Tishaura Jones was sworn in as the 47th mayor of St. Louis—and the first Black female mayor in the city’s history—on April 20, 2021. Described as a history maker on a mission, Jones served two terms in the Missouri House of Representatives, was selected as the first African American woman in Missouri history to hold the position of assistant minority floor leader, and was also the first African American woman to serve as treasurer of St. Louis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Hampton University and a master’s degree in health administration from the St. Louis University School of Public Health. Jones is also a graduate of the Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She spoke with senior fellow Anthony Flint earlier this year for the Land Matters podcast. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anthony Flint: For those rooting for a rebound for legacy cities, St. Louis has been a bit of a roller coaster, from the renaissance of Washington Avenue to the post-COVID downtown doom loop and continuing population loss. What’s your assessment of the city’s strengths and weaknesses at this point?

Tishaura Jones: I would say that in the past three years, we have been laser focused on doing the nonsexy work to lay the foundation for future growth. And that is, the work within City Hall to make City Hall easier to navigate, easier to participate in, and easier to understand. And then adding different pieces that are looking to the future. We just opened an Office of New Americans because we realized that part of population growth is going to come from our refugees and other international citizens who choose St. Louis as a home who may be fleeing violent situations. We’ve accepted refugees from Afghanistan, from Ukraine, and back in the ’90s, we accepted refugees from Bosnia. So we have the largest Bosnian population outside of Europe. Knowing those things and knowing those pieces of the puzzle, also looking at our severe population loss of African Americans, we are laying the groundwork to make sure that St. Louis is equitable and a city that everybody can participate in; we’re focused on rebuilding areas and investing in areas that haven’t seen investment in decades.

AF: Speaking of investment, we’ve been looking at the Inflation Reduction Act and how it is pumping billions for clean energy manufacturing into economically distressed areas, including St. Louis. Do you consider the region part of a potential new “battery belt,” and can this clean energy transition be a savior?

TJ: I would say partly. We haven’t seen a lot of companies investing and exploring that technology. We only have one company that has taken advantage of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to expand its business. Where we see the most growth is in defense and geospatial, as well as advanced manufacturing. Those are the areas and industries that we have focused our attention on.

AF: Tell us more about the investments that are going on. With the backdrop of federal funding, you also have the $250 million NFL settlement from the loss of the Rams. There seems to be an unprecedented amount of funding and an approaching deadline for spending it. How are you managing that?

TJ: We received almost $500 million in ARPA funding, which is really large for a city our size. We’ve made intentional decisions to put that money out in communities that haven’t seen investment in decades. For St. Louis, that’s North St. Louis, which is 99 percent African American, and a part of Southeast St. Louis, which is about 60 to 65 percent African American. Both of those areas have high levels of poverty, high levels of vacancy, and also high levels of crime. So we are making intentional investments in those areas, bringing back business and industry, building new homes. There are places where a mortgage hasn’t been generated in a neighborhood for 10 or 15 years . . . we’re trying to rebuild a market in order to build  more new market-rate and affordable homes.

The Monarch at MLK was an old electrical plant that sat vacant for decades. We are turning that into a world-class workforce development hub, co-located with companies that will be producing their products on site. Our Office of Violence Prevention will go there, and our Workforce Development Agency . . . our Economic Empowerment Center will also go there, which is going to help entrepreneurs either start or grow their businesses, as well as our Land Reutilization Authority, our land bank. They have a lot of equipment that they use to maintain our vacant lots; we have about 7,000 vacant lots that we are currently maintaining.

We’re co-locating essential services in the community so people don’t always have to come downtown to City Hall. We hope that this facility is going to be a hub of activity, and we also own 15 acres around it, so we’re going to build up around it as well, with a daycare center and housing and other amenities.

AF: For all the physical planning and placemaking that is part of the mayor’s job, what are the key elements of addressing violent crime, which understandably is on the minds of so many residents?

TJ: The year before I came into office, which was a pandemic year, we had 263 homicides. As of the end of 2023, that number is down to 158. That’s a 40 percent decrease. Crime is also decreasing in other categories. . . . It’s because of several things that we put in place. It’s not just one thing. We started by opening a new Office of Violence Prevention, where we work with community organizations because people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

We provide grants and technical assistance to community organizations on the ground who are doing this violence prevention work, employing trusted messengers, taking care of mental health, substance abuse. We also started a cops-and-clinicians program where we pair an officer with a mental health professional to be deployed to certain calls. We’re trying to deploy the right professional to the right call. That program alone has saved us thousands of man hours and millions of dollars because we’ve diverted people from emergency rooms, we’ve diverted people from jail and entering the criminal justice system. . . . Also for the first time in our city’s history, I hired a police chief from outside of the city. He’s been in several cities, Wilmington, Delaware, Chicago, and started his career in New York. He applies business practices to policing . . . and deploys our resources—which are finite—based on what the data is telling us. In his first full year being police chief, homicides were reduced 20 percent. We’re not quite where we want to be, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction with all of these pieces working together.

AF: I want to turn to infrastructure, which plays a role in the overall vibe of the city. Have you seen any difference in the results of the infrastructure plan from two years ago, which included some small but important things like sidewalk repair, lighting, and trimming weeds?

TJ: Yes. I sit as the chair of our local metropolitan planning organization, the East-West Gateway [Council] of Governments. Most of our infrastructure dollars flow through there for our various transportation projects. But we also, as a city, set aside almost $50 million to repave our major thoroughfares. And we currently have about $300 million in projects going on, whether it’s repaving our major thoroughfares or our side streets. Great Rivers Greenway is building the Brickline Greenway—think of Atlanta or Denver, where they have those greenways that are bike and ped paths. We will be expanding ours to connect our major parks. So in about five years, you’ll be able to ride your bike from the Arch all the way to Forest Park, and then to a park on the south side called Tower Grove Park, to a park on the north side called Fairground Park. It’ll all be connected through a series of bike and ped pathways.

We’re hoping to also start construction on expanding transit, taking advantage of the money that’s available through the Department of Transportation, expanding our light rail. Then we’re also going to apply for funding to redo our airport. So in about five to seven years, St. Louis is going to have a new airport, a new transit line, new bike and ped pathways, and a whole host of infrastructure projects will be almost finished or at completion.

AF: How can a city like St. Louis contribute to the effort to combat climate change while at the same time, needing to build resilience to manage extreme heat, for example?

TJ: Today, as we are recording this interview, it’s about 100 degrees outside, which is normal for August in St. Louis, but it’s not normal for those who have respiratory problems. We also received a multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government to plant more trees to make sure certain neighborhoods are not heat islands. Just with the disinvestment that happened in certain portions of our community, there weren’t trees replanted. We’re going to be planting more trees, hopefully cooling down the city as we do that. We’re also part of the Bloomberg Sustainable Cities Initiative, where we will be employing about three to four people for the next three to four years to identify other sustainability projects and how those intersect with economic justice.

AF: A lot of the mayors that we’ve interviewed have talked a little bit about the stress and heavy weight of the job. I’d like to ask you, on a personal level, how do you manage all of these challenges day to day?

TJ: The answer I usually give is that I rely on three things: Jesus, my Peloton, and bourbon, and not always in that order. But I think I have a fourth weight that’s on my shoulders, which is I’m a single mom of the most adorable and probably the tallest 17-year-old you’ll ever see. He is about 6′ 8″, and he’s a junior in high school. So I also have to juggle that in addition to being mayor. I would say I do it all by the grace of God. I feel like this is the work that God called me to do, and because of that, it doesn’t feel like work. I really enjoy and love what I do. I love being able to see in real time the changes that we’re making—either brick and mortar or the lives that we’re changing. So that is the job satisfaction that helps me rest every night.

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: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones takes a selfie at City Hall with local middle school and high school students. Credit: St. Louis Mayor’s Office via Facebook.

CAMBRIDGE, MA—The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has released a new Policy Focus Report, Preserving Affordable Homeownership: Municipal Partnerships with Community Land Trusts, by John Emmeus Davis and Kristin King-Ries.

Drawing on insights from 115 community land trusts (CLTs) that were interviewed or surveyed by the International Center for Community Land Trusts, the report explores how CLTs are partnering with public officials to help address the housing affordability crisis. In this innovative model, individuals buy homes on land that is leased from a local CLT and agree to limit the resale price, reducing the upfront cost of homeownership and keeping those homes affordable for one income-qualified household after another.

“There has been a seismic shift in public policy over the last two decades, especially among cities and counties,” said Davis, a city planner who has spent much of his 40-year career providing technical assistance to CLTs and documenting their history and performance. “Public resources invested in helping to expand homeownership were once routinely allowed to leak away when assisted homes resold. Today, a growing number of public officials are prudently committed to preserving those subsidies—and the hard-won affordability of the homes themselves—for many years. Municipalities are partnering with CLTs because they have proven their effectiveness in making that happen. CLTs remain in the picture long after a home is purchased, ensuring that affordability lasts, homes are maintained, and newly minted homeowners succeed. These multi-faceted duties of stewardship are what CLTs do best.”

Preserving Affordable Homeownership builds on the Lincoln Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Report The City-CLT Partnership, coauthored by Davis and Rick Jacobus. In addition, a multimedia case study published by the Lincoln Institute in 2023, Still the One: Affordable Housing Initiatives in Burlington Vermont’s Old North End, features Davis and several colleagues from the Champlain Housing Trust, the largest CLT in the United States.

“The survey of CLTs conducted by the International Center for this report revealed that city and county government partnerships with CLTs have grown in number, variety, and sophistication since the 2008 Policy Focus Report, and a number of state governments are now supporting CLTs as well,” said King-Ries, an attorney whose practice focuses on creating and stewarding homeownership opportunities for people priced out of the traditional real estate market. “This updated report offers insights and tips on what is possible when governments and CLTs work together toward the shared goal of creating permanently affordable homeownership. The report also examines unintended consequences of governmental policies and conditions that make it difficult for CLTs to produce and to preserve affordably priced homes—and offers recommendations for how government officials can work more productively with CLTs.”

Preserving Affordable Homeownership reveals significant trends in the landscape of CLTs and municipal-CLT partnerships, from Los Angeles to Lawrence, Kansas. Among the key findings: more municipalities are starting CLTs, including Tampa, Florida, which set aside part of a $10 million bond for that purpose, and Indianapolis, Indiana, which appropriated $1.5 million to start a citywide CLT.

More cities are also incorporating lasting affordability into housing subsidies and regulations, and many are considering how to more fairly assess and tax the lands and homes in CLT portfolios. State governments are increasingly providing legislative and financial support for CLTs, from Connecticut to Texas.

In addition to identifying trends, the report provides recommendations for successful public-CLT partnerships. “This is a groundbreaking and insightful report,” says Sheila R. Foster, a professor of climate and law at Columbia University and cofounder and director of LabGov, an applied research laboratory focused on urban challenges. “It will make a tremendous difference to practitioners, cities, and policymakers as CLTs are experiencing historic growth and expansion in an increasingly unaffordable housing market.”

About the Authors

John Emmeus Davis is a city planner who has spent much of his 40-year career providing technical assistance to CLTs and documenting their history and performance. He coauthored the Lincoln Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Report The City-CLT Partnership. He previously served as housing director in Burlington, Vermont, and was dean of the National CLT Academy. He is a partner at Burlington Associates in Community Development LLC, a national consulting cooperative. Davis is a founding board member of the International Center for CLTs and editor in chief of the center’s imprint, Terra Nostra Press.

Kristin King-Ries is an attorney whose practice focuses on creating and stewarding permanently affordable homes and farms for people priced out of the traditional real estate market. She represents CLTs and other nonprofits and serves as a consultant to the Agrarian Trust and the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. She is currently organizing a CLT legal collaborative on behalf of the International Center for CLTs. She served as general counsel for Trust Montana from 2017 to 2021.

Lead image: Rebecca Buford, executive director of Tenants to Homeowners, a community land trust (CLT) in Lawrence, Kansas. The CLT has developed permanently affordable housing with support from the city, an example of the growing universe of municipal-CLT partnerships across the country. Credit: Taylor Mah/City of Lawrence.

In the spirited cultural debate over the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence, the imagined pros and cons have tended toward the sensational. There’s been little mainstream attention paid to the technology’s potential impact on the everyday tasks that keep our cities humming—things like construction permit reviews, development application processes, and planning code compliance enforcement. But the needs in those areas are quite real, and experiments to apply newer AI breakthroughs to these kinds of operations are already well underway. Municipalities large and small, from Florida to New England, and Canada to Australia, have announced AI-related pilots and other exploratory efforts.

While the approaches vary, the challenges are practically universal. Determining whether proposed construction or development projects meet all land and building codes is a detail-intensive, often slow process: It can be confusing for applicants and require extensive back-end work for municipalities and other authorities. The hope is that AI can help make that process—or “the tedious parts of city planning,” as the publication Government Technology bluntly put it—speedier and more efficient, as well as more accurate and comprehensible. Ideally, it would even allow planning departments to streamline and reallocate resources.

But as city officials working with the new technology make clear, there’s a long way to go to get to that point. And given that some of AI’s most publicized moments to date involve embarrassing failures (such as Google’s AI search tool advising users on the benefits of eating rocks and adding glue to pizza), they are proceeding with caution.

There’s often a “hype cycle” between a new technology’s early promise and its eventual reality, cautions Andreas Boehm, the intelligent cities manager for Kelowna, British Columbia, a city of about 145,000. His team is specifically charged with seeking new opportunities to leverage tech innovations for the city and its residents. Despite a lot of chatter, we still haven’t seen many “concrete, tangible examples” of AI as a “transformative” force in planning systems, Boehm says. But we may start to see real results soon.

Canada is experiencing a housing shortage, Boehm notes, and moving faster on new construction could help. The permitting pipeline is clogged with inquiries from current property owners about zoning and code issues for more routine projects. For a few years, Kelowna has been using a chatbot to answer common questions, Boehm says. That has helped, but the more recent “generative” version of AI can handle a much broader range of inquiries, phrased in natural language, with precise and specific responses. So Kelowna began working with Microsoft to build a new and much more sophisticated version of the tool incorporating Microsoft’s Copilot AI functionality, which they now use to aid permit applicants.

Boehm says the Intelligent Cities team and its consultants worked with a range of residents (including those with no permitting knowledge) as well as experienced builders to develop the tool; it can give high-level responses or point to specific code provisions. It has notably streamlined, and sped up, the application process. “It frees up our staff time” because fewer questions need to be addressed by staff early in the process, Boehm says. “So now they can focus on processing applications that are coming in. And often these applications are much better quality because people are using these AI tools as they’re putting these applications together, and getting all the information they need.”

On the other side of Canada, the city of Burlington, Ontario, near Toronto, has been developing generative AI tools in collaboration with Australian property and tech firm Archistar. Chad MacDonald, Burlington’s chief information officer (and previously executive director of digital service), says Burlington, population 200,000, also faces a housing crunch. With little space available for single-family housing construction, the city’s focus is on improving the process of handling larger projects, including industrial and commercial proposals, with an eye toward creating a single platform that would work for all kinds of projects. The system the city is developing aims to integrate not only local zoning and bylaws, but also the Ontario Building Code, which affects all structures in the province.

Testing this system involves checking whether it correctly assesses previously submitted plans whose outcome is known. This process also trains the AI. “Every time we correct an inaccuracy in the algorithm, it actually makes it smarter,” MacDonald explains. “So the next time it gets more and more accurate.” And if the proposed solution to one permit problem could create two more problems in the application, the system is designed to point that out immediately, avoiding a lengthy resubmission process. An “extremely successful” round of testing was completed in May, MacDonald says, and he expects the city’s use of the technology to expand.

MacDonald envisions the technology advancing to the point of creating code-compliant designs. But won’t that put engineers and architects out of business? He counters that it’s vital to keep humans in the loop. “This is about speeding up these really mundane processes,” he says, “and then allowing these very highly educated and specialized experts to focus on the things they really need to focus on.”

In Honolulu, expanding the use of AI tools is part of a more sweeping tech-plan upgrade to address a significant permitting backlog—in 2021, the city’s mayor declared the process “broken” and committed to an overhaul. In 2022, a permit prescreen process involved “an intolerable six-month wait” to reach a reviewer, says Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, director of Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting. The city added an AI bot that was able to review some of the prescreen checklist items in a newly streamlined process, and it helped cut that wait to two or three days. That success helped lead to a more expansive generative AI pilot with Chicago-based startup CivCheck, a relationship Takeuchi Apuna expects to continue.

“We have learned that there are enormous possibilities of AI in our business processes,” she says, “and that the most important piece is the people that are using it.” She emphasizes that this is just part of an overhaul that also includes better staff training and improved communication with applicants. “It’s a value that you must bring and continue to enforce as part of AI in order to get the best results.”

While these early results are promising, AI still presents plenty of challenges and wildcards. Some of the startup’s promising, powerful generative AI tools are untested. And as MacDonald points out, the technology isn’t cheap. There’s also a need to set standards around what data the process collects and how it can be used. (Kelowna, for example, is working with the nonprofit Montreal AI Ethics Institute on policy and guidance issues.) And, of course, there are broader public concerns about giving too much control to an automated tool, however seemingly intelligent and teachable that tool may be. “It’s not going to replace people,” Boehm says. “We’re never going to just issue you a building permit from an AI bot.”

In fact, he continues, that concern could be considered an opportunity, if cities use AI thoughtfully and transparently. Although government is often opaque and thus treated with skepticism by many, AI “is a great opportunity to demystify government,” Boehm says. “It [can increase the] understanding that this is really about people in the end and supporting them.” In other words, in the best-case scenario, AI might improve a knotty but vital bureaucratic process by giving it a more human touch.

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of the Lincoln Institute book City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com.

Lead image credit: PhonlamaiPhoto via iStock/Getty Images Plus.