Writing during the last Gilded Age, Henry George warned of the social and economic perils of giving away land value increases to landowners who had done nothing to earn them. In this new Gilded Age, wealth inequality coupled with persistently low interest rates is leading to a worsening redistribution of wealth, with a growing share flowing to the asset-rich while a growing share of families is priced out of decent housing. One positive outgrowth of the pandemic is the political will we’ve summoned to deal with two related challenges that have their roots in land policy: the housing affordability crisis and the wealth gaps created by structural racism. 

A consensus is emerging among policy analysts and policy makers that both challenges are the result of exclusionary land policies. While exclusion is the principal driver, it is not the only one. More important, no single remedy will magically call forth more affordable housing and simultaneously close wealth gaps. Dozens of local, state, and national governments—including that of Pasco, Washington, which we recently profiled—are reforming residential zoning that previously permitted only detached single-family dwellings. The logic of this intervention is sound. Single-family zoning constrains development with restrictions like minimum lot sizes. This drives up housing costs and excludes lower-income families from buying or renting in desirable neighborhoods. By relaxing these policies, it will be possible to produce more housing at lower prices. At least in theory. 

Market fundamentalists argue that the financial incentives are so powerful that if we make it possible to build two, four, or even twelve units on a parcel that formerly permitted one, we cannot help but solve the housing affordability crisis through increased production. But there is a big difference between permitting the development of multiple units and multiple units being developed. And there is no guarantee that these units will be affordable. Many unaffordable condos and apartments have been built in high-density locales like New York City, where affordable housing is in critically short supply. A lot of them are vacant. How can places like Pasco keep the same thing from happening? 

Part of the answer has to do with the housing market. As I’ve noted before, housing represents two very different commodities traded in the same market. Each unit can satisfy the demand for shelter for a family or the demand for yield from hungry investors. Often, but not always, a housing unit can satisfy both—when the owner occupies the unit. But more and more frequently, households find themselves competing for available shelter against investors drowning in liquidity. With the exception of a pathbreaking intervention by the Port of Cincinnati that I will discuss another time, the investors usually win.  

As global wealth inequality worsens, the wedge between shelter provision and investment opportunity is precipitating unassailable affordable housing shortages. But not housing shortages. We have some 20 million more units of housing in the United States than we have households, and there are more houses than households in every housing market in the country. Even in a tight market like Pasco, the U.S. Census reports that there are 23,126 housing units but only 22,174 households. The metro market that includes Pasco contains 106,104 housing units and 100,336 households. This oversupply is not vast, but it offers a good illustration: our problem is not supply, but the kind of housing we supply (or allow to be supplied). 

Land, too, is a commodity traded in multiple markets—as an investment good and a good with multiple uses: residential, industrial, commercial, and agricultural. The price of land derives from a complex mix of social, statutory, and economic factors that are almost completely outside the aegis of the landowner. If more people migrate to a city or neighborhood, the land value goes up. If infrastructure improvements are made, like wastewater treatment or accessible transportation, the value of the land goes up. If local policies allow for more intensive development on a parcel, its value will go up. 

Who wins when we allow multifamily construction on formerly single-family lots? Landowners who receive windfall increases in land values are among the big winners. This increase in property values puts nearby homeowners at risk, if it raises their tax bills. If zoning changes aren’t designed to be part of a broader strategy to tackle affordability, they could inadvertently usher in displacement. Planners in Pasco know this and are working on a suite of balanced and comprehensive tactics to keep their community affordable. 

This country’s legacy of racial exclusion further complicates land and housing markets, while eluding all efforts to address it. Historically, deed restrictions, legal covenants, and other overt, but now illegal, practices ensured that people were kept out of neighborhoods based on skin color, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. These were supplemented with blatantly racist finance practices established at the birth of the modern housing finance system. For six decades, we have attempted to confront these forms of structural racism using public policy, with very limited success. It is an important cautionary tale.  

Starting with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, the nation nominally prohibited discrimination in housing and lending. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 imposed further affirmative obligations on regulated lenders to meet the credit needs of their communities. And yet, in 2018 the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed 31 million mortgages and found that people of color were denied conventional mortgages by regulated lenders at significantly higher rates than whites in 61 metropolitan areas, even after controlling for income and other socioeconomic factors. The national racial gap in homeownership rates is worse today than it was in 1960, when efforts to address housing discrimination began. 

Closing the racial wealth gap will require much more than leveling the financial playing field and producing more housing units. Stable, affordable housing in high-opportunity areas is foundational to the long-term economic success of families. But increasing the housing stock does not necessarily increase affordable housing for lower-income households, nor does it ensure that historically excluded populations will have access to wealth-building homeownership opportunities in thriving neighborhoods.  

In almost every housing market in the United States, we’re producing too much of the wrong kind of housing and letting the existing housing stock slip out of local control. Escalating rents are inspiring conversions of single-family homes to rental units at unprecedented rates. Single-family rental real estate investment trusts (SFR REITs) have become a hot investment. According to CoreLogic, investors acquired more than 25 percent of all the single-family homes purchased in the United States in the last two quarters of 2021.  

A single zoning reform will not change the way the market works, and nothing will stop global capital from bidding housing in desirable neighborhoods away from families that need shelter unless other actions are taken. We need aggressive inclusionary housing requirements that obligate landowners to build affordable housing when redeveloping former single-family sites. We also need to provide and protect opportunities for historically excluded families to purchase affordable homes and build wealth. Rather than giving away additional development rights to landowners, development rights should be sold. Development rights are traded actively in many private and some public markets in the United States. Municipalities could raise billions of dollars by selling development rights, and the proceeds could be used for affirmative efforts to address the racial wealth gap by, for example, providing generous down payment assistance or property tax relief. 

Once we have established a reasonable supply of affordable housing, we need to preserve it. This will require shielding affordable housing stocks from global capital markets. This can be done easily with steeper capital gains taxes imposed on speculative property transactions. In Taiwan, land value increment taxes had a chilling effect on property speculation. 

In addition, deed restrictions can limit future sales prices. Alternative ownership arrangements like limited equity cooperatives or community land trusts can ensure permanent affordability. If we don’t act now, we’ll face continual affordable housing crises in the coming decades. But there is an important caveat: preserving affordable housing by limiting the financial upside will impede our efforts to close racial wealth gaps through homeownership. This illustrates the challenges of intervening in complex systems. Once we recognize the complexity, we can consider tradeoffs to find a practical and acceptable compromise.  

At the Lincoln Institute, we applaud the recognition that land policy sits at the roots of major social and economic challenges. But simplistic interventions in complex land and housing systems will not address these staggeringly complex challenges. We cannot rely on increasing the supply of housing as a silver-bullet solution. We must layer zoning reform with other policies, trying different combinations in an iterative process. As we proceed, we should be mindful of the words of H.L. Mencken: “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” 

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: “Missing middle” housing such as this duplex in Portland, Oregon, can provide more affordable options in formerly single-family neighborhoods, but the zoning changes that allow such housing must also mandate affordability and must be part of a broader housing strategy. Credit: Sightline Institute Middle Homes Photo Library via flickr CC BY 2.0.

Reforming Detroit’s property tax system by taxing land at a higher rate than buildings would help to revive the local economy and reduce tax bills for nearly every homeowner, according to a new study from the nonprofit Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
 
With the lowest property values of any large U.S. city and some of the highest property tax rates, Detroit is caught in a decades-long cycle of rising tax rates that still fail to generate enough revenue. In the absence of strong public services, high property taxes increase owner costs, reduce property values, and increase the costs of repair and redevelopment, creating a drag on economic recovery. 

Like many economically distressed cities, Detroit copes with this challenge by offering generous tax abatements for new development and for some homeowners. Abatements relieve excess costs and temporarily raise property values, but only a small set of residents and new businesses qualify. This leaves high—sometimes destabilizing—tax bills in place for long-term owners. While high taxes remain on most homes and businesses, inclusive and lasting incentives for reinvestment are absent. 

A higher tax rate for land than for structures—known as “split-rate” because there are two different tax rates—would address the problem more effectively and distribute the benefits more equitably.  

The new study, Split-Rate Property Taxation in Detroit: Findings and Recommendations, finds that taxing land at five times the rate for buildings would result in lower tax bills for 96 percent of homeowners, with an average savings of about 18 percent. Under a revenue-neutral reform, tax savings would be fully offset by tax increases on vacant and underutilized property. 

“By adopting a split-rate property tax, Detroit can make its tax system both more efficient and more equitable,” said John Anderson, an economist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and lead author of the study. “Efficiency is enhanced by removing the tax-related barriers to capital improvements and development. Equity is enhanced by a reduction in taxes for the vast majority of residential homeowners.” 
 
“Splitting the property tax provides long-time Detroiters with the tax relief that new businesses and residents already receive,” said co-author Nick Allen, former manager of strategy and policy for the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation and now a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Our study shows that it is an effective, immediate way to permanently reduce burdens on overtaxed households and restore property wealth. It’s not enough, but it is a required step towards racially equitable recovery.” 

In addition, a split-rate tax increases the cost of holding vacant land and reduces the cost of developing it, or of renovating deteriorated buildings. Reduced tax burdens and accelerated investment lead to an average 12 percent increase in residential property value and a 20 percent increase for commercial property. In a supporting technical paper, the project team also found that the proposed 18 percent reduction in residential taxes would reduce residential tax foreclosures by at least 9 percent. 

“Implementation of a split-rate tax in Detroit offers an opportunity to strengthen the property tax system by increasing efficiency, and reducing property tax inequities and tax foreclosure,” said Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore, a co-author of the study. 

Commissioned by Invest Detroit with support from The Kresge Foundation, the study analyzes data from municipalities in Pennsylvania that have implemented split-rate taxes, as well as real estate and property tax data from Detroit. In addition to Anderson, Allen, and Skidmore, the study’s co-authors include Fernanda Alfaro of Michigan State University, Andrew Hanson of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Zackary Hawley of Texas Christian University, Dusan Paredes of Northern Catholic University in Chile, and Zhou Yang of Robert Morris University. 

“If we are to continue the momentum of Detroit’s positive, equitable growth, we must transform our property tax structure to alleviate the burden on majority Black homeowners and local developers,” said Dave Blaszkiewicz, president and CEO of Invest Detroit. “This report provides a solution that accomplishes that while also disincentivizing blighted and underutilized properties that hinder Detroit’s growth.” 

“With this analysis, Invest Detroit has elevated an equitable approach to taxation that can bring much-needed relief to tax-burdened Detroiters while encouraging investment and growth. This is a timely idea that addresses an urgent concern, and the highly regarded Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has now provided a solid framework for community discussions,” said Wendy Lewis Jackson, managing director of Kresge’s Detroit Program. 

The team also produced three technical papers to support the study: “Assessment of Property Tax Reductions on Tax Delinquency, Tax Foreclosure, and Home Ownership”; “Split-Rate Taxation and Business Establishment Location Evidence from the Pennsylvania Experience”; and “Split-Rate Taxation: Impacts on Tax Base,” all published by the Lincoln Institute. 

The study is available for download on the Lincoln Institute’s website: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/split-rate-property-taxation-in-detroit 

Will Jason is the director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: Aerial view of Residential district in Detroit Michigan. Credit: pawel.gaul via Getty Images.

As part of a multipronged effort to address the housing affordability crisis, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is overseeing an initiative to promote manufactured housing as a source of wealth-building home ownership and stable rental housing. The Lincoln Institute is the new convenor of the Innovations in Manufactured Homes (I’m HOME) Network, which was founded in 2005 by Prosperity Now (formerly the Corporation for Enterprise Development) to counteract stigma associated with manufactured housing, change public policy, and improve industry practices.

“We need to protect the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States. Manufactured homes are an underappreciated solution to the housing affordability crisis,” said Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. McCarthy. “The Lincoln Institute is grateful to Prosperity Now for its longstanding leadership, and we are committed to continuing their work to make manufactured homes a secure and accessible onramp to homeownership for millions of American families.”

“Prosperity Now is extremely proud of the success of I’m HOME over the years,” said Doug Ryan, vice president for policy and applied research for Prosperity Now. “As a network, we advanced policies, scaled programs, and helped reduce the stigma attached to manufactured and mobile homes and their owners. We are thrilled that the work will continue and grow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and look forward to many years of partnership in the field.” 

Modern manufactured homes are often indistinguishable from traditional houses, but they cost less to build thanks to an efficient construction process. However, several barriers prevent manufactured homes from reaching their potential.  

First, manufactured homes have a reputation for poor quality that dates to early mobile homes, even though models built after 1976 adhere to rigorous national standards. Second, a lack of good financing options means that loans on manufactured homes are often more expensive and less secure than traditional mortgages. Finally, many states fail to create legal pathways for residents to easily purchase the land on which their homes sit, leaving residents vulnerable to predatory landlords. 

The I’m HOME Network will work to remove all these barriers through research, analysis, technical assistance, and engagement with policy makers. The network includes homeowners, advocates, academics, policy makers, lenders, manufacturers, developers, and others who, together, can effect change in the private sector and at all levels of government. 

“The first step in reenergizing I’m HOME will be to listen to the many manufactured-unit owners and other members of this network to ensure that we are taking it in the direction they wish to go,” said Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow Jim Gray, who will oversee the network. 

Convening the I’m HOME Network is part of the Lincoln Institute’s larger effort to address the housing affordability crisis as part of its goal to reduce poverty and spatial inequality. The institute recently published a report outlining comprehensive and balanced housing strategies, it is conducting research, and it is collaborating with the Housing Solutions Lab at the NYU Furman Center to help local governments develop such strategies. The Lincoln Institute is also working with the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition to create a bigger role for government-sponsored housing enterprises in securing housing finance opportunities for families not traditionally served by the private market. 

Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: Mobile homes in Montauk, New York. Credit: rjlerich via Getty Images. 

Two weeks after a U.S federal agency rejected affordable housing plans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a coalition of housing organizations has released a blueprint showing how the two government-sponsored enterprises can better reach underserved mortgage markets.

On January 5, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) rejected three-year plans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to comply with Duty to Serve, a federal regulation that requires the enterprises to prioritize and improve affordable housing finance opportunities in three historically neglected markets: manufactured housing, affordable housing preservation, and rural housing. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must substantially improve their plans in all three areas, and a new blueprint from the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition provides a path that would likely lead to approval.

The coalition consists of 20 leading U.S. affordable housing organizations seeking to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable to their founding purpose: to bring housing finance opportunities to American families not traditionally served by the private market.

“I applaud FHFA for rejecting the proposed Duty to Serve plans,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, one of the convenors of the coalition. “If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac adopt the modest consensus recommendations of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, that would be a win for the enterprises, FHFA, and affordable housing in the United States.”

The coalition’s blueprint outlines key recommendations for the enterprises’ Duty to Serve plans for 2022–24. By recommending specific, prioritized action steps, the coalition hopes to expand and enhance the enterprises’ performance in underserved markets. The blueprint urges the enterprises to increase certain loan purchases in all three markets, improve loan products for rural low- and moderate-income borrowers, and allow for Low Income Housing Tax Credit-equity investment in non-rural markets.

The members of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition include:

• Center for Community Progress
• cdcb
• Enterprise Community Partners
• Fahe
• Grounded Solutions Network
• Housing Assistance Council
• Housing Partnership Network
• Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation
• National Council of State Housing Agencies
• National Community Stabilization Trust
• National Housing Trust
• NeighborWorks America
• Next Step
• Novogradac
• Opportunity Finance Network
• Prosperity Now
• RMI
• ROC USA
• Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future

Photograph: vkyryl via iStock / Getty Images Plus.

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 in APA’s Planning magazine.  

COVID-19 has turned the world upside down. When the American Planning Association’s Foresight team entered the second year of our partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the symptoms and side effects of the pandemic were reflected in nearly every trend, changing the way we live, work, and play. And while the world is still trying to flatten the COVID curve, we need to flatten others—social inequalities, the climate emergency, and the speed of technological innovation that makes it difficult to keep up. 

This year, we’re publishing the 2022 Trend Report for Planners, your foresight-driven road map for the new year and beyond. With guidance from our Trend Scouting Foresight Community, a diverse group of 31 forward-thinking thought leaders, we’ve identified what planners need to act on today, what we need to start preparing for, and what we need to better understand and continue watching throughout the year. The report also takes a look at some big-picture developments and trend patterns and what they mean for the future of planning. 

Here, take a sneak peek (in no particular order) at seven of the nearly 100 trends and signals from the report. Additional topics range from innovative ways to encourage equitable community investment to the future of data collection and analytics, the climate emergency, and political polarization. We’re also working on finding answers to some of our most pressing questions: What’s the future of transportation? How can 3D printing be a part of the solution to the housing crisis? And why should it matter to planners when Jeff Bezos starts sending tourists into space? 

Read on for some of the answers and more. 

1. CTRL + P HOUSING 

We’ve long been tracking the potential impacts of 3D printing on planning, but in the past year, the trend has moved up from our watchlist to our high-priority trend list as housing and infrastructure projects get underway. 

Specifically, we’re closely observing a development near Austin, Texas. The 3D printing company ICON has joined forces with real estate developer Lennar and architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group to build the largest community of 3D-printed homes to date. The project will print 100 energy-efficient houses that claim to be built faster, with less waste, and to last longer than conventional construction. 

The tech could prove to be an attractive solution to many issues, from the housing crisis to supply chain challenges. Some companies are even exploring 3D-printed food. While the broader impact of Austin’s 3D-printed neighborhood is yet to be seen, this is certainly a trend planners should keep a close eye on. 

2. The Great Resignation 

The term was coined by Anthony Klotz, a psychologist and professor at Texas A&M, to describe the record-high wave of people quitting their jobs in 2021. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, four million people resigned in April 2021, and by July, the Bureau had registered almost 11 million open jobs. 

The most impacted sectors are food and hospitality, comprising 6.8 percent of U.S. resignations in August 2021 alone. Outside the leisure sector, retail has been hit the hardest, with 4.7 percent in the same month. Health care, IT, construction, and transportation also have been affected. 

Looking at these numbers, the COVID-19 connection becomes very clear. Many of those who resigned were low-wage workers in frontline positions during the darkest months of the pandemic, or those who worked in industries that experienced extreme growth in the past few years. But the pandemic isn’t the only reason for this development. 

The trend of low-wage workers resigning was already building in 2019. Though it paused during the worst of the pandemic, it picked back up more intensely in 2021. That’s because the root causes—lack of benefits, minimum wage levels, and generally poor working conditions—existed well before COVID. The pandemic only added to these factors, increasing demand and burnout while introducing more safety and health concerns. 

For people who shifted to working from home (or working from anywhere—yes, that’s also in our report), the motivation to change jobs is different. Working from home means more flexibility, eliminated commutes, increased time with family and friends, and, for many, the opportunity to reconsider the so-called work-life balance. 

According to psychologist Klotz, who we are as employees has long been key to American identity. But working from home has driven people to shift their priorities and focus on life outside of work. Klotz argues that near-death situations or life-threatening illnesses usually inspire people “to take a step back and ask existential questions,” he told Business Insider. “Like, what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I’m spending my time right now?” 

Employers will need to keep this in mind when hiring new staff. Companies that don’t offer certain perks in a post-COVID world will have a hard time finding competitive employees. The Great Resignation is currently spurring an increase in wages for low-income workers at a rate not seen since the Great Recession. 

These workforce trends will likely be impacted by another in the report: the development and deployment of robots has been accelerated during COVID as well. The industry sectors that are currently hit the hardest by the Great Resignation are also the ones that have been experimenting with robots. AI-powered robots are now being used in recycling facilities, for food deliveries, and in many other service industries. KFC opened its first contactless, robo-based restaurant in Moscow last year, while multiple cities in the U.S. and across the globe are now allowing for automated delivery services. 

While the connection between urban planning and automated delivery services might be obvious, it’s not clear today how the Great Resignation and tech innovations in the service industries will further affect how we plan for our communities and the people who live in them. We can already see, though, that it’s impacting how people live, work, play, and move around, which means it must factor into how we think about future economic development, land use, and transportation planning. 

3. Space Oddity 

A new space race is underway, this time among private corporations like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and the United Launch Alliance. 

This competition is fueling a revolution in launch capabilities in the U.S. and abroad that is leading to major cost reductions and sustained interest in the commodification of space. This commercialization and privatization can generally be explored in the context of three emerging trends: growing competition for commercial satellite launches, space tourism, and the long-term colonization of space. 

Right now, it’s unclear how planners will be involved in space colonization, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on. Currently, space travel mainly disrupts communities with launch sites, like Boca Chica, Texas, where test launches and failures occur. 

4. Departure from the Cave 

If your employer asks you to come back to the office a few days a week but you’re still wary about sharing a space with multiple people; if you recently went to a restaurant and couldn’t wait to get back home; or if you went to the movie theater only to change your mind at the box office, even while vaccinated, you are not alone. 

Researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, have been exploring a phenomenon called “cave syndrome.” For many, staying at home and away from people for almost two years has made it difficult to readjust to the social, public lives we once led. In general, the pandemic has caused an increase in mental health issues, including anxiety and depression. 

While many people might be comfortable with their current work-from-home situation, UC Berkeley professor Robert W. Levenson says that, especially for young people, it is critical to leave the pandemic cave, reconnect with the outside world, and (re)establish a social life and career outside the home. 

“Young people need to be in environments where unexpected things happen and where they are challenged and inspired,” he told Berkeley News. “They need to flex their emotional and perceptual muscles.” 

Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, believes reestablishing these connections will be crucial for all of us to create a “sense of common humanity and collective interests.” Emerging from our pandemic caves might take a while, but “being physically near each other and not experiencing harmful or threatening consequences is the way that our nervous systems need to relearn the foundational trust and the affiliative and cooperative potential that is so fundamental to human ultra-sociality.” 

Planners can play an essential role in addressing mental health issues like pandemic cave syndrome. Location, equitable design, and accessibility of public and green places determine how we feel and experience space, and they can be important factors in our decision to leave the house in the first place. Planning can create spaces where unexpected things happen, where we are challenged in a good way, where we are inspired. And if done right—with intentional consideration for equity, diversity, and inclusion—planning can get us out of our caves and back in public spaces. 

5. Green Signals from Across the Pond 

The report takes a deep dive into environmental concerns, like the fact that we are running out of time when it comes to the climate emergency. But we’re also observing some green signals on the horizon. 

As some European countries ban short-distance flights, cities are transitioning to a car-free era. Oslo, Norway, and Ljubljana, Slovenia, have already converted their entire downtown areas into car-free zones, while Paris and many others have implemented or are planning extensive car-free areas throughout cities. 

It’s not an entirely foreign concept in the U.S. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many American cities converted streets into shared or pedestrian zones, some permanently. Making streets a place where people can safely spend their leisure time has become a widely embraced trend and should continue to be considered by planners when imagining healthy, environmentally responsible communities. 

Another green signal from abroad is the uptick in the circular economy, an approach to sustainable production and consumption that prioritizes sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling products and materials. In 2018, China stopped taking plastics from many countries, including the U.S. As a result, these countries had to get creative about what to do with their waste. The EU adopted the Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) in 2020, a mix of legislative and non-legislative measures. The circular economy is starting to grow in the U.S., with more retailers exploring buyback and recycling programs. And as supply chain backups continue, we could see this trend further accelerate. 

6. Zoning Reform Goes Mainstream 

Single-family housing is the dominant residential land use in the U.S., largely due to local zoning codes and maps that have remained unchanged for decades—but not for much longer. 

Many local governments are looking into zoning reform as a means of increasing housing choice and affordability and reducing racial and economic segregation. With cities like Minneapolis revising their codes to permit “missing middle” housing types in formerly restrictive districts and California and Oregon instituting statewide bans on single-family-only zoning, a movement is building, and quickly. Even at the federal level, legislators are working to tie local funding to the revision of exclusionary zoning regulations. 

Expect these measures to gain further momentum in cities and states of all sizes as housing costs, displacement, and homelessness continue to rise. 

7. Welcome to the Metaverse 

The digitalization of life continues to accelerate. The term “metaverse,” which was coined in the 1990s, has gained more attention since Facebook changed its name to Meta in October 2021. And while it doesn’t exist just yet, it might be the next step in the evolution of the internet. 

The metaverse is a computer-generated universe or “extended reality” that combines augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. According to proponents, it will be the new platform we use to socialize, conduct business, and do anything else that can be done in a virtual, 3D space. It’s expected to be as transformative to the ways we live, work, and play as the cell phone. And those of us growing tired of being on video all day can create cartoon avatars who mimic our facial expressions, wear digital outfits we buy, and take on alternate personalities. 

In his announcement about Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg said he envisions the metaverse as “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or web page, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness.” 

As the company’s new name reveals, Meta plans to be a big player in this space. So do others in the big tech sector, ranging from Microsoft to Epic Games. Tech giants have often been accused of prioritizing profit over the common good, or as Jessa Crispin, columnist at the Guardian, put it around the time former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos briefly traveled to space, “tech billionaires [are] trying to leave the world to evade responsibility for their malevolent influence on it.” Many believe that allowing these companies control over the metaverse could be a dystopian nightmare. 

So far, it’s not clear what the metaverse will mean for privacy, how inclusive the experience will be, or how harmful content will be mitigated or avoided. There’s obviously a lot to unpack here, but it could have enormous impacts on the trajectory of our future. We face great risks repeating past mistakes from the analog world in a digital society. Ultimately, we need to think carefully and critically about how people will engage with this platform and how that will change lifestyles, behaviors, and the work of planners. 

Petra Hurtado, Ph.D., is the research director of APA. Learn more about APA’s applied research program.  

Image: Conceptual rendering of a 3D-printed community planned in Austin, Texas. Credit: ICON.