Shapiro says, especially right next to the government offices. “We understood that the value of the land would really help to subsidize the development of the property.”

Each building combined a 4 percent low-income housing tax credit from Virginia Housing with an additional 9 percent tax credit won through a competitive process, in what Shapiro calls a “twinning” strategy. The FCRHA also issued a pair of bonds to help finance the development, totaling $23.5 million, as well as $25 million in loans from its Blueprint fund. “There are other sources in the deal, too—some other state funding and a grant for the daycare buildout,” Shapiro says. “We try to set up our underwriting criteria to really ensure that developers are going out and getting outside capital as well.”

Fairfax County’s decision to retain ownership of its land through ground leases is preferable to what many municipalities end up doing to spur affordable housing development: selling the lot for a dollar, granting a 20-year tax abatement, and “losing all of the value of the asset forever just to achieve the outcome,” says Robert ‘R.J.’ McGrail, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Accelerating Community Investment program.

Every incentive matters, McGrail notes, and each one “can be the difference between shovels in the ground and cranes in the air or not.” But surrendering future tax revenue risks degrading the public services that the new residents, from across the income spectrum, will rely on. “Losing pieces of that to get a deal done is a choice, one that jurisdictions make every day,” he says. “For me, optimizing the disposition strategy in a way that is least extractive of downstream public revenue makes a land activation housing affordability strategy also a municipal fiscal health strategy.”

As of early February, Fairfax County has delivered 1,373 new affordable units toward its goal, with another 2,470 units in 11 projects either under construction or in the pipeline, including Fairfax Crest, according to FCHRA’s affordable housing dashboard. In addition to the libraries Shapiro mentioned, the FCHRA is evaluating other county-owned sites for affordable housing potential, including a park-and-ride lot and a community center. And as the Town of Franconia prepares to move its government offices to a new campus, the county planning commission in February approved a proposal to build 120 units of new affordable housing on the vacated site, along with a district police station, museum, and expanded public library.

‘It Makes Me Smile Again’

What none of those numbers quite captures is the impact a welcoming, safe, affordable place to live can have on individuals and families—the friendships made, the worries dispelled.

Cheerful and outgoing, Hunter is something of a Belmont ambassador, recruiting residents to the building’s social events and classes, and suggesting new ones. He’d like to see parties held for people’s birthdays, for example. “I have a funny feeling that people might appreciate that,” he says. “People who don’t have family, who don’t have company coming all the time, who don’t get out as often … it’s probably pretty special for them.”

In his first-floor apartment, his instruments at hand, Hunter now plucks out a short melody; his cat, Sophie, makes for a captive if indifferent audience. “She’s my comfort animal, after what I’ve been through, and having pets all my life,” he says. “It was pets and music, those were my calming things.”

As the chords ring out over the jingle of a tambourine, Sophie lazes in the window. “She’s up there at least 10 and a half hours a day, sitting there just staring out that window,” Hunter says. “Right outside my window is the bike trail. So that’s where all the dogs from the neighborhood get walked … Every once in a while, a dog notices her and comes up to see her, and the same with people,” he adds.

“I’m glad I have this window; it’s important for me, too,” Hunter reflects. “I’m an extrovert, and watching people walk by, it makes me smile again to look at people. There are a few people who’ll look in the window to see if Sophie’s there today—that helps my soul.”

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

Lead image: Part of the One University redevelopment on County-owned land in Fairfax County, Virginia. Credit: Hartman Design Group.

As state and local governments struggle to make progress on challenges including affordable housing and climate change amid dramatic policy shifts at the federal level, reporters and editors learned more about those efforts—and the solutions to be found in land policy—at the 2025 Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum.

The two-day workshop, the latest installment in a series held for more than twenty years, was put on in December in partnership with the Bloomberg Center for Cities and Arnold Ventures. More than 30 working press attended, representing outlets including Bloomberg, Politico, Slate, Fast Company, Pro Publica, and Governing magazine, as well as the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Texas Tribune, Baltimore Banner, and Substack. The Journalists Forum is designed to allow reporters and editors to take two days away from their pressing deadlines to gain perspective on the issues they are covering; the last two workshops had a focus on housing, in 2023, and climate, in 2022.

In welcoming remarks, Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. “Mac” McCarthy  said that the organization has been committed to supporting local government through technical assistance and other means since David C. Lincoln, son of founder John C. Lincoln, established it in Cambridge in 1974. “From our first days, our interest has been in … making it possible for local governments to do their job, because for us, we think that the quality of life is delivered by your local government.”

Anaclaudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, delivered the opening keynote online from Dakar, Senegal, highlighting the importance of local initiatives around the world to build safe and affordable housing and environmentally resilient metropolitan regions. “Localization has been a key principle for us,” she said, noting how cities and nations worldwide are putting together action plans on what she views as an intertwined crisis of housing and climate change.

In the US, however, as the first panel revealed, state and local governments trying to pursue their own policies have encountered vigorous opposition by the federal government, in the form of halting offshore windfarms, freezing or clawing back funding for clean energy and mitigation initiatives, and initiating lawsuits against setting vehicle emissions standards or holding polluters liable for compensation. That has state and local governments playing a lot of defense and in some cases punching back, said Nestor Davidson, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

But states are also engaging in pre-emption of their own, inherent in the zoning reform mandates that override local control of land use. Those kinds of initiatives aren’t ideological as much as a practical attempt to streamline bureaucracy and prompt more housing to be built amid the constraints of a not-in-my-backyard stance in established neighborhoods, Davidson said. “A lot of what states are trying to do is overcome fragmentation and overcome local parochialism,” he said. Tracy Loh, fellow at the Brookings Institution,  observed that the tumultuous array of pre-emptions, legal challenges, and regulatory reversals are making it harder for metropolitan regions to manage rapidly changing economies. The panel was moderated by Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute.

Having heard those perspectives on the current political environment, the journalists then explored challenges and opportunities for state and local governments in three categories—housing, climate, and local public finance—and discovered several interconnected policy elements among those topics.

Housing. As the Trump administration calls for reducing rental assistance and other programs under US Housing and Urban Development, state and local governments have been tackling the urgent issue of housing affordability on their own. In a panel moderated by Solomon Greene, director of Land and Communities at the Lincoln Institute, Charles Gardner, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, reported that 33 states enacted legislation aimed at expanding the supply of housing through zoning and code reform, a big increase since 2023. The measures—such as allowing accessory dwelling units, reducing minimum parking requirements, banning single-family only zoning, increasing density at transit stations, and streamlining permitting so housing projects don’t get bogged down—constitute a “great land use realignment,” he said, and are getting popular support in red and blue states alike.

New housing still faces pushback in established neighborhoods, and some local leaders have decried any diminishing of local control over land use and development. But as more communities understand the outdated land use rules they have in place,  zoning reform becomes more legible as a way to create a range of housing types that are more affordable, said Sara Bronin, law professor at George Washington University and founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a database of zoning conditions in 9,000 jurisdictions. Even as they push to increase housing supply, local leaders need to understand flooding and sea level rise to halt “nonsensical” development in vulnerable areas, she said.

Colin Higgins, executive director of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, a bipartisan coalition promoting innovations in the production and preservation of housing, said that in pursuit of the goal of producing up to 8 million new homes, communities need to include subsidized and mixed-income projects alongside the luxury market-rate housing that upzoning enables. That would help address growing skepticism about filtering—the theory that wealthier homebuyers who move into high-end housing open up apartments, condos, and smaller single-family homes that are lower in price.

In a second panel on housing moderated by George W. “Mac” McCarthy, practitioners talked about alternative pathways to affordability, including pre-assembled and manufactured homes, community land trusts (CLTs), and homes built on government-owned land.

Reina Chano Murray, associate director at the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), demonstrated recent efforts to help municipalities identify land they own that is suitable for housing. CGS identified 276,000 acres of buildable, government-owned land in transit-accessible urban areas with existing infrastructure, across the US. These public lands present many opportunities for the potential development of affordable housing options, including establishing a community land trust, which allows buyers to purchase homes on leased land and agree to restrictions on resale profit.

Charles Dillard, director of planning for the City of Burlington, said that Vermont city is testing what’s possible in developing city-owned land, and has one of the longest-running community land trusts, the Champlain Housing Trust, as a model. John Smith, executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Association in the Roxbury section of Boston, said the bulwark against gentrification is community control of land.

While new construction is an obvious path to expanding affordable housing options, cities and towns must also strive to preserve existing housing stock, some of which gets snapped up by institutional investors, said McCarthy. A recent report published by the Lincoln Institute revealed that nearly 9 percent of residential parcels across 500 urban counties have corporate owners, who often jack up rents and outmaneuver first-time homebuyers. The Trump administration recently moved to restrict purchases of housing stock by institutional investors.

Nature-Based Solutions. Two panels of experts examined the question of whether local and state climate action can have any impact on what’s happening to the whole planet. The retrenchment at the federal level is breathtaking, said Jody Freeman, professor at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, including withdrawal from international emission reduction treaties, the deregulation of fossil fuels and their impacts by the Environmental Protection Agency, the termination of collection of climate data, and the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act and its promotion of clean energy.

The panelists and moderator Peter Colohan, director of partnerships and program innovation at the Lincoln Institute, described a federal rollback defined by unprecedented maneuvers. Freeman offered, as an example, “the executive orders from the president directing the attorney general to identify state climate policies that the administration disagrees with … as somehow unlawful or unconstitutional, and sue the states in order to block them.”

Bradley Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, said advocates are spending a lot of time in court defending “a legacy of victories” once thought secure, on fronts including offshore drilling, the Endangered Species Act, or Vermont’s use of the Superfund law to collect money from fossil fuel companies to pay for climate action.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources to just maintain [previous wins],” he said. “Fortunately the advocacy community is very well organized … I think we have a pretty solid front for defending against a lot of those rollbacks.”

The dramatic redirection from Biden administration climate policies has prompted state and local government to fill the gap with dedicated funding for emissions reductions, clean energy like solar and wind power, and what Melissa Hoffer, chief of the Massachusetts Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience, described as a “nature-forward but engineered” approach to building coastline resilience. By establishing statewide codes that promote geothermal heating and a switch from fossil fuels to renewable-powered electricity, she said, states can prove that “clean energy and energy efficiency is really the pathway to affordability.”

“Cities have been leading the charge on climate long before state and federal governments were ever involved,” said Brian Swett, Boston’s chief climate officer. “Gina McCarthy, one of our great EPA administrators and the first and only domestic climate czar, used to say … that’s where innovation happens.” He cited the city’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance, which sets requirements for large existing buildings to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions over time. “You pilot at the city level, and we’ve been proud of what we’ve been able to do in Boston. So we’re back in that moment again. We are used to leading the charge.”

State, local, and regional initiatives promoting land conservation, biodiversity, and ecosystem protection preservation are similarly continuing apace despite policy reversals at the federal level, as a second climate panel revealed. Peter Stein, principal at Lyme Timber Company, acknowledged the termination of the Biden administration’s 30×30 initiative and moves to expand resource extraction on public lands, but said land conservation has widespread support among voters.

“A little more than a year ago … Donald Trump got elected, but $18 billion worth of local public finance was passed by voters in the U.S. in red, purple, and blue counties and states to support land conservation,” he said. “There’s a long history of voters voting to tax themselves … to pay for land conservation. Eighty percent of all the public money that’s invested in conservation comes from local and state governments.”

Regional collaboration on land conservation is partly filling the vacuum at the federal level, including a pact between New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers, as well as targeted efforts to protect ecosystems and wildlife corridors, said Deb Davidson, chief strategy officer at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey launched a package of initiatives promoting biodiversity and wildlife protection. Efforts are also underway to make agriculture more climate-friendly, said Vincent Gauthier, senior manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. Agricultural communities are working with environmental advocates to “develop solutions that find the right trade-offs for everyone, for the climate, and for farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods are on the line every day.”

The land conservation panel was moderated by Chandni Navalkha, director of conservation and stewardship at the Lincoln Institute.

Public Finance and the Property Tax. In two sessions, panels of experts examined the extraordinary fiscal squeeze being felt by cities and towns nationwide, with pandemic aid winding down and future federal funding in doubt, the cost of providing services soaring, and the bedrock source of local revenue—the property tax—under threat. Moderator Bethany Paquin noted that “lawmakers all over the country are exploring how they can provide meaningful property tax relief without undermining … essential local services,” but proposals making headlines in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania among other places would scale back the property tax dramatically or eliminate it altogether.

The new wave of property tax revolts is driven in part by booming housing markets and significant increases in assessed home values that have prompted nearly a doubling of property tax bills in some cases, said Jared Walczak, vice president of the Tax Foundation. “It’s not surprising that people have some really strong, robust responses to this. I don’t blame them,” Walczak said, though he added: “I do think that the solutions they’re talking about are irresponsible and will not work.”

Because the property tax is the primary source of revenue for local governments and school systems, it is hard to imagine what would take its place, said Billy Hamilton, deputy chancellor emeritus at Texas A&M University. Big increases in a sales tax, or the income tax, seem politically infeasible.  Targeted property tax relief in the form of circuit breakers can help those who struggle to pay rising bills, the panelists agreed.

Meanwhile, cities and towns struggle each year to keep a balanced budget, said Katie McCue, deputy executive director at the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Property tax revenues in Massachusetts are capped each year by Proposition 2 1/2, but the cost of providing services, including employee health care and retirement funding, continues to rise. Municipalities have had to rely on voter-approved overrides to bolster funding for services or to build a new school, she said.

Experts in the second public finance panel, moderated by Luis Quintanilla, program analyst at the Lincoln Institute, suggested there are precious few other ways for local governments to raise revenue. Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the practice of charging user fees, partly making up for the post-pandemic drop in commercial property tax revenue in struggling downtowns. Daphne Kenyon, principal at D.A. Kenyon & Associates, said payments-in-lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreements with nonprofit institutions can bolster municipal coffers, but only to a point.

Other tactics include establishing a vacancy tax or a land value tax, said Nathan Seegert, professor of finance at Northeastern University. Municipalities that are responsible for an increasing array of obligations, from filling potholes to educating kids, need to diversify their revenue portfolio to have any hope of functioning in that role, he said. “If we’re going to have this trend of pushing the services further down the chain, we’re going to have to be creative in what kind of revenue sources we look for, that can provide that stability.”

At an evening reception at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Jorrit de Jong, director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, introduced Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who shared reflections on the current state of American democracy, including the bare-knuckle tactics being deployed as different levels of government fight with each other. Sandel, who wrote The Tyranny of Merit and was recently awarded the  Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, said the public discourse might be less polarized if educated elites would “listen more” and avoid technocratic slogans like “follow the science.” He also said that while more than a century old, the ideas of Henry George, the 19th century political philosopher who inspired Lincoln Institute founder John C. Lincoln, are critical to understanding the high home prices and real estate speculation of today.

The journalists also heard from Brett Smiley, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who referred to Sandel’s description of state and local governments as historically laboratories of democracy, but now seen more as “outposts or sanctuaries of democracy. I found that pretty meaningful and certainly motivating for the work that we’re doing in the environment that we’re in right now.” As a classic second city in the orbit of Boston, Providence is daylighting rivers, taking down freeways, and promoting arts and culture to attract those seeking an alternative to larger cities, Smiley said. More affordable housing is a key part of the city’s economic development strategy.

Finally, a panel of journalists and publishers in the closing “Practicing the Craft” roundtable addressed a troubling dilemma: that while the actions of state and local governments are more important than ever, many communities lack the capacity to cover those activities.

Over the last 20 years, about 3,500 newspapers have shut down, most of them weeklies that provided the kind of granular, hyper-local neighborhood coverage that community democracy depends on, said Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University. Some 50 million Americans are left with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Kennedy cited several successful examples of independent digital startups based on a nonprofit model, though he added “they tend to be located in affluent suburban communities, and urban communities of color and rural areas are struggling.” Success stories included Brookline.News,  which co-founder Ellen Clegg reported was gaining in circulation covering local stories in that Boston suburb of 65,000 people. Dale Anglin, representing Press Forward, a national local news network funded by the MacArthur Foundation, reported “strengthening information networks that keep communities engaged and informed” through chapters in 32 states, and suggested that not only formal news outlets but video influencers and others deserve support.

Local reporters and editors can do their jobs better if they have access to training for covering complicated issues like housing, said Jon Greenberg of the Poynter Institute. Charles Sennott, co-founder of Report for America and publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, suggested that local outlets—just like cash-strapped local governments—need to work smarter and more efficiently, and could make judicious use of artificial intelligence.

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. Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Catherine Benedict is the digital communications manager at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: 2025 Journalists Forum panelists shared their work with reporters from media outlets across the country. Credit: Catherine Benedict