“Solo quiero decirle una palabra.
Solo una palabra”.
“Sí, señor”.
“¿Está escuchando?”
“Sí”.
“Plásticos”.
“¿A qué se refiere exactamente?”.
“Hay un gran futuro en los plásticos.
Piénselo. ¿Lo pensará?”.

Me disculpo con mis amigos millennials, pero es inevitable delatar mi edad con este ejemplo emblemático de consejo no solicitado que le dio McGuire a Benjamin en El graduado. Captura lo que más me molesta de los think-tanks sobre políticas: el hábito de proporcionar consejos no solicitados al por mayor. Los think-tanks a menudo evocan preguntas que presumen relevantes, las analizan y, luego, distribuyen recomendaciones de políticas a audiencias desconocidas.

No hay nada menos atractivo que un consejo no solicitado, y los consejos no solicitados sobre políticas, incluso cuando tienen buenas intenciones, socavan el trayecto de resolución de problemas del destinatario y, a menudo, generan frustración. El consejo se suele centrar en el resultado deseado, no en el proceso que se debe emprender para llegar allí. Incluso peor, quien da el consejo no tiene ninguna responsabilidad por el resultado. Al ofrecer soluciones sin inversión, quien da el consejo no arriesga nada, mientras que el receptor lidia con las posibles consecuencias de actuar según el consejo. ¿Cómo se esperaba exactamente que Benjamin manifestara el potencial de los plásticos?

Se nos conoce por hacer esto en el Instituto Lincoln. Tomemos el ejemplo de la recuperación de plusvalías del suelo: Durante décadas, hemos aconsejado a los gobiernos locales que utilicen esta herramienta de financiamiento basada en el suelo para movilizar renta que pueda ayudar a pagar la infraestructura urbana. Hemos sugerido a los financiadores municipales que suscriban préstamos contra la renta futura capturada de los incrementos del valor del suelo. Hemos escrito documentos para presentarles el concepto a los gobiernos y los financiadores, descrito múltiples herramientas de recuperación de plusvalías del suelo que pueden usar y producido estudios de casos de buenas prácticas en lugares como San Pablo. Pero, a menudo, no nos hemos acercado a los profesionales para ayudarlos a decidir qué herramientas de recuperación de plusvalías del suelo son las mejores para sus circunstancias y aprender con ellos a medida que las adoptan y las implementan. Eso está por cambiar.

Antes de explicar cómo, permítanme señalar que otro tipo de consejo inútil son las “buenas prácticas”. Defender “buenas prácticas” para resolver problemas sociales, económicos o medioambientales complejos ignora el contexto del desafío en cuestión, no tiene en cuenta los recursos o capacidades de las personas y organizaciones que intentan adaptar el enfoque exitoso de alguien más y, a menudo, genera frustración e ineficiencia cuando la solución prescrita no se alinea con la realidad. La idea de las buenas prácticas ahoga la innovación y la creatividad, desalienta la exploración y la experimentación y suele pasar por alto soluciones más apropiadas y eficaces. Y, en todo caso, ¿quién sabe si la práctica es “buena“?

El mundo es dinámico y el contexto importa. Confiar solo en las normas establecidas promueve la aceptación pasiva en lugar de fomentar un entorno en el que las personas cuestionan las suposiciones y se involucran de forma activa en la resolución de los problemas. En lugar de adherirse ciegamente a las “buenas prácticas”, una mejor estrategia para abordar problemas complejos radica en comprender el contexto y adoptar un enfoque basado en principios. Esto defiende la adaptabilidad y fomenta soluciones personalizadas para abordar los matices únicos de cada desafío. Obliga a las personas a sopesar varias opciones y tomar decisiones informadas basadas en la evidencia y la lógica.

Entonces, ¿cómo se relaciona esto con el trabajo del Instituto Lincoln? Este otoño, con nuestro socio Claremont Lincoln University (CLU), lanzamos el programa Lincoln Vibrant Communities. Este nuevo proyecto encarna nuestras mejores ideas sobre cómo atravesar la brecha entre la teoría y la práctica. Prioriza el liderazgo, la acción, la colaboración y los resultados tangibles. Es una iniciativa audaz e innovadora que busca transformar la forma en que trabajamos, aprendemos y actuamos juntos para resolver los desafíos apremiantes que enfrentan las ciudades de todos los tamaños.

Muchas comunidades, en particular las que enfrentan dificultades económicas, carecen de la capacidad (recursos financieros y humanos) para implementar planes de desarrollo ambiciosos. La burocracia, las regulaciones obsoletas y las estructuras de poder muy arraigadas impiden el progreso y reprimen la innovación. Con frecuencia, la falta de confianza entre los residentes y los dirigentes locales, junto con las limitadas oportunidades de participación significativa, socavan la eficacia de las iniciativas de desarrollo. La mayoría de las veces, la presión para producir resultados inmediatos hace que los profesionales se centren en soluciones rápidas en lugar de soluciones sostenibles a largo plazo.

En las próximas décadas, capacitaremos a una nueva generación de dirigentes y los equiparemos con las habilidades, las herramientas y los recursos para transformar sus ciudades. Ayudaremos a estos dirigentes a involucrar a equipos intersectoriales en sus comunidades que puedan trabajar con los residentes a fin de ser dueños de su propio futuro mediante la resolución colectiva de problemas complejos. Lincoln Vibrant Communities proporcionará la capacitación, las herramientas, los recursos y el apoyo necesarios para convertir las ideas en realidad. Y tenemos la intención de realizarlo a escala.

Nuestra nueva iniciativa se inspira en los mejores programas de capacitación de desarrollo del liderazgo y basados en desafíos que hemos visto, incluidos los programas Fulcrum Fellow y Community Catalyst del Centro para la Inversión Comunitaria y el programa Achieving Excellence de NeighborWorks America. Se basa en los superpoderes tanto de CLU como del Instituto Lincoln, ya que adapta el plan de estudios de formación para el liderazgo de CLU y se sustenta en la vasta fuente de investigación, herramientas políticas y experiencia del instituto.

Lincoln Vibrant Communities comienza con la identificación y la capacitación de dirigentes emergentes de diversos orígenes y sectores. Estas personas completarán un programa intensivo de desarrollo para el liderazgo de seis meses centrado en comprender las complejidades de los desafíos urbanos, potenciar las habilidades para el liderazgo colaborativo, desarrollar capacidades de planificación e implementación estratégica y aprender a aprovechar los activos y recursos de la comunidad. Después de completar la capacitación, estos dirigentes regresarán a sus respectivas ciudades y reclutarán equipos diversos de personas que representen a los sectores público, privado y ciudadano. Esta colaboración intersectorial es vital para abordar desafíos complejos que exigen soluciones multifacéticas.

Cada equipo identificará un desafío importante al que se enfrenta su ciudad. Esto podría abarcar una gama de problemas, desde la revitalización económica y la vivienda asequible hasta la sostenibilidad medioambiental y la seguridad pública. Luego, los equipos regresarán para recibir capacitación integral en equipo durante seis meses adicionales, lo cual les dará herramientas y políticas desarrolladas por el Instituto Lincoln. Esta capacitación proporcionará un marco para enfrentar sus desafíos y construir soluciones sostenibles. Con la guía de formadores experimentados, los equipos elaborarán planes de acción detallados. Luego, los equipos regresarán a sus comunidades y se embarcarán en la aventura de implementar sus planes. A lo largo de este proceso de 18 meses, los equipos recibirán apoyo continuo y, lo más importante, asesoramiento del programa para garantizar que no se desvíen y que superen cualquier obstáculo que puedan encontrar.

Lincoln Vibrant Communities tiene el potencial de revolucionar el campo del desarrollo comunitario y económico. Al atravesar el espacio entre la teoría y la práctica y empoderar a los dirigentes locales para que actúen, el programa está diseñado para producir mejoras concretas en las ciudades participantes. Al enfrentar los principales desafíos con determinación, los equipos harán una diferencia real en las vidas de los residentes locales. Además, el programa desarrollará la capacidad de los dirigentes y las comunidades locales para diseñar soluciones para desafíos complejos que puedan implementarse una y otra vez. Las habilidades y el conocimiento adquiridos a través de Lincoln Vibrant Communities tendrán un impacto duradero, lo que permitirá a las comunidades continuar progresando mucho después de que concluya el programa.

Este programa culminará en una red creciente y curada de solucionadores especializados de problemas comunitarios. Nuestro enfoque cultiva la innovación al priorizar la comprensión y la adaptación sobre la implementación de memoria. Fomenta un espíritu de aprendizaje continuo al incitar a las personas a reflexionar sobre sus experiencias y perfeccionar sus estrategias de resolución de problemas. Lincoln Vibrant Communities no se trata solo de resolver problemas, sino de construir un movimiento de dirigentes empoderados que se comprometan a crear ciudades vibrantes, sostenibles y equitativas. Al cerrar la brecha entre teoría y práctica, podemos liberar todo el potencial de nuestras comunidades y crear un futuro más próspero para todas las personas.

George W. McCarthy es presidente y director ejecutivo del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Imagen principal: El programa Lincoln Vibrant Communities está diseñado para dotar a los responsables de la formulación de políticas locales de la capacidad y la convicción para abordar problemas sociales, ambientales y económicos complejos. Crédito: Claremont Lincoln University (CLU).

Municipios grandes y pequeños, desde Florida hasta Nueva Inglaterra, y desde Canadá hasta Australia, han anunciado proyectos piloto relacionados con la IA centrados en las tareas cotidianas que mantienen a nuestras ciudades en constante movimiento.

“Se trata de acelerar estos procesos realmente mundanos, y luego permitir que expertos con un alto nivel de formación y especialización se centren en lo que en realidad necesita concentración”.

No va a reemplazar a las personas. Nunca vamos a emitirle un permiso de construcción de un bot de IA”.

En el animado debate cultural sobre los riesgos y las posibilidades de la inteligencia artificial, las ventajas y desventajas imaginadas se han inclinado hacia lo sensacionalista. Se le ha prestado poca atención masiva al potencial impacto de la tecnología en las tareas cotidianas que mantienen a nuestras ciudades en movimiento, como las revisiones de permisos de construcción, los procesos de solicitud de urbanización y el cumplimiento del código de planificación. Pero las necesidades en esas áreas son bastante reales, y resulta que los experimentos para aplicar los últimos avances de la IA en este tipo de operaciones ya están en marcha. Municipios grandes y pequeños, desde Florida hasta Nueva Inglaterra, y desde Canadá hasta Australia, han anunciado proyectos piloto relacionados con la IA y otros esfuerzos exploratorios.

Si bien los enfoques varían, los desafíos son prácticamente universales. Determinar si los proyectos de construcción o urbanización propuestos cumplen con todos los códigos de suelo y edificación es un proceso detallado, a menudo lento: puede ser confuso para los solicitantes y requerir un extenso trabajo de fondo para los municipios y otras autoridades. La esperanza es que la IA pueda ayudar a que ese proceso, o “las partes tediosas del planeamiento de las ciudades”, como lo expresó sin rodeos la publicación Government Technology, sean más rápidos y eficaces, así como más precisos y comprensibles. Lo ideal sería que incluso permitiera a los departamentos de planificación racionalizar y reasignar recursos.

Pero, según explicaron con claridad los funcionarios de la ciudad que en verdad están trabajando con la nueva tecnología, hay un largo camino por recorrer para llegar a ese punto. Y, dado que algunos de los momentos más publicitados de la IA hasta la fecha han involucrado fracasos avergonzantes (como la herramienta de búsqueda de IA de Google que asesora a los usuarios sobre los beneficios de comer rocas y agregar pegamento a la pizza), la mayoría está procediendo con cuidado.

Suele haber un “ciclo de exageración” entre la promesa temprana de una nueva tecnología y la eventual realidad, advierte Andreas Boehm, el gerente de ciudades inteligentes de Kelowna, Columbia Británica, una ciudad de alrededor de 145.000 habitantes. El equipo de Boehm se encarga de buscar nuevas oportunidades para aprovechar las innovaciones tecnológicas para la ciudad y sus residentes. Aunque se dice mucho, aún no hemos visto muchos “ejemplos concretos y tangibles” de la IA como una fuerza “transformadora” en los sistemas de planificación, dice Boehm. Pero es posible que pronto comencemos a ver resultados reales.

Boehm señala que Canadá está experimentando una escasez de viviendas, y un avance más rápido en las nuevas construcciones podría ayudar. El proceso para obtener permisos tiene incluso más obstáculos con las consultas de los propietarios actuales sobre la zonificación y los problemas de código para proyectos más rutinarios. Durante algunos años, Kelowna ha usado un chatbot para responder preguntas comunes, dice Boehm. Eso ha ayudado a liberar un poco de tiempo, pero la versión generativa más reciente de la IA puede manejar una gama mucho más amplia de consultas, redactadas en lenguaje natural, con respuestas precisas y específicas. Así que Kelowna comenzó a trabajar con Microsoft para crear una versión nueva y mucho más sofisticada de la herramienta que incorpora la funcionalidad de IA Copilot de Microsoft, que la ciudad utiliza hoy en día como ayuda para quienes solicitan permisos.

Boehm dice que el equipo de Ciudades Inteligentes y sus asesores trabajaron con varios residentes (incluidos aquellos sin conocimientos de permisos) y con constructores experimentados para desarrollar la herramienta, que puede dar respuestas de alto nivel o señalar disposiciones específicas del código. Ha agilizado y acelerado el proceso de solicitud de forma notable. “Libera el tiempo del personal” dado que el personal debe hacerse cargo de menos preguntas al principio del proceso, dice Boehm. “Así que ahora pueden centrarse en el procesamiento de las solicitudes que están llegando. Y, a menudo, la calidad de estas es bastante mejor porque las personas utilizan estas herramientas de IA a la hora de crear las solicitudes y, así, obtienen toda la información que necesitan”.

En otra parte de Canadá, la ciudad de Burlington, Ontario, cerca de Toronto, ha estado desarrollando herramientas de IA generativa en colaboración con Archistar, la firma australiana de tecnología y bienes raíces. Chad MacDonald, director de información de Burlington (y antes director ejecutivo de servicios digitales), dice que Burlington, con una población de 200.000 habitantes, también enfrenta una crisis de vivienda. Con poco espacio disponible para la construcción de viviendas unifamiliares, su enfoque está en mejorar el proceso de manejo de proyectos más grandes, que incluyen propuestas industriales y comerciales, con una perspectiva hacia la creación de una plataforma única que funcione para todo tipo de proyectos. El sistema que la ciudad está desarrollando tiene como objetivo integrar no solo la zonificación y los estatutos locales, sino también el Código de Edificación de Ontario, que afecta a todas las estructuras de la provincia.

Probar este sistema implica verificar si realiza una evaluación correcta de planes ya presentados cuyo resultado se conoce. Este proceso también entrena a la IA. “Cada vez que corregimos una inexactitud en el algoritmo, en realidad lo hace más inteligente”, explica MacDonald. “De este modo, cada vez se volverá más preciso”. Y si la solución propuesta a un problema de permiso podría crear dos problemas más en la solicitud, el sistema está diseñado para señalarlo de inmediato, y así evitar un largo proceso de reenvío. En mayo, se completó una ronda de pruebas “extremadamente exitosa”, dice MacDonald, y espera que el uso de la tecnología por parte de la ciudad se expanda.

MacDonald prevé que la tecnología avance hasta el punto de crear diseños que cumplan con el código. ¿Eso no dejará a ingenieros y arquitectos fuera del negocio? Él responde que, en realidad, es vital que haya personas en el proceso. “Se trata de acelerar estos procesos realmente mundanos”, dice, “y luego permitir que estos expertos con un alto nivel de formación y especialización se centren en lo que en realidad necesita concentración”.

En Honolulu, ampliar el uso de herramientas de IA es parte de un plan más amplio para usar la tecnología a fin de abordar una importante acumulación de permisos. En 2021, el alcalde de la ciudad declaró que el proceso estaba “roto” y se comprometió a una revisión. En 2022, un proceso de preselección de permisos implicó “una espera intolerable de seis meses” hasta alcanzar un revisor, dice Dawn Takeuchi Apuna, directora del Departamento de Planificación y Permisos de Honolulu. La ciudad agregó un bot de IA que pudo revisar algunos de los elementos de la lista de preselección en un proceso recientemente simplificado y ayudó a reducir la espera a dos o tres días. Ese éxito ayudó a dar paso a un piloto de IA generativa más expansivo con CivCheck, la empresa emergente con sede en Chicago, una relación que Takeuchi Apuna espera que continúe.

“Hemos aprendido que las posibilidades para la IA en nuestros procesos de negocio son enormes”, dice, “y que la pieza más importante es la gente que la usa”. Enfatiza que esto es solo parte de una revisión que también incluye una mejor capacitación del personal y una mejor comunicación con los solicitantes. “Es un valor que uno debe aportar y seguir aplicando como parte de la IA a fin de obtener los mejores resultados”.

Si bien estos primeros resultados son prometedores, quedan muchos desafíos de y cuestiones inciertas de la IA. Algunas de las empresas emergentes que prometen poderosas herramientas de IA generativa no se han probado. Y, como señala MacDonald, la tecnología no es barata. También es necesario establecer estándares en torno a la recopilación de datos y la privacidad. (Kelowna, por ejemplo, está trabajando en cuestiones de políticas y orientación con el Montreal AI Ethics Institute, una organización sin fines de lucro). Y, por supuesto, existen preocupaciones públicas más generales sobre cederle demasiado control a una herramienta automatizada, por muy inteligente y capaz de recibir entrenamiento que sea. “No va a reemplazar a las personas”, dice Boehm. “Nunca vamos a emitirle un permiso de construcción de un bot de IA”.

De hecho, añade, esa preocupación podría considerarse una oportunidad, si las ciudades usan la IA de manera reflexiva y transparente. Aunque el gobierno a menudo es opaco y, por lo tanto, muchas personas lo tratan con escepticismo, la IA “es una gran oportunidad para desmitificar al gobierno”, comenta Boehm. “[Puede ampliar la] comprensión de que, al final del día, en realidad se trata de las personas y de apoyarlas”. En otras palabras, en el mejor de los casos, la IA podría mejorar un proceso burocrático complicado pero vital al darle un toque más humano.

Rob Walker es periodista; escribe sobre diseño, tecnología y otros temas. Es autor de Tecnociudad: 20 aplicaciones, ideas e innovadores que cambian el panorama urbano. Publica un boletín en robwalker.substack.com

Imagen principal: Crédito: Phonlamai Photo vía iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One More Hurdle to Homeownership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting the Burden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better Ways to Quell a Tax Revolt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Tie Your Hands?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning.  

In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” 

Keep that in mind when you find that your next trip on a long weekend—which could be every weekend as more and more companies move to a four-day work week—will be on a solar—powered plane. Or when you buy your next multitool, which turns out to be made of a plastic that can change its form and properties when it’s heated or cooled. 

With a world moving faster than even a 24-hour news cycle can handle, it’s more important than ever for planners to stay one step ahead of the issues and prepare communities as change occurs. 

2025 Trend Report for Planners 

On January 29, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish the 2025 Trend Report for Planners in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. APA’s Foresight team and the APA Trend Scouting Foresight Community have identified existing, emerging, and potential future trends that planners will want to be aware of and understand so that they can act, prepare, and learn. 

The report includes about 100 trends and signals, exploring them in future scenarios, deep dives, podcasts, and more. Here are just a few of the trends you need to know about. 

1. More Housing Hurdles: Insurance Costs, Climate Impacts, and Population Shifts

Population is growing much more slowly in the US than in previous decades, and the Census Bureau projects just a 9.7 percent population growth over the next 75 years. The concept of family is changing, too. Single-person households and couples without children now make up more than half of all US households. Single-parent and multigenerational households also are on the rise, as are roommate situations. 

Less than one-fifth of US families now fit the traditional “nuclear family” model, and the typical concepts regarding households continue to evolve. But one thing that has not changed in recent years: finding housing that’s affordable is getting more difficult. According to research by Zillow, households need to earn $47,000 more than they did just four years ago to afford a single-family home. Inflation, high interest rates, and the shortage of affordable housing have put the American Dream out of reach for many, with homeownership now almost 50 percent more expensive than renting. 

Meanwhile, cities in the Northeast and Midwest are seeing population losses, while states in the South and West continue to gain residents even as climate change impacts are striking those areas the hardest. Relative tax burdens and lower costs of living are likely key factors. In fact, the drastic impacts of climate change are threatening the health, safety, and lives of millions of people, with 34 percent of people in the US living in areas at risk of natural disasters and flooding and 41 percent of rental units vulnerable to climate change. 

Climate change–related losses are also generating chaos in the insurance market. Insurance providers are raising rates substantially in many areas and have become reluctant or have refused to insure homes in hazardous areas. Big insurers have pulled out of Florida, Louisiana, and California, a state where insurance giant State Farm stopped accepting applications because of “rapidly growing catastrophic exposure.” (Future scenarios in the Trend Report can help planners explore how this situation could play out in the next 10 years.) 

To mitigate insurance market impacts to homeowners, regulators can employ strategies such as mandating insurance industry transparency and forbidding “bluelining,” the increase in premiums or withdrawal of services in high-risk areas by providers. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners recently adopted a National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance to guide regulators and providers alike, and Florida has passed several laws aiming to reduce insurance premiums and provide mitigation grants to homeowners and multifamily property owners.

2. Public Spaces for Shaggy—and Scooby Too

As the need for public, “third places” grows, some cities are reimagining how spaces can adapt or where new ones can be created. This includes factoring in places for pets, especially since more US households have pets than children. The global pet industry is expected to reach nearly $500 billion by 2030. Cities can obtain a “pet-friendly” certification to fetch more tourists, and the number of US dog parks is exploding, with a 40 percent increase in public dog park development from 2009 to 2020. In San Francisco, developers are adding dog-specific areas near housing complexes to attract buyers.

3. Water Is Precious and Under Threat

The Gulf of Mexico is the hottest it has been in the modern era, causing rapidly forming storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton this past year that devastated the US East Coast. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef are the highest they’ve been in four centuries, while heat-driven ocean expansion has caused a third of global sea level rise. In the Persian Gulf, water is scarce and valuable, as growing populations and development reach an all-time high. Globally, a quarter of all food crops are threatened by unreliable or highly stressed water supplies. At the same time, water currents in the Arctic and the Atlantic appear to be slowing down, with the potential to change weather patterns and put food-producing regions at risk. 

Meanwhile, large-scale commercial water bottling operations driven by private equity are posing an increasing risk to the stability of local water sources in the US, as is the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that need massive amounts of water for cooling. That is threatening local and regional reservoirs, aquifers, and freshwater sources, and some places are implementing water usage regulations as a response.

4. Could We Evolve to a Post-Work World?

The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in remote work has blurred the lines of traditional work patterns. Take the growing popularity of “workcations” and “bleisure,” which suggest that work and personal life may increasingly overlap. Not everyone likes it; Australia enacted a “right to disconnect” law for workers in August 2024. 

Four-day workweek pilots introduced globally and in the US show that reduced hours can lead to higher productivity and greater life satisfaction. Workers think so, too. About 80 percent said they would be happier and just as productive dropping a day from the traditional schedule, according to the 2024 Work in America study. 

At the same time, our relationship with our work is shifting. A 2023 Pew Research Center study uncovered a new trend: only four in ten US workers see their job as central to their overall identity. This shift is reinforced by the idea of viewing a job as a verb (something you do) rather than a noun (something you are, like an accountant or technician). 

Attitudes toward leisure are changing, too. If individuals use their free time to pursue personal projects or passions, leisure could replace work as a primary focus in life. With the percentage of Americans older than 65 expected to rise to 23 percent by 2025, these current and future retirees also are seeking to make the most of their next chapter in life.

5. Digital Fatigue (and Pushback) Sets In

Digital fatigue is real. It is showing up in various ways, from a growing distrust of online news and increasing concerns over AI-generated content to disillusionment with online dating. Schools are banning mobile phones in classrooms, and states are restricting children’s access to social apps. The US surgeon general has even suggested that social media platforms should carry warning labels like those on cigarettes. In July, the Senate passed the first major internet safety bill for children in two decades. 

These measures reflect a broader effort to balance the benefits of technology with the need to be more conscious about the younger generation’s well-being. For planners, this trend suggests a greater need to balance digital public engagement with face-to-face interactions, fostering meaningful communication and empathy within communities. This includes creating in-person opportunities to engage younger people in planning processes, which can help connect those generations to their communities and each other.

6. Fungus Is the Future

Pop culture may lead you to think an age of fungi marks the last of us, but the ecological and health benefits of fungi should have more than just “mushroompreneurs” jumping for joy. Fungi can help shift us away from fossil fuels, lower cholesterol, help with successful organ transplants, tackle plastic pollution, eliminate micropollutants from contaminated water, and transition to more sustainable food systems. In 2023, US mushroom sales reached $1.04 billion, and the market is projected to triple in the next 10 years. As planners look for nature-based solutions for urban environments, fungi could become a key partner in creating better living spaces for all.

7. Balancing Green Energy Demand with Indigenous Rights

As the interest in renewable energy has spiked, so has the need for mining the raw minerals and metals required by these technologies—with some estimates believing demand will quadruple by 2040. These include lithium, cobalt, and silicon, as well as over a dozen rare earth elements. But mining comes with myriad human and environmental costs, often occurring in and at the expense of disadvantaged areas. This potentially pits government and private interests against Indigenous peoples, primarily through the extraction and exploitation of resources on tribal lands. 

More than half of projects to extract energy transition materials are on or near Indigenous land, and Indigenous peoples are directly impacted by over a third of global environmental conflicts, either through landscape, land, or livelihood loss. Some efforts are underway to boost Indigenous sovereignty. 

Central to the issue—and potential solutions—are land use and ownership, as well as the ability to apply different lenses to see the points of view and needs of the people these decisions will affect the most. Protecting the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples could reduce the negative impact of environmental conflicts over the green energy transition and provide solutions. One such way is by adopting Indigenous knowledge into existing approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation, like how several Native American nations are reintroducing bison to the US plains to enhance environmental and socioeconomic outcomes. 

The 2025 Trend Report for Planners was written by Petra Hurtado, Ievgeniia Dulko, Senna Catenacci, Joseph DeAngelis, Sagar Shah, and Jason Jordan. It was edited by Ann Dillemuth. 

Jon DePaolis is APA’s senior editor. 

Lead image: Steam rises above the cooling towers of Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Credit: Courtesy of Google.

The day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast in August 2005, Jessica Dandridge-Smith turned 16. But instead of celebrating her milestone birthday at home, she and her family had evacuated from New Orleans, with what remained of her possessions stuffed into a single suitcase. When she eventually returned to the city, the suffering she saw—disproportionately wrought upon Black neighborhoods, and accompanied by a slow federal relief response—angered her. The pain and damage was the work of a violent storm, yes, but she recognized that Katrina had found a ruthless accomplice in centuries of structural racism and policy failures.

So began a two-decade career in community organizing and advocacy. For the past five years, as the executive director of the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, Dandridge-Smith has been working to “actualize water as a human right” in southeast Louisiana, she says. That involves lifting community voices in pursuit of systemic, sustainable changes around water issues—everything from nature-based stormwater solutions and flood-risk reduction to ensuring water access and affordability. One of the questions guiding her work, she says, is, “What does it look like to turn community perspectives into policy?”

Her dedication to answering that question led Dandridge-Smith to Cambridge, Massachusetts, last spring, where the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Massachusetts Amherst convened a two-day roundtable discussion on climate migration.

The event’s roughly two dozen attendees came from all corners of the United States, representing research and academic institutions, community-based and other nonprofits, municipal governments, utilities, and regional planning agencies, among other organizations. During their time together, they shared lived and learned knowledge and unique perspectives from their communities. And they talked about how to plan and prepare for an inevitability: As the impacts of climate change intensify, making life inconvenient or intolerable in places more prone to drought, wildfire, or flooding, people will increasingly relocate to safer places.

These moves may happen slowly, with forethought, given the means; or abruptly, out of necessity, in the face of disaster. They may take people just up the road, or to places that have been touted as “climate havens,” such as the Great Lakes region or northern New England.

Some attendees, like Dandridge-Smith, came from disaster-prone areas. Others live in receiving communities—places anticipating an influx of newcomers displaced by climate change. “We’ve had stagnant population growth in the county for years and years,” says Mike Foley, who heads up Cuyahoga Green Energy in Ohio, a county-owned utility tasked with creating renewable electricity microgrids. Foley notes that Cleveland had three times as many residents just 60 years ago. “So we’re able to be a receiving community, theoretically.”

Over the course of the two days, however, some recurring themes emerged, as described in a recent working paper. One of the more surprising conclusions that surfaced was a somber one: There’s no such thing as a climate haven—no place is fully, truly sheltered from climate risk.

Where People Go, and Why

Attendees from Vermont, often dubbed a climate haven, recounted how the fear and flooding residents faced during Hurricane Irene in 2011 returned just over a decade later in July 2023, when heavy downpours flooded the state capital and other areas, causing $2.2 billion in damage across northern New England and New York. The same realization would strike again with fiercer clarity the following year, when Western North Carolina, long considered a climate haven with a relatively low risk of drought, wildfire, or sea level rise, suffered catastrophic flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The storm and related flash flooding left at least 96 dead in North Carolina and caused an estimated $53 billion in damage.

These events make it clear that no place can truly be considered immune to climate change, which made all those storms stronger and more damaging. But with projections showing that by 2100, at least 13 million Americans will be displaced by sea level rise alone—to say nothing of wildfire, extreme heat, or drought—some areas do present fewer or more tolerable risks than others. That doesn’t just mean so-called “climate havens” halfway across the country. It can also include crosstown neighborhoods a few miles inland that are less susceptible to flooding, or downtown apartment blocks that are safer from wildfires than those on a city’s outskirts.

So what can cities and regions do to prepare for large-scale, climate-induced population shifts? The convening of this cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary group—which may have been the first of its kind dedicated to climate mobility, says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute—elicited valuable insights that can guide planners, elected officials, and researchers attempting to answer that question. “We gained so much from having such a rich variety of perspectives in that conversation,” Cotter says, noting that the participants shared a wealth of hard-earned lessons and engaged in the kind of policy pollination that helps advance both creative and time-tested strategies.

One of the early insights to emerge from the roundtable was the very different needs of people and communities impacted by climate mobility, depending on the context. A Californian who takes a new job in the Midwest after one too many close calls with wildfire is arriving under very different circumstances than a family who just lost their home to a hurricane, for example.

To that end, it’s helpful to distinguish between “fast” and “slow” relocation. The former commonly occurs in a state of urgency after a disaster, as a result of displacement, and can often be temporary in nature. Slow climate relocation, on the other hand, tends to be a more permanent and deliberate decision influenced by myriad factors. These could include typical concerns like job opportunities and housing costs, but also fatigue from successive climate impacts, such as repeated fire evacuation warnings or sunny-day flooding incidents.

That distinction carries major equity implications, Cotter says, and determines what kind of support and resources newcomers and their receiving communities will need. “People who are confronted by crisis have no choice but to relocate. But this slow migration is also happening; it’s poorly understood, and it’s being done by people who have the wherewithal to make a choice to move,” she says.

In most cases, though, people tend to relocate where they can find opportunity, safety, and connection—be that family, friends, or a familiar cultural environment.

Sometimes that brings them only a few miles away, to the nearest safer place within their metro area. Other times, their new home is more distant, but along an existing cultural corridor. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, for example, tens of thousands of residents left the island, many resettling within existing Puerto Rican communities in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts, as this data visualization by Teralytics shows.

“Regardless of whether they’re moving in response to a crisis or because they’re making a choice to avoid a future unlivable situation, people are going where they have relationships,” Cotter says. “And that’s why we’re seeing people move to nearby locations or places that might be distant, or even . . . other places that are also in harm’s way. It’s because that’s where they have relationships or can find something affordable, not necessarily because they’re choosing some place with empirically lower risk.”

Those existing cultural and economic pathways could provide clues about who will migrate where, and inform the kinds of infrastructure—both hard infrastructure like transit, power grids, and water supplies, and soft, or social, infrastructure like health and human services—that communities need to settle newcomers in a sustainable, equitable way.

What the South Can Teach the North

When it comes to displacement and fast relocation, participants agreed that places in the northern United States could learn a lot from their southern counterparts, which have historically dealt with disasters more frequently. The five Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, for example, have experienced as many billion-dollar disasters in just the past five years as the entire Northeast region did from 1980 to 2018 (even adjusted for inflation), according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

But the changing climate has left the North increasingly vulnerable. After averaging just one or two major disasters a year for three decades, the Northeast is now seeing about seven of them annually. (The Gulf Coast states averaged nearly two billion-dollar disasters per month in 2023.) And because most people tend to evacuate to the nearest safe place where they have family or friends, southern cities and organizations also have lessons to share with receiving communities in the North.

Legal aid nonprofits in the South, for example, have more experience navigating federal disaster assistance programs and securing relief funds for communities and evacuees. Dandridge-Smith and other attendees from the South were also surprised to learn that few participants from the Northeast had solid evacuation plans in place—even if such plans exist on paper, they’re not top of mind in the way they are in more disaster-prone areas—and that regional coordination on such matters is limited.

“That was definitely a wide awakening experience,” Dandridge-Smith says. “Without that emergency preparedness planning—and that requires communication, at every level of government, preparing people in advance and post-event—community members are not going to know how to react.”

New Orleans has always been a challenging place to live, she says, going back hundreds of years. But that redundancy helps build resiliency, at both the municipal and personal level. “Being in Louisiana after a hurricane is an amazing sight, because we’ve done it so many times that there is no panic. There’s sadness, and there’s frustration, and maybe even fear, but I’ve never seen people come together the way that Louisianans do,” she says. “Whatever happens in the future of the climate crisis, Louisianans will still be there, we can survive anything. And that’s not just a testament to our resilience, it is also a testament to learned resilience.”

Dandridge-Smith and others don’t love the way the current climate conversation tends to focus on resilience, since it subtly places a burden on people to endure more hardship than they should have to. But the hard-won tenacity of the New Orleans community helped spark an innovative and potentially replicable initiative she highlighted at the roundtable event.

“After Hurricane Ida, some people didn’t have power for weeks,” Dandridge-Smith explains. “What ended up happening is that people who did have power, whether they were on a different grid or maybe they had a generator, they took extension cords and put them in their front lawn, and people could come and charge their phone or computer, or medical equipment. And a lot of the churches got involved in that as well.”

That inspired a group called Together New Orleans to form the Community Lighthouse program, a coalition of 85 faith-based organizations that will act as community resilience hubs during power outages. Each lighthouse—including churches, temples, mosques, and other institutions across the city—will be equipped with commercial-scale solar panels and backup batteries, so they can act as emergency cooling or heating centers during a power outage and provide food, charging for light medical equipment and communications devices, and other essential services.

After Hurricane Francine caused power outages in September, nine of the first Community Lighthouse locations, four of them completely solar- and battery-powered, served some 2,300 residents. Each pilot location is being equipped with a trained disaster response team—the “human infrastructure” so crucial in these kinds of crises—and can provide aid organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or the Red Cross with a trusted location from which to distribute supplies, food, communications, and other assistance to residents. Such centralized response centers could also be set up in communities receiving evacuees, where newcomers typically need help finding housing, applying for disaster assistance, enrolling their kids in local schools, and generally getting settled and stabilized in a new community.

Affordable Housing and Climate Relocation

While there are still a lot of unknowns around slow migration—for example, what are the tipping points that push people to relocate, and where or how far away do they go?—Cotter contends that housing costs are a central issue. “We’re already seeing climate relocation, but trends show people have been moving toward harm rather than away from it,” she says, often lured by housing affordability. The most fire- and flood-prone counties in the US, particularly those in Texas and Florida, continue to see a net inflow of new residents, according to Redfin.

“Looking at the map of domestic migration and housing cost burdens, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that people are accepting more risk to find a place that’s affordable for their families,” Cotter says. “And that’s a trade-off they’re being forced to make because of policies that leave us with a lack of affordable housing, particularly in low-risk places.”

Americans have been moving to the Sun Belt for decades, ever since home air conditioning became commonplace in the 1960s. The Phoenix metro area, for example, saw its population more than double between 1950 and 1970 (to over 1 million), then double again by 1990 (to 2.2 million), and then double again by 2020 (to 4.8 million)—despite increasingly long and scorching heat waves that now kill hundreds of residents each year. The median Phoenix home sold for $451,000 in October, according to Redfin; that’s around the national average, but less than half the price of homes in San Diego ($950,000) or Los Angeles ($1,040,000).

Meanwhile, in California and other places in the US, as urban sprawl (combined with restrictive zoning and parking rules) pushed new home construction into exurban areas—further into the wildland-urban interface, where nature and humans collide—millions more people moved into areas at risk of wildfire in recent decades, just as climate change was making those fires more frequent and more severe. The LA County wildfires in early 2025 served as a frightening reminder of this truth.

Getting more people to choose relative safety over climate risk, then, means creating more affordable homes and neighborhoods in safer places.

That’s a challenge Maulin Mehta is trying to address as New York director for the Regional Plan Association. In terms of climate mobility, the New York metro area—like many others—could be viewed as both a sending and receiving community. Parts of the city have already succumbed to the effects of climate change—hundreds of New York homeowners participated in voluntary buyout and acquisition programs after Hurricane Sandy, a storm made more severe by climate change—and sea level rise threatens many more homes. Some 52,000 New York City homes would be at risk from a (soon-to-be routine) five-foot flood, according to Climate Central. Yet the economic and cultural gravity of America’s largest metropolis continues to draw a steady stream of new arrivals.

The region is already in the grip of a housing crisis, Mehta says, and climate change will only exacerbate that as more areas become uninhabitable. So creating the conditions to encourage more housing—especially in suburbs that have long used exclusive zoning to stifle growth—is fundamental to the region’s future.

“We’ve been trying to figure out how we can promote zoning reform at scale to facilitate broader housing supply, without concentrating it on specific communities and specific areas that might be more open to development, because one neighborhood is not going to solve the housing crisis for the entire state,” Mehta says. “We’ve seen some more reverse commuting from New York City out to the suburbs, because there’s no place to live in the suburbs. So we’re just trying to figure out, how can we address the practical need for housing more broadly?”

To do that—to get reticent suburban residents to give up exclusionary zoning practices and allow much more much-needed housing—Mehta says the narrative around affordable and dense housing needs to change. “One thing we’ve been trying to do is fundamentally reframe what affordable housing means,” Mehta says. “If you think your single-family neighborhood is going to be overrun with [strangers], people balk at that. But when you see that, ‘Oh, my kid’s teachers can’t even afford to live here, our police officers and firefighters can’t afford to live here’—I don’t think that’s in people’s psyche when they think about affordable housing.”

Most climate relocation to date has been fairly local or regional—which means New York’s climate migrants are as likely to come from Long Island as from, say, Houston. “We can make the case that this is not just about new people coming in, this is about your own neighbors, your own family members that are going to be in jeopardy,” Mehta says. “Part of the narrative change requires people to reframe how they view new types of housing away from it being outsiders, and more about the people that they care about.”

Wires, Pipes, and Pumps—and How to Pay for Them

Housing is critical, but so are the physical landscapes and structures supporting it.

While the Cleveland area could use a population boom and has plenty of nearby freshwater and more affordable housing than most US cities, Foley does worry about the readiness of the area’s aging infrastructure—much of which hasn’t received enough investment over the past few decades—to handle tens of thousands of new residents. After a storm this past summer, he says, some 350,000 people were without power for multiple days. “Our electric grid is still pretty frail in most parts,” he says.

But the region also has a key advantage for growing sustainably: existing rights of way for new infrastructure. While some areas face legal battles when trying to site new renewable energy generation and transmission lines, Foley says, “We’ve got a fairly mature network of legal rights of way that exist, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time and money on lawyer fees to figure out where wires and lines and pipes should be going.”

In that sense, much of the needed work is a matter of upgrading and modernizing service along current corridors that are out of harm’s way. But while having rights of way in place simplifies things, it doesn’t necessarily make it cheap. “We’re going to electrify vehicles, we’re going to electrify home heating systems,” Foley says. “We’ve got this embedded infrastructure in all these homes and buildings that are reliant on natural gas, and to address climate change we need to start electrifying all that stuff—which is expensive, and not simple to do. . . . But then add on top of that a potential 100,000 or 200,000 more people in the region, and that’s a greater stress.”

Since Cuyahoga Green Energy is a newly formed utility, it isn’t yet burdened by the costly upkeep of old or failing equipment, Foley says, “but we’ve got new infrastructure we’re going to have to build.” He hopes the public-private partnership model the utility has developed (along with federal grant money) will help accomplish that in a cost effective way.

A third-party operator will build and own the initial projects “underneath the utility’s auspices, and then we’ll have the right, after the investments have been paid off, to take over and own that infrastructure,” he explains. “So that model may be a way for us, if we get smart about it, to build out the infrastructure of the future without breaking the bank of local government.”

In Vermont, Green Mountain Power recently expanded its popular backup battery program. The utility offers heavily discounted leases or rebates of up to $10,500 on installed backup batteries if homeowners enroll to share stored energy during peak power surges—for example, during the hottest few hours of a July afternoon. This helps localize and stabilize the overall grid, allows excess solar and other renewable energy to be stored, and reduces the use of more expensive and dirtier “peaker plant” power.

And in New Orleans, the Water Collaborative has been pushing for a stormwater fee, called the Water Justice Fund, to more equitably pay for its massive, aging, and expensive water utility and drainage system.

New Orleans owes its modern existence to 97 drainage pumps, two dozen of which operate every day, Dandridge-Smith says, turning what had once been marsh and swamp into dry—but slowly sinking—buildable land. The pumps are both “a blessing and a curse,” she says.

For one thing, the pumps are old—one has been in use since its introduction in 1913—and expensive to operate. More than that, fighting nature is a hard bargain. “We were meant to be soft and wet and continually replenished with water. If you drain all the water out, you sink,” she says. Most of 19th-century New Orleans was above sea level; today, some areas of the city sit five feet below sea level.

The water utility system in New Orleans doesn’t just drain the city, it also handles water quality and sewage. “It is so big that it has its own power company,” Dandridge-Smith says. “That’s how big it is in scale, so it’s expensive to run.” And historically, that cost has been funded through property taxes paid by businesses and homeowners, but not by nonprofits and other large landowners.

“We’re a tourism economy. We don’t have high-end tech jobs to pay for this expensive endeavor that is New Orleans,” Dandridge-Smith adds. “So we needed to find a way to fund that, but also fund our way out of the pumps.” The Water Justice Fund, which she hopes to get on the city’s ballot in 2025, would instead charge all city properties a stormwater fee based on their total square footage of impervious surfaces.

The stormwater fee would fund not just the operation and maintenance of the city’s gray water infrastructure, but also neighborhood-scale green infrastructure and stormwater management projects, urban reforestation, blue and green job training programs, insurance innovations, and other more forward-looking investments. Residents themselves helped shape the plan, ensuring greater community buy-in. “The main recommendations came out of a 10-part workshop series where regular residents, ranging from the age of 16 to 82, learned the nitty-gritty, most boring, nuanced things about infrastructure and systems, and helped build out what we know as the Water Justice Fund of New Orleans,” she says.

Seeking Safety, Seeking Justice

In both sending and receiving communities, climate migration is fraught with justice issues. Why was someone in harm’s way to begin with? How much assistance goes to homeowners rather than renters? How can communities resettle newcomers without displacing existing residents?

The modern-day topography of climate risk and mobility has to some extent been shaped by centuries of injustice. Historically “redlined” neighborhoods—those areas mortgage lenders once deemed too risky to write loans in, based on the racial makeup of residents—carry a higher risk of extreme heat and flooding today. People of color continue to experience disproportionate exposure to harmful environmental hazards like toxic chemicals and air pollution because of where they live.

Even after the Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal, many places employed exclusive zoning rules, large minimum lot requirements, and other tactics to effectively keep residents out based on race and income. Those who managed to build generational wealth through homeownership despite these obstacles now face the possibility of losing their homes to climate change.

Dandridge-Smith’s parents, for example, own properties that have been passed down from various family members over the years. “In a normal scenario, I would acquire that wealth one day and be able to sell it, care for it, or rent it out,” she says. “But I think about how, not just myself, but everybody in Louisiana is going to lose generations of wealth building” if the region succumbs to flooding. “Knowing the history of this country and how they’ve treated Louisiana in particular, we will be blamed, and we will not be protected or cared for. And I have a hard time grappling with that, because I know it’s not right—but it’s what’s going to happen,” she says.

In New York, Mehta says, home prices are so high that a low-income homeowner who accepts a voluntary buyout may not end up with enough money to buy another home without taking on a new mortgage. “If that’s how we build wealth as a society, and now we’re telling folks in areas at risk—who may live there because of historical policies that have pushed them to be there—that this asset of yours is no longer viable? If a buyout program doesn’t guarantee a one-to-one exchange of your existing house for a safer house?” Mehta says. “We’re not creating enough opportunity for low-income homeowners in general, and if we’re now saying even those assets they do have need to be sunsetted, what’s the strategy? Renting will work for some people, but what if they wanted to pass this on to their kids?”

Mehta says communities and planners need a thoughtful framework to make the kinds of hard choices that await. “It’s only going to get harder, and if we’re not proactive about it now, we’ve seen what happens,” he says. “We wait for the disaster, chaos ensues, people’s communities get erased or displaced, and we repeat that cycle over and over, which is to the detriment of the whole region.”

Planning and Policy Tools

As the roundtable event wrapped up, participants shared suggestions about what types of policy tools, planning approaches, and research could help ensure communities are better prepared for a world beset by climate movement.

Cotter says the inherent uncertainty around climate relocation—whether, when, and how many people will move, where to, in what circumstances, and how a massive influx or exodus could displace or destabilize communities—lends itself to exploratory scenario planning (XSP). This planning technique helps communities consider a range of possible futures and prepare for the unknown. (The Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning Conference, in January, will include workshops on disaster recovery and resilience, among other topics.)

With more thoughtful, community-driven, and cooperative planning, Cotter hopes this disruptive challenge could also present an opportunity. “What are the planning approaches that can help leverage this phenomenon for positive, transformational change?” she asks. “To both facilitate people moving out of harm’s way, when they make that decision, and then for places to receive them in an equitable manner without causing burdens on existing residents?”

Cotter says land policy tools such as the transfer of development rights (TDR)—in which the owners of an at-risk property could sell their legal right to build a bigger structure to an owner in a safer location who wishes to build a taller-than-permitted development, for example—could also help play a role in thoughtfully redirecting development and creating more housing in safer areas.

New York City has allowed this practice for decades in certain scenarios. For example, owners of historic Broadway theaters who agreed to preserve their properties as entertainment venues could sell their forfeited “air rights” to nearby developments. Arlington, Virginia, allowed owners of historic garden apartments to sell unused development rights to other builders, in exchange for preserving the apartments as affordable housing for at least 30 years. And the TDR market in Seattle has helped preserve 147,500 acres of would-be sprawl in King’s County, redirecting development from forest and farmland to downtown. While TDRs have traditionally been used to preserve open space or historic landmarks, there’s no reason they couldn’t be employed to create more affordable and climate-resilient housing.

“Quite frankly, one of the best things you can do to prepare for an influx of population is to make sure that you’re building housing and infrastructure out of harm’s way, making your existing built environment and infrastructure more resilient, because then it will serve both your existing population and any newcomers better,” Cotter says.

Whether or not climate change delivers an influx of new residents to a community, making investments in preparedness is never a wasted effort, she adds.

“Housing out of harm’s way, sound and adequate infrastructure, disaster response—all of these will serve your existing population well,” Cotter says. “And if you do get an influx of population, you’ve got the stage set to do what governments should do: ensure that your residents and your business owners have what they need to thrive—and that includes being safe in the face of a changing climate.”

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

Lead image: Cars evacuate ahead of a hurricane. Credit: Darwin Brandis via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Plastics.”
“Exactly how do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”

With apologies to my millennial friends, I can’t help but date myself with this iconic example of unsolicited advice given by Mr. McGuire to Benjamin in The Graduate. It captures the thing that bugs me the most about policy think tanks—their habit of providing wholesale unsolicited advice. Think tanks often conjure questions they presume to be relevant, analyze them, and then dispense policy recommendations to unknown audiences.

There’s nothing less appealing than unsolicited advice—and unsolicited policy advice, even when well-intentioned, undermines the recipient’s problem-solving journey and often results in frustration. The advice typically focuses on the desired outcome, not the process one must undertake to get there. Even worse, the adviser bears no responsibility for the outcome. Offering solutions without investment, the adviser risks nothing while the recipient grapples with the potential consequences of acting on the counsel. How exactly was Benjamin supposed to manifest the potential of plastics?

We’ve been known to do this at the Lincoln Institute. Take the example of land value capture: For decades, we’ve advised local governments to use this land-based financing tool to mobilize revenue that can help pay for urban infrastructure. We’ve suggested to municipal funders that they should underwrite loans against future revenue captured from land value increments. We’ve written papers to introduce governments and funders to the concept, described multiple land value capture tools they can use, and produced case studies of best practices in places like São Paulo. But we haven’t often dug in with practitioners to help them decide which land value capture tools are best for their circumstances and learn with them as they adopt and deploy them. That is about to change.

Before I explain how, let me suggest that another useless kind of advice is the “best practice.” Advocating “best practices” to solve complex social, economic, or environmental problems ignores the context surrounding the challenge at hand, does not account for the resources or capacities of people and organizations trying to adapt someone else’s successful approach, and often leads to frustration and inefficiency when the prescribed solution doesn’t align with reality. Best practice thinking stifles innovation and creativity, discourages exploration and experimentation, and often overlooks more appropriate and effective solutions. And who knows if the practice is “best” anyway?

The world is dynamic, and context matters. Relying solely on established norms promotes passive acceptance rather than fostering an environment where individuals question assumptions and actively engage in solving problems. Rather than blindly adhering to “best practices,” a better strategy for tackling complex problems lies in understanding context and adopting a principles-based approach. This champions adaptability and encourages customized solutions to address the unique nuances of each challenge. It compels individuals to weigh various options and make informed decisions grounded in evidence and logic.

So how does this relate to the work of the Lincoln Institute? This fall, with our partner Claremont Lincoln University (CLU), we launched the Lincoln Vibrant Communities program. This new undertaking embodies our best thinking about how to traverse the gap between theory and practice. It prioritizes leadership, action, collaboration, and tangible results. It is a bold and innovative initiative that seeks to transform the way we work, learn, and act together to solve the vexing challenges that cities of all sizes face.

Many communities, particularly those facing economic hardship, lack the capacity (financial and human resources) to implement ambitious development plans. Bureaucratic red tape, outdated regulations, and deeply ingrained power structures impede progress and stifle innovation. Frequently, a lack of trust between residents and local leaders, coupled with limited opportunities for meaningful participation, undermines the effectiveness of development initiatives. More often than not, pressure to produce immediate results leads practitioners to focus on quick fixes rather than long-term, sustainable solutions.

Over the coming decades, we will train a new generation of leaders and equip them with the skills, tools, and resources to transform their cities. We will help these leaders engage cross-sector teams in their communities that can work with residents to take ownership of their futures by solving complex problems collectively. Lincoln Vibrant Communities will furnish the training, tools, resources, and support needed to turn ideas into reality.

And we intend to deliver at scale. Our new initiative draws inspiration from the best leadership development and challenge-based training programs we’ve seen, including the Center for Community Investment’s Fulcrum Fellow and Community Catalyst programs and NeighborWorks America’s Achieving Excellence program. It draws on the superpowers of both CLU and the Lincoln Institute—adapting CLU’s leadership training curriculum and relying on the institute’s deep well of research, policy tools, and expertise.

Lincoln Vibrant Communities begins by identifying and training emerging leaders from diverse backgrounds and sectors. These individuals will complete an intensive six-month leadership development program focused on understanding the complexities of urban challenges, building collaborative leadership skills, developing strategic planning and implementation capabilities, and learning how to leverage community assets and resources. After completing their training, these leaders will return to their respective cities and recruit diverse teams of people representing the public, private, and civic sectors. This cross-sector collaboration is vital for addressing complex challenges that demand multifaceted solutions.

Each team will identify a major challenge their city faces. This could encompass a range of issues, from economic revitalization and affordable housing to environmental sustainability and public safety. The teams will then return for comprehensive team-based training over an additional six months that will equip them with tools and policies developed by the Lincoln Institute; this training will provide a framework for addressing their challenges and building sustainable solutions. With the guidance of experienced coaches, the teams will develop detailed action plans. The teams will then return to their communities and embark on the journey of implementing their plans. Throughout this 18-month process, the teams will receive ongoing support and, most important, coaching from the program to ensure they stay on track and overcome any obstacles they may encounter.

Lincoln Vibrant Communities has the potential to be a game-changer in the field of community and economic development. By traversing the space between theory and practice and empowering local leaders to act, the program is designed to produce concrete improvements in participating cities. By tackling major challenges head on, the teams will make a real difference in the lives of local residents. Additionally, the program will build the capacity of local leaders and communities to design solutions for complex challenges that can be deployed again and again. The skills and knowledge gained through Lincoln Vibrant Communities will have a lasting impact, enabling communities to continue making progress long after the program concludes.

This program will culminate in a growing, curated network of dedicated community problem-solvers. Our approach cultivates innovation by prioritizing comprehension and adaptation over rote implementation. It nurtures a spirit of continuous learning, prompting individuals to reflect on their experiences and refine their problem-solving strategies.

Lincoln Vibrant Communities is not just about solving problems; it is about building a movement of empowered leaders who are committed to creating vibrant, sustainable, and equitable cities. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, we can unleash the full potential of our communities and create a brighter future for all.

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

Lead image: The Lincoln Vibrant Communities program is designed to equip local policymakers with the capacity and conviction to address complex social, environmental, and economic issues. Credit: CLU.