A falta de acesso a moradias dignas pode perpetuar desigualdades que persistem ao longo de gerações. E, nesse sentido, países de toda a América Latina e Caribe estão enfrentando crises habitacionais. No entanto, cada um enfrenta esses desafios de maneira única. Nas cidades que estão se urbanizando rapidamente, por exemplo, em que os custos de terrenos e da construção são altos, a demanda por moradias acessíveis supera a oferta. Em outros lugares, pode ser difícil ou caro demais para os compradores de imóveis obterem um financiamento habitacional.

Esses desafios relacionados, que se manifestam em contextos distintos, exigem soluções políticas únicas e bem elaboradas. E agora, um novo relatório que “harmoniza” dados habitacionais díspares de uma dúzia de países da América Latina coloca o panorama habitacional da região em uma perspectiva mais clara para os formuladores de políticas.

O 2024 LAC Housing Yearbook, uma colaboração entre o Lincoln Institute of Land Policy e o CAF (Banco de Desenvolvimento da América Latina e do Caribe) catalogou mais de 250 indicadores habitacionais e financeiros em 12 países (Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colômbia, Costa Rica, República Dominicana, Equador, El Salvador, México, Panamá, Peru e Uruguai) para permitir comparações entre os países da região. O relatório já está disponível em espanhol, com traduções para inglês e português em breve.

“Ao coletar e padronizar esse amplo conjunto de informações, o projeto busca preencher lacunas de conhecimento, permitir comparações entre países e apoiar a formulação de políticas eficientes e direcionadas que reduzam os déficits habitacionais, melhorem a acessibilidade e promovam o desenvolvimento sustentável”, afirmou Pablo López, coordenador executivo sênior de habitação no CAF.

“Os dados revelam realidades marcantes”, continuou López, cuja equipe apresentou o relatório inaugural à Assembleia Geral do Fórum de Ministros e Altas Autoridades em Habitação e Desenvolvimento Urbano da América Latina e do Caribe (MINURVI) em dezembro. “Os déficits habitacionais são significativos, a penetração de hipotecas continua baixa e a acessibilidade é constantemente prejudicada pelo aumento dos custos em um ritmo mais acelerado que o dos rendimentos.”

Os tipos de indicadores monitorados nos 12 países incluem taxas de inflação e de hipoteca, taxas de participação no mercado de trabalho formal e informal, custos de construção por metro quadrado, além de medidas quantitativas e qualitativas do déficit habitacional de um país, sendo que as primeiras se referem ao número de casas adicionais necessárias para atender à demanda, e as últimas contabilizam o número de famílias que vivem em moradias precárias. Além de um almanaque de informações estatísticas, o relatório inclui uma visão geral regional e perfis detalhados do mercado habitacional de cada país.

“É um projeto bastante ambicioso devido à ampla variedade de categorias de dados que ele tenta consolidar”, disse Luis Quintanilla, analista sênior de políticas do Lincoln Institute. A esperança é atualizar o anuário anualmente, o que permitirá comparações ano a ano, além de expandir a lista de países ao longo do tempo. “Achamos que é um recurso muito valioso”, acrescentou. ““Esperamos que seja útil para os ministros de habitação e secretários de desenvolvimento urbano, bem como para profissionais, desenvolvedores, instituições bancárias e financeiras e outros pesquisadores.”

Reunir alguns dos dados apresentou um “desafio formidável”, disse López, já que estavam dispersos em várias bases de dados públicas e privadas, exigindo uma meticulosa verificação cruzada, quando estavam disponíveis. Por exemplo, as informações sobre microfinanciamentos (pequenos empréstimos não hipotecários que as famílias podem usar para fazer melhorias graduais em suas casas) eram inconsistentes e fragmentadas. E números confiáveis sobre a produção de habitação informal e o acesso ao crédito para trabalhadores informais eram difíceis ou impossíveis de encontrar.

O processo também revelou algumas lacunas de informações que pesquisadores ou agências públicas poderiam abordar no futuro, bem como algumas ineficiências nos subsídios habitacionais. “Contrariamente à intuição, alguns mecanismos de apoio habitacional de países carecem de foco social, [o que faz com que] beneficiem grupos de maior renda, minando seus objetivos de equidade social”, explicou López.

Os países estudados não estão apenas enfrentando a crise habitacional de maneiras diferentes, mas também estão tomando medidas distintas para enfrentá-la. “Embora os países compartilhem desafios fundamentais relacionados à habitação, suas abordagens variam significativamente”, disse López. “A pesquisa revelou bolsões de inovação e progresso em toda a região—cada nação demonstrou pontos fortes únicos que oferecem insights para possíveis soluções.”

O Chile, por exemplo, desenvolveu um mercado hipotecário sofisticado “complementado por programas inovadores de subsídios para aluguel que abordam a acessibilidade habitacional de múltiplas perspectivas”, afirmou López. O Panamá pode se orgulhar de taxas de hipoteca relativamente baixas e de um mercado de crédito que alcança quase um quarto (23,1%) do PIB, “um feito notável em uma região muitas vezes caracterizada pela inclusão financeira limitada”, acrescentou. “Enquanto isso, o Equador e o Peru estão rompendo barreiras com instrumentos inovadores de financiamento verde, incluindo títulos verdes e hipotecas que demonstram uma abordagem progressista para o desenvolvimento sustentável da habitação.”

Ainda assim, os dados deixam claro que nenhum país solucionou de modo abrangente os desafios habitacionais, disse López. “Em vez disso, a região exibe um mosaico de inovações direcionadas, cada uma abordando dimensões específicas de um panorama habitacional complexo.”
Quintanilla espera que essa nova coleção de dados confiáveis e comparáveis ajude os formuladores de políticas a se conectarem e aprenderem uns com os outros. “Se algum país em particular encontrar um contexto semelhante, mas com resultados diferentes, esperamos que, ao destacar essas discrepâncias, seja possível gerar um intercâmbio de ideias e lições transferíveis”, afirmou.

Jon Gorey é redator da equipe do Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Crédito da imagem principal: CAF – Banco de Desenvolvimento da América Latina e Caribe. 

La falta de acceso a una vivienda digna puede perpetuar la desigualdad que persiste de generación en generación. En ese sentido, países de toda América Latina y el Caribe tienen crisis de vivienda, pero cada uno se enfrenta a desafíos únicos. Por ejemplo, en las ciudades que se urbanizan rápidamente, donde los costos del terreno y la construcción son altos, la demanda de viviendas asequibles supera la oferta. En otros lugares, puede ser difícil o demasiado costoso para los compradores obtener una hipoteca.

Esos desafíos relacionados, que se dan en contextos distintos, exigen soluciones de políticas únicas y sensatas. Ahora, el panorama de la vivienda de la región es más claro para los gestores de políticas gracias a un nuevo informe en el que se “armonizan” datos dispares sobre la vivienda de una decena de países latinoamericanos.

En el Anuario de Vivienda de ALC de 2024, una colaboración entre el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo y CAF (Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina y el Caribe), se catalogan más de 250 indicadores de vivienda y financieros en 12 países (Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, México, Panamá, Perú, República Dominicana y Uruguay) para propiciar comparaciones en toda la región. El informe ya está disponible en español, próximamente con traducciones al inglés y portugués.

“Al recopilar y estandarizar este amplio conjunto de información, el proyecto busca abordar las brechas de conocimiento, permitir hacer comparaciones entre países y apoyar la formulación de políticas eficientes y específicas que reduzcan los déficits de vivienda, mejoren la accesibilidad y promuevan el desarrollo sostenible”, explica Pablo López, coordinador ejecutivo sénior de vivienda de CAF.

“Los datos revelan realidades crudas”, continúa López, cuyo equipo presentó el informe inaugural a la Asamblea General del Foro de Ministros y Autoridades Máximas de la Vivienda y el Urbanismo de América Latina y el Caribe (MINURVI) en diciembre. “Los déficits de vivienda son significativos, la penetración hipotecaria sigue siendo baja y la asequibilidad se ve erosionada continuamente por el aumento de los costos a tasas más altas que los ingresos”.

Los tipos de indicadores analizados en los 12 países incluyen tasas de inflación e hipotecas, tasas de participación en el mercado laboral formal e informal, costos de construcción por metro cuadrado, y medidas cuantitativas y cualitativas del déficit de vivienda de un país (la primera se refiere al número de viviendas adicionales necesarias para satisfacer la demanda, mientras que la segunda indica el número de familias que viven en viviendas en malas condiciones). Además de un almanaque de información estadística, en el informe se incluye información general regional y perfiles detallados del negocio inmobiliario de cada país.

“Es un proyecto bastante ambicioso, debido a la amplia gama de categorías de datos que se intenta consolidar”, expresa Luis Quintanilla, analista sénior de políticas del Instituto Lincoln. La meta es actualizar el anuario cada año, lo que permitirá hacer comparaciones año tras año y ampliar la lista de países a lo largo del tiempo. “Creemos que es un recurso muy valioso”, agrega. “Esperamos que sea útil para los ministros de vivienda y los secretarios de desarrollo urbano, así como para los profesionales, los emprendedores inmobiliarios, las instituciones bancarias y financieras y otros investigadores”.

La recopilación de algunos de los datos presentó un “desafío formidable”, dice López, ya que estaban dispersos en varias bases de datos públicas y privadas y requerían referencias cruzadas verificadas, si es que estaban disponibles. Por ejemplo, la información sobre microfinanciación (pequeños préstamos no hipotecarios que las familias pueden utilizar para realizar mejoras graduales en sus hogares) era inconsistente y estaba fragmentada. Además, fue difícil o imposible encontrar cifras confiables sobre la fabricación de viviendas informales y el acceso al crédito para los trabajadores informales,

El proceso también reveló algunas brechas de información que los investigadores o los organismos públicos podrían abordar en el futuro, así como algunas ineficiencias en los subsidios de vivienda. “Contrario a la lógica, los mecanismos de apoyo a la vivienda de algunos países carecen de consideración social, [por lo que] benefician a los grupos de mayores ingresos y socavan sus objetivos de equidad social”, explica López.

Los países estudiados no solo están experimentando la crisis de la vivienda de diferentes maneras, sino que también están tomando distintas medidas para abordarla. “Si bien los países comparten desafíos fundamentales en materia de vivienda, sus enfoques varían de manera significativa”, dice López. “Según la investigación, existen focos de innovación y progreso en toda la región: cada nación demostró fortalezas únicas que ofrecen información valiosa sobre posibles soluciones”.

Por ejemplo, Chile ha desarrollado un sofisticado mercado hipotecario “complementado por programas innovadores de subsidios de alquiler que abordan la asequibilidad de la vivienda desde varios ángulos”, indica López. Panamá puede presumir tasas hipotecarias relativamente bajas y un mercado crediticio que alcanza casi una cuarta parte (23,1 %) del PIB, “un logro notable en una región que a menudo se caracteriza por una inclusión financiera limitada”, agrega. “Mientras tanto, Ecuador y Perú están ampliando los límites a través de instrumentos pioneros de financiamiento verde, incluidos bonos e hipotecas verdes innovadores que señalan un enfoque con visión de futuro para el desarrollo de viviendas sostenibles”.

Aun así, López explica que los datos dejan en claro que ningún país ha resuelto de manera integral sus desafíos de vivienda. “En cambio, la región demuestra una variedad de innovaciones específicas, cada una de las cuales aborda dimensiones particulares de un panorama de vivienda complejo”.

Quintanilla espera que esta nueva recopilación de datos confiables y comparables ayude a los gestores de políticas de políticas a comunicarse y aprender unos de otros. “Si un país en particular encuentra un contexto similar al suyo, pero resultados diferentes, esperamos que resaltar algunas de esas discrepancias pueda ser la chispa para un intercambio de ideas y lecciones transferibles”, dice.

Jon Gorey es redactor del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Crédito de la imagen principal: Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina y el Caribe (CAF)

As affordable housing markets continue to evolve, the financial landscape is shifting. With an increasing number of mortgages originating from non-federally regulated lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (“the Enterprises,” or GSEs) play a pivotal role in shaping access to affordable housing finance. A scorecard recently released by the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition identifies important areas where the GSEs have made progress in serving low- and moderate-income families—and spotlights opportunities for improvement.

Since 2018, the federal “Duty to Serve” (DTS) regulation has required the GSEs to prioritize serving three historically neglected markets: manufactured housing, affordable housing preservation, and rural housing. The goal of Duty to Serve is to increase the liquidity of mortgage investments and improve the distribution of investment capital available for mortgage financing for very low-, low-, and moderate-income families in those markets. Within their DTS requirements, each Enterprise must plan for outreach, loan product offerings, loan purchases, and investments and update their plans every three years with targeted objectives. The Enterprises’ latest revision, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s Duty to Serve (DTS) Underserved Market Plans for 2025–2027, was released in November 2024. 

The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC)—a coalition of 42 leading US housing organizations convened by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy—has long advocated for more focused action to improve outcomes for underserved markets, including through the Enterprises’ DTS commitments. In response to the updated plan, the coalition published a scorecard identifying the biggest successes and shortcomings of the 2025–2027 market plans and highlighting progress over time in some areas while underscoring shortcomings in others.  

DTS plans are required by federal regulation to prioritize affordable housing finance, and the Scorecard 2025 evaluates the development of efforts around those priorities, such as new loan products, the GSEs’ purchasing efforts in targeted markets, and new partnership opportunities. The recent update incorporates several elements that the UMMC recommended in its DTS Blueprint 2024, as well as several opportunities for further improvement. 

With the release, the coalition noted the positive steps that have occurred but also called on the Enterprises to do more to reach underserved housing markets. 

“The UMMC commends Freddie Mac for including a Consumer Development Financial Institution- (CDFI) preferred product pilot in rural markets, among myriad positive steps toward expanding attainable homeownership,” said Jim Gray, who leads the UMMC in his role as senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute. “This program will also allow CDFIs to effectively collaborate with the GSEs and develop loan products and training designed for hard-to-reach markets—activities for which the coalition has long advocated.” 

CDFIs have a strong track record of serving their communities and helping those they serve achieve sustainable homeownership. With a shared goal of expanding access to homeownership and reaching underserved communities and populations, CDFIs are a natural conduit for helping the GSEs achieve their housing and affordability goals and reduce ethnic and racial wealth gaps. 

The Enterprises’ plans to purchase loans in manufactured housing communities received strong marks. With high site rents making manufactured housing a less affordable option than it traditionally has been, particularly for residents on fixed incomes, this initiative helps bridge an important gap in financing.  

While the UMMC is encouraged by these new initiatives, it also identifies critical gaps in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s plans. The Scorecard highlights that both Enterprises fall short of the UMMC’s recommendations for energy efficiency loan purchases and green product development, which are increasingly essential as energy costs continue to rise and threaten long-term affordability. These programs, the UMMC asserts, are vital for ensuring that housing remains sustainable and accessible in the face of economic pressures. Additionally, the UMMC calls for stronger engagement in Native American markets, urging both Enterprises to set higher loan purchase targets for lending on tribal land, which remains an underfinanced housing market. 

The UMMC strongly urges Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to carefully consider the scorecard when refining their Duty to Serve plans and calls on the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to factor the scorecard into its evaluation of the Enterprises’ performance. 

As the 2025–2027 Duty to Serve plans unfold, the UMMC will continue to monitor their implementation. The coalition intends to release a revised scorecard yearly, assessing how effectively the GSEs have carried out their plans and whether they have met the expectations established by affordable housing advocates. 

Allison Ehrich Bernstein is principal at Allative Communications.

Lead image: Single-family homes in a rural area. Credit: Alex Potemkin via Getty Images.

This article was originally published in Government Finance Review (gfoa.org).

Two Miami townhouses—built the same year, in the same Coconut Grove condo complex, with matching floor plans, identical balconies, and equivalent square footage—bear a striking resemblance to each other. Except for their property tax bills.

The owners of one unit, who purchased their townhome soon after it was built in 2006, will owe $4,092 in property taxes for 2024. Their new neighbors a few doors down, who bought their townhome last year, will pay more than three times as much in property taxes this year: $14,693, or almost $900 more per month.

The discrepancy can be traced to the State of Florida’s “Save Our Homes” amendment, which since 1995 has capped property tax assessment increases on primary (or “homestead”) residences to three percent a year or the rate of inflation, whichever is less, until the property changes hands.

By capping the rate at which a home’s assessed value can increase each year, assessment limits ensure that a property’s tax bill doesn’t skyrocket, even if its market value does. But that can also lead to disparities and distortions in local housing markets, creating winners and losers.

Florida’s assessment limit is similar to one established by the State of California’s Proposition 13, which since the 1970s has capped annual assessment increases at the lesser of two percent or inflation. About a dozen other states and Washington, D.C., also have some kind of assessment limit in place, which can create dramatic tax bill discrepancies between new and longtime homeowners.

In a recent 50-state comparison study of property taxes paid in 2023, researchers from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence found that, among major U.S. cities, the City of Miami has the largest discrepancy in property tax obligations between new homebuyers and existing homeowners. Someone who bought a median-priced Miami home in 2023, for example, would owe $9,205 in annual property taxes—almost three times more than someone who’s owned their nearly identical, comparably priced home for 12 years. New homebuyers in the cities of Tampa, Jacksonville, New York City, Oakland, and Sacramento pay more than twice as much in property taxes as longtime homeowners in similarly valued homes.

The difference in those tax bills often adds hundreds of dollars to a new buyer’s housing payment each month. That’s not just inequitable—it adds yet another cost hurdle for first-time buyers already struggling with higher home prices and mortgage rates.

One More Hurdle to Homeownership

“The tax disparities from assessment limits are increasingly a barrier to homeownership,” said Adam Langley, associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute. “New homeowners, who are already paying so much more in mortgages due to rising home values and interest rates, are also paying significantly higher property tax bills in some places.

Consider the headwinds already facing first-time homebuyers in a city like Miami. The median home price in the Miami metro area has risen by $139,000 since September 2021, according to data from the national brokerage Redfin—a 34 percent increase, from $410,000 to $549,000.

Meanwhile, even though mortgage rates have ticked down from the 20-year highs of 2023, in September 2024 the average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage (6.2 percent) was still nearly four percentage points higher than it was three years before (2.35 percent), according to Freddie Mac. This makes financing a home far more expensive.

What does that add up to in actual housing costs? Someone who purchased a typical $410,000 Miami home in September 2021 with a conventional 30-year mortgage would have needed $82,000 for a standard down payment, and enough income to cover a $1,271 monthly mortgage payment before taxes, insurance, and HOA fees.

Today, buying the same median-priced Miami home would require a six-figure down payment of $109,800, and a monthly mortgage payment of $2,690—more than an additional $1,400 per month, largely due to higher interest rates and home prices (see Exhibit 1). And that’s before the property tax discrepancy that forces new homebuyers to pay hundreds of dollars more per month for the same services.

(*Assumes $50,000 in homestead exemptions and a mill rate of 20.0332.)

“For first-time buyers, this extra cost, on top of already high home prices and rising interest rates, can make the difference between affording a home and being priced out of the market altogether,” said Zev Freidus, president and broker at ZFC Real Estate. “It’s a frustrating dynamic because buyers often feel like they’re penalized for simply entering the market later, and this can lead to them reconsidering certain areas or downgrading their expectations.”

The tax cap is “incredibly popular with current homeowners,” Freidus adds, but it creates real barriers for new buyers and adds another layer of financial stress. “Many buyers don’t anticipate just how much their tax bill will jump until they’ve already made an offer,” he said. “I always emphasize this to first-time buyers, so they can budget accurately—but the difference in property tax payments can still come as a shock.”

Shifting the Burden

Property taxes are the primary source of revenue for many municipalities, funding essential services like police, fire, and schools, and they are generally considered a good tax—relatively transparent, fair, and stable through economic cycles.

By shifting some of the property tax burden according to tenure, however, assessment limits tend to make that fair tax less fair, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “There’s the inherent unfairness that existing homeowners— who already have all this equity in their home, who are already in a good financial position because they don’t have to deal with rising rents—are the ones who, on top of that, get this tax benefit,” she said.

“In practice, in most places, the research shows that assessment limits shift the tax burden away from wealthier neighborhoods toward poorer neighborhoods,” Langley adds.

In California, where Proposition 13 has limited annual assessment increases to the lesser of two percent or inflation since the 1970s, “higher-income Californians own more homes and own homes of higher value and, therefore, receive the majority of the total dollars of tax relief provided to homeowners by Proposition 13,” wrote the authors of a Lincoln Institute report prepared for the 30th anniversary of the famous—and famously controversial—California tax legislation. “Limits on assessed values, while favored by many homeowners, are a deeply flawed means to counter rising property taxes.”

Such assessment limits can also compound previous or entrenched inequities. “When you think about the people who were able to be homeowners when Prop 13 was enacted, they had likely benefited at least somewhat from redlining and the other unfair housing policies that were allowed before the Fair Housing Act,” Fairweather said.

In New York City and Oregon, assessment limits don’t reset when a property is resold. “That helps address some inequities between new and longtime homeowners, but it can create even larger disparities across neighborhoods,” Langley said. “In New York City, it’s basically like your tax is based on a 1981 value. So, you have huge swaths of Manhattan, for example, that are paying very low effective tax rates relative to places in, say, the Bronx, that haven’t appreciated as much over the last four decades.” Assessment limits that don’t reset at sale also discourage new construction, since those homes bear a higher tax burden, and the permanent reduction in the tax base creates even larger tax shifts or revenue losses.

An assessment limit can also be “very distortionary for the housing market,” Fairweather added, because “it tends to encourage people to stay in the same home for longer than they would in the absence of this policy, because you lose the tax benefit when you move.” That can lead to a mismatch of housing preferences and realities: empty nesters staying in four-bedroom houses instead of downsizing, growing families sticking it out in smaller homes despite a need for more space, and young homebuyers stuck on the sidelines waiting for a starter home to free up.

To get around that “lock-in effect,” Florida made its assessment limit portable, allowing existing homeowners to move their tax savings to their next home. California allows some seniors to do the same. “That’s addressing one problem, but creating new problems that are arguably worse,” Langley said. “It’s eliminating the disincentive to move, which is good, but then it’s heightening those tax disparities, because you’re not even getting back to equity when people are selling.”

Better Ways to Quell a Tax Revolt

When property values rise quickly, as they have in the past five years, property tax bills can rise sharply as well, if a community fails to readjust its tax rate.

These “silent” tax hikes can frustrate residents—such property tax increases inspired the tax revolts of the 1970s and ’80s and the passage of Prop 13 in California—and particularly strain seniors or low-income homeowners, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods.

State and local officials looking to rein in property tax growth or offer tax relief to vulnerable residents should consider alternatives to assessment limits, said Langley.

Tax rate adjustments. The simplest way for a community to constrain rampant tax growth is to regularly adjust its property tax rate in response to changes in its property tax base, a process sometimes called mill rate offsetting. (The “mill rate” is the amount of tax levied per $1,000 of assessed value.) “Local governments have the discretion in most states to reduce their tax rates if property values are going up rapidly—and they should be doing that,” Langley said.

“Property tax bills should be determined fundamentally by spending needs, not property values. So, when property values go up a ton, tax rates should, most of the time, go down considerably,” Langley said. Meanwhile, in a situation where home values plummet, such as during the Great Recession, “rates probably need to go up to help stabilize revenues.”

Truth in Taxation. Twenty states have some kind of “Truth in Taxation” or “full disclosure” law in place, according to a new Lincoln Institute working paper. These policies require taxing entities to disclose any proposed increase in property tax revenues—whether due to higher tax rates or property values—and to hold a public hearing on the proposal. Most such states also require the local governing body to vote for any increase in the levy; they can’t simply leave rates unchanged and let taxes increase while “doing nothing.”

Unlike tax or assessment caps, Truth in Taxation measures don’t impose a uniform, binding limit on every community in a state, nor do they prevent a municipality from raising more property tax revenue when needed; the local government just needs to disclose that fact to the public. More often than not, research shows that an increase in transparency and accountability is enough to temper tax growth.

“Truth in Taxation grants local governments the discretion and flexibility to adopt tax revenue increases that align with local needs and preferences,” wrote Yonhui Um, author of the working paper and a senior policy and legal analyst at the Lincoln Institute. “As long as taxpayers are informed of the proposed tax increase and have an opportunity to weigh in on the proposal at a public hearing.”

Circuit breakers. Just as an electrical circuit breaker prevents a temporary overload of electrical current, a property tax circuit breaker targets tax relief to homeowners paying the highest share of their income in property taxes—such as seniors on fixed incomes, low-income homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods, or those facing a sudden job loss or drop in income. A circuit breaker policy can ensure that no homeowner would have to pay more than, say, five percent of their income in property taxes. At that threshold, a household with $20,000 in income and a property tax bill of $2,000 would only have to pay the first $1,000 of their tax bill.

“In our view, the share of income spent on property taxes is the most meaningful measure of who needs relief,” Langley said. Someone who pays a very small portion of their income in property taxes, despite their home increasing in value, probably doesn’t need relief urgently. “Conversely, maybe you lost your job. Even if your property tax bill hasn’t gone up at all, you might end up in tax foreclosure if you don’t receive any tax relief. So, a circuit breaker would make sure those people receive relief.”

Homestead exemptions. A simple and common way municipalities and states offer property tax relief is through a homestead exemption, which provides homeowners with either a partial exemption from the property tax or a partial credit against their tax bill, but only on a primary “homestead” residence. This broad-based policy shifts the tax burden toward businesses, renters, and second-home owners, and can especially benefit low- and middle-income homeowners if applied as a fixed-dollar exemption.

Deferrals. Property tax deferral programs are most often targeted to seniors who are housing-rich but income-poor; imagine a retiree living off Social Security benefits in the home she’s owned for decades, in which time both its value and tax bill have increased sharply. Tax deferrals allow such homeowners to delay the payment of their property taxes until they sell the home—at which point, the full amount of deferred tax becomes due, typically with interest and paid for with the proceeds of the home sale. Unlike other forms of tax relief, deferrals impose no long-term cost on other taxpayers.

Why Tie Your Hands?

Each of these alternatives has its own pros and cons—as described in the Lincoln Institute Policy Focus Report, Property Tax Relief for Homeowners. But they’re all generally easier to tweak or adjust than an assessment limit, Langley said, which can be extremely difficult to reform after it’s enacted into law.

And while an assessment cap is typically a popular idea among existing homeowners, many overestimate its value. “There are a lot of people who perceive themselves as winners from an assessment limit when they’re actually losing out,” Langley said. “There’s research in Cook County, Illinois, and in New York City, for example, that shows a significant majority of homeowners are actually paying more under an assessment limit than they would without it, because the assessment limit requires a higher tax rate.”

Fairweather contended that there’s another way to rein in property taxes— by building more housing. “The reason people revolt against the taxes when property values go up is that they’re not linking it to the root cause, which is that there aren’t enough homes to keep property values in check,” she said. “The way to get property values down is to actually build more. But I think a lot of homeowners want to have their cake and eat it, too, in the sense of wanting more home equity. They like that part of property values going up, but they don’t like the higher taxes. They want the benefit, but they don’t want any of the cost.”

She notes that placing hard-and-fast restrictions on property taxes and assessments doesn’t just create inequitable situations for homeowners paying different tax bills on identical properties. It can hamstring a community and set the stage for long-term challenges— especially when the policy discourages first-time homebuyers.

States that cap property taxes leave local governments with “one arm tied behind their backs when it comes to raising revenue to support things like schools and local services,” she said. “And anything that reduces housing affordability for first-time homebuyers is going to make it harder for a city to attract workers—it’ll be harder to attract teachers, police officers, anybody who works to keep the city running in that middle-income band.”

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

Lead image: Since 1995, the state of Florida has capped property tax assessment increases on primary residences to three percent a year or the rate of inflation, whichever is less, until the property changes hands. Such caps can protect homeowners against skyrocketing tax bills, but lead to disparities in the taxes new and longtime homeowners pay. Credit: ntzolov via E+/Getty Images.

This article is reprinted with permission from Bloomberg CityLab, where it originally appeared.

Not far from the pyramids of Giza, symbols of the endurance of civilization, a global group of urban planners and scholars recently gathered to confront the myriad threats afflicting the physical city.

Calamity associated with climate change continued to be top of mind at UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum 12, a summit to promote equitable and sustainable global cities held in Cairo in November. But another driver of urban devastation loomed especially large: intensifying military conflict.

In Gaza and Ukraine, entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, following on the vast destruction seen in Syria, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia in the last nearly half-century. While attacking human settlement is hardly new—from the sacking of Rome to the London blitz to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the razing of cities has grown in intensity and scope, researchers say, thanks to shifts in military strategy and advances in missile, bomb, and drone technology.

Accordingly, conflict-driven destruction—and the vastly complicated associated questions of humanitarian triage, refugees, and ultimately, rebuilding—played a prominent role in policy discussions at WUF12. With urban ruination occurring in real time not far away, one of the forum’s six major “dialogues” confronted the issue directly: In a session called “The Loss of Home,” delegates addressed “displacement caused by global crises, with a focus on rebuilding resilient communities and strengthening urban responses to protect the idea of home.”

The forum’s concluding resolution acknowledged the toll, citing “the need for resilient urban systems that can adapt and respond to the needs of all residents, fostering social cohesion and the reconstruction of homes” and noting that “local governments play a key role in driving solutions and integrating the forcibly displaced into urban development strategies.”

“Those of us brought up as architects or urban planners, we know that the home is not just about the provision of shelter,” but is inextricably bound up with family, community, culture and identity, said Sultan Barakat, professor of public policy at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and one of the speakers at the dialogue.

Any plans for accommodating displaced peoples, or in the longer term, reconstruction—a politically fraught exercise that will depend on who is doing the rebuilding, and paying for it—must acknowledge these powerful associations, Barakat said.

While there is no single metric, researchers and international aid organizations agree that urban destruction driven by conflict has intensified in the first quarter of the 21st century. Since 2002, approximately 432,000 civilians have been killed, and 38 million forcibly displaced, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Most were city dwellers, partly a reflection of continuing global rural-to-urban migration.

Over the last several decades, the battlefield has shifted to dense urban areas, military scholars say, often because insurgent or paramilitary forces have embedded themselves into the civilian population. In other cases, armies are simply seeking to make territorial gains city by city—an established military tactic that is today playing out in an excruciatingly drawn-out process.

“Evacuation and exile appear to be the main objective: depopulation lowers the human capital of countries and depresses their economies,” writes University of Glasgow professor Josef Konvitz in his 2023 article “People Are the Target: Urban Destruction in the 21st Century.” “Moreover, the increased number of refugees can be turned into an instrument to exert leverage on other countries, destabilizing regions far removed from the war zone.”

Advances in weaponry also play a role. While modern weapons systems can hit with great accuracy—and in some cases civilians are forewarned of an attack—the sheer volume and intensity of today’s urban bombardments has brought shocking devastation. By some measures, the campaign on Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. Human rights groups have decried the use of weapons like ground-penetrating bunker buster ordnance, air-launched glide bombs and “barrel bombs”—oil barrels filled with explosives—on the populations of cities like Kharkiv in Ukraine and Aleppo in Syria. This carnage has brought into the discourse the concept of urbicide, referring to the deliberate destruction of cities, their iconic architecture, and their identity.

The end result, as listed by United Nations Under-Secretary Anacláudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, which organizes the World Urban Forum: 1.4 million homes damaged or destroyed and 3.7 million people displaced in Ukraine; 227,000 homes destroyed and 2 million forced to flee in Gaza; and 6,700 residential buildings destroyed and 1.2 million people displaced in Lebanon.

“The situation is huge and urgent. The sense of emergency—we need to bring that to the table,” she said before a hushed audience at the event, offering to work with other parts of the UN, especially with regard to building safe housing. “My view on that is that we can support in looking at the long term. While all the agencies are very well equipped to provide immediate humanitarian support, we can help look beyond the humanitarian crisis. We can work with communities, with local governments, with local stakeholders, with the civil society, because we do have these entry points naturally throughout our work.”

Beyond near-term measures geared toward humanitarian relief and accepting refugees—an estimated 9 million are expected in Egypt alone—the broader discussion of reconstruction from these current conflicts is so politically fraught that it’s hard to envision a way back from all the destruction. The rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan appears straightforward by comparison. As the journal article author Konvitz wrote: “Cities destroyed in world wars were rebuilt; cities destroyed in today’s urban battles, often in fragile, unstable states, may be left in ruins for years.”

Nevertheless, there are tools and methodologies available to facilitate rebuilding, these experts said in Cairo, from post-disaster land readjustment strategies to geospatial mapping, which can instantly assess the damage and define the land use parameters of reconstruction.

At WUF12, those with experience with the devastation of warfare on cities talked about the importance of neighborhood-scale planning. Mona Fawaz, professor in urban studies and planning at the American University of Beirut, warned against a focus on rebuilding individual buildings, which can engender competition. Instead, she envisioned building a “collective” that would have “custody over the neighborhood and the space of negotiation with public authorities. Once we don’t focus on the collective and we don’t put the public at the center of our attention, what happens is that people don’t come back.”

Another challenge, she said, is the regulatory framework. Consider that cities and villages in southern Lebanon, for example, were built before modern building codes: “So the framework allows only for reconstruction not as it used to be before, which destroys heritage and the sense of identity in these collectives, or then to build illegally.”

Ammar Azzouz, a research fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, agreed that if cities can ever recover from the horrors of conflict over recent years, rebuilding will need to be informed by more basic elements of urbanism. There is too much emphasis on the destruction of “cultural heritage and monuments and the ancient and the classical antiquity sites, but less often there is a focus on the everyday, on the mundane, on the bakery shops on the streets, the neighborhood, the schools,” he said.

Azzouz, the author of Domicide: Architecture, War, and the Destruction of Home in Syria, left his hometown of Homs, Syria, in 2011, and has not been able to return.

“These power dynamics are so important, and I feel like we have to to move from our obsession in academia and journalism and international organizations of focusing on one mosque or one church or a bridge, to celebrate the success of reconstruction,” Azzouz said, asserting that master plans formulated by aggressors do not constitute genuine rebuilding at all. “We need to think about the wider question of what reconstruction means for the local people, and how can we listen to their voices.”

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

Lead image: A residential building in Odesa, Ukraine, damaged by a Russian drone strike in 2024. Credit: Office of the President of Ukraine via Flickr/CC0 1.0 Universal.