Don’t miss the Mayor’s Desk book, coming this fall! 

With a population of nearly 33 million and growing, Delhi is the second-largest metropolitan area in the world after Tokyo, and on track to become number one. Shelly Oberoi, 39, was elected mayor of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), a governing body representing some 20 million of those people, in early 2023. Born in the capital city, Oberoi was named a vice president of the women’s wing of the anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party before becoming a ward city councilor in 2022. Oberoi, who had to run for the mayoral post several times due to parliamentary voting challenges, promised that “Delhi will be cleaned and transformed” in her tenure. She has been an assistant professor at Delhi University and Mumbai’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, and has authored several research papers on corporate social responsibility, global finance, and other topics.

Anthony Flint: You’re the first mayor in a decade to oversee all of central city Delhi, after reunification of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. What kind of governing challenges and opportunities come along with that?

Shelly Oberoi: Governing the Municipal Corporation after its unification has come along with a fair share of challenges and opportunities. On one hand, centralization of powers allows for streamlined decision-making, enhanced accountability, and improved collaboration across departments. While centralization allows for more efficiency, it also requires careful planning to ensure equitable distribution of resources to address the diverse needs of different areas within Delhi. Balancing these needs and optimizing resource allocation is a significant challenge that we are addressing at the moment. On the other hand, unification has also offered us an opportunity for policy alignment. With a unified municipal corporation, we can now align policies and regulations across all areas of Delhi. Policy alignment allows us to address issues such as education, property tax, and new initiatives in a coordinated manner, leading to more effective civil planning and development across the city. This enables consistent implementation of rules and regulations, creating a level playing field and ensuring fairness and transparency in governance.

AF: You said upon being elected that you would work “to make Delhi the city that it should have been”—what does that vision look like, and what are the biggest obstacles to achieving it?

SO: My vision for Delhi is based upon the Aam Aadmi Party’s 10 guarantees, as announced by our National Convenor and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. These guarantees reflect the aspirations of the people and prioritize the overall well-being of the city. We have envisioned a clean and beautiful Delhi, free from the blight of landfills, where waste management systems are streamlined and cleanliness is promoted throughout the city. We are establishing a culture of transparency and accountability, ensuring a corruption-free Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Our vision also includes providing a permanent solution to the problem of parking through efficient management systems and addressing the issue of stray animals with compassionate and sustainable measures. Moreover, we aim to have well-maintained roads that prioritize safety and smooth traffic flow, improving the overall commuting experience for residents.

The work of the Aam Aadmi Party’s state government in Delhi is already talked about globally, particularly in the fields of education and healthcare. Chief Minister Kejriwal has administered revolutions in the landscape of India’s public education and public health sectors. People have started believing that government facilities can be trusted, that they can offer them the equal standard of services for free that private facilities do at exorbitant prices.

Building on this momentum, we are working with a special focus on transforming schools and hospitals into centers of excellence. We are also enhancing parks across the city, creating green spaces for citizens to enjoy. In a welcome change, we are ensuring regular salaries for workers and offering them a better environment within the MCD to promote job security and build a motivated workforce. Simplifying the process of obtaining licenses for traders, creating a welcoming business environment, and establishing designated vending zones for street vendors are also part of our vision.

However, we acknowledge the challenges posed by rapid urbanization, budgetary constraints, stakeholder engagement, and coordination among different agencies. By recognizing these challenges and proactively addressing them, we can work toward making Delhi the city it should have always been—a thriving, inclusive, and sustainable metropolis that residents can be proud to call home and, above all, the number-one capital of the world.

AF: Regarding air quality—brought to international attention by such documentary films as All That Breathes—what are some short-term solutions? Please also comment on your approach regarding garbage and landfills. The two issues are related, in that the new waste-to-energy plant will seemingly help solve one problem while further contributing to air pollution.

SO: Air quality is indeed a pressing concern for Delhi, and addressing it requires a multi-faceted approach that incorporates both short-term and long-term solutions. However, air doesn’t belong to any one geographical boundary; a lot of factors that arise in our neighboring states adversely impact Delhi. Thus, the challenge needs a concerted and coordinated approach from all stakeholders, including the central government and neighboring state governments.

The Delhi government is leading an extensive effort to reduce air pollution through its Summer and Winter Action Plans. The government accordingly decides upon short- and long-term solutions as part of these action plans, be it stopping dust pollution and industrial pollution, improving on solid waste management, or conducting real-time source apportionment studies. Under these action plans, the MCD has been delegated the responsibility of keeping a check on the factors under its domain and maintaining vigils on smaller roads under its domain. The state government regularly convenes review meetings and the MCD has extended its unconditional support to help with these efforts. It is important to also note that due to these efforts, the air pollution levels in Delhi have already seen a welcome change.

As for garbage and landfills, we are actively working upon improving the city’s solid waste management system by means of promoting waste segregation, installing fixed-compactor transfer stations, and shutting down neighborhood garbage dump yards. We have also set a plan to eliminate the three garbage landfills of the city. Of this we are on track to completely clear off the Okhla landfill by the end of this year and the Bhalswa landfill by the first half of next year. These targets have been set by the state as part of a dedicated approach to clean the city, and Chief Minister Kejriwal has been monitoring the daily progress to further strengthen MCD’s resolve toward this mission.

AF: Are there any policies in the works to address the city’s notorious traffic congestion? How does that fit in with your overall plan to enhance infrastructure and make the city more resilient?

SO: Traffic is mostly beyond the domain of the MCD. In Delhi, the municipal body only looks after minor roads and neighborhood lanes, whose upkeep we are working upon with utmost commitment ever since taking over the reins. Along with the help of our councilors and local citizens, we are identifying all such roads and lanes that need any sort of repair and ensuring that the task is dealt with. At the larger level, the Delhi Government’s Public Works Department and Transport Department are doing a great job of reducing traffic congestion in the city by upgrading the existing infrastructure, building new flyovers and underpasses, and introducing electric buses.

AF: The Delhi metro area—with a population of nearly 33 million and growing by nearly 3 percent per year—seems to warrant a more centralized form of governance. Is there any chance of reform to allow mayors in India to manage their cities as leaders do in major cities in other parts of the world?

SO: In principle, I do recognize the need for reforms that empower city leaders to effectively manage their cities, similar to the governance models observed in major cities around the world. However, the current governance structure in India has its limitations that we respect, and we prefer to mull about within our own landscape. In theory there is always a chance for reform and exploration of alternative models. We can explore enhancing the capacity of mayors and local authorities through training programs, knowledge sharing, and collaboration with international city management institutions that can equip them with the necessary skills and expertise to effectively lead and manage their cities. We can also promote collaborative governance models that involve active participation of citizens, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders to facilitate better decision-making and ensure that the diverse interests and concerns of the city’s residents are adequately represented.

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

Lead image: Leaders are working to improve air quality and clear landfills in Delhi, which is on track to become the world’s largest metropolitan area. Credit: PRABHASROY via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.

Homeowners in Jacksonville, Florida, saw the largest property tax disparities in the nation last year due to assessment limits, according to a new study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence. According to The 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study, the owner of a newly purchased, median-valued home in Jacksonville would face an effective tax rate 64 percent higher than the owner of an equally valued home in the city that was purchased in 2010. Jacksonville is not alone: it is one of 30 cities in the report affected by parcel-specific assessment limits. 

Produced annually, the comprehensive 50-state report provides the most meaningful data available to compare property taxes among cities by calculating the effective tax rate: the tax bill as a percentage of a property’s market value. Data are available for 74 large US cities and a rural municipality in each state, with information on four different property types (homestead, commercial, industrial, and apartment properties), and statistics on both net tax bills and effective tax rates.  

The study found that the average effective tax rate on a median-valued homestead was 1.32 percent in 2022 for the largest city in each state, with Bridgeport, Connecticut, Aurora, Illinois, Newark, and Detroit all having effective tax rates at least two times higher than the average. Conversely, seven cities have tax rates that are half of the study average or less: Honolulu, Boston, Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Charleston, South Carolina, and Cheyenne, Wyoming.  

The report also finds significant variations across cities in commercial property taxes, which include taxes on office buildings and similar properties. In 2022, the effective tax rate on a commercial property worth $1 million averaged 1.836 percent across the largest cities in each state. The highest rates were in Detroit and Chicago, where effective tax rates remain more than twice that average. Rates were less than half of the average in Cheyenne, Boise, Charlotte, Seattle, and Honolulu. 

The data highlighted in the report have important implications for cities because the property tax is a key part of the package of taxes and public services that affects cities’ competitiveness and quality of life. This analysis of how and why property taxes vary significantly across the United States allows for meaningful comparisons and more informed decision making by policymakers. 

The report is available for download on the Lincoln Institute website: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/50-state-property-tax-comparison-study-2022

Lead image: Miami, Florida. Credit: xbrchx via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

As cities grow and the struggle to address climate change and its effects continues to mount, the importance of the urban tree has also grown. Efforts to cultivate urban tree canopies abound and are popular with policymakers and the public alike. Trees provide much-needed shade, remove air pollution, absorb carbon, and even increase property values. But boosting the urban treescape has one element that often gets overlooked: It’s one thing to plant a lot of trees—but it’s something else to maintain them.

Technology has long played a role in efforts to track, map, and quantify the big-picture impacts of urban treescapes, from the environmental to the economic, a topic covered in this column in 2018. But new technologies have emerged and evolved since then, and some of the most intriguing are focused not just on high-level policy impacts but on the crucial issue of long-term maintenance. One specific example: adequate and timely watering, especially for younger trees, must be part of planning if the urban tree population is to endure.

Increasingly, cities are leveraging sophisticated tree-data tools to encourage and enable citizen engagement with urban tree maintenance, and in some cases even directly involve citizens in caring for the canopy.  

Consider a set of ongoing projects originating with CityLAB Berlin, a tech innovation nonprofit that applies data to urban problems. In recent years, Berlin, one of the more tree-rich cities in Europe, lost 20 percent of its trees thanks to high temperatures and a dearth of rain. That’s partly because monitoring and maintaining individual trees can be a complicated and heavy burden for municipal governments. So in 2020, CityLAB launched Gieß den Kiez (Water the Neighborhood), a digital platform that made government tree data available and accessible to the public. This made it possible for citizens to learn about local tree-watering needs—and to commit to helping out. “The application was developed based on the needs of our community,” said Yannick Müller, the organization’s head of strategic partnerships, via email.

The amount of data already available was a revelation: government projects had previously detailed and mapped hundreds of thousands of trees. CityLab combined this with other data, such as rainfall figures. The result is a new digital map with data on more than half a million trees, indicating watering levels and dates, cross-matched with watering needs based on age and species. Feedback and insights from a highly tree-engaged chunk of the citizenry helped shape the platform’s subsequent development. Some individuals had already essentially adopted, and independently started maintaining, particular urban trees. “They feel like it’s their own tree,” CityLab Berlin manager Julia Zimmermann told an interviewer. Citizens also had specific ideas about utilizing the city’s existing water pump system and making it more accessible. 

“A chat tool enables interaction between users, groups, and initiatives and allowed us to communicate and collect feedback,” Müller explained. Aside from resolving smaller bugs, this inspired new features, like one that displays the location and status of water pumps. It also helped support the designation of “caretakers” for specific trees, who commit to monitoring and watering on a regular basis. “This small added feature allows citizens to make use of their resources in a more targeted manner,” he said.

In 2021, the city of Leipzig adopted the tool, and a few more German municipalities have followed, according to Müller. User numbers are increasing continually, with more than 3,500 registered citizen-caretakers now watching over 7,500 adopted trees.

That said, the efforts of Gieß den Kiez remain an adjunct to public policy, not formally absorbed into official government urban tree maintenance plans. “However, the platform succeeds in raising awareness for climate adaptations in the light of future heat waves,” Müller maintains. In Berlin, for example, “it ignited a debate between different local district authorities as to what extent citizens should be involved in taking care of city trees and if that’s a good use for water.” (It is, Müller argues, considering the costs of planting new trees and the many proven environmental and health benefits of a robust urban treescape.)

One of the inspirations CityLAB Berlin has cited is the NYC Tree Map, a digital tool with roots reaching to 2016 that now maps nearly 1 million trees. “The NYC Tree Map is the most comprehensive and up-to-date living tree map in the world,” the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation declares. “Integrated directly with Parks’ forestry database, the map gives citizens the same real-time access to the urban forest that Parks foresters have on the ground.” This enables New Yorkers to “digitally interact” with the city’s tree population across the five boroughs—for instance, they can monitor a tree’s most recent inspection, with the date and inspection ID.

“Our NYC Tree Map allows casual tree lovers to easily identify trees, flag concerns, and report their care,” NYC Parks Director of Stewardship Nichole Henderson said via email. “Groups and individuals log their tree care activities into the map, like watering, litter removal, soil cultivation and mulching.” Moreover, several citizen groups monitor and use the map to coordinate more ambitious stewardship and maintenance efforts. As examples, Henderson mentions the Jackson Heights Beautification Group, an arts and environmental organization in Queens; Trees New York, a longstanding professional organization that trains “citizen pruners,” among other engagement activities; and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, whose projects include “community science” efforts such as experiments in capturing and using rainwater. And the tree map is key to NYC Parks’ own broader Let’s Green NYC campaign, which posts “citywide street tree care activities with community partners and allows volunteers to see the visible impact, how they are directly contributing to caring for the urban forest,” Henderson said.

Similar initiatives are playing out in other major cities. The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) in Washington, DC, maintains a digital tree map that encourages citizen involvement (including reporting browning leaves or insect damage, as well as trees in need of watering). The tree map launched with a special focus on maintaining 8,200 trees planted in 2017. Elsewhere, the Adopt-A-Tree app in Athens, Greece, enables citizens to take responsibility for watering individual city trees during dry summer months. And entities like CityLAB Berlin continue to innovate: its new Quantified Trees (“QTrees”) project aims to develop a prediction system supported by artificial intelligence, drawing on databases and sensors to identify urban trees at risk from drought. A prototype is already in testing, and launch is planned for this year.

Zimmermann, of CityLab Berlin, concedes that it has been difficult to precisely demonstrate the impact of these efforts. “This is due to the nature of nature,” she said. Trees adapt slowly, so gauging the effects of watering programs could require years of monitoring growth, roots, leaves, and so on. But in the short term, the project’s data dashboard does illuminate watering patterns —and has shown that watering amounts have increased since the program started, almost certainly countering drought effects. “So the project leads at least to a better understanding and caretaking of urban green,” she continued. In some cases it has sparked local governments to support volunteers with material and guidelines for optimal watering practices.

“Trees are the new polar bears, the trending face of the environmental movement,” the historian and author Jill Lepore observed recently, in a survey of humans’ surprisingly long-lived appreciation for the arboreal. Now we have the science and technology to understand and quantify the value of trees beyond aesthetics. “If our ancestors found it wise and necessary to cut down fast forests, it is all the more needful that their descendants should plant trees,” Andrew Jackson Downing, a landscape architect, wrote in 1847. “Let every man, whose soul is not a desert, plant trees.” Fair enough. But we have the obligation—and the technology—to maintain them, too.

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com.

Lead image: Newly planted trees along a pop-up bike lane in Berlin, Germany. Credit: IGphotography via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

With sophisticated market research powered by prodigious profits, corporate real estate investors have long had the upper hand over vulnerable homeowners and the groups trying to protect them.

Investors can identify distressed homes in otherwise gentrifying neighborhoods, snap them up at a discount, and leave them empty for years waiting for nearby home values to rise. They can target longtime, elderly homeowners who may need to sell at a discount. And with plenty of cash on hand—and a new playbook that includes renting out houses rather than just flipping them—they can outbid individual homebuyers as they turn bedrooms into balance sheet items.

Now, a new data mapping tool from the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) can help equip nonprofits, advocates, and local governments with similarly powerful technology to help identify and defend affordable housing stock threatened by real estate speculators and absentee landlords.

“It’s a very uneven playing field between private investors, who have the capital and are willing to invest the capital to get this market intelligence, and nonprofits that are struggling to keep the doors open, let alone invest in platforms like this,” says Jeff Allenby, CGS director of Geospatial Technology. “What you see is governments and nonprofits continuously trying to play catch up.”

Down-to-the-Parcel Data

In the wake of the Great Recession, corporations increasingly started purchasing and then renting out not just apartment buildings, but also single-family homes—especially in Sun Belt metro areas and postindustrial legacy cities, where rents remained stable despite lower property prices. Often, that’s had a cascade of negative impacts on low-income communities.

For one thing, it leaves more renters dealing with absentee corporate landlords, who can be quick to force an eviction and raise rents, but slow to fix a leaky roof or resolve code violations. It also reduces the supply of affordable housing stock available to would-be homebuyers, robbing local renters of opportunity.

In Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood, for example, just 53 of the 464 homes sold since 2017—12 percent—were purchased by owner occupants. In 2022, one of every five homes sold in the neighborhood (19.2 percent) was purchased by an out-of-state business, and nearly half were bought by in-state corporations with multiple-property portfolios.

“You just saw this backfill of corporate ownership come into this neighborhood, and it’s going to take years to come back from that,” Allenby says. Where real estate investors once focused on flipping houses for a quick buck, they now see rental properties as a long-term moneymaker. “These houses are just gone, likely in perpetuity, from a homeownership perspective.”

This grim, granular data is courtesy of a CGS initiative called “Who Owns America?” Starting with Baltimore, CGS used a variety of public data sources to map every parcel in the city by its ownership characteristics, cross-checking postal information with deeds and other records to distinguish owner-occupied properties from those owned by private landlords and large or out-of-state businesses.

After coding city-owned residential parcels, Allenby explains, CGS filters for all properties where the owner’s mailing address doesn’t match the physical address—meaning it isn’t owner-occupied. After that, CGS can differentiate between private, off-site owners—local “mom-and-pop” landlords who may own one or two properties, for example—and more formal corporations, checking the names against a series of business-related keywords and acronyms, such as LLC, LLP, incorporated, and so on. Further filtering reveals whether a business is based in or out of state, and whether it owns multiple properties in the city.

The resulting color-coded maps make it clear where owner occupancy is more prevalent and where corporate landlords are most active. Empowered with this intuitive, down-to-the-parcel data, communities can identify housing stock likely to be targeted by speculators. Then they can take steps to defend (or even reclaim) affordable housing before it’s lost to corporate ownership.

The Right to Fight Back 

One policy cities can employ to thwart predatory investors is a right of first refusal rule, which gives tenants the option to purchase their home before it’s sold to a corporation. Knowing where such investors are active can help community leaders support the rollout of such a program with more targeted public outreach, says Senior Research Fellow Robert “R.J.” McGrail, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Accelerating Community Investment initiative.

“That’s the neighborhood you do flyers in, where you have some community organization go knock on doors to tell people, ‘Just so you know, if the out-of-state company that you write your rent check to ever sells your house, you have the first chance to buy it,’” McGrail says. “The ‘just-so-you-know’ conversation can be incredibly agency building and empowering for an individual, in a way that I think is another downstream potential benefit from this tool.”

Allenby is quick to point out that the formalization of property ownership isn’t in itself a bad thing. For example, if a local landlord dies and his children inherit his three rental properties and put them all into an LLC, that doesn’t fundamentally alter the local real estate landscape. And true investment—companies that buy vacant, dilapidated buildings, restore them to good condition, and get them back into the housing market—is almost always welcome.

“Investor owner doesn’t necessarily mean bad owner,” McGrail agrees. But by overlapping additional layers of parcel-level datasets, CGS can provide more context and reveal bad actors. For example, mapping where corporate ownership coincides with code violations—reports of broken deck railings, lack of heat, leaky toilets, and so on—“tells a dramatically more nuanced, useful story around what is happening and what to do about it,” he says.

In that case, McGrail notes, mapping might offer chronically understaffed inspectional departments a better way to prioritize their code enforcement. Similarly, layering vacancy data over out-of-state ownership maps can inform discussions around land use policies such as a split-rate tax.

“So many times, policy discussions happen in a vacuum of data,” Allenby says. “You’re talking about theoreticals, abstract numbers, abstract concepts, and you don’t really have a good handle on the scale of the issue that you’re talking about. And these tools allow you to frame that conversation very specifically.”

Beyond Baltimore 

CGS can provide a granular data map customized to an organization’s or community’s needs in just a couple of weeks, Allenby says. And it’s not just a tool for cities. CGS has also mapped the entire state of Massachusetts for a housing nonprofit, and is currently documenting timberland ownership across Alabama.

CGS also partnered with the International Land Conservation Network to combine the research of multiple conservation organizations in search of “Consensus Landscapes”—areas that meet not just one conservation priority, such as biodiversity, habitat connectivity, or carbon storage potential, but many such goals, all at once. The goal of this collaborative mapping framework, according to CGS, is to identify “places that everyone can agree are important, and should be the immediate focus of collective conservation efforts” as the United States works to protect 30 percent of its land by 2030.

The Center for Geospatial Solutions created a framework for mapping “consensus landscapes” by assessing and integrating the research of several conservation organizations. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

Jim Gray, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is now working with CGS to study ownership trends among manufactured housing communities, which have also garnered the attention of real estate investors in recent years for their relatively low costs and reliable rents. Gray calls CGS’s work “invaluable” for its ability to transform a largely anecdotal challenge into real data.

“Knowing the extent of the problem, who is responsible, and where the problem is most acute will help inform and target which communities need to prioritize preserving this affordable housing stock, and how to go about that,” he says.

To learn more or to work with the Center for Geospatial Solutions, visit the CGS website or contact cgs@lincolninst.edu.

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

Lead image: This Center for Geospatial Solutions image combines spatial analysis with land parcel data to illustrate different types of property ownership, part of a project intended to help communities better understand how institutional investors are affecting local land markets. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.