Esta entrevista, que se ha editado por motivos de espacio, también está disponible como pódcast de Land Matters.

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riginario de Vermont y elegido por primera vez en 2012, Miro Weinberger ejerce su cuarto período como alcalde de Burlington, Vermont. Asistió a Yale y a la Escuela de Gobierno Kennedy de Harvard, y trabajó en Habitat for Humanity antes de fundar su propia empresa de desarrollo de viviendas asequibles. También es atleta a medio tiempo; juega como receptor en una liga amateur de béisbol para mayores de 35 años.

Hace tiempo que Vermont es un sitio progresista con una población dedicada a las medidas medioambientales, ya sea energía solar o eólica, vehículos eléctricos o prácticas agrícolas sostenibles. En 2014, Burlington, la capital y agente del cambio, en donde surgió Bernie Sanders (que fue alcalde entre 1981 y 1989), se convirtió en la primera ciudad en obtener el 100 por ciento de su energía a partir de fuentes renovables, un objetivo que se había planteado en 2004. Ahora, Weinberger y otros dirigentes siguen trabajando sobre esas bases y se comprometen a hacer que la energía, el transporte y el sector constructor dejen de usar combustible fósil.

ANTHONY FLINT: Cuéntenos sobre este objetivo ambicioso de ser una ciudad con energía de cero emisiones netas para 2030. ¿Cómo será y cuáles son los pasos para cumplir la meta? 

MIRO WEINBERGER: Como resultado de décadas de compromiso con la creación de construcciones eficientes y la climatización, Burlington, como comunidad, usa menos electricidad en 2022 que la que consumía en 1989, a pesar de la proliferación de dispositivos electrónicos nuevos y demás. . . suena excepcional y lo es. Si le resto del país hubiese seguido nuestros pasos, hoy en día tendríamos alrededor de 200 plantas energéticas a base de carbón menos. 

Cuando nos convertimos en una ciudad con electricidad 100 por ciento renovable en 2014, había mucho interés en cómo Burlington lo había logrado. Después de hablar con equipos de filmación de Corea del Sur y Francia, y de responder muchísimas preguntas sobre cómo lo habíamos logrado, llegué a la conclusión de que fue por dos grandes motivos. En primer lugar, la voluntad política. En segundo lugar, teníamos un departamento de electricidad municipal que tenía mucha experiencia técnica y que podía hacer que la transformación a fuentes renovables fuese asequible. 

En pocas palabras, definimos las cero emisiones netas como el no uso de combustibles fósiles, o el uso de combustibles fósiles con cero emisiones netas, en tres sectores. En el sector eléctrico ya lo logramos. Eso equivale al 25 por ciento del objetivo total. Los otros sectores son el transporte y el térmico, es decir, cómo calefaccionamos y refrigeramos nuestros edificios.

La estrategia más importante es la electrificación. Electrificar todos los autos y los camiones con base aquí en Burlington. Cambiar los sistemas de calefacción y refrigeración a distintas tecnologías eléctricas; es probable que la más común sea la de las bombas de calor de clima frío.

Por último, para redondear la estrategia, buscamos implementar un sistema energético por distrito que capture el calor residual [de la planta de biomasa de la ciudad] y lo use para calefaccionar algunos de los edificios institucionales principales. También estamos haciendo modificaciones en la red de transporte para que el transporte activo represente un mayor porcentaje de los viajes en vehículos y así reducir el uso de combustible fósil. Esas son las estrategias principales planificadas. 

AF: ¿Hay algún componente que le haya parecido más complejo en cuanto a aplicarlo en toda la ciudad? 

MW: En general, estoy bastante conforme con el progreso que hicimos. De hecho, en la primera actualización de 2021, descubrimos que estábamos encaminados para cumplir esta meta increíblemente ambiciosa de dejar de usar combustibles fósiles para 2030.

Aunque debo admitir que parte de eso se debe, como todos sabemos, a que 2020 fue un año excepcional en el que las emisiones provenientes del transporte se redujeron drásticamente por la pandemia. Recibimos una medición nueva hace poco y vimos un aumento, por lo que no estamos tan encaminados luego de dos años como lo estábamos [luego] de uno. Ese aumento que se produjo aquí en Burlington fue de alrededor de un cuarto del aumento de las emisiones a nivel nacional. Es decir, tuvimos un aumento del 1,5 por ciento después de la pandemia, mientras que las emisiones aumentaron un seis por ciento en el resto del país. Hemos notado un aumento muy rápido en la adopción de las bombas de calor y los vehículos eléctricos en los últimos dos años desde que propusimos incentivos a los que llamamos estímulos verdes al principio de la pandemia. 

Sin embargo, a veces siento que estamos peleando con una mano atada atrás de la espalda, porque la electrificación y las tecnologías renovables luchan en desventaja. Hoy en día, el costo de quemar combustibles fósiles no se refleja correctamente en la economía. Tenemos que encontrar la forma de ponerle un precio al carbono. El hecho de que no lo tenga es lo que evita que progresemos. Cuando lo logremos, y sé que lo haremos porque es inevitable que demos con la política correcta, al igual que otras jurisdicciones en todo el mundo, creo que tendremos viento a favor para poner en marcha todas estas iniciativas. Será de gran ayuda para todo lo que estamos intentando hacer.

AF: Quiero asegurarme de estar entendiendo bien. ¿Quiere que todos en Burlington tengan vehículos eléctricos para 2030? ¿Estamos hablando de una ampliación a escala y adopción de este tipo? 

MW: Básicamente, sí. Eso es lo que necesitaríamos para cumplir el objetivo. Eso o inversiones de compensación que nos ayuden a lograrlo, pero nos tomamos con mucha seriedad el hecho de hacer todo lo posible para lograr esta transformación lo más rápido posible. 

Hace un año entró en vigencia una ordenanza de zonificación en la que se establece que las edificaciones nuevas en Burlington no pueden usar combustibles fósiles como fuente primaria de calefacción. No prohibimos el combustible fósil porque nos pareció muy oneroso y porque la tecnología no está lista para eso. Reglamentar la fuente primaria de calefacción puede reducir el impacto de las construcciones nuevas en un 85 por ciento. En las últimas semanas, el estado aprobó un cambio en nuestro estatuto que nos permite ir más allá y establecer reglamentaciones nuevas para todas las construcciones en Burlington. 

Para la próxima asamblea municipal en marzo, queremos tener lista una ordenanza nueva para someter a votación, que fijará requi-sitos para la transformación de los sistemas mecánicos de las construcciones más grandes, tanto nuevas como existentes, cuando lleguen al final de su vida útil. Por ejemplo, cuando las calderas se rompan, tendremos una estrategia mediante nuestra empresa de servicios públicos que ofrecerá incentivos generosos, y también implementaremos normas reglamentarias que requerirán una transformación.

AF: Quiero saber más sobre los servicios públicos. Mencionó Burlington Electric y, por supuesto, también está Green Mountain Power. ¿Qué tan importantes son, dado que las empresas de servicios públicos de otros lugares parecen desconfiar de las energías renovables y podrían llegar a dificultar la transición? 

MW: Debo decir que una década en un cargo público lidiando con estos problemas me ha hecho un defensor acérrimo del control público de la energía. El departamento de electricidad fue una gran parte de todo el trabajo que describí de los últimos 30 años. Creo que es más difícil para los municipios, los pueblos y los alcaldes que no tienen su propio servicio de electricidad. Hay cosas que cualquier comunidad local puede hacer para colaborar y, cuando es necesario, ejercer presión pública sobre las empresas de servicios públicos, que usualmente deben responder ante una autoridad reglamentaria pública. Creo que hay formas de hacer que otras empresas de servicios públicos hagan lo mismo que está haciendo Burlington Electric. En Vermont, es emocionante escuchar que la otra empresa de servicios públicos que fue muy innovadora, Green Mountain Power, es una empresa de servicios controlada por inversores.

Si nos acercamos al objetivo de cero emisiones netas, significará que estaremos vendiendo mucha más electricidad que ahora. Creemos que será al menos un 60 por ciento más que hoy en día. Ahora, cuando alguien compra un vehículo eléctrico y lo carga en Burlington, si lo hacen de noche, podemos venderles energía fuera del horario de mayor demanda de manera que la empresa de servicios públicos obtiene más ganancias. Económicamente es muy bueno. Por eso podemos ofrecer estos incentivos muy generosos: cada vez que ponemos otro vehículo eléctrico o una bomba de calor en funcionamiento, es una nueva fuente de renta para la ciudad. En su mayoría, estos incentivos se autofinancian con esa renta nueva. Me parece que seguir este camino es una buena jugada económica.

AF: Vermont se convirtió en un destino muy popular para los refugiados climáticos más adinerados que compran suelo y construyen viviendas. ¿Cuáles son las ventajas y las desventajas de esto? 

MW: Tiene razón, hay muchos refugiados climáticos aquí. También los hay de la pandemia. El mercado de viviendas está bajo mucha presión, y ese es el aspecto negativo. Hace mucho que hay una crisis aguda de viviendas, pero ahora la situación está peor que nunca. El lado positivo es que quizás fuerce a Vermont a considerar seriamente establecer reglas para el uso del suelo a nivel local y estatal que posibiliten la construcción de más viviendas.

Se necesitan más viviendas de manera urgente. Es un aspecto que debemos mejorar y creo que habrá beneficios medioambientales si lo hacemos. Para mí, más gente viviendo en una ciudad ecológica como Burlington es una buena compensación para el medio ambiente.

AF: ¿Tiene otras estrategias en mente para hacer que Burlington, como ciudad ecológica, sea o siga siendo asequible? Burlington tiene un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario exitoso, ustedes fomentan las viviendas accesorias, hay zonificación inclusiva. . . ¿Qué sigue? 

MW: Tenemos mucho trabajo por hacer en cuanto a las ordenanzas de zonificación y la reforma de uso del suelo a nivel estatal. En este momento, en Vermont, muchos proyectos buenos, ecológicos, de eficiencia energética en áreas habitadas, deben pasar por procesos de permisos de uso del suelo a nivel local y estatal. Estos procesos son casi redundantes y enlentecen todo, aumentan el costo y crean muchas oportunidades para que surjan obstrucciones. Hay mucho trabajo por hacer y estamos enfocados en ello. Actualmente, estamos trabajando en tres esfuerzos principales de mejora de la zonificación y se está debatiendo mucho la reforma de la Ley 250 [ley de uso y desarrollo del suelo de Vermont] a nivel estatal. 

AF: Por último, ¿qué consejo les daría a los dirigentes de otras ciudades para que tomen acciones climáticas similares, en especial en lugares que no están tan preparados como Burlington? 

MW: Cuando hablo con otros alcaldes al respecto, intento dejar en claro que esta es un área en la que el liderazgo político [y la voluntad de la comunidad] puede tener un gran impacto. Cuando asumí, casi no había energía solar en Burlington. Esa fue nuestra prioridad y cambiamos algunas reglas sobre los permisos. Hicimos que fuese más fácil para los consumidores instalar paneles solares en sus viviendas.

La empresa de servicios públicos aportó lo suyo y, en pocos años, nos convertimos en una de las ciudades del país con más energía solar per cápita. Ahora estamos en el puesto n.º 5 a nivel nacional. En un momento, éramos la única ciudad de la costa este entre las primeras 20, y eso no es casualidad. Es porque tomamos la decisión de enfocarnos en ese tema y hacer un cambio. Se puede lograr un gran impacto. 

En un momento en el que la emergencia climática es una amenaza existencial, en un momento en el que claramente el gobierno federal está paralizado y no puede impulsar cambios, y en el que muchos gobiernos estatales están en la misma situación, los alcaldes y las ciudades pueden demostrar progresos en el terreno. Creo que, cuando lo hacemos, le demostramos a la gente lo que es posible.

Anthony Flint es miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln, conduce el ciclo de pódcasts Land Matters y es editor colaborador de Land Lines. 

Fotografía: Burlington, Vermont. Crédito: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images.

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n la ciudad china de Zhengzhou, un centro de fabricación ubicado casi a mitad de camino entre Pekín y Shanghái, un smog continuo que irrita los ojos colocaba a la ciudad en las listas de las ciudades más contaminadas del mundo. Hace casi10 años, los dirigentes locales se unieron en un plan de acción nacional e integral para limpiar el aire, iniciado por varios departamentos gubernamentales centrales y diseñado para reducir las emisiones de la industria, la producción energética, el uso del suelo y otras actividades de consumo.

Unos años más tarde, los resultados eran claros: nada extremo, pero cielos más celestes y una diferencia lo suficientemente notoria para influir en el comportamiento social, como la disposición de la gente a viajar y estar al aire libre. Un equipo de investigadores descubrió algo más: la mejora en la calidad del aire se relacionaba con un aumento general del valor de las propiedades.

Mediante un modelo espaciotemporal que cuantificaba la asociación entre el aire más puro y el valor del suelo, los investigadores determinaron que mejorar la calidad del aire en un 10 por ciento aumentaba un 5,6 por ciento el valor de las propiedades en toda la ciudad, dice Erwin van der Krabben, profesor en la Universidad Radboud en Países Bajos. Con el tiempo, eso podría dar como resultado un estímulo de US$ 63.000 millones, dice van der Krabben.

“Si se mejora aún más la calidad del aire, podemos predecir cuánto valor obtendremos”, dice van der Krabben, que está documentando las ramificaciones de la acción climática a nivel mundial. Hace poco coescribió un documento de trabajo del Instituto Lincoln sobre la calidad del aire y el valor del suelo en China, junto con Alexander Lord de la Facultad de Ciencia Medioambiental de la Universidad de Liverpool y Guanpeng Dong, profesor de Geografía Humana Cuantitativa en la universidad de Henan (Lord, van der Krabben y Dong, 2022).

La idea de que la acción medioambiental aumenta el valor del suelo y las propiedades puede parecerle obvia a muchos, pero, en general, creo que no se ha demostrado completamente. El tipo de análisis realizado en Zhengzhou es importante porque vincula directamente las mejoras medioambientales con un aumento del valor. Demostrar la relación es fundamental para respaldar la herramienta financiera que podría ser clave para abordar la crisis climática: la recuperación de plusvalías.

La recuperación de plusvalías, una herramienta financiera poco conocida en el pasado, se usa en todo el mundo para ayudar a financiar el transporte, la vivienda asequible, los espacios al aire libre y otras obras de infraestructura pública. El enfoque requiere que los emprendedores inmobiliarios y los propietarios aporten una parte de los aumentos del valor de las propiedades o del suelo, fomentados por la inversión pública y las acciones gubernamentales. Las municipalidades destinan la renta generada a obras de infraestructura u otros proyectos que benefician al público (Germán y Bernstein, 2020).

Mientras el mundo se prepara para invertir billones de dólares en un esfuerzo masivo para dejar atrás los combustibles fósiles, reducir las emisiones y generar resiliencia, la recuperación de plusvalías podría ayudar a subsanar la brecha financiera climática internacional, en especial a nivel local.

Determinar que lo que es bueno para el planeta es bueno para la economía, dice van der Krabben, explica con claridad la premisa fiscal de usar la recuperación de plusvalías. En China, donde el suelo es propiedad del estado y se arrienda a los emprendedores inmobiliarios, los aumentos del valor del suelo se añaden al precio que pagan los emprendedores. “Si las ciudades chinas actúan de manera racional, si invierten ese ingreso adicional de la renta del suelo, si continúan destinando esas inversiones a generar aire más puro, se logra un círculo virtuoso”, dice.

En consecuencia, se implementan metodo-logías de valuación y tasación cada vez más sofisticadas para describir el impacto de la acción gubernamental en el valor del suelo y la propiedad, y no solo para detallar cómo una estación de transporte o un parque resiliente a las inundaciones crea una mejora en el barrio local, sino cómo las políticas más amplias, como los requisitos de aire puro o las políticas que fomentan la actividad física, pueden tener un impacto positivo en un público más amplio.

El análisis del “círculo virtuoso” no es solo una razón económica poderosa que respalda la responsabilidad compartida del financiamiento de la acción climática, sino que también es una razón moral. Por lo general, en muchos lugares, los emprendedores inmobiliarios y los propietarios obtienen beneficios inesperados, generados por las inversiones públicas.

“Hay una falta de financiamiento bien documentada de las acciones que se necesitan para abordar la crisis climática”, dice Amy Cotter, directora de Estrategias Climáticas en el Instituto Lincoln. “Una parte muy pequeña funciona como la recuperación de plusvalías: se crea a partir de la misma acción que posibilita, bajo control local”. La recuperación de plusvalías “no solventará el financiamiento climático, pero tiene el potencial de subsanar una brecha importante”, dice Cotter.

UNA CARACTERÍSTICA LLAMATIVA del estudio de caso de la contaminación aérea de Zhengzhou es que los beneficios se distribuyeron por toda la ciudad. Pero en los contextos urbanos, una amplia gama de proyectos y políticas que pueden contribuir a la resiliencia ante el cambio climático se están poniendo de manifiesto en términos económicos, tanto a nivel de una cuadra de la ciudad como de todo un barrio:

• La Ordenanza Eco Eficiencia del distrito Metropolitano de Quito, que ganó un premio Guangzhou en 2021 por innovación urbana, fomenta la eficiencia energética y la densidad vendiéndoles a los emprendedores inmobiliarios el derecho a construir edificios más altos si tienen elementos ecológicos o están cerca de un medio de transporte público. Desde que la ordenanza entró en vigencia en 2016, se aprobaron 35 proyectos que tuvieron tanto éxito que los emprendedores inmobiliarios no tuvieron problemas en devolver una parte de las ganancias mediante esta herramienta de recuperación de plusvalías. La ciudad invertirá los US$ 10,7 millones recaudados hasta el momento en mejoras, como parques y viviendas asequibles, y está adoptando la ordenanza como parte de su nuevo plan de administración y uso del suelo.
• En un estudio realizado por Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) y SB Friedman Development Advisors, se descubrió que las instalaciones de infraestructura verde de agua pluvial en Seattle y Filadelfia, como los jardines infiltrantes y los bajíos, daban como resultado un aumento estadísticamente importante en los precios de venta de las viviendas cercanas (CNT y SB Friedman Development Advisors, 2020). Duplicar los metros cuadrados de jardines infiltrantes, bajíos, áreas con plantas o pavimento permeable a 75 metros de una vivienda se asocia con un valor de venta entre 0,28 y 0,78 por ciento mayor, en promedio.
• En Buenos Aires, una valuación similar de proyectos de infraestructura azul-verde propuestos en la cuenca del arroyo Medrano demostró un enorme potencial de impactos positivos sobre el valor del suelo, a partir de la reducción del riesgo de inundaciones asociado con la infraestructura gris tradicional, y las mejoras en el espacio verde público (Kozak et al., 2022). Los autores citan un proyecto que mejoró el acceso público al río Paraná en Santa Fe, Argentina, como ejemplo del desarrollo que puede tener esto. La revitalización de esta vía fluvial produjo un aumento promedio del 21 por ciento del valor del suelo en un radio de 10 cuadras de la costa.
• Los principales proyectos de transporte del mundo que contribuyen a alcanzar los objetivos de descarbonización, desde la extensión del ferrocarril Tsukuba Express de Tokio, hasta la modernización y electrificación del ferrocarril interurbano de pasajeros en San José, Costa Rica, y el proyecto de ferrocarril de Londres, que se espera que ahorre aproximadamente 2,75 millones de toneladas de carbono durante su vida útil, se financian, en su mayoría o en parte, a partir de la presunción de que los valores de las propiedades ubicadas a lo largo de las rutas que cubren aumentarán.
• Los emprendedores inmobiliarios y los propietarios buscan un lugar seguro, lejos de la subida del nivel del mar y otros impactos climáticos, y están dispuestos a pagar por esa sensación de seguridad. Boston creó un fondo de resiliencia ante el cambio climático, al que los emprendedores inmobiliarios contribuyen para ayudar a coordinar la construcción de malecones y sistemas naturales a fin de proteger el suelo urbano. Cada vez más, el hecho de colaborar con la adaptación se considera como un pequeño precio que debe pagarse para proteger los bienes inmuebles y garantizar que no se pierda su valor inherente, dice Brian Golden, el recién jubilado director de la Agencia de Planificación y Desarrollo de Boston.

Parece ser que lo mismo aplica a los compradores particulares. Siempre tuvieron en cuenta las características de la propiedad y las preferencias de los consumidores, como la cantidad y la composición de las habitaciones o la calidad de las escuelas públicas locales. Ahora quieren saber más sobre las características que hacen que una vivienda sea más resiliente ante el cambio climático y están dispuestos a pagar más por ellas, según Katherine Kiel, una profesora de Economía en College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, y autora de un documento de trabajo del Instituto Lincoln sobre la adaptación y el valor de las propiedades (Kiel 2021).

SI BIEN LA CONEXIÓN entre las intervenciones medioambientales y el aumento de los valores es una buena noticia para los emprendedores inmobiliarios y los propietarios, el asunto se complica con el aburguesamiento y los desplazamientos. Un ejemplo reciente y conocido de mejoras ecológicas que tienen un impacto en la economía local es la iluminación natural del río Saw Mill en Yonkers, Nueva York, que transformó un área de negocios descuidada de forma tal que los precios de las viviendas se alzaron repentinamente en el área circundante, dice Cate Mingoya, directora nacional de Resiliencia ante el Cambio Climático y Uso del Suelo en Groundwork USA. Los aumentos se produjeron por “la percepción de un espacio más limpio y más verde”, dice Mingoya.

“De ninguna manera plantar árboles o iluminar de forma natural un río obliga a los propietarios a aumentar los alquileres de una manera tan abrupta. En ninguna parte dice que los propietarios tienen derecho a maximizar el beneficio de un sistema que está regulado injustamente a su favor”, dice.

Pero los propietarios pueden aprovechar estas inversiones públicas para cobrar más y de hecho lo hacen, dice Mingoya, que modera asociaciones intersectoriales para implementar medidas de adaptación climática en comunidades vulnerables. Algunas comunidades que buscan frenar el aburguesamiento ecológico implementan medidas que son “lo suficientemente ecológicas . . . y donde se hacen una cantidad limitada de mejoras en los barrios de bajos recursos en un intento por evitar los desplazamientos”. Muchas veces estos esfuerzos rozan lo absurdo, según Mingoya: “¿Debería haber 30 árboles o solo 10?”. Pero claramente demuestran la conciencia cada vez mayor de que las intervenciones ecológicas y el aumento de los valores están relacionadas (las políticas de recuperación de plusvalías diseñadas estratégicamente pueden mitigar los casos en los que las intervenciones medioambientales se asocian con el aburguesamiento y los desplazamientos, con disposiciones para aumentar las viviendas asequibles, por ejemplo).

Desde otra perspectiva, las condiciones medioambientales malas que no se abordan o que se abordan de forma parcial tienen un efecto económico negativo. En un informe reciente que realizaron investigadores de varias universidades de Utah, se estima que el aire contaminado acorta la expectativa de vida dos años y le cuesta al estado casi US$ 2.000 millones al año. Algunos gobiernos locales y estatales llevan un registro del daño que causa el cambio climático, según Pew Charitable Trusts, a fin de prepararse para demandar a las empresas de combustibles fósiles.

La falta de acción climática, en casos en los que las municipalidades no pueden o no quieren implementar infraestructura de resiliencia ni tomar otras medidas para evitar las inundaciones, la subida del nivel del mar, las avalanchas de lodo y otros problemas similares, hace caer el valor precipitadamente. Un estudio sobre el hundimiento del suelo en Java, Indonesia, donde las viviendas se hundieron en tierra inestable, demostró que la práctica local de reconstruir sobre socavones, a veces dos o tres veces, con la esperanza de recuperar la viabilidad económica no ayudó a detener la disminución del valor de las propiedades. La única solución en esos casos, según el estudio, que también fue dirigido por van der Krabben, sería realizar una recomposición enorme de la administración del agua y el suelo, o abandonar el área por completo. Indonesia sigue avanzando con la reubicación a gran escala de su capital, Yakarta, principalmente por esta razón.

En Miami, uno de los motivos de las contribuciones del sector privado a la infraestructura de resiliencia es que, sin acciones rápidas, más propiedades quedarán sumergidas en el agua. Desde esta perspectiva, las medidas protectoras hacen más que aumentar el valor del suelo y las propiedades; evitan que los valores caigan por debajo de cero, ya que evitan que el suelo sea inhabitable.

INCLUSO A MEDIDA QUE AUMENTA LA EVIDENCIA DE LA RELACIÓN entre la acción medioambiental y el alza económica, deben superarse muchos desafíos para que funcione la recuperación de plusvalías. Las leyes nacionales de desarrollo urbano deben reformarse para autorizar a más gobiernos locales a utilizar las plusvalías y permitir rentas propias. En todo el mundo sigue habiendo una gran necesidad de una mejor capacidad institucional, una buena gobernanza, controles del suelo y sistemas de tenencia.

Los gobiernos también deben recordar que las finanzas con base en el suelo son solo una forma de financiar las iniciativas climáticas y medioambientales, que tienen mayor capacidad para subsanar brechas que para actuar como fuente principal o única de renta para un mundo con emisiones de carbono neutras.

Probablemente, los gestores de políticas también tengan que cuidarse para no abarcar demasiado. Los beneficios de una estación de transporte para las viviendas cercanas son “claros como el agua”, dice van der Krabben, por lo que los emprendedores inmobiliarios son más propensos a realizar aportes para estas obras de infraestructura. El beneficio más importante de una política medioambientalmente progresiva a nivel local o regional, por ejemplo, la prohibición de los sistemas de calefacción y refrigeración alimentados con combustibles fósiles en las construcciones nuevas, como las prohibiciones para usar gas natural en grandes ciudades de los EE.UU., como Seattle, San Francisco y Nueva York, puede ser más difícil de vender.

“Lo que se busca es que los emprendedores inmobiliarios contribuyan con las inversiones regionales, pero eso es más difícil de negociar. Los beneficios son más indirectos”, dice van der Krabben.

Según los académicos, esta es una razón más por la que deben analizarse las prácticas de valuación y tasación que rigen las plusvalías y los aumentos del valor de las propiedades en primer lugar. Los métodos de valuación más sofisticados mejoraron la precisión de la tasación, dice Joan Youngman, miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln, citando el estándar técnico de la Asociación Internacional de Funcionarios Tasadores (IAAO, por su sigla en inglés) para el avalúo masivo de los bienes inmuebles, que fue diseñado para mejorar la equidad, la calidad, la igualdad y la precisión de la valuación. El avalúo masivo se define en ese estándar como “el proceso de valuar un conjunto de propiedades en una fecha determinada mediante datos comunes, métodos estandarizados y pruebas estadísticas”.

Es posible que próximamente el proceso de valuación se realice con ayuda de herramientas tecnológicas. Hace poco el International Property Tax Institute y la IAAO publicaron informes sobre el uso posible de la inteligencia artificial (IA) en la valuación de propiedades. Si bien la IA presenta desafíos e incertidumbre, se espera que produzca valores más precisos que los que se obtienen mediante los métodos tradicionales.

Cuando se trata de identificar los efectos de las acciones y la inversión públicas en el valor del suelo, las herramientas modernas, el análisis de datos y las técnicas estadísticas ayudan a identificar y medir las plusvalías, dice Youngman.

Con buenas prácticas, un pensamiento especulativo y una lista cada vez más extensa de ciudades en todo el mundo que usan la recuperación de plusvalías, quienes abordan la crisis climática esperan que la relación entre las inversiones públicas masivas necesarias para salvar el futuro del planeta y las recompensas económicas que brindan sea más clara; además, esperan que se evidencien aún más las formas en que dichas recompensas económicas se pueden reinvertir para el bien público (Bisaro y Hinkel, 2018; Dunning y Lord, 2020; Van der Krabben, Samsura y Wang, 2019).

Golden, el planificador saliente de Boston, dice que notó un “cambio cultural” entre los propietarios y los emprendedores inmobiliarios, que reconocen que las inversiones públicas en infraestructura de resiliencia protegen los bienes inmuebles privados, lo que hace que sea más probable que ayuden a cubrir los costos.

Exigir que los emprendedores inmobiliarios ayuden a financiar la restauración de los terraplenes, los malecones y los sistemas naturales, que servirán de protección ante una subida estimada del nivel del mar de 100 centímetros en la costa de 75 kilómetros de la ciudad, se toma como una cuestión de interés propio, dice Golden, no solo para los sitios de desarrollo particulares, sino para la prosperidad a futuro de Boston como motor económico de la región. El sector privado prácticamente no mostró resistencia contra iniciativas como el fondo de resiliencia. “Hay mucho trabajo por hacer”, dice Golden. “Ellos lo saben”.

Anthony Flint es miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln, conduce el ciclo de pódcasts Land Matters y es editor colaborador de Land Lines.

Imagen principal: Zhengzhou, provincia de Henan, China. Crédito: Zhang mengyang vía iStock/Gettty Images.

Referencias

Bisaro, Alexander y Jochen Hinkel. 2018. “Mobilizing Private Finance for Coastal Adaptation: A Literature Review”. WIREs 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.514.

CNT y SB Friedman Development Advisors. 2020. “Green Stormwater Infrastructure Impact on Property Values”. Noviembre. Chicago, IL: Center for Neighborhood Technology. https://cnt.org/publications/green-stormwater-infrastructure-impact-on-property-values.

Dunning, Richard J. y Alex Lord. 2020. “Viewpoint: Preparing for the Climate Crisis: What Role S…hould Land Value Capture Play?” Land Use Policy, volumen 99. Diciembre. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837720302908?via%3Dihub.

Germán, Lourdes y Allison Ehrich Bernstein. “Land Value Return: Tools to Finance Our Urban Future”. Resumen de políticas Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo (enero). https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-briefs/land-value-return.

Kiel, Katherine A. 2021. “Climate Change Adaptation and Property Values: A Survey of the Literature”. Documento de trabajo Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo (agosto). https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/climate-change-adaptation-property-values.

Kozak, Daniel y Hayley Henderson, Demián Rotbart, Alejandro de Castro Mazarro y Rodolfo Aradas. 2022. “Implementación de Infraestructura Azul y Verde (IAV) a través de mecanismos de captación de plusvalía en la Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires: El caso de la Cuenca del Arroyo Medrano”. Documento de trabajo Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo (febrero). https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/implementacion-infraestructura-azul-verde-iav-traves-mecanismos. [Versión en inglés disponible en https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/6/2163.]

Krabben, van der, Erwin, Samsura, Ary y Wang, Jinshuo. 2019. “Financing Transit Oriented Development by Value Capture: Negotiating Better Public Infrastructure”. Documento de trabajo Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo (junio). https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/van_der_krabben_wp19ek1.pdf.

Lord, Alexander, Erwin van der Krabben y Guanpeng Dong. 2022. “Building the Breathable City: What Role Should Land Value Capture Play in China’s Ambitions to Prepare for Climate Change?” Documento de trabajo Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo (junio). https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/building-breathable-city.

El Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo ha trabajado en América Latina y el Caribe por 29 años, 27 de los cuales estuvieron bajo el liderazgo del economista urbano Martim Smolka. El Instituto comenzó su trabajo en la región con el objetivo de ayudar a los líderes a enfrentar el desafío de los asentamientos informales en tiempos de rápida urbanización.

Desde entonces, el Instituto Lincoln ha trabajado con miles de planificadores urbanos, funcionarios de gobiernos locales, y otros gestores de políticas y profesionales a lo largo de América Latina y el Caribe para la creación de nuevas políticas que fomenten la equidad social y la sostenibilidad a través del uso efectivo del suelo y del financiamiento con base en el suelo.

El Instituto Lincoln ha contribuido a la adopción de la recuperación de plusvalías como método para la distribución equitativa de los beneficios y cargas de la urbanización, así como al financiamiento de infraestructura y otras inversiones en áreas marginales. El Instituto publicó el reporte de Smolka “Implementación de la recuperación de plusvalías en América Latina” en 2013, considerado una referencia en el tema. Dos años antes había publicado el reporte fundamental sobre el mejoramiento de los asentamientos informales “Regularización de asentamientos informales en América Latina”.

Con la jubilación de Smolka a principios de este año, el Instituto Lincoln tiene una nueva cara en la región, la economista Anacláudia Rossbach, quien asumió como directora para América Latina y el Caribe en agosto. Rossbach se desempeñó hasta hace poco como gerenta regional de Cities Alliance, donde contribuyó a la transferencia de conocimiento y mejores prácticas entre líderes en políticas urbanas y de vivienda. Anteriormente, fue coordinadora de proyectos para el mejoramiento de asentamientos informales en Brasil, fundó una organización no gubernamental, y también fue parte del Banco Mundial como especialista sénior para vivienda.  

En esta entrevista editada, Anacláudia Rossbach habla sobre el trabajo del Instituto Lincoln en América Latina y el Caribe, y los desarrollos que pueden esperarse para la región en los próximos años.

Will Jason: ¿Conocía al Instituto Lincoln antes de enterarse de este cargo?

Anacláudia Rossbach: El Instituto Lincoln me era bastante familiar porque tiene una gran reputación en América Latina. Entre las entidades que trabajan en temas urbanos, el Instituto Lincoln es muy conocido y cuenta con una red muy fuerte. Y yo entendía el gran impacto: no es difícil encontrar a alguien que trabaje en un municipio, en un gobierno nacional, que haya sido parte de los programas educacionales del Instituto.

WJ: ¿Cuál cree que es el mayor valor que el Instituto Lincoln ha entregado a la región?

AR: Creo que hay mucha más conciencia con respecto al rol fundamental que tiene el suelo en la planificación y el desarrollo urbano. El tema de la recuperación de plusvalías ha sido bien introducido en la región, por lo que hoy las personas, los profesionales y todos quienes trabajan en los municipios comprenden la importancia de la recuperación de plusvalías.

Si se compara el panorama de hace 20 años y el de hoy, se puede ver que actualmente en América Latina tenemos muchas ciudades que han introducido instrumentos de financiamiento con base en el suelo o instrumentos más avanzados de administración de suelos en la planificación urbana. Se ven cambios en los marcos legales nacionales de los países.

Pero por supuesto, todavía tenemos un largo camino por delante porque, bueno, la informalidad aún está muy presente en la región. Es la región más desigual del mundo. Se puede ver que las ciudades están segregadas, esto es visible.

WJ: ¿Cuál cree que es el rol más importante que el Instituto Lincoln puede continuar ejerciendo? ¿Y qué tipo de cambios las personas de la región pueden esperar del Instituto Lincoln a partir de este momento?

AR: Por supuesto que el Instituto Lincoln no cambiará la posición que ha promovido por largo tiempo, pero creo que necesitamos poner más atención a la informalidad. Notamos que durante la pandemia estos asentamientos informales, estas ocupaciones informales en nuestras ciudades sufrieron, y si bien aún no tenemos números, creo que podríamos ver alguna expansión de la informalidad del suelo en América Latina. Ya sabemos que tenemos más pobreza.

La pobreza ha aumentado durante el COVID y tenemos tasas de desempleo más altas en los países de la región. Entonces, la vivienda será menos asequible y, por lo tanto, la probabilidad de que se creen ocupaciones informales aumentará. Debemos ser inteligentes para saber combinar medidas preventivas y correctivas a través de instrumentos de administración del suelo, planificación urbana, estrategias para viviendas de bajos ingresos y mejoramiento de asentamientos informales para ser capaces de enfrentar la magnitud del problema que enfrentamos hoy y que enfrentaremos en el futuro si las condiciones actuales se mantienen.

El otro asunto es que hemos estado desarrollando capacidades en la región por un tiempo, pero necesitamos encontrar una manera para extender el alcance de lo que hemos estado haciendo. Tenemos muchas ciudades en la región, tenemos una situación clara de falta de capacidad a nivel de las ciudades, y hablo de ciudades de diferentes tamaños. Debemos pensar estratégicamente cómo podemos sacar ventaja de nuestro impacto y tener un mayor alcance en términos del aumento de capacidad.

Y luego, por supuesto, debemos ser capaces de medir de mejor manera nuestro impacto.

¿Cómo podemos encontrar maneras de generar mediciones cualitativas del impacto, o incluso mediciones cuantitativas del impacto que estamos generando en la región? Veo un gran potencial del Instituto Lincoln para aumentar el impacto en la región a través de asociaciones y alianzas. El Instituto ya ha estado trabajando a través de asociaciones, comunidades de práctica y redes, pero creo que en el futuro necesitamos reforzar y aumentar las asociaciones que hemos generado en el pasado.

Y por supuesto, necesitamos abordar al gran desafío que todos enfrentamos, que es el cambio climático. En América Latina tenemos una situación en que los más vulnerables, los más pobres de las ciudades, son los más afectados por el cambio climático. Aún tenemos muchas personas sin agua en la región. Tenemos este importante desafío bajo la gran sombra del cambio climático, que afecta a una parte importante de la región, una región que contribuye en menor medida a las emisiones globales pero que es afectada en mayor medida por los desastres y por sus consecuencias.

WJ: Volvamos a la distinción que hizo cuando estaba hablando sobre la informalidad, entre medidas correctivas y medidas preventivas. ¿Podría explayarse más sobre qué ha hecho y qué podría hacer el Instituto Lincoln en cada una de estas áreas, que son muy distintas?

AR: No sé si son tan distintas; creo que están interrelacionadas. Necesitamos reforzar la manera en que prevenimos la aparición de la informalidad. Y esto es lo básico: entregar para la construcción de viviendas suelo bien localizado y con servicios. Es más barato proveer infraestructura al comienzo que instalar servicios retroactivamente en los asentamientos informales. También necesitamos asegurar la disponibilidad de viviendas de bajos ingresos a través regulaciones para viviendas inclusivas u otras regulaciones.

Pero la informalidad ya está ahí y afecta nuestras vidas diarias. ¿Qué aspectos de las políticas de suelo el Instituto puede utilizar como medidas correcticas? Regularización del suelo, por ejemplo. En Brasil, por nombrar un caso, incluso tenemos empresas que realizan regularización del suelo. Es un mercado, es una política pública.

Pienso que podemos encontrar maneras para apoyar este tipo de iniciativas: mejorar los asentamientos informales a través de una combinación entre regularización del suelo, desarrollo de infraestructura, acceso al agua y protección de los ambientes naturales. Todas estas son áreas que pueden ser miradas holísticamente. El suelo es parte de un tejido vivo, donde todas estas cosas están sucediendo y donde la gente vive.

WJ: ¿A su juicio, qué rol jugará la recuperación de plusvalías en la regularización?

AR: La recuperación de plusvalías podría financiar la regularización, como fuente de fondos, porque es un instrumento que se desarrolla a nivel de ciudades. Usualmente, para las grandes regularizaciones o programas de mejoras, las ciudades dependen de los gobiernos nacionales o de subsidios nacionales.

Pero también al regularizar el suelo lo estamos incorporando al mercado. Estamos mejorando la capacidad de la ciudad como un todo para sacar ventaja de la recuperación de plusvalías porque estamos creando un nuevo activo en la ciudad.

WJ: En un tema más liviano, ¿qué país de América Latina tiene la mejor comida? ¿Cuál tiene la mejor música?

AR: Esa es una pregunta capciosa, porque me gustan muchos tipos de música y de comida de América Latina. Pero debo confesar mi amor eterno a México. Pienso que el país tiene comida increíble y, en general una cultura muy rica. Me gustan especialmente las voces femeninas de la escena musical mexicana actual.

Imagen: Anacláudia Rossbach.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has worked in Latin America and the Caribbean for 29 years—the past 27 of them under the leadership of urban economist Martim Smolka. The institute entered the region with the goal of helping leaders to address the challenge of informal settlements at a time of rapid urbanization.

Since then, the Lincoln Institute has worked with thousands of urban planners, local government officials, and other policy makers and practitioners throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, contributing to new policies to promote social equity and sustainability through effective land use and land-based financing.

The Lincoln Institute has contributed to the adoption of land value capture as a method to equitably distribute the benefits and burdens of urbanization, and to finance infrastructure and other investment in marginalized areas. The institute published Smolka’s authoritative report on the subject, Implementing Value Capture in Latin America, in 2013, two years after its foundational report on the upgrading of informal settlements, Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America.

With Smolka’s retirement earlier this year, the Lincoln Institute has a new face in the region, Anacláudia Rossbach, who took over as director for Latin America and the Caribbean in August. An economist, Rossbach joins the Lincoln Institute from Cities Alliance, where she served as the regional manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, supporting the transfer of knowledge and best practices among leaders in housing and urban policy. Previously, Rossbach oversaw major slum upgrading projects in Brazil, founded a nongovernmental organization, and served as a senior housing specialist for the World Bank.

In this edited interview, Rossbach speaks about the Lincoln Institute’s work in Latin America and the Caribbean, and potential developments in the region in the coming years.

Will Jason: How familiar were you with the Lincoln Institute before you learned about this position?

Anacláudia Rossbach: I was quite familiar because the Lincoln Institute has a strong reputation in Latin America. Among stakeholders working on urban issues, the Lincoln Institute is very well known and has a very strong network. And I understood the huge impact. It’s not difficult to find someone working in a city, in a national government, that has been part of a Lincoln Institute educational program. 

WJ: What do you see as the greatest value that the Lincoln Institute has been delivering to the region?

AR: I think there is more awareness around the key role that land plays in urban planning and development. The topic of land value capture was very well introduced in the region. Today, people, professionals, practitioners working in cities, they understand the importance of land value capture.

If you look at the big picture 20 years ago and now, you see that today in Latin America, we have many cities that have introduced land-based finance instruments or more advanced land management instruments in urban planning. You see changes in the national legal frameworks of countries.

But still, of course, we have a long way to go because, well, informality is still very prevalent in the region. The region is the most unequal in the world. You see the cities are segregated; this is visible.

WJ: What do you see as the most important role that the Lincoln Institute can continue to play? And what types of changes can people in the region expect from the Lincoln Institute now?

AR: Of course, the Lincoln Institute will not change the position that it has been advocating for a long time, but I believe that we need to pay more attention to informality. We noticed during the pandemic how these informal settlements, these informal occupations in our cities suffered, and we don’t have numbers yet, but I believe we might see some expansion in the informality of land in Latin America. We know that we have more poverty already.

Poverty has grown during COVID and we have higher unemployment rates in the countries in the region. So, housing will be less affordable and then the likelihood to create informal occupations and so on will increase. We have to really be smart on how to combine preventive and curative measures through land management instruments, urban planning, low-income housing strategies, and slum upgrading to be able to address the size of the problem that we face now, and will face in the future if the current conditions prevail.

The other thing is that we have been building capacity in the region for a while, but we need to see a way to extend the outreach of what we have been doing. We have many cities in the region, we have a clear situation of lack of capacity at the city level, and I’m talking about different sizes of cities. We need to strategically think how we can leverage our impact and have a bigger outreach in terms of building capacity. 

And then, of course, we should be able to measure our impact more. How can we find ways to go for qualitative assessments of the impact or even quantitative assessments of the impact that we are generating in the region? I see a great potential for the Lincoln Institute to increase impact in the region through partnerships and alliances. The institute has been already working through partnerships, communities of practice, and networks but I believe in the future we need to strengthen and add to some of the partnerships that we have been generating in the past.

And of course, we need to address the big challenge that we all face, which is climate change. We have, in Latin America, a situation where the most vulnerable, the poorest in the city, are most affected by climate change. We still have many people without water in the region. We have this major basic challenge in the region under this big shadow of climate change, which is affecting a lot of the region, a region that contributes less to emissions globally, but is being highly affected by disasters, by the consequences.

WJ: Let’s come back to the distinction that you made when you were talking about informality, between curative measures and preventive measures. Could you please talk a little bit more about what the Lincoln Institute has done and could do in each of these two areas, which are very distinct?

AR: I don’t know if they’re so distinct; I think they are interrelated. We need to strengthen the way we prevent informality from taking place. And this is, well, the basics: provide well located, serviced land for housing. It’s cheaper to provide infrastructure at the beginning than it is to retrofit slums with services later. We also need to make sure there are low-income housing options available through inclusionary housing or other regulations.

But informality is already there, and it’s affecting our daily lives. What are the aspects of land policy that the Institute can use as a curative measure? Land regularization, for example. In Brazil, for instance, we even have companies doing land regularization. It’s a market, it’s a public policy.

I think we can find ways to support these kinds of initiatives—improving informal settlements through a combination of regularization of land and infrastructure improvement, access to water, and protection of natural environments. These are all areas that we can look at in a more holistic manner. Land is part of a living tissue, where you have all these things happening and you have people living. 

WJ: What role do you see land value capture playing in regularization?

AR: Land value capture could finance regularization, as a source of funding, because land value capture is an instrument that is developed at city level. Usually, for big regularization or upgrading programs, cities depend on national governments, on national grants.

But also, once you regularize land, you are bringing land to the market. You are adding value to the city. You are improving the capacity of the city as a whole to leverage land value capture because you’re bringing a new asset to the city.

WJ: On a lighter note, which Latin American or Caribbean country has the best food? Which has the best music?

AR: This is a tricky question, because I am very fond of many types of Latin American music and food. But I need to confess my eternal love for Mexico. The country has amazing food, and to me a very rich culture overall. I particularly like the female voices from the Mexican contemporary musical scene.

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

Image: Anacláudia Rossbach

Columbus, Ohio, invented the first known off-street parking requirement for an apartment building in 1923. After nearly a hundred years, the results are in, and they’re not good. 

Last year, an assessment of the local zoning code—commissioned by the city as part of a comprehensive code revision process—concluded that off-street parking requirements were “not effective” and “often poorly matched to true parking demand.” 

That mismatch has gotten worse over time. Today’s parking requirements in Columbus are far higher than their cousins from the city’s midcentury zoning code. In 1954, an apartment building with 100 one-bedroom units was required to have 100 parking spaces; today it has to have 150. For a 2,500-square-foot restaurant, nine required parking spaces became 34, in the 90 percent of the city not covered by special overlay districts. These ratios are out of step with the local market, leading builders to request parking reductions more than any other type of zoning variance. City and regional plans have recommended reducing parking requirements and making them more consistent. 

Columbus is not alone. Across the United States, decades of similar parking requirements have led to a glut: researchers estimate that for every car in the country, there are at least three parking spaces—and some have suggested the number is closer to eight spaces.  

This oversupply has created a host of problems: parking requirements can inflate housing costs, block buildings from being adapted to new uses, and contribute to sprawl, making additional driving (and parking) necessary. They create an administrative burden. And the impervious surfaces of parking lots increase the risk of flooding and contribute to the urban heat island effect. 

But there is good news: of all the harms traditional zoning has inflicted on communities, parking requirements are the easiest to fix, said Sara Bronin, former chair of the Hartford, Connecticut, Planning and Zoning Commission. Bronin was at the helm in 2017, when Hartford became one of the first cities in the United States to eliminate residential and commercial parking mandates. The year before, city leaders had tested the waters by eliminating requirements in the downtown area, a move that yielded new development projects and new proposals for reuse. “Every community should be eliminating their parking requirements,” Bronin said.  

Each year, more cities are eliminating or reducing such mandates. In 2021, cities from Minneapolis to Jackson, Tennessee, eliminated minimum parking requirements from their zoning codes. In the week that this article was drafted alone, cities from Spokane to Chicago to Burlington, Vermont, rolled back parking mandates. 

Communities might reduce their parking requirements because they are trying to reinvent themselves by attracting new businesses and development, accommodate population growth with space-efficient infill, or focus more on transit and walkability. Regardless of the reason, parking reform advocates say this land use regulation could finally be on its way out. 

“We’re going to look back at this as just this weird, late-20th century aberration,” predicts Patrick Siegman, an economist and planner who has been studying parking since 1992, including as a partner at the national transportation planning firm Nelson Nygaard. “We created something wildly inefficient.” 

Hartford Leads the Way 

Like many industrial cities in the United States, Hartford saw dramatic population decline during the second half of the 20th century. In 1960, half of the people working in Hartford lived there, many walking or taking transit to jobs downtown; by 1980, less than a quarter of its workforce called the city home. Many white residents had fled for the suburbs and the overall population was declining. The repercussions of this demographic and economic shift are visible in the city’s bounty of parking lots: to accommodate the increase in car commuters, the city essentially paved over swaths of its downtown. 

As historian Daniel Sterner put it, “Hartford is famous for having so much torn down.” Not even the city’s first skyscraper, built in 1912, survived the demolition boom. It was razed to make way for a taller office tower, but those plans were abandoned in 1990 as the country entered a recession. The prominent corner lot became, and remains, surface parking. 

University of Connecticut professor Norman Garrick and his team found that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of land dedicated to parking lots in the downtown business district tripled, nearly equaling the amount of land underneath all the adjacent buildings. “The increase in parking was part of the collapse of the city,” Garrick said. “It’s typical of a lot of American cities.” 

Even without the research, there was little debate that Hartford had an oversupply of parking. “I don’t think every city needs a full-on parking history, or parking analysis,” said Bronin. “Most people should be able to just look around and say, ‘there’s a lot of parking in this city.’” 

The overabundance of parking came at a great cost for the city, Garrick’s team found in a report released in 2014. They estimated that the city was missing out on property tax revenue to the tune of $1,200 per downtown parking space, or about $50 million a year. That was a significant amount for a city whose downtown buildings were generating $75 million in annual tax revenue. 

Attracting investment is critically important for Connecticut’s capital city—and particularly challenging. More than half of the city’s real estate is nontaxable, because the land is owned by the government or nonprofit institutions. The rest is subject to the highest property tax rate in the state. Eliminating parking requirements citywide is one way to create a more flexible, inviting environment for development. 

“It’s easy to say we have no parking minimums, as opposed to ‘what zone?’,” said Aaron Gill, current vice chair of Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The biggest hurdle now is convincing developers they have new options, Gill said. He encourages developers to revisit parcels they might have discounted in the past, and to review how much parking is actually being used in previous developments.  

The strategy seems to be working. The quasi-public Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) has funded more than 2,800 new homes downtown since 2012, aiming to build a critical mass of residents to support retail and other services. Mike Freimuth, executive director of the CRDA, said the new zoning code has helped reduce costs and increased the use of existing parking garages. 

One of the CRDA projects, Teachers Village, involved converting an office building that had been vacant for 20 years into housing for area educators. Thirty percent of the apartments were designated as affordable. Prior to the code change, more than one parking space would have been required for each unit, but the renovated building has only 18 underground parking spaces for 60 households. The spaces are leased separately from the apartments, saving money for those who don’t need a parking spot. According to estimates based on 2016 Census data, more than 30 percent of Hartford households don’t even own a car. 

Other redevelopment projects have cut deals with adjacent parking garages, which are also adapting to the new world of remote work, to provide an off-street parking option for residents for an additional fee. Two derelict commercial buildings on Pearl Street, which Freimuth used to joke were the largest pigeon coops in the state, went that route when the buildings were renovated into 258 new homes. A few blocks away, a former Steiger’s department store is being converted into 97 new apartments with commercial space below. 

The CRDA is also involved in an ambitious project known as Bushnell South, which aims to convert a 20-acre area dominated by surface parking into a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use neighborhood with up to 1,200 apartments and townhouses, restaurants and retail, green space, and cultural attractions. The city was reviewing proposals from developers this summer with the goal of moving forward this fall. Although some developers have expressed concern that the city is building more residential space than the market can support, Freimuth is eager to proceed. “This land has been laying fallow for 50 years,” he told the Hartford Courant. “Why do we have to keep on waiting?” 

The Benefits of a Citywide Shift 

On the edge of downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas, a building that had stood vacant for nearly 40 years now houses a local restaurant with a rooftop patio. Down the road, a formerly abandoned gas station is back in use as retail space. The reuse of these once-forgotten properties was made possible several years ago, when Fayetteville’s city council voted to remove commercial parking requirements citywide. 

While most cities start with reducing parking mandates in a central business district, like Hartford did, planners in Fayetteville were fielding requests about properties throughout the city, and opted against defining a smaller boundary. At 44 square miles, Fayetteville is nearly 2.5 times larger than Hartford, with 70 percent of the population. 

“As a city planner, you receive phone calls about what’s possible with this property,” Fayetteville planner Quin Thompson explained. “What I began to see was the same properties over and over again. Some of those properties were downtown, but a lot weren’t.” None of the parcels had enough space to meet the parking requirements in place at the time. 

The planning staff approached the city council with the idea of eliminating commercial requirements citywide. Some of these properties were so constrained, they explained, it was impossible to imagine how they could be redeveloped under the current rules. They also said investors taking on the financial risk of a project were best suited to determine their own parking needs, and would act as a backstop even when the city was no longer regulating off-street parking spaces. In October 2015, Fayetteville’s city council agreed. 

What happened next? “The buildings that I had identified as being perpetually and perhaps permanently unusable were very quickly purchased, redeveloped, and are in use right now,” said Thompson. “I can’t think of any that are still out there that I had used as case studies that haven’t been redeveloped.” 

Thompson and his colleagues were right that the distinction between parking needs in a central city versus outlying neighborhoods can be arbitrary. In the lead-up to the removal of parking requirements in Edmonton in 2020, a citywide study of 277 sites found no clear geographic trend that related to how full parking lots were, even after factoring in variables like population density, walkability as measured by Walk Score, or drive-alone rate. Of all the sites surveyed, only 7 percent neared capacity at the busiest times of day. It was far more common for parking lots to remain half empty, as was the case for 47 percent of observed sites. 

In Fayetteville and other cities, eliminating parking minimums citywide has had another benefit: reducing administrative work and freeing up city staff to work on other things. “One of the things you find in American cities is that they’ve got all of these college-educated planners, many of whom actually have graduate degrees, and what they’re doing is spending hour after hour processing parking variances,” explained Siegman. 

Kevin Robinson was one of those planners, until he was hired as director of Planning and Development Services for Albemarle, North Carolina. To his surprise, the city had almost no parking requirements, having eliminated virtually all of them two decades prior. “However you came about it,” he recalls telling city officials, “I think you’re on the right track.” 

Towns where he had worked previously had only reduced parking requirements in central business districts, not citywide. “From an administrative standpoint, it’s a heck of a lot easier to deal with,” said Robinson. “Quite honestly, a lot of times [parking minimums] are very arbitrary numbers,” Robinson said. Now that he no longer has to enforce them, he has more time to spend on other aspects of development—including a downtown parking plan. He has plenty of data to rebut complaints that there isn’t enough parking. Even at peak hours, public parking never gets more than half full, his heatmaps indicate. 

Robinson acknowledges that eliminating parking minimums wasn’t a cure-all: “We are still seeing far more parking being built than is absolutely necessary.” (See sidebar to learn how the shift has played out in other cities.) Construction in Albemarle is picking up as people get priced out of nearby cities like Charlotte. In the last two years, this small city of 16,000 has approved permits for 3,000 new housing units, with another 1,000 in the works, including middle housing like duplexes and townhouses. 

Robinson is nervous that the parking requirements, which were discarded at a time when the city wasn’t growing, might return as development accelerates. “I’m trying to keep them from going in that direction,” he said. His concerns aren’t unfounded. 

When Mandates Make a U-Turn 

It took almost a decade for a new apartment building with no parking to arrive in Portland after the city waived requirements near transit in 2002. The political backlash came more swiftly. As Portland’s rental market tightened, the city found itself with the second-lowest vacancy rate in the country in 2012. Apartment construction was booming, and buildings without off-street parking were becoming increasingly common. 

Then controversy erupted. The epicenter was a 13-block section of Division Street, a car-oriented commercial corridor experiencing a building boom. By the time the issue made it to the front pages of Willamette Week, the local weekly paper, 11 new multifamily buildings were under development, seven with no parking at all.  

A city-commissioned survey of 115 residents of new apartment buildings would show that 72 percent of the respondents owned cars, with the majority parking on neighborhood streets. Even though the same survey showed that the areas around the buildings had plenty of available parking, neighbors didn’t perceive it that way.  

Mayor Charlie Hales, who had championed the removal of parking mandates as a council member in 2002, even floated the idea of instituting a building moratorium until the zoning code could be sorted out. Hales told Willamette Week that he had anticipated developers might build one parking spot instead of two, but hadn’t imagined banks would finance housing with no parking at all. 

In response to the outcry, Portland’s city council reinstituted a parking requirement for multifamily developments with more than 30 units. Those larger buildings would need to provide one parking space for every three or four units, depending on the building size. “That was the strategic retreat,” Hales explained. “We decided to adjust our ideal slightly to a watered-down version in order to reduce the controversy.” 

Hales, who is no longer mayor, still believes strongly in eliminating parking requirements. “There’s some things we really don’t need to regulate,” he said recently. “Minimum number of parking spaces is one of them.” Given the political pressure of the time, he has a hard time imagining how things could have worked out differently. 

While supporters of parking mandates prevailed in that case, the matter was far from settled. Several years after the 2013 brouhaha, regulated affordable housing near transit regained its exemption from parking requirements, after rising rents and economic displacement prompted Portland to declare a housing state of emergency and elect a tenant advocate to city council. Portland adopted an inclusionary zoning policy that same year, requiring multifamily buildings to set aside units for affordable housing—and waiving residential parking requirements for those buildings. 

Looking back, Portland activist Tony Jordan, who went on to launch the national Parking Reform Network, thinks the city was foolish to derail the housing construction wave. “Why would you do anything” to make developers think twice about investing in larger buildings, he asked. The way the code was written, adding one more unit to a 30-unit building came with “a penalty of six parking spaces, incentivizing builders to stay under the limit. “Even if we only lost 60 apartments,” he said, “that’s a housing subsidy that we just threw away—and for what?” 

Communities with No Parking Minimums 

According to the Parking Reform Network, the following communities do not have citywide minimum parking requirements (dates of implementation indicated when known). Learn more about these and other changes to U.S. parking mandates at www.parkingreform.org. 

• California: Alameda (2021), San Francisco (2018), Emeryville (2019) 

• Connecticut: Bridgeport (2022), Hartford (2017) 

• Georgia: Dunwoody (2019) 

• Indiana: South Bend (2021) 

• Michigan: Ann Arbor (2022), Mancelona, Ecorse (2020), River Rouge (2021) 

• Minnesota: Minneapolis (2021), St. Paul (2021) 

• Missouri: Branson 

• New Hampshire: Seabrook (2019), Dover (2015) 

• New York: Buffalo (2017), Canandaigua, Hudson (2019), Saranac Lake (2016) 

• North Carolina: Raleigh (2022) 

• Tennessee: Jackson (2021) 

• Texas: Bandera, Bastrop (2019) 

• Alberta: Edmonton (2020), High River (2021) 

Stopping Parking Spillover 

When parking complaints bubbled up in Portland’s Northwest neighborhood in 2016, the city was ready to try a different strategy: directly managing on-street parking. A local parking advisory committee had petitioned Portland’s city council to apply the citywide parking requirements to the growing district, which had historically been exempted. But when a study showed that those regulations would have made 23 percent of newly constructed homes in the neighborhood illegal, the council opted to improve the district’s fledgling parking permit program instead. 

“When city staff manage on-street parking properly, they can prevent that on-street parking from getting overcrowded with a 99 percent success rate,” said Siegman, who has spent much of his career studying spillover parking concerns. The problem, he said, is that almost no one has training in how to manage street parking in a way that is both effective and politically popular. On-street parking management is not part of the core curriculum for planners or transportation engineers. 

“What you’re essentially doing with on-street parking spaces is taking a valuable resource that belongs to the public and setting up rights to determine who gets to use it,” said Siegman. Any hotel manager knows that once the keys are gone, there is no vacancy. Yet cities often hand out multiple residential permits for every street space, and wait until the problem is so bad that neighbors have to petition for curbside management. When a neighborhood has more drivers seeking permits than there are on-street spaces, there are a number of ways to ensure balance. Boundaries for a parking district could exclude new buildings or households with driveways, or restrict the number of permits to the street frontage of the lot—forcing developers and incoming residents to make a plan for storing cars off-site.

Left to the Market, How Much Parking Gets Built? 

In Buffalo, New York, which struck down parking requirements in April 2017, a review of 36 major developments showed that 53 percent of projects still opted to include at least as many parking spaces as the previous code had required. The developers who did propose building less parking averaged 60 fewer parking spaces than the old minimum required, avoiding over eight acres of unnecessary asphalt and saving up to $30 million in construction costs. 

Seattle saw similar results after eliminating parking requirements near transit in 2012. A study of 868 residential developments permitted in the following five years found that 70 percent of new buildings in areas not subject to parking requirements still chose to have on-site parking. Collectively, the new buildings included 40 percent fewer parking spaces than would have previously been required, saving an estimated $537 million in construction costs and freeing up 144 acres of land. 

Siegman estimates the costs of setting up an effective parking permit program could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000—a bargain compared to the cost of building parking, which can run as much as $50,000 per space. “There are all kinds of different feelings about what’s fair,” Siegman said, “but you can often come to a solution that has durable majority political support.” 

That’s what officials in Vancouver, British Columbia, did in 2017 to resolve crowded curbs in the West End. Despite 94 percent of residents having access to an off-street parking space, many still preferred to park on the street. Over 6,000 drivers had opted for the $6 a month permit for the chance to park in one of the 2,747 on-street spaces. When the city raised permit prices to $30 per month—more in line with what private garages charged—and installed more parking meters, curb congestion cleared up. Before that change, only one out of five blocks met the city’s standards of being less than 85 percent full at the busiest time of day. Within two years of the pricing adjustments, all of the blocks measured below that threshold, making it far easier to find a parking space. 

The Next Wave of Parking Reform 

More and more, champions of eliminating parking mandates are getting elected to offices and planning commissions, according to Jordan, of the Parking Reform Network. “One person can really get the idea and push it through,” he said. The growing number of cities that have taken this deregulatory action provides political cover for policy makers who have been hesitant to go first. 

But parking reform advocates say change should and will happen beyond the local level. Since “the perceived benefits of instituting parking regulations [have been] almost entirely local,” Siegman said, he thinks almost all of the productive reform to get rid of minimum parking laws is going to come from regional, state, or national governments. 

A wave of legislation against parking mandates has been gathering momentum on the West Coast. In 2020, Washington State quietly capped excessive parking requirements near transit for market-rate and affordable housing. California’s third attempt to limit local parking requirements near public transit succeeded in September with the signing of AB 2097. That came on the heels of another statewide rollback in Oregon, where a state land use commission struck down parking mandates for projects near transit, affordable housing, and small homes across the state’s eight largest metro regions, which house 60 percent of Oregon’s population.  

By July 2023, nearly 50 cities in Oregon will need to choose between wholly eliminating minimum parking requirements or implementing a suite of other tools to manage parking and comply with the new administrative rule. They are sure to have lots of company, as municipalities and states across the nation weigh the harm these regulations have caused against the 20th century dream of free and easy parking. 

Aaron Gill, of the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission, has some simple advice for jurisdictions considering removing parking minimums: “I would say just do it. Don’t waste time having a discussion as to if it’s going to work or not. The reality is we have way too much parking in this country.” 

Catie Gould is a transportation researcher with the Seattle-based nonprofit think tank Sightline Institute. 

Lead image: Fordham Heights, New York. Credit: krblokhin via iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

Twenty miles upstream of Portland, Maine, lies Sebago Lake, the state’s deepest and second-biggest body of water. The lake provides drinking water to 16 percent of Maine’s population, including residents of Portland, the state’s largest city. It holds nearly a trillion gallons of clear, cold water. Portland’s water utility has earned one of only 50 federal filtration exemptions in the country, which means the water, although treated to ward off microorganisms, does not have to be filtered before it flows into the city’s taps.  

“The primary reason it’s so pure is that most of the watershed is still forested,” says Karen Young, director of Sebago Clean Waters, a coalition working to protect the area. Eighty-four percent of the 234,000-acre watershed is covered in forests—a mix of pine, oak, maple, and other species that filter water and help make this system work so well. But those forests face threats. Between 1987 and 2009, the watershed lost about 3.5 percent of its forest cover. Just 10 percent of the area was conserved. In 2009, 2014, and 2022, the U.S. Forest Service ranked the Sebago watershed as one of the nation’s most vulnerable, due to threats from development.  

Over the last couple of decades, conservation groups began to worry about the future of this critical resource—and the Portland Water District (PWD) was worried, too. An independent utility that serves more than 200,000 people in Greater Portland, PWD purchased 1,700 acres around the water intake in 2005 and adopted a land preservation policy in 2007. In 2013, it established a program to help support conservation projects undertaken by local and regional land trusts. 

Most of these organizations were working independently until 2015, when The Nature Conservancy brought them together to develop a conservation plan for the lake’s largest tributary, the Crooked River. That convening evolved into the Sebago Clean Waters coalition, which includes nine local and national conservation groups, the water district, and supporters from the business community. As they explored creative ways to protect the lake and the land around it, the idea of creating a water fund surfaced. 

Water funds are private-public partnerships in which downstream beneficiaries like utilities and businesses invest in upstream conservation projects to protect a water source—and, by extension, to ensure that the supply that reaches users is as clean and plentiful as possible. In 2016, Spencer Meyer of the Highstead Foundation—one of the groups that founded Sebago Clean Waters—took a trip to Quito, Ecuador, with The Nature Conservancy. The group visited with representatives of the Fund for the Protection of Water for Quito (FONAG), a leading example of this novel source water protection model. Meyer saw some similarities to the situation in Maine. 

“We thought, ‘What if we could bring the partners together as a whole system to accelerate the pace of conservation?’” he says. “And could we apply that model to a healthy watershed, to take a proactive position and build this financial model in a place where it isn’t too late?” 

A water fund is a financial tool, but it’s also a governance mechanism and management framework that brings multiple stakeholders to the table. Quito’s fund, launched in 2000, is the longest-standing one in the world. Similar projects have proliferated across the globe, particularly in Latin America and Africa. According to The Nature Conservancy, more than 43 water funds are operating in 13 countries on four continents, with at least 35 more in the works. 

The Importance of Healthy Watersheds 

Globally, clean water is our most important resource. When upstream watersheds are healthy, they collect, store, and filter water. That provides a resource that can, in addition to meeting basic hydration and sanitation needs, support climate change adaptation, food security, and community resilience. When watersheds are not healthy, sediment clogs up water filtration systems, pollutants flow downstream, and ecosystems become degraded. 

That difference is crucial. According to a Nature Conservancy report, more than half the world’s cities and 75 percent of irrigated agriculture are likely already facing recurring water shortages. Climate change is fueling extreme drought, from the U.S. West to Australia, and pollution from sources like nitrogen and phosphorus has grown ninefold in the last half century. In many cities, the source of water is far away and under different jurisdiction, which makes regulation and treatment challenging. 

The Nature Conservancy also estimates that 1.7 billion people living in the world’s largest cities currently depend on water flowing from fragile source watersheds hundreds of miles away. That puts strain on both ecological systems and infrastructure, and demand is only growing. By 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in those cities. That level of demand simply may not be sustainable, especially in a rapidly changing climate. Water funds can be creative, multilayered solutions to two urgent, interlocking issues: water quality and quantity. 

“Water funds sit at the intersection of land, water, and climate change,” says Chandni Navalkha, associate director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “They are an example of the kind of cross-sectoral, multi-stakeholder governance and collaboration that is required to maintain water security in a changing climate.” 

Navalkha recently oversaw the development of a case study of the Sebago Clean Waters initiative, which the Lincoln Institute will distribute through its International Land Conservation Network. Changing the way water has been historically managed isn’t easy, particularly because it’s tangled up in issues like city planning, economic growth, and public health. So groups like the Lincoln Institute and The Nature Conservancy are working to spread the water fund model by showing the science behind source water protection, giving communities tools to find ecosystem-specific solutions, and sharing the experiences of places like Portland and Quito. 

Lessons from Quito 

In the late 1990s, officials in the Metropolitan District of Quito started to worry that they were running out of water to support the city’s 2.6 million residents. The upstream ecosystems that filled the city’s aquifers were eroding, and those impacts were trickling downstream. 

A full 80 percent of the city’s water supply originated from protected areas within its watershed: the Antisana Ecological Reserve, Cayambe Coca National Park, and Cotopaxi National Park. “But they were only paper parks,” says Silvia Benitez, who works for The Nature Conservancy as water security manager for the Latin American Region. Instead of being protected, the area’s páramos—biodiverse high-altitude grasslands that are home to a range of rare endemic species and filter the upstream water supply—were facing multiple threats from livestock grazing, unsustainable agriculture, and construction. 

Where conservation was an option, lack of funding made it difficult to achieve. Benitez says water managers knew the situation needed to be addressed, so the Municipal Sewer and Potable Water Company of Quito and The Nature Conservancy set up a fund to support the upstream ecosystem with $21,000 in seed money. Over the next four years they built a board of public, private, and NGO watershed actors, including Quito Power Company, National Brewery, Consortium CAMAREN, which provides social and environmental policy training, and the Tesalia Springs Company, a multinational beverage corporation. All of those stakeholders had a vested interest in water, and each contributed to the trust every year. 

Today, FONAG is regulated by the Securities Market Law of Ecuador and has a growing endowment worth $22 million. That funding is used to support upstream environmental projects like agricultural training and plant restoration in the páramos, which helps limit sedimentation. 

“It’s a financial mechanism that harnesses investments from private and public sectors to protect and restore forests and ecosystems,” says Adriana Soto, The Nature Conservancy’s regional director for Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. It’s also a forward-thinking way to manage water, says Soto, who was previously vice minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia and serves on the board of the Lincoln Institute.  

Traditional water infrastructure—often called gray infrastructure—consists of pipes, water filtration systems, and chemical treatments, which are designed to purify water before it’s used. Gray infrastructure has long been relied on to ensure that water was potable and accessible. But it’s expensive and energy intensive, it can negatively impact wildlife and ecosystems, and it breaks down over time. Climate change is also posing threats to gray infrastructure; for instance, intensifying wildfires have led to increased sedimentation that chokes existing filtration plants, and virulent storm cycles have overwhelmed water treatment plants and other key pieces of infrastructure. 

By contrast, green infrastructure is a water management approach that takes its cue from nature. Protecting upstream water sources is a form of green infrastructure investment that can help alleviate the pressure on water systems. There are almost as many ways to manage source water as there are water sources, but The Nature Conservancy’s “Urban Water Blueprint” report, which surveyed more than 2,000 watersheds, identifies five archetypes: forest protection, reforestation, agricultural best management practices, riparian restoration, and forest fuel reduction. 

For instance, in the páramos above Quito, FONAG funded work to keep cattle off the most fragile grasslands and employed guards to stop rogue burning, because rebuilding the ecosystem was a top priority. Working across nearly 2,000 square miles, the fund has now protected more than 70,000 acres of land. This effort has benefited more than 3,500 families, providing funding to support sustainable, profitable farming operations. 

“One of the beauties of the strategy is the social and economic results,” Soto says. “It’s not just tackling water regulation, it tackles climate change resiliency, biodiversity conservation, and it strengthens communities and creates gender equality. Most of the farms are led by women.” 

Quito’s model inspired a swell of other water funds, many launched by The Nature Conservancy. Like these examples, each has place-specific strategies and funding structures: 

• In 2021, the Greater Cape Town Water Fund invested $4.25 million in removing invasive plants such as gum, pine, and eucalyptus trees, which were absorbing an estimated 15 billion gallons of water each year from this drought-stricken watershed—equal to a two-month water supply. More heavily engineered solutions like desalination plants or wastewater reuse systems would have cost 10 times as much, The Nature Conservancy estimated. 
• Since the Upper Tana–Nairobi Water Fund launched in 2015, organizers have worked with tens of thousands of the watershed’s 300,000 small farms to keep sediment from running down the region’s steep slopes into the Tana River, which provides water for 95 percent of Nairobi’s 4 million residents. The effort has reduced sediment concentration by over 50 percent, increased annual water yields during the dry season by up to 15 percent, and increased agricultural yields by up to $3 million per year. In 2021, the fund became an independent, Kenyan-registered entity. 

• The chemicals used in conventional bamboo production were polluting China’s Longwu Reservoir, which provides drinking water to two villages of 3,000 people. With an initial investment of $50,000, the Longwu Water Fund has helped local farmers adopt organic and integrated farming methods, now used in 70 percent of the area’s bamboo forests; promote ecotourism; and provide environmental education programs. In 2021, the water utility and local government agreed to pay into the fund on behalf of all water users. 

Measuring Progress 

Water funds support conservation projects that address a range of issues, including sedimentation and turbidity, nutrient build-up, and aquifer recharge. They also create social and environmental cobenefits, like protecting and regenerating habitat and sequestering emissions. 

There are financial upsides as well: according to The Nature Conservancy, these investments in land management can provide more than $2 in benefits for every $1 invested over 30 years. One in six cities could recoup the costs of investing in upstream conservation through savings in annual water treatment costs alone.  

Creating a water fund requires establishing governance systems, securing funding, identifying conservation goals, and defining benchmarks for measuring progress. “The business case development is hard: how much money, where is it going to be invested,” Soto says. Part of the business case is demonstrating the ecological and financial benefit of a fund. Soto says that’s the biggest challenge, because the benefits of conservation are long term, and don’t present themselves immediately. 

“Water is difficult,” she says. “The challenge is not only time—we have to prove the case over many years—but also the aggregated result. How much of the water quality or quantity is because of the water fund?” She says FONAG struggled to find a way to quantify that, but researchers from San Francisco de Quito University helped set up a monitoring system that tracked water quality and quantity. That system has been used to mark progress and to show investors the direct benefits of this work.  

“It’s not an easy sell, especially when you’re talking about committing funding for 50 or 70 years,” Benitez says. “But now, 20 years later, we have a lot of tools to show the benefits of nature-based solutions.”  

She says that over those years, as The Nature Conservancy has introduced water funds in Colombia, Brazil, and other countries, they’ve learned to show potential partners concrete, measurable outcomes, and they’ve gathered tools and science to back up the work. 

Scaling Up 

Quito’s project has been considered a success over the years, but while building a single water fund is one thing, scaling the concept is another. As the water fund model has expanded to other countries and continents, challenges have come up. Changing the way water institutions think and operate takes time and negotiation. On the financial side, transaction and set-up costs can be high, and there’s no clear framework to compare the costs of nature-based solutions and gray infrastructure. Logistically, setting up a fund is different every time; Cape Town’s invasive species problem is different, for example, from Quito’s páramo protection needs. 

To address these challenges, The Nature Conservancy—along with the Inter-American Development Bank, the FEMSA Foundation, the Global Environment Facility, and the International Climate Initiative—formed the Latin America Water Funds Partnership in 2011. The goal of the partnership, which is described in From the Ground Up, a recently published Lincoln Institute Policy Focus Report, is to scale the development of water funds in the region and provide a global model for how to help urban centers with source water protection. 

A year after its launch, the partnership published a manual intended to provide resources that could guide work everywhere, even though each place faced specific challenges. “We have water funds that work with indigenous groups upstream, and we have other funds that have more large landowners, or small farmers,” Benitez says. “Our common purpose is to establish agreement with the groups and set up the responsibilities of the fund.”  

That’s different in every case, but there are certain elements that can help make a water fund successful, like political involvement. For instance, Soto says that in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cartagena, fund organizers made sure to involve Colombia’s Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Housing, which is in charge of graywater. “Having them on board provides a platform to facilitate policy change, so we don’t start from scratch,” she says. The Nature Conservancy also offers strategies to engage companies, and to show them how supporting water funds reduces their long-term risk. 

In 2018, The Nature Conservancy took the framework a step further, building a Water Funds Toolbox designed to guide potential partners through five stages of a project: feasibility, design, creation, operation, and consolidation. The toolbox, which leans on 20 years of accrued knowledge, shows how and where a water fund can help with water quality and availability, and provides a framework for the financial and conservation side of planning, too. 

Maine Adopts the Model

In Maine, the members of Sebago Clean Waters took that toolbox and ran with it. “From the very beginning, we strived to design Sebago Clean Waters as a replicable model for other coalitions, regions, and water funds to learn from,” said Meyer, of the Highstead Foundation. 

The coalition assessed the fund’s feasibility, commissioning a study by the University of Maine. The study found that reducing area forest cover by even 3 percent could noticeably increase pollutants. If forest cover decreased by 10 percent, it would cause the watershed to fall below federal filtration standards, the study said: “Protecting the filtration-avoidance waiver saves PWD and its customers an estimated $15 million per year in expected additional annual filtration plant costs.” 

The economic argument was strong. The researchers found that every dollar invested in forestland conservation is likely to yield between $4.80 and $8.90 in benefits, including the preservation of water quality. If a filtration plant became necessary, however, PWD would need to increase water rates by about 84 percent to offset the costs of construction. There were ecological benefits to conserving the watershed, too, like providing habitat for trout and salmon, reducing erosion, and managing floods. 

Sebago Clean Waters came up with a plan to ensure that a total of 25 percent of the watershed—35,000 acres—was conserved over the course of 15 years. They started with projects like the 1,400-acre Tiger Hill Community Forest in the town of Sebago. That tract was protected through a partnership between the Loon Echo Land Trust, a member of the coalition that has worked to protect the northern Sebago Lake region since 1987, and the Trust for Public Land. In 2021, Sebago Clean Waters announced its participation in a deal that would protect more than 12,000 acres in Oxford County, including the headwaters of the Crooked River, the lake’s main tributary. The amount of protected land in the watershed has increased from 10 percent to 15 percent.  

Land conservation isn’t cheap or easy, especially in New England, where much of the lakeside land has long been in private hands. Achieving the water fund’s goals will take an estimated $15 million. But the fund is gaining momentum: building on an initial capacity-building grant of $350,000 from the U.S Endowment for Forestry and Communities; private and corporate funding; and a commitment by the Portland Water District to provide up to 25 percent of funding for each watershed conservation project that meets its criteria, the coalition recently landed an $8 million Regional Conservation Partnership Program award from the USDA. 

Local businesses have also stepped up. In 2019, Portland’s Allagash Brewing offered to donate 10 cents from every barrel of beer it brewed, a total of about $10,000 a year. Allagash was the first of about 10 companies—including four other breweries—that have joined the coalition. MaineHealth, a statewide hospital network, just got involved as well. 

“Drinking water is so compelling, it’s not a hard sell to talk to people about protecting it—particularly the breweries, because beer is 90 percent water,” Young says. “They understand the benefit as a business and as a community member.” She’s been surprised at the reasons so many partners have come on board. Many aren’t doing it because of their bottom line; they’re concerned with sustainability, and with supporting the communities where their employees live. 

Sebago Clean Waters has accomplished a great deal, but its members are very aware of the time-sensitive need to protect this relatively pristine resource. After all, conserving land and water is easier than restoring them. Once a clean water source is gone, it’s hard to bring back. 

As the water fund model spreads, it’s illustrating the real potential of upstream-downstream partnerships to make meaningful change. This work is not simple or immediate, but it can have lasting positive impacts in watersheds and communities around the world. Meyer said the model holds great promise: “It’s powerful to see how far a trust-based partnership can go.” 

Heather Hansman is a Colorado-based journalist and the author of the book Downriver. She’s a Registered Maine Guide and a lover of the state’s rivers. 

Lead image: Sebago Lake, Maine. Credit: Phil Sunkel via iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

In northern California, three regional agencies representing some 11 million people are banding together to address long-term transportation planning issues. In the Northeast, a dozen states are collaborating on an effort to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. And in other places across the United States, from the Southwest to the Midwest, governments and organizations in large metropolitan areas are embracing regional strategies to address challenges that cross jurisdictional boundaries. 

It’s an approach that planners have been encouraging for some time, as adjacent U.S. metro areas seemed increasingly destined to merge. Jonathan Barnett remembers attending a conference in London in 2004, and watching as maps of expected urban growth and regional development in the United States flashed onto a screen. At the time, Barnett was the director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his colleagues had been pondering the implications of Census Bureau projections that the U.S. population might grow 50 percent or more by 2050, an increase of more than 100 million people. 

“What popped out at everybody in the room was that there was a pattern emerging in the maps of where these people were going to go,” Barnett says. “You can see [these urban patterns] from space, and it’s a little like looking at the stars and seeing Orion and Sagittarius. We realized that something important was happening.” 

Bob Yaro was in the room that day, too. “You could see that, across the country, the suburbs of one metropolitan region were merging with the suburbs of the next metropolitan region,” recalls Yaro, who led the Regional Plan Association at the time while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. “Physically, these places were becoming integrated with each other. And then when we looked at economic and demographic trends, you could see that in fact the lives of these cities and metropolitan areas were merging with their neighbors.” 

This was hardly the first time that geographers and planners had taken note of the way linked metropolitan areas can share economies, natural resource systems, infrastructure, history, and culture. But by the turn of the 21st century, the scope and pace of the phenomenon were reaching new levels in the United States.  

Not long after the conference in London, Armando Carbonell—who retired from the Lincoln Institute this year after leading its urban planning program for more than two decades—gave the phenomenon a name that would stick: megaregions. 

A band of planners, including Yaro, Barnett, and others, has picked up the banner of megaregions, arguing that these urban areas have an outsize importance nationally. “More than eight in 10 Americans live in these places, and it’s over 90 percent of the economy of the country,” Yaro says. “So it’s very clear that if these places don’t succeed or aren’t operating at their full potential, the whole country’s economy and livability will suffer.” 

This spring, the Lincoln Institute published Megaregions and America’s Future, which Yaro wrote with Ming Zhang, director of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, and Frederick Steiner, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. They argue that megaregions may offer a way for the United States to contend with challenges that don’t respect arbitrary political boundaries, from climate change to public health crises like COVID-19. Megaregions can, if properly and creatively governed, strengthen climate resilience, natural resource management, economic competitiveness, and equity at the local, regional, and national levels. 

What Constitutes a Megaregion 

For more than a century, the heavily populated region stretching from Boston to Washington, DC, has drawn the attention of geographers. In his 1915 book Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes gave the swath of urban development running from Boston to New York the decidedly unlovely term “conurbation.” In 1961, French geographer Jean Gottman called the region a “megalopolis.” And in 1967, Herman Kahn gave the whole corridor the equally unlovely name “BosWash.” 

It would take another three decades before these boundary-busting phenomena began receiving more comprehensive academic attention, but the pace has been picking up over the last 20 years as the University of Pennsylvania, the Lincoln Institute, and others have worked to advance people’s understanding of what megaregions are and how they function. 

Definitions vary of what, exactly, constitutes a megaregion, but they are generally defined as regional economies that clearly extend beyond an individual metropolitan area. “I think of megaregions as a way of thinking about space, more than as real things that are out there,” says Carbonell. “I see it as a construct and a tool, [but] megaregions are not fixed and they change.” 

Researchers have used a variety of innovative approaches to identify and delineate individual megaregions. One analysis looked at the commuting habits of more than 4.2 million Americans to identify megaregions. Another used satellite imagery to identify contiguously lighted urban agglomerations across the globe, then—with a sort of Seussian whimsy—gave those places names like So-Flo, Chi-Pitts, Char-Lanta, Tor-Buff-Chester, and Am-Brus-Twerp (Florida, Gulden, and Mellander 2008). To estimate economic activity in each megaregion, that study combined the satellite-imaged light footprints with population and GDP data, extrapolating a “Light-based Regional Product.” It also used the number of patent registrations and highly cited scientific authors in each megaregion as a measure of technological and scientific innovation. 

At this point, researchers have identified about 40 megaregions around the world (see sidebar). In Megaregions and America’s Future, the authors focus on 13 megaregions in the United States (see map). Those are the venerable Northeast; Piedmont Atlantic, a southern stretch that includes sections of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; Florida; Great Lakes; Gulf Coast; Central Plains; Texas Triangle; Front Range in Colorado; Basin and Range (Utah and Idaho); Cascadia (the Pacific Northwest from Portland to Vancouver, BC); Northern California; Southern California; and Arizona’s Sun Corridor (Yaro, Zhang, and Steiner 2022). 

Many of these megaregions have economies that put them within the rankings of the world’s biggest national economies. In 2018, for example, the Northeast megaregion had a GDP of $4.54 trillion—more than that of Germany. The same year, the nearly $1.8 trillion GDP of the Southern California megaregion was larger than that of Canada. In many ways, a megaregion is an increasingly spontaneous and organic unit of organization, one that presents more opportunity than the traditional political divisions that it transcends. 

Megaregions Around the Globe 

Scholars have identified more than 40 megaregions around the world, and several more are rapidly forming in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Established megaregions include: 

Pentagon, Europe. This region, whose outlines are defined by Paris, London, Hamburg, Munich, and Milan, was identified as an economic and transportation hub in 1999. It covers about 20 percent of the continent and is responsible for 60 percent of its economic output. Several other megaregion models have also been applied and explored in Europe. 

Tokaido, Japan. The corridor between Tokyo and Osaka is home to more than half of the country’s population. Its cities are linked by the Shinkansen high-speed rail network, which has reduced travel time between Tokyo and Osaka from eight hours in the early 20th century to two and a half hours today; a bullet train in development will further reduce the trip to one hour. 

Pearl River Delta, China. The most densely populated urban area in the world, the Pearl River Delta includes Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. The Chinese government has invested several hundred billion dollars in high-speed rail designed to strengthen connections within and among the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, the region around Beijing and Tianjin, and burgeoning megaregions in coastal and inland areas. 

Collaborating on Climate Mitigation 

One of the most prominent examples of successful initiatives that span a megaregion is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cooperative effort to cap and reduce power sector carbon dioxide emissions in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Known in shorthand as “Reggie,” it is the first mandatory cap and trade program for greenhouse gas emissions in the country and now spans 12 states. 

At the turn of the 21st century, efforts to establish a national cap and trade framework for greenhouse gas emissions were fizzling. In 2003, then–New York Governor George Pataki sent a letter to the governors of other states in the Northeast proposing a bipartisan effort to fight climate change. In 2005, the initial agreement to implement RGGI was signed by the governors of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont. In 2007, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland signed on. 

“I think for the states that recognized that climate change was real and a problem, there was a desire and an appetite to take some leadership,” says Bruce Ho, who heads the Natural Resource Defense Council’s work on RGGI. “Climate change is a global problem, and we need to be acting as much as possible in a coordinated way. But at the same time, there’s a recognition that you have to start somewhere.” 

Even as climate change efforts at the federal level foundered, RGGI got stronger and expanded. In 2014, the participating states reduced the emissions cap by 40 percent and committed to further year-by-year reductions. Then in 2017, the states agreed to aim for an even steeper decline in emissions, and also agreed to extend those emissions reductions efforts through at least 2030. 

Since RGGI began, power plant emissions have decreased by more than 50 percent—twice as much as the national decrease during the same time—and the program has raised over $4 billion by auctioning carbon allowances. That money has been invested in local energy efficiency programs, renewable energy, and other initiatives. Virginia, for example, dedicates half of its RGGI funding to low-income energy efficiency programs and puts the other half toward flood preparedness and sea-level rise mitigation in coastal communities. 

While not immune to criticism, RGGI is “an early example of a megaregion-scale initiative that has held up quite well,” says Carbonell—and it continues to gain momentum. Although then–Governor Chris Christie withdrew New Jersey from RGGI in 2012, the state rejoined in 2020. Virginia joined in 2021, and Pennsylvania followed this year. Leaders in North Carolina, spurred by a citizens’ rulemaking petition, are now considering joining RGGI as well. 

Hopes for High-Speed Rail 

One of the key challenges of megaregions is how people get around within them. Because megaregions can run 300 to 800 miles across, they demand an approach to transportation that has largely been ignored in the United States. “They’re too small to be efficiently traversed by air, and too large to be easily traversed by road,” Yaro says. “And then on top of that, the airports, airspace, and the interstate highway links in these places are highly congested.”  

Putting a new emphasis on high-speed rail, which can reach speeds over 200 miles per hour, will help relieve a transportation system that is groaning under strain nationwide, says Yaro, who is now president of the North Atlantic Rail Alliance, a group advocating a high-speed and high-performance “rail-enabled economic development strategy” for New York and New England. In addition to reducing congestion, highspeed rail can decrease emissions; it can also spur economic development by connecting people with jobs and other opportunities throughout a region. 

Plenty of successful examples of high-speed rail systems exist worldwide. In Japan, for example, the world’s first high-speed rail line—the famous Shinkansen, or bullet train—has linked Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka into a single megaregion. The system, which now carries over 420,000 passengers each weekday, will mark its 60th year of service in 2024. In Europe, nine countries now operate high-speed rail on more than 5,500 miles of track. Perhaps no country has embraced high-speed rail as enthusiastically as China. Since just 2008, its government has built a system that reaches practically every corner of the sprawling country on more than 23,500 miles of track—and counting. 

In the United States, an early realization of the concept’s potential has been slow to gain traction. In 1966, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island proposed a high-speed line between Boston and Washington in his book, Megalopolis Unbound: The Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow. In 2000, Amtrak started Acela service between Boston and Washington. Because it reaches 150 miles per hour, it qualifies as high-speed rail—yet it hits that upper limit over only about 34 miles of the 457-mile route. The Acela’s average speed is just 70 miles per hour. 

Plans for intercity high-speed rail have been considered or are underway in other regions; the Texas Central Line would connect Dallas and Houston, while the Brightline West project would link Southern California to Las Vegas. Elsewhere in California, construction is underway on an ambitious line that will connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a second phase extending the line north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. But challenges related to funding, politics, and logistics have meant that high-speed rail has barely made it out of the blocks. 

Early versions of last year’s infrastructure bill included $10 billion for high-speed rail, but that was cut during negotiations. While proponents keep pushing for meaningful federal investment in a high-speed network, megaregions can also benefit from investments in existing systems—or “fast-enough rail,” as Barnett dubs it in his book Designing the Megaregion: “There are many transportation improvements that can be made incrementally to give a much better structure to the evolving megaregions.” 

Sharing Solutions in California 

The Northern California Megaregion extends across the cities of the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and the San Joaquin Valley. The region has seen a dramatic increase in commuters from inland communities like Tracy and Stockton to jobs in the Bay Area, and has some of the nation’s longest average commute times.  

James Corless heads the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, but previously worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the agency responsible for planning and financing regional transportation in the Bay Area. In the mid-2000s, he says, regional agencies began looking at the swath of cities running from the Bay Area to Sacramento as an emerging megaregion, and gave it a name that put it squarely in the ranks of places like So-Flo and Char-Lanta. “We actually coined the phrase ‘San Framento,’” Corless says. “Everybody hated it. But it got people’s attention.” 

In 2015, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Sacramento Area Council of Governments, and San Joaquin Council of Governments signed an MOU to create a Megaregion Working Group. Their goal: to begin tackling issues that transcended the boundaries of the 16 counties and 136 cities they collectively represented.  

It took a while for the effort to gain momentum, precisely because of the sprawling nature of the megaregion. “I kept seeing these megaregion meetings pop up on my calendar and then get canceled,” Corless says. “Because for elected officials to get together from across these 16 counties, it requires an entire day of travel.” 

The arrival of COVID, and the resulting turn toward conducting government business via Zoom, helped bridge that distance and give the effort momentum. “At first, we were struggling a little bit to find our focus,” Corless says. Gradually, though, the participating entities began asking a simple question: “Where are we stronger together?”  

Late in 2021, the Megaregion Working Group announced a list of a dozen transportation-focused projects, from highway improvements to expansion of three regional rail lines. The California high-speed rail system that’s under construction—but far from completion—doesn’t much play into the working group’s plans, Corless says. “I have no doubt that high-speed rail will be a game changer,” he says. But “if we could just get reliable medium-speed rail, we’ll take that.” 

In fact, much of the megaregional effort is more quotidian than flashy infrastructure projects. The partners are focusing on integrating their regional plans and synchronizing their long-range planning cycles. “Because so much of our travel and even our housing markets are now intertwined,” Corless says, “if we’re looking out at the next 25 years, we need to be in sync.” 

The concept of megaregions is coming of age, Corless says, in much the same way that the rise of metropolitan planning organizations helped meet new challenges in the 1960s. “Once American cities suburbanized,” he says, “you couldn’t rely on the central city to do everything. People were more mobile, economies were bigger, and the issues transcended local city and county boundaries.” 

Moving Megaregions Forward 

What will it take to push the megaregion concept—which essentially invites those metropolitan planning organizations to an even bigger table—more squarely into the public consciousness and the policy realm?  

Bob Yaro thinks one answer is the climate crisis, which could push regions to work together in new ways. “I think it takes a crisis to do anything big in this country,” Yaro says. “You read these stories about whole counties running out of water. And that’s only going to get worse. [To address] the climate issue, you need both adaptation and mitigation strategies, and those mitigation strategies probably become most efficacious at the megaregion scale.” 

The RGGI initiative in the Northeast offers one example of how that kind of collaboration can work; the current water crisis in the desert Southwest offers another. There, tough times have, somewhat paradoxically, made for closer connections. Communities and governments have looked toward their neighbors and realized that they can do more together. 

The seven U.S. states that rely on water from the Colorado River, along with Mexico, have historically had an extremely contentious relationship. Yet, while recent headlines scream about impending water catastrophe, those parties have for more than 20 years been quietly working together on agreements intended to minimize the collective damage that they might suffer. A sense of partnership, however tenuous and prone to ongoing tensions, has been supplanting longstanding parochial attitudes toward the river.  

As metro regions melt together and global challenges ramp up, a growing sense of shared fate with historically distant neighbors could help tackle all kinds of problems that might once have seemed insurmountable. 

“I think one of the things we need to do is redefine ‘home,’ and the Southwest is Exhibit A on why that needs to happen,” Yaro says. “I think it’s redefining home at this larger scale. The final boundaries are going to depend on an individual community’s sense of association with their neighbors—but the place doesn’t succeed unless we do that.” 

Matt Jenkins is a freelance writer who has contributed to the New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and numerous other publications. 

Lead image: A rendering of the United States as seen from space, based on NASA images. Credit: DKosig via iStock.