This peer exchange will focus on evolveEA’s work on scenario planning and housing affordability for the Consortium’s 2023 RFP cycle. We’ll be discussing their process as well as their experience using scenario planning to create future-based plans in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
In partnership with Nexus at Michigan Engineering, this course is available both in person in Ann Arbor and as a three-day remote live session via Zoom. Participants will learn to appropriately foster urban progress for future scenarios through effective planning methods and gain hands-on knowledge of techniques to analyze trends, construct scenario narratives, and model scenarios using GIS tools. Upon course completion, students will have concrete ideas for implementing scenarios in their communities.
Scenario Planning for Urban Futures is intended for a varied audience. Early-career planning professionals, experienced scenario planning practitioners, master’s level, and PhD urban planning students, applied researchers, and consultants are all encouraged to attend.
Who Owns America (WHOA) is a flagship CGS initiative designed to demystify landownership and equip communities with clear, actionable parcel-level data. In a landscape where ownership records are often siloed, outdated, or incomplete, WHOA provides a consistent, data-driven foundation for informing housing production and preservation strategies.
We work with municipalities, nonprofits, land trusts, and others get the information they need to:
Understand complex patterns of landownership
Identify strategic parcels for affordable housing or conservation
Recognize trends in land speculation and displacement
Make more just and equitable land use decisions
Our approach fuses ownership data with environmental, demographic, and zoning overlays—delivering a comprehensive view of how land is owned, valued, and used. Whether supporting regional housing strategies or mapping patterns of resource inequality, WHOA helps communities act with clarity and precision.
As the principal facilitator of the Internet of Water (IoW) Coalition, CGS leads a national movement to modernize and connect public water data across the United States. We work to ensure that water data—much like weather data—is discoverable, accessible, and usable for all.
Our work centers on:
Developing Geoconnex, a core open-source system for linking disparate water datasets through shared identifiers back to real-world locations—making it easier to discover and connect information across agencies and platforms.
Building tools and advancing standards that support transparent, more informed water data sharing and improved access for all water data users.
Supporting implementation by helping federal and state agencies, utilities, and community partners adopt and operationalize modern data infrastructure.
This work builds on efforts that began at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability and is now supported by the US Geological Survey and a national coalition of partners. CGS is proud to serve as the home of the IoW Coalition while continuing to develop and deploy tools that power open, connected water data systems.
The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.
After earning her PhD in applied economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 2018, Lindsay Relihan was invited to join the Lincoln Institute Scholars program, an opportunity for recent PhDs focused on public finance or urban economics to work with senior academics and journal editors. Now an assistant professor of economics at Purdue University, Relihan has lately focused her work on the question of how remote work is reshaping downtown retail—with many stores following their customers to the suburbs or smaller cities. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Relihan shares what intrigues her about the retail industry and why she’s still bullish on the future of cities.
JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research and the work you presented at the Lincoln Scholars program?
LINDSAY RELIHAN: Broadly speaking, my research agenda is about trying to understand how technology is reshaping cities.
The job market paper I presented at the Lincoln Institute is all about the rise of online retail, and how online retail was reshaping consumer shopping patterns. The big lesson there is that we often tell this ‘retail apocalypse’ story about online retail, where Amazon opens up and all the bookstores and other kinds of goods stores close. And that’s actually true—but it’s a very limited view of what online retail is doing to the economy, and to the retail economy specifically.
What I find in my work is that when people become online grocery shoppers, they go to the grocery store less, which is that classic substitution effect that we always talk about. But one thing they can do is turn around and use all that time savings from going to the grocery store to go somewhere else instead. And that’s what I find they do: they go to the grocery store less, but they go out to restaurants more. So restaurants can win from the rise of online retail, being something you can do with that extra time that you can’t replicate online. It’s not just restaurants . . . they go out to more salons, and they go out to more entertainment venues, like theaters or bowling alleys, those kinds of things that you can’t do online.
JG: What are you working on now, and what do you have planned next?
LR: Most of the story about work-from-home has focused initially on what it’s doing to things like office real estate. But retail is a big part of the economy, and it’s tied to both where you live and where you work. So if you go into the downtown office less, well, maybe you don’t go to Chipotle for lunch, and maybe you don’t go to happy hour after work, or you don’t go out for coffee—that’s a big part of downtown commerce.
If you’re instead having lunch at home, the question is: Do you go to Chipotle in the suburbs? In which case, Chipotles might just change where they locate. Or, because it’s a lot easier just to make a sandwich, do you just stay home, and that restaurant visit just disappears entirely? We find that people are leaving downtowns for the suburbs, and sometimes we also see people leaving big cities for smaller cities. That’s happening. But these retail establishments are also following the people, in a way that intuition would suggest.
With fewer workers commuting regularly to major urban downtowns, some businesses have expanded into smaller cities and suburbs, including the regional restaurant chain Dig. The company opened its first freestanding restaurant last year in a former diner in Stamford, Connecticut, part of a broader expansion of its reach. “For us to be sustainable as a business, we had to be where the mouths are,” said CEO Tracy Kim. Credit: PJ Kennedy/HeyStamford!.
In that original paper, I ignored the supply side as if stores were not changing anything about their strategies, but we have good intuition and our everyday experience to expect that grocery stores should do something else to compete. And so we’re going to try and figure out what does that response look like? Are they going to change their product offerings, are they going to change their prices, are they going to change where their stores are? So we’re going to try and really trace out that supply side response.
JG: What sparked your interest in studying retail?
LR: It was recognizing that retail is this large, less explored aspect of commercial real estate. And I feel like it speaks to the way that people live their everyday lives, and that’s why I really like it.
I actually came to studying real estate and urban economics through an interest in the residential housing market. I worked with Chip Case at Wellesley, who developed one of the canonical models of house price indices, and I went to work at the Federal Reserve after undergrad and worked in their housing and real estate finance section, and then I went to Wharton to work on housing. And one day, my dissertation chair called me into his office, and—in his French accent—he was like, ‘Lindsay, you cannot be Miss Mortgage, you have to branch out.’ And I was like, okay, fair, but this other thing I’m interested in is still about the everyday of people’s lives, but how space shapes people’s consumption decisions, and the distributional consequences of that.
JG: What do you wish more people knew about economics?
LR: What I say to my undergrads when I’m teaching is the most beautiful economics is something that was obvious in retrospect—that says something true about the way the world works, and illuminates something new to you about the way that the world works in a very intuitive way . . . I think the best example from my work is when you shop online, you get more time, then you can do something else. Good economics makes concrete a lot of our really strong intuitions that will help us to understand how the world is really working so we can make better policy.
Something else I wish people knew is that economics is extremely nonpartisan, when it feels like everything else in the world is super partisan. It’s really about trying to understand people’s incentives and how we should distribute resources to achieve some kind of policy goal, and I think it’s very powerful in uniting people who maybe have very different personal opinions about a lot of things to speak a common language about tools and objectives.
JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?
LR: During the housing boom of the 2000s, there was a big move away from the traditional 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage, toward mortgages that had teaser rates, or interest-only periods, or that could negatively amortize—they just had very exotic, nontraditional features that could allow you to have a cheaper mortgage payment every month than you could get on a standard contract. And what my research on that time period says is that a lot of that was really driven by this need by private banks and lenders who were packaging mortgage-backed securities to continue originating mortgages despite increasing interest rates after about 2003.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that in the current economic climate. We were puzzled back in the mid-2000s—interest rates are rising, why aren’t house prices falling?—and we actually have a very similar situation and discussion today. I think a lot about where in the system we are allowing mortgages to continue to get made, and whether those new mortgages being made today are risky in ways that are reminiscent of what happened in the 2000s.
[What gives me hope is that] every time we’ve had a technology shock, cities as a whole have come out on top. I mean, that’s not to say that individual cities can’t rise and fall . . . but I have hope overall. Every time we invent a new technology that allows easier communication across space, people predict the death of cities. They invented the telegraph, and people were like, ‘Distance doesn’t matter, so cities will disappear,’ or they invented the telephone, and they were like, ‘Cities don’t matter, we can just call each other, why would we ever need to be in person?’ The internet was the same way. And through all of those episodes, cities did the exact opposite, they got denser and became more valuable places to live; what changed was why people wanted to live there, and why cities were super valuable. I think both online retail and work from home have a good chance of following that path. So I am definitely part of the faction that bets long on cities.
JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
LR: Something I’ve been really into lately is trying to revisit lessons in philosophy. And one book that I read recently that really spoke to me as an urban economist was The Just City by Jo Walton. It’s a science fiction novel that imagines what would happen if you actually tried to set up Plato’s Republic by stealing people from across time that ever wished aloud to live there, and trying to run it in accordance with the way that Plato set down as being the way that cities should be run. So they put up a city that’s just like Plato’s prescription, and then of course, things get very interesting and run amok in ways that I thought were great.
A few years ago, the city of San Antonio conducted research into the anticipated impacts of climate change on local temperatures. The study projected that, by midcentury, the city might experience 61 days a year with temperatures over 100 degrees. In reality, the city notched 75 days over 100 degrees—in 2023.
Like many cities, San Antonio has been strategizing responses to climate change for years, but recent record-shattering temperatures have given such efforts a new sense of urgency, says Douglas Melnick, San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer. One major component that’s been getting a serious rethink: city surfaces, from roads to roofs. These human-made surfaces are often dark and impermeable, amplifying hot weather, worsening flood risks, and contributing to the heat island effect. But soaring global temperatures are sparking a wave of experiments with new materials and engineering innovations designed to reimagine surface problems as deep opportunities.
Pavement is a particular focus for San Antonio and many other cities, because it’s hot and there’s a lot of it: researchers estimate that it accounts for 30 to 40 percent of urban land cover. After an initial “very small” pilot in 2021 experimenting with a reflective pavement coating, San Antonio embarked on a $1 million project that will test five such materials in various parts of town, Melnick says. The streets were selected based on data related to equity and heat, and the work is being integrated into already-scheduled maintenance and repaving projects; the city will work with the University of Texas San Antonio to evaluate the results.
A similar effort is underway in Phoenix, a city “on the front lines of extreme heat,” as David Sailor, professor and director of the school of geographical sciences and urban planning at Arizona State University, puts it. The city was an early proponent of rethinking surfaces, launching a major Cool Pavement Pilot Program three years ago. But even in this notoriously hot place, efforts have accelerated lately: ASU has been involved as a research and advisory partner in a city-led project that has treated more than 100 miles of local roads with reflective coatings. “This is something that would not have happened five years ago,” Sailor says, “and it’s increasingly happening across different cities.”
The Phoenix Street Transportation Department has applied a water-based cool pavement treatment in neighborhoods across the city. Credit: City of Phoenix.
Los Angeles has introduced a number of pilot programs, including one in the Pacoima neighborhood testing a reflective coating on streets, a school playground, and a recreation center parking lot. Researchers at Purdue University, meanwhile, have developed and are preparing for market the “world’s whitest paint,” which reflects 98 percent of solar heat and could be used on buildings, trains and buses, and other surfaces. A number of US cities are offering tax incentives for reflective roofs. Others have installed green roofs, topping waterproofing material with plants and other greenery that can be both cooling and absorb rainfall. And smaller projects are popping up all over the world, like parking lot solar canopies that provide shade and generate energy; corrugated self-cooling walls that stay as much as 18 degrees cooler than flat walls and can help reduce the need for air conditioning; and innovative, affordable cool-roofing materials for informal and self-built structures in India, Africa, and elsewhere.
The idea that governmental will to address extreme heat is expanding—and municipal funding is growing along with it—is spurring more material innovation in the market, says Sailor of ASU. He notes the creation of new, acrylic-based asphalt treatments. Because lighter colors can show tire markings, demand has also led to the development of a coatings that are dark in the visible spectrum but engineered to have high reflectance outside that spectrum, and reflect 30 to 40 percent of the sun’s energy, compared to 4 percent on a standard road. Other materials getting their moment in the sun include new kinds of coating for extruded metal roofing; reflective, porous concrete; and passive radiative cooling film engineered to actively radiate heat away from surfaces (instead of simply reflecting it, as coatings do). ASU is testing such products from giants like 3M as well as smaller startups.
But the real breakthrough isn’t any single material or innovation, says Greg Kats, founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition (SSC)—it’s the sheer variety of projects afoot, and a new willingness to “think broadly and citywide” about surfaces. Launched in 2019, SSC is now working with some 40 organizations and 10 cities and metropolitan areas across the country, providing data and tools to help implement smart surfaces effectively. “The city has gotten hotter and darker and more impermeable, with higher energy bills, more environmental injustice,” Kats says. “A lot of cities have really reached a point where they’re looking for systemic solutions.” Kats notes that there are fiscal motivations, too: major credit rating agencies have begun to factor climate change into their calculations, which could affect municipal credit ratings.
Kats and other smart surface advocates emphasize that tech-based materials must be complemented by trees and other natural solutions. Brendan Shane, climate director for the Trust for Public Land, which focuses on creating and enhancing parks and green spaces in cities and communities (and works with SSC), argues that smart surfaces and green infrastructure go naturally together. “Our tree canopies are at historic low levels,” he points out. But they are part of a city’s surface area, and “the surface of the city is one of those things that really does change. You’re going to repave roads. And you’re going to replant trees.”
Daytime surface temperatures (represented by the solid orange line above) tend to be far hotter than air temperatures (orange dotted line), especially in downtowns and industrial areas. Credit: US EPA.
The coalition hopes to help cities devise multi-pronged but locally tailored approaches, Kats says, through improved data synthesis and analysis. SSC is already working with a dozen US cities, and two in India, to compile data from hundreds of sources, producing detailed heat maps from satellite data and other information, and running cost/benefit scenarios on different implementations and timelines. The goal is to be both comprehensive and flexible, given that a dry city like Stockton, California, will have different needs and solutions than a wetter city like Baltimore. Whatever a given city’s objective, Kats asserts that with a full suite of responses—smart reflective surfaces, trees, and green infrastructure projects like rain gardens—the vast majority of cities can cool average temperatures by five degrees, or even more in previously neglected heat island neighborhoods.
Back in San Antonio, plans are taking shape to use heat-mapping technology to identify the neighborhoods that would most benefit from municipal investments in cool pavement, street trees, and shade structures. The wake-up call of recent extreme weather, Melnick says, has created a real opportunity for coordinated, citywide plans. “Cities tend to be very siloed. The parks department’s doing trees over here, and then the public works department is doing roads over there,” he says. “Everyone’s got a role in mitigating heat, but how do we get everybody talking together?”
As technologies evolve and the world’s cities continue to grow, investing in solutions to create cooler, more livable cities—and working together to implement them—is essential, Kats says: “Waiting is now a higher-risk strategy than taking action.”
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.
Established in 2020, the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) is a self-sustaining nonprofit enterprise operating out of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. We are a nonprofit data solutions provider, working with external partners to transform how land, water, and social resources are managed and protected.
At CGS, we believe that better decisions—about housing, infrastructure, conservation, and community well-being— depend on better data. That’s why we specialize in building modern, integrated, and actionable geospatial systems for the public good. We approach this work with a commitment to objectivity and service, and our work helps federal agencies, state and local governments, nonprofits, and regional and national networks access the tools and insights they need to tackle complex challenges.
We are more than technologists. We are systems thinkers, designers, data scientists, and community collaborators. Our strength lies in helping mission-aligned organizations use data not just to understand the world—but to change it.
Mission and Vision
CGS was founded to enable data-driven decisions for the greater good of land, water, and people. Our expert team improves how data is accessed, interpreted, and applied to help changemakers big and small fulfill their purpose. We envision a world where new technologies—like remote sensing, AI, and geospatial analysis—are used to realize swift and fair outcomes for people and the planet.
The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is the leading land conservation organization in Canada. Since 1962, the nonprofit and its partners have helped protect more than 35 million acres (14 million hectares) across Canada. NCC is working with us to develop a long-term technology strategy that streamlines data collection and management across the organization and allows all of its programs to leverage the latest technology to improve conservation prioritization, securement, and management. This strategy is helping reduce the time it takes staff to effectively manage properties and communicate key metrics to outside partners and funders. Access to better technology is also making it easier for NCC to effectively leverage new revenue sources, such as carbon offsets, by quantifying and capitalizing on the ecological benefits of land conservation.
Enabling Better Decisions About Land, Water, and People
At our core, CGS helps partners make better, more informed decisions about how land, water, and other resources are used, governed, protected, and shared. We ensure that data is a decision-making asset—not just a technical resource.
Our clients and collaborators rely on us to translate complex challenges into achievable solutions that are grounded in real-world goals and community values.
“The Center for Geospatial Solutions is moving the global environmental field forward to meet ambitious goals set forth by scientists to save and restore our planet.”
The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.
As the director of The Nature Conservancy’s North America Center for Resilient Conservation Science, ecologist Mark Anderson led a team of scientists in the development and mapping of TNC’s resilient and connected network: a detailed, nationwide map of linked landscapes that are uniquely suited to preserve biodiversity and withstand the impacts of climate change. In 2021, Anderson received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance. In this interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, he explains why connected natural strongholds are critical to combating our biodiversity crisis.
JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?
MARK ANDERSON: Conservation of land and water is extremely expensive, and it’s long term. What we’ve really been focused on is making sure we’re conserving places that are resilient to climate change—really thinking about biodiversity loss, and where are the places on the ground or in the water that we think will continue to sustain nature, even as the climate changes in ways that we can’t fully predict.
As we dove deeper and deeper into the science, the beauty of it is that the properties of land and water—the topography, the soil types, the way water moves and collects—actually build resilience into the system. When you hear about a climate disaster, for example, a drought or a flood, you kind of picture it as a big swash everywhere. But in fact, there’s all sorts of detail to how that plays out on the land, and we can actually use an understanding of that to find places that are much more resilient and places that are much more vulnerable. So the effects of that are spread in understandable and predictable ways, and that’s what we are focused on: finding those places where we think nature will retain resilience.
Climate change is very different than any other threat we’ve ever faced because it’s a change in the ambient conditions of the planet. It’s a change in the temperature and moisture regimes. And in response to that change, nature literally has to rearrange. So a big question is, how do we help nature thrive and conserve the ability of nature to rearrange? Connectivity between places where species can thrive and move is key to that.
We divided the US into about 10 regions, and in each of those regions, we had a large steering committee of scientists from every state. They reviewed it, they argued about the concepts, we tested stuff out, they tested it on the ground, and that’s what improved the quality of the work, it’s all thanks to them. By the time we finished, it took 287 scientists and 12 years, so it was a lot of work. We involved a lot of people in the work, and so there’s a lot of trust now of the dataset.
Anderson led the development of The Nature Conservancy’s Resilient Land Mapping Tool, which allows users to generate customized maps of the places in the US where species can survive and thrive in a changing climate. Credit: The Nature Conservancy.
JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?
MA: The US has not signed on to the global 30 by 30 agreement [to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030], but we have America the Beautiful, which the Biden Administration has launched as a 30 by 30 plan. People get hung up on that 30 percent, which is important, but if we want to sustain biodiversity, what’s really important is, which 30 percent is it? Are we representing all the ecosystems, are we reaching all the species? Are we finding places that are resilient, and are we connecting them in a way that nature can actually move and be sustained?
Our work is all about resilience and connectivity and biodiversity, and it turns out that the network we came up with, that has full representation of all the habitats and ecoregions and connectivity, turned out to be 34 percent [of the US]. So we have internally adopted it within TNC as our framework: We are trying to conserve that network, and that’s been super exciting. Because over the last five years, we conserved 1.1 million acres, of which about three quarters was directly in the network.
In 2023, The Nature Conservancy protected high-priority landscapes including Fern Lake, which spans the Kentucky-Tennessee border in the Cumberland Gap. Credit: PapaBear via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
It’s very unlikely that the federal government is going to actually do the conservation; it’s really going to be done by the private NGOs, state agencies, and land trusts. In fact, in the Northeast, private land conservation over the last 10 years surpassed all the federal and state agency conservation combined. So our strategy has been to create a tool and get the science out and just encourage people to be using the science and thinking about climate resilience—with our fingers crossed that, if this makes sense to people, wherever they are, and we’re all sort of working off that, it will conserve the network in a diffuse way.
What we’re working on now is freshwater resilience, focusing on rivers and streams and the connectivity and resilience of those systems. Our vision of a resilient system is a long, connected network with good water quality that allows fish and mussels to move around and adapt to the changing climate. But a lot of those systems are fragmented by dams, their floodplains are developed, their water quality is poor, and there’s a lot of water use, because they’re in a residential area that’s extracting all the water.
JG: What do you wish more people knew about conservation, biodiversity, and ecology?
MA: Well, two things—one good, one bad. I wish more people understood the urgency of the biodiversity crisis. The fact that we’ve lost 3 billion birds—there are 3 billion fewer birds than there were 40 years ago. Our mammals are constrained now to small fragments of their original habitats. There’s a crisis in our insects, that is really scary. Most of my career, we were focused on rare things; now these are common things that are dropping in abundance. So I wish people really understood that.
And I also wish people understood that we can turn that around, by really focusing our energy and conserving the right places, and there’s still hope and time to do that. It’s a big task, and it can only be done by thousands of organizations working on it, but it can be turned around.
River otters in Indiana’s Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge. The Nature Conservancy recently purchased 1,700 acres adjacent to the refuge, expanding the valley’s connected wildlife habitat to more than 20,000 acres. Credit: Steve Gifford via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
JG. When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?
MA: Well, I’m a scientist, and there are so many potential errors and problems and data issues, they never end. So our results are not perfect. They’re pretty good, they’ve been ground tested a lot, but they’re not perfect.
The other thing is the future. I really want my kids and grandkids to have a wonderful world full of nature, and to get there, we’re going to have to really change our course.
JG. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?
MA: When we started this work, we didn’t have a concept of what the end was going to look like. And I probably thought of the end as a bunch of big places, you know? But it’s not a bunch of big places, it’s a net, it’s a web—a web of connected places, some big, some small. So that was a surprise to me.
JG: You work a lot with maps—what’s the coolest map you’ve ever seen?
MA: We have a concept called climate flow, which is predicting how nature will move through the landscape following unfragmented areas and climatic gradients. And one of our scientists successfully animated that map, so that you can see the movement of the flows—and that is one of the coolest maps. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it gets the concept across really nicely. And it was this map that helped us figure out that there’s a pattern to all this. It’s not random, there’s a pattern—there are places where flows concentrate, there are places where flow diffuses, and that’s really important to know.
The Nature Conservancy’s animated Migrations in Motion map shows the average direction species need to move to track hospitable climates as they shift across the landscape. Credit: Dan Majka/The Nature Conservancy.
JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
MA: My favorite book recently was Wilding by Isabella Tree. It’s a nonfiction book from the British Isles, where a farming couple in Knepp, they were never able to make the area a productive farm so they decided just to stop farming it and let it go wild, and they document the change from farming to wildness. They introduce some grazing animals that would be the counterpart of the aurochs and warthogs that would have been there, and immediately, the farm becomes a total mess—lots of weeds, dug up areas, the neighbors complain. But over time, all these rare species start to show up, all these owls that have not been seen, nightingales, turtle doves, and pretty soon it is like a total biodiversity hotspot. So it’s a very interesting read, it’s very hopeful.
In the last year I’ve read several books about African American perspectives on the environmental movement, and those are powerful. One was called Black Faces, White Spaces, by Carolyn Finney, and I’m reading one now called A Darker Wilderness, and it’s really eye-opening on the equity issues that are buried in conservation.
Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Mark Anderson. Credit: Courtesy photo.
Seven Need-to-Know Trends for Planners in 2024
By APA Foresight team, January 24, 2024
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This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning.
Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.
To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.
The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.
There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.
Illustration by Chris Lyons.
You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown
As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.
The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.
Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP
Despite flood risk, development continues in many low-lying areas. Photo by Ryan Johnson/Flickr.
Climate Displacement on the Rise
In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.
In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.
Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.
Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP
A more equitable approach to transportation planning, like the one in Jersey City, New Jersey, not only can increase options but also can decrease pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities. Photo courtesy of City of Jersey City.
Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities
Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.
Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.
Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.
Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado
‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back
Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.
Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah
Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth
The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.
De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.
However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado
Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends
Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.
Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado
It’s Time to Welcome the Robots
Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.
In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.
With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis
Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.
New Tool Measures Vertical Equity in Property Tax Assessments
The coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 30 miles north of Boston, has about 6,000 homes built over the course of five centuries. There are the typical cul-de-sac Colonials, the new townhouses, and both modest and massive waterfront properties. But Ipswich is also awash in historic homes—including roughly five dozen “First Period” houses built before 1725, more than any other community in the United States. Lately, the town’s antique houses have been popular with homebuyers, fetching the kinds of multimillion-dollar sales prices usually associated with new construction.
Ipswich Chief Assessor Mary-Louise Ireland isn’t sure whether it’s a temporary blip or the start of a trend. But she does know one thing: it’s making her team’s task of assigning fair and accurate property tax values to every home in town a bit more challenging.
After all, one of the biggest difficulties for a local tax assessor isn’t just making accurate property valuations—it’s doing so consistently, across all price points, home styles, and neighborhoods. If a $1 million Colonial is assessed at $950,000, for example—or 95 percent of its market value—then a $100,000 condo in the same district should be assessed at $95,000. When that ratio is consistent across a community’s price tiers, the valuations have what’s called vertical equity.
That’s tricky enough to achieve in a homogenous postwar suburb. But when 300-year-old saltboxes share the streets with new luxury townhomes, and storied houses get converted to character-rich condos, making equitable assessments across such a sundry assortment of housing styles gets even more challenging. “We’re three people,” says Ireland, “and we do all of the field work on our own.”
Now, Ireland’s small department is using an innovative—and free—new online tool from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to evaluate and interpret the vertical equity of their assessments. “We don’t have a lot of money for extra tools,” she says. “So having this has been fabulous.”
Evaluating the Valuations
Getting assessments right across the board is crucial to a fair and equitable property tax. But accurately assessing very low- and high-priced properties is notoriously difficult, partly because there are fewer market sales in those brackets. And in recent years, researchers analyzing national data sets have found headline-worthy evidence that lower-priced homes are being over-assessed—and therefore overtaxed—relative to higher-priced properties nearby.
“If assessments are equitable, then low-, medium-, and high-priced properties are all assessed at the same level relative to the market,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy fellow Ron Rakow. “But even though it’s a fairly simple concept, vertical equity is really tricky to measure.”
The International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) has two vertical equity standards in place to guide assessors, says Rakow—former commissioner of the City of Boston Assessing Department—but even those measures are imperfect. The price related differential is a simple ratio most assessors use, but Rakow says it can be imprecise; the coefficient of price related bias is a little more robust, but also more complex—it requires a type of analysis that many small departments don’t have the resources or expertise to conduct.
“Because of the difficulty of measuring vertical equity, there’s no single best, definitive measure,” Rakow says. “So rather than just looking at one indicator, it’s better to look at several indicators to paint a more complete picture.”
Needless to say, that’s no simple undertaking. So the Lincoln Institute partnered with the nonprofit Center for Appraisal Research and Technology (CART) to develop a new online tool to help assessors measure and understand the vertical equity in their own valuations.
The browser-based vertical equity app, which is free to use, instantly analyzes property data that any local assessor already has on hand, evaluating it against six different measures of vertical equity and providing a detailed report. “We wanted to give assessors a tool where they can not only get these measures calculated out, but also get some assistance in interpreting them,” Rakow says.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Vertical Equity App is a free online resource designed to help assessors evaluate and interpret vertical equity, a measure of how consistently properties at different price points are assessed relative to the market. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
The new tool, launched in September, simply requires users to upload a data set of assessment records, which are anonymized to protect the privacy of property owners. The tool then runs a calculation based on two main ingredients: time-adjusted sale prices and assessed values.
From there, assessors can see different illustrated measurements of vertical equity in their data set, with customized graphs and explanations, and can download a full PDF of the results.
“If you can upload an attachment to an email, you can now do these complex statistical quality control studies—you don’t have to have a PhD, you don’t even have to have programming experience,” says CART founder and research scientist Paul Bidanset. “There are a lot of different ways to do it that would have been more complicated—but we thought if we could meet people exactly where they were, we would be helping the most people.” (Read our profile of Bidanset, a former C. Lowell Harriss fellow at the Lincoln Institute.)
Ireland says she’s thrilled to have access to such a powerful tool. “It was super simple—I have everything in Excel spreadsheets anyway, and you only needed two columns,” she says. “I can use this really beautiful report to go before the Select Board and say, ‘OK, here’s the data to support what we’ve done.’”
The professional look of the report was impressive, Ireland says—and not something her department of three could have put together on their own with their limited budget. And the illustrated graphs aren’t just useful for communicating vertical equity data to non-assessors. Paired with contextual explanations of what each measurement means and how it’s calculated, they helped Ireland wrap her head around some of the more complex and novel metrics. “I’ve taken all the classes, and we’ve talked about [these measurements], but for some reason it really hit home for me seeing it all put together this way,” she says.
Six Sides to Every Story
The tool provides results based on six approaches. The first looks at the commonly used assessment-to-sale ratio, which simply divides assessed values by their sale prices; the tool then sorts and charts those results into price deciles.
“We basically split all the sales into 10 bins—lowest-priced properties in the first bin and highest-priced properties in the tenth bin—and then we compare that ratio and see if it changes,” Rakow explains. “If we have proportional assessments, the ratio should be the same in each of those bins. But what we commonly see is that the assessment ratios tend to be a little bit higher for the low-priced properties than they are for high-priced properties.”
The coefficient of dispersion analysis plots out how far each property’s ratio is from the median. While that’s more commonly used as a measure of horizontal equity, Rakow says, it still reflects the overall quality of the assessments. “Generally speaking, if you have problems with vertical equity, you’re also probably going to have a pretty high coefficient of dispersion,” he says.
The tool also calculates the price related differential, one of two standards the IAAO uses to measure vertical equity (a PRD between 0.98 and 1.03 indicates vertical equity, according to IAAO guidance); the coefficient of price related bias, which can help users understand patterns in assessment-to-sales ratios at higher price points; and Spearman’s rank-order correlation, which compares rankings of assessments and sales from lowest to highest.
The Spearman’s rank-order correlation compares rankings of assessments and sales from lowest to highest. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Finally, the tool includes Gini coefficients, which have long been used to measure inequality in economics. It’s only fairly recently that the assessment profession has begun to apply the Gini ranking technique to analyze vertical equity. “We’re really excited about these,” Rakow says. The Gini ranking not only offers an overall indicator of equity in the assessments, “but it also can point to where in the price distribution you’re actually having problems,” Rakow says. “It’s great to know whether or not the assessment distribution is equitable or not, but it’s even more important, if it isn’t, to know where to start looking and where you may have some issues.”
While any one of these six measurements in isolation might provide an imperfect analysis of vertical equity, Rakow says, they offer a more complete picture when taken altogether. And the app can also help an assessor look more closely at specific data. “If you suspect that the issue may be in certain neighborhoods, or within certain housing styles, you could basically cull your sales file and just feed those types of properties into the app and see whether or not that is in fact the case, and how severe the problem is,” Rakow explains.
Ultimately, the developers of the tool hope that it will make it easier for assessors not just to understand vertical inequity, but to take steps to address it. In future iterations, Rakow would like to add diagnostic elements. One feature currently in development is a geographically weighted tool to highlight areas with the most significant divergences between market values and assessments. “So then you can zoom in and see what’s going on there,” he says. “Maybe there’s a certain style of house in that neighborhood that you’re not capturing right in the model, or maybe it’s very large homes that tend to be in that particular location versus the rest of the community.”
This kind of data could also help assessors make the case for their municipalities to consider targeted tax relief policies, such as a homestead exemption, that can help make assessments more equitable.
Like any good technology, the tool will never truly be finished, Bidanset says: “It’ll always be changing and evolving as the industry evolves, and as we get more feedback, and as the industry comes up with new metrics and better statistics.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Houses in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Credit: Leigh Mantoni-Stewart.
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