A fines de la década de 1980, Anne Whiston Spirn lanzó un “proyecto de investigación en acción” diseñado para explorar cómo las pequeñas intervenciones en el paisaje podrían ayudar a restaurar la naturaleza y reconstruir la comunidad en barrios de bajos ingresos en el oeste de Filadelfia. Se suponía que el proyecto duraría cuatro años. Casi cuatro décadas después, el Proyecto de Paisaje del Oeste de Filadelfia (West Philadelphia Landscape Project) sigue vigente, y ha cosechado esperanza y un entendimiento otorgado por la experiencia.

En Mill Creek y otros barrios de Filadelfia, el trabajo conjunto de estudiantes, residentes, paisajistas y otros actores locales creó focos estratégicos de diseño ecológico, por ejemplo, al convertir lotes abandonados en jardines comunitarios y espacios verdes que absorben las inundaciones, y luego vincularon esos proyectos al plan de estudios en las escuelas locales. Este enfoque liderado por la comunidad atrajo la atención nacional. Más cerca de su origen, el programa ayudó a inspirar el plan Green City, Clean Waters (Ciudad Verde, Aguas Limpias) de Filadelfia, a través del cual la ciudad instaló infraestructura verde, como acequias con árboles, jardines pluviales y extensiones con vegetación para aguas pluviales en las aceras en más de 1200 hectáreas de tierras públicas y privadas en toda la ciudad y, de esta forma, se redujo la escorrentía anual de aguas pluviales hacia los cursos de agua locales en más de once mil millones de litros.

En las comunidades históricamente desatendidas, donde los residentes deben tolerar una carga desproporcionada de riesgos climáticos y contaminación, agregar espacios verdes parecería una medida lógica para abordar desigualdades de larga data. Sin embargo, ocurrió algo más cuando el Proyecto de Paisaje del Oeste de Filadelfia tomó impulso. A mediados de la década de 2010, los precios de la vivienda en barrios como Mill Creek comenzaron a subir, al igual que el interés de los inversionistas institucionales, que tienden a aumentar el valor de los alquileres con mayor agresividad que los propietarios que no son inversores, según una investigación del Banco de la Reserva Federal de Filadelfia. Al parecer, todas esas zonas verdes estaban convirtiendo al área más deseable para los inversionistas y más costosa para vivir.

Los espacios verdes no solo filtran y enfrían el aire circundante, sino que también absorben aguas pluviales y mejoran la salud física y mental. También está comprobado que aumentan el valor de las propiedades cercanas.

El aumento del valor puede resultar ventajoso para los propietarios de viviendas en barrios que han pasado años sin recibir inversiones, un fenómeno sistemático en las comunidades de color. Pero si bien beneficia a los propietarios, puede ejercer presión de desplazamiento sobre los inquilinos. En ciudades como Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Filadelfia y Seattle, alrededor de la mitad de las familias son inquilinas, mientras que en ciudades como Boston, Chicago, Los Ángeles y Nueva York esta cifra es de casi dos tercios.

“Me resultó impactante… la rapidez con la que se reemplazaron la desinversión, las plazas disponibles y los edificios abandonados con especulación y desarrollo”, menciona Spirn, que era profesora en la Universidad de Pensilvania cuando comenzó el proyecto en el oeste de Filadelfia y, ahora, enseña en el MIT. “En este momento, las comunidades en las que he trabajado, como Mill Creek, están bajo el asedio de especuladores y desarrolladores”.

Reverdecimiento sin desplazamiento

En un estudio de 28 ciudades norteamericanas y europeas que realizaron grandes inversiones en espacios verdes o adaptación climática entre 1990 y 2016, se concluyó que el reverdecimiento urbano fue un factor principal o contribuyente en el aburguesamiento de diversos sectores de la ciudad en 17 lugares. En Boston, Denver y otras ciudades, el reverdecimiento fue solo un factor que contribuyó al aburguesamiento. En lugares como Atlanta, Copenhague y Montreal, el reverdecimiento urbano se consideró el principal impulsor del aburguesamiento.

Por ejemplo, entre 2011 y 2015, el valor de las viviendas en un rango de 0,8 kilómetros de la vía verde Beltline de Atlanta, un circuito de 35 kilómetros de senderos y parques que conectan 45 barrios de la ciudad, aumentó entre un 18 y un 27 por ciento más que las propiedades en otras partes de la ciudad.

“Hasta que el reverdecimiento urbano sea tan generalizado que no haya un diferencial de precios por su presencia, tendremos que enfrentar el hecho de que es una comodidad a la que la gente responde con una suba de precios”, menciona Amy Cotter, directora de Sostenibilidad Urbana del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Existe una fuerte asociación entre los parques y las vías verdes a gran escala y el aburguesamiento, explica James Connolly, profesor asistente de Planificación en la Universidad de Columbia Británica y coautor del estudio de aburguesamiento verde y un documento de trabajo encargado por el Instituto Lincoln. “Es una comodidad muy visible y, al igual que ocurre con cualquier otra comodidad tan visible, como una nueva estación de transporte o un nuevo desarrollo de alto perfil, el reverdecimiento cambia los mercados inmobiliarios de la zona”, indica.

Los grandes proyectos como parques y vías verdes no son los únicos esfuerzos de reverdecimiento urbano que pueden impulsar el aburguesamiento. Los inversionistas y desarrolladores prestan atención a las inversiones municipales. E incluso las intervenciones más pequeñas, como jardines de lluvia y árboles en la calle, pueden interpretarse como indicios de un cambio cultural o económico.

“Algunas de estas intervenciones de infraestructura verde más pequeñas son solo pequeños jardines de lluvia o elementos ecológicos en la acera”, menciona Connolly; es decir, no significa que los mercados inmobiliarios estén reaccionando a una nueva comodidad de gran envergadura que está cambiando la dinámica de la comunidad. Pero al considerarlas en conjunto, “todas estas intervenciones diferentes pueden comenzar a producir una especie de cambio en la percepción”, agrega Connolly. “En Filadelfia, por ejemplo, podemos ver evidencias, ya que, al sumar las intervenciones de muy pequeña escala, se observa un alto nivel de correlación con los cambios en la dinámica racial y los cambios en el aburguesamiento en la ciudad”.

Todo esto significa que los residentes de comunidades históricamente marginadas pueden desarrollar un escepticismo justificado hacia los nuevos proyectos verdes, incluso cuando las intervenciones tienen la intención de mejorar un barrio o brindarle una mejor protección de los riesgos climáticos como las inundaciones o el calor extremo.

Durante los quince años posteriores a la apertura de Schuylkill River Park en el sur de Filadelfia, la mediana de los precios de las viviendas aumentó un 1.120 por ciento, la residencia en el barrio pasó de ser mayoritariamente negra a ser mayoritariamente blanca, y las instituciones culturales locales, como la Iglesia Bautista New Light Beulah, consideraron necesario cerrar o reubicarse, escriben Sterling Johnson, candidato a doctorado en la Universidad de Temple, y Kimberley Thomas, profesora asociada de Geografía en Temple. “Puede que los términos hayan cambiado desde principios del siglo XX, pero la administración medioambiental sigue pareciendo colonización para muchas personas negras de bajos ingresos”.

Y en Detroit, alrededor de una cuarta parte de los residentes se negaron a aceptar árboles gratuitos en las calles frente a sus casas: no por no entender los beneficios del dosel de árboles, sino debido a la persistente desconfianza en la ciudad, según un estudio realizado por Christine Carmichael, en ese momento, en la Universidad de Vermont.

Si las ciudades no reconocen y tratan con seriedad el potencial de desplazamiento causado por las intervenciones ecológicas, agrega Connolly, “lo que logramos es un apoyo político muy reducido para el reverdecimiento urbano, ya que muchas personas terminan pensando que no tiene sentido apoyarlo porque no está dirigido a ellas”.

Formulación coordinada de políticas 

La tensión entre el reverdecimiento urbano destinado a mejorar la calidad de vida y el desplazamiento económico que suele resultar es un problema que exige una planificación y formulación coordinadas de políticas. “No se puede tener seguridad residencial a expensas de la seguridad medioambiental, y no se puede tener seguridad medioambiental a expensas de la seguridad residencial”, explica Connolly. “Estos dos elementos no son negociables entre sí: ambos son necesarios”. También señala que el reverdecimiento urbano no siempre conduce al desplazamiento; en casi la mitad de las ciudades estudiadas, el impacto de el reverdecimiento en el aburguesamiento fue leve o nulo.

Una ciudad puede usar diversas herramientas de política específicas para ayudar a mitigar el desplazamiento al reverdecer un barrio. De hecho, las soluciones son similares al margen de la causa de la presión del desplazamiento, pero deben aplicarse en conjunto con las intervenciones verdes (o incluso antes).

Los fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios, por ejemplo, pueden ayudar a los residentes a obtener participación en la propiedad del barrio y garantizar la capacidad de pago permanente de la vivienda. Las medidas de estabilización de alquileres pueden controlar los aumentos de los precios del alquiler, por lo que los inquilinos no deben abandonar la comunidad por cuestiones de precio. Las leyes de “oportunidad de compra”, como las de Washington, DC, permiten que los inquilinos o las ciudades tengan prioridad para comprar una casa si un propietario decide vender. La zonificación inclusiva, los requisitos de vivienda asequible, las tarifas de los desarrolladores y otras herramientas también pueden ayudar a aliviar la presión del desplazamiento.

“No es solo un elemento, sino un conjunto de herramientas”, explica Isabelle Anguelovski, profesora de investigación de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona y directora del Laboratorio de Barcelona para la Justicia Medioambiental Urbana y la Sostenibilidad (BCNUEJ), coautora del estudio y documento de trabajo sobre el aburguesamiento junto con Connolly.

“Depende tanto de los impuestos como de los incentivos”, continúa. “Vancouver tiene un impuesto a las viviendas vacías. Algunos estados, como Washington, tienen control de alquileres a un nivel estatal más amplio. Portland, Oregón, implementó lo que se denomina política de “derecho al retorno”, que está dirigida a residentes que sufrieron desplazamiento debido al aburguesamiento en las últimas décadas o la renovación urbana en la década de 1960”.

Se pueden aplicar otros impuestos y tarifas para desarrolladores a fin de construir viviendas sociales, generar subsidios para el alquiler o apoyar a pequeños comercios minoristas locales que, de lo contrario, podrían verse obligados a abandonar la comunidad que habitan hace un largo tiempo por cuestiones de precio. “A nivel local, si los impuestos se asignan con claridad de la manera correcta, las ciudades pueden usar esos fondos para comprar terrenos vacantes o edificios abandonados y transformarlos en viviendas sociales y públicas”.

Mientras tanto, los incentivos pueden tomar la forma de bonificaciones de densidad, que permiten que los desarrolladores construyan estructuras más altas de lo que se permite con la condición de que se reserven más unidades para viviendas con ingresos limitados, por ejemplo, el 30 por ciento del edificio. “A menudo, los municipios no logran obtener más del 10 o 15 por ciento”, según Anguelovski. “Sin embargo, es el turno de las ciudades en crecimiento que son atractivas para los desarrolladores. Así que no deberían tener miedo de ejercer presión sobre ellos, ya que son ciudades que tienen diversas comodidades que la gente busca”.

Reverdecimiento dirigido por la comunidad con intención de colaboración

Ninguna de estas intervenciones de desplazamiento es particularmente misteriosa o difícil de implementar, menciona Cotter. Pero hacerlo bien requiere la colaboración entre agencias que no suelen trabajar juntas: “La tarea del silvicultor urbano no es pensar en la estabilización de los alquileres”.

Es por eso que Connolly y Anguelovski, que presentaron una investigación para un próximo informe de enfoque en políticas en un taller del Instituto Lincoln en junio, indican que es esencial que las ciudades adopten un enfoque coordinado e intersectorial para el reverdecimiento. Incluso si el departamento de parques o la comisión de agua está tomando la iniciativa en una intervención ecológica en particular, explica Connolly, el esfuerzo también debería involucrar a otros departamentos clave de la ciudad, de modo que “la infraestructura ecológica se implemente con un plan de infraestructura de vivienda y transporte integrados”.

Barcelona demostró que este enfoque es posible, y quizás perfecto, durante la alcaldía de Ada Colau, indica Connolly. “Desde la oficina del alcalde, ordenaron que muchas de las agencias comenzaran a tener más conversaciones transversales sobre cómo la planificación de recursos existente se integra con otras dimensiones del gobierno y otras operaciones de la ciudad”, agrega Connolly.

“Es necesario intentar, en la medida de lo posible, evitar que estos dos elementos entren en conflicto, evitar que los desarrollos de la agencia de reverdecimiento dificulten que se alcancen las medidas de capacidad de pago de la vivienda”, agrega. “Solo se trata de debatir los dos temas en conjunto, lo que no significa rechazar la capacidad de pago de las viviendas ni rechazar el reverdecimiento: significa realizar esto de forma coordinada, además de incorporar elementos como apoyos sociales e infraestructura de transporte, entre otros… No digo que sea simple. Pero Barcelona tomó buenas medidas en pos de esto”.

Otro cambio más grande, casi filosófico, que Connolly cree que las ciudades deberían lograr es alejarse de un enfoque “oportunista” de el reverdecimiento, en el que las ciudades con objetivos climáticos o medioambientales específicos aprovechan cualquier oportunidad que tengan para agregar intervenciones verdes para avanzar en esos objetivos. Si existe la oportunidad de plantar algunos árboles o ponerlos en algún parque, lo hacen por reflejo, explica Connolly. “Pero esas oportunidades se crean por ciertas razones que, en general, están asociadas con el desarrollo. Entonces, si solo se tiene un enfoque oportunista para el reverdecimiento, siempre se vinculará el reverdecimiento con estos ciclos de desarrollo y ahí radica un desafío”. En cambio, recomienda adoptar un enfoque más intencional y general. “Incluso si no hay una oportunidad para el reverdecimiento, ¿cómo podemos crearla por nuestra cuenta?”.

Spirn, del Proyecto de Paisaje del Oeste de Filadelfia, que ha pasado gran parte de los últimos cinco años trabajando con sus alumnos en estrategias para prevenir el desplazamiento relacionado con el reverdecimiento urbano, está de acuerdo: “Es muy importante empezar a pensar en cómo ayudar a las personas a permanecer en sus hogares antes de comenzar a construir nuevos proyectos de infraestructura verde”, concluye. Y agrega que cualquier estrategia que una ciudad emplee en este sentido debe centrarse en los residentes. “La infraestructura verde debe ser algo más que el reverdecimiento. Tiene que tratarse de las personas”.

A algunos les preocupa que este enfoque, el reverdecimiento con más intención y con más aportes e intervención de los residentes empoderados de la comunidad, no pueda seguirle el ritmo a la urgencia de la crisis climática. “Existe la preocupación de que ser equitativos y respetar la autodeterminación implicará una peligrosa ralentización, y lo entiendo, pero también rechazo esa suposición”, indica Cotter. “Es un imperativo de la equidad que abordemos el cambio climático lo más rápido posible, porque las personas que más sufrirán son las poblaciones que siempre quedan marginadas, las mismas personas cuya autodeterminación y participación se ha visto socavada por los sistemas de racismo estructural”.

Si las comunidades pueden liderar la toma de decisiones frente al cambio climático, continúa Cotter: “No creo que sean más lentas. Creo que tendrían una perspectiva clara de lo que debe suceder, lo harían más rápido y encontrarían soluciones que en verdad reflejen las condiciones y las necesidades locales”.

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

Imagen principal: Una calle residencial en el oeste de Filadelfia. Crédito: Ciudad de Filadelfia.

CLEVELAND, OH – The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Land Trust Alliance are pleased to announce that Steve Rosenberg has been presented with the 2025 Kingsbury Browne Distinguished Practitioner Award at the Alliance’s annual national land conservation conference, held this year in Cleveland, Ohio.

The Kingsbury Browne Distinguished Practitioner award—named for Kingsbury Browne, a lawyer and conservationist who was a Lincoln Institute Fellow in 1980 and inspired the Alliance’s founding in 1982—is presented annually and honors those who have enriched the conservation community through their outstanding leadership, innovation, and creativity in land conservation. Rosenberg will serve as the Kingsbury Browne distinguished practitioner for the Lincoln Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for 2025–2026.

Rosenberg is currently the co-convener of the Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing and Conservation, which brings together organizations to strengthen biodiversity and climate resilience in New York’s Hudson Valley while creating affordable places where people can live. His work there follows more than three decades as the senior vice president of Scenic Hudson and the executive director of the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, where he led many efforts bringing land, equity, and conservation together at the regional scale, including authoring the NYC/Hudson Valley Foodshed Conservation Plan, launching Scenic Hudson’s River Cities Program, and transforming postindustrial Hudson River waterfronts into inviting public places. Rosenberg served on the board of the Land Trust Alliance for nine years.

“Steve has been a driving force in putting conservation to work for communities—safeguarding local food systems, expanding land access, and advancing economic opportunity,” said Chandni Navalkha, director of conservation and stewardship at the Lincoln Institute. “His leadership in uniting the land conservation and affordable housing sectors in the Hudson Valley sets a powerful example for collaborative solutions that benefit people and places, nationwide and beyond.”

“I have witnessed firsthand Steve’s passion and tireless dedication to land conservation and the mutually reinforcing benefits to people and communities,” said Ashley Demosthenes, CEO of the Land Trust Alliance. “The acreage protected and parks that were created during his tenure at Scenic Hudson are tremendous assets for communities and the entire Hudson Valley. And his bringing together of the affordable housing community and the land preservation community has made it possible to address critical community issues in new and collaborative ways. It is my honor to recognize Steve Rosenberg as the recipient of the 2025 Kingsbury Brown Distinguished Practitioner award.”

About the Land Trust Alliance

Founded in 1982, the Land Trust Alliance is a national land conservation organization working to save the places people need and love by empowering and mobilizing land trusts in communities across America to conserve land for the benefit of all. The Alliance represents approximately 1,000 member land trusts and affiliates supported by more than 250,000 volunteers and 6.3 million members nationwide. The Alliance is based in Washington DC, with staff in communities across the United States.

About the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy seeks to improve quality of life through the effective use, taxation, and stewardship of land. A nonprofit private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute researches and recommends creative approaches to land as a solution to economic, social, and environmental challenges. Through education, training, publications and events, we integrate theory and practice to inform public policy decisions worldwide.

Lead image: Steve Rosenberg (center) accepts the Kingsbury Browne award alongside Land Trust Alliance CEO Ashley Demosthenes (right) and board chair David Calle (left). Credit: DJ Glisson II/Firefly Imageworks.

In the late 1980s, Anne Whiston Spirn launched an “action research project” to explore how small landscape interventions could help restore nature and rebuild community in low-income neighborhoods in West Philadelphia. The project was meant to last four years. Nearly four decades later, the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) is still going strong—and it has yielded a harvest of both hope and hindsight.

In Mill Creek and other Philadelphia neighborhoods, local students, residents, landscape architects, and others worked together to create strategic pockets of ecological design—converting abandoned lots into community gardens and flood-absorbing green spaces, for example—and then tied those projects into the curriculum in local schools. This community-led approach earned national attention. Closer to home, it helped inspire Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters plan, through which the city has installed green infrastructure like tree trenches, rain gardens, and stormwater bumpouts on over 3,000 acres of publicly and privately owned land citywide, reducing annual stormwater runoff into local waterways by three billion gallons.

In historically underserved communities, where residents shoulder a disproportionate burden of climate risks and pollution, adding green space would seem a natural step toward addressing long-standing inequities. But something else happened as the West Philadelphia Landscape Project gained momentum. In the mid-2010s, housing prices in neighborhoods like Mill Creek began to rise—and so did interest from institutional investors, who tend to raise rents more aggressively than noninvestor landlords, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. All that greening, it seemed, was making the area more desirable to investors—and more expensive to live in.

Green space doesn’t just filter and cool the surrounding air, absorb stormwater, and improve physical and mental health. It’s  also proven to increase nearby property values.

That can be good for homeowners whose neighborhoods have been denied investment over the years, which has systematically happened to communities of color. But while rising home values benefit property owners, they can put displacement pressure on renters. About half of the households in cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Seattle rent their homes, while nearly two-thirds rent in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

“It was shocking to me … how quickly the disinvestment, vacancies, and abandoned buildings were replaced by speculation and development,” says Spirn, who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania when she started the project in West Philadelphia and now teaches at MIT. “Right now, the communities that I’ve worked in, like Mill Creek, are under siege by speculators and developers.”

Greening Without Displacement

In a study of 28 North American and European cities that made major investments in green spaces or climate adaptation between 1990 and 2016, urban greening was either a leading or contributing factor in citywide gentrification in 17 places. In Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, and other cities, greening was just one factor contributing to gentrification. In places like Atlanta, Copenhagen, and Montreal, urban greening was seen as the primary driver of gentrification.

Home values within a half-mile of Atlanta’s Beltline greenway, for example—a 22-mile loop of trails and parks connecting 45 Atlanta neighborhoods—increased 18 to 27 percent more than those of properties elsewhere in the city between 2011 and 2015.

“Until urban greening is so pervasive that there’s no price differential for its presence, we’re going to have to confront the fact that it’s an amenity that people respond to by bidding up prices,” says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Large-scale parks and greenways are most associated with gentrification, says James Connolly, associate professor of planning at the University of British Columbia and coauthor of the green gentrification study and a working paper commissioned by the Lincoln Institute. “That is a highly visible amenity, and like any other highly visible amenity—like a new transit station, or a new high-profile development,” he says, “any of those things would change real estate markets around the area, and greening is no different.”

Large projects like parks and greenways aren’t the only urban greening efforts that can drive gentrification. Investors and developers pay attention to municipal investment. And even smaller interventions like rain gardens and street trees can be interpreted as signs of a cultural or economic shift.

“These smaller green infrastructure interventions, some of them are just tiny rain gardens or curbside greening types of things,” Connolly says—so it’s not that real estate markets are reacting to a major new amenity that’s changing the community dynamic. But taken collectively, “these many different interventions can start to produce a kind of a shift in perception,” Connolly adds. “In Philadelphia, for example, we can see evidence of this, where those really small-scale interventions, when you aggregate them, are highly correlated with shifts in racial dynamics and shifts in gentrification in the city.”

All of this means that residents of historically marginalized communities may develop a justified skepticism toward new green projects, even when the interventions are intended to improve a neighborhood or better protect it from climate risks such as flooding or extreme heat.

In the decade and a half after Schuylkill River Park opened in South Philadelphia, median home prices rose 1,120 percent, neighborhood residency shifted from majority Black to majority white, and local cultural institutions such as the New Light Beulah Baptist Church found it necessary to shutter or relocate, writes Sterling Johnson, a PhD candidate at Temple University, and Kimberley Thomas, associate professor of geography at Temple. “The language may have changed since the early 20th century, but environmental stewardship still looks like colonization to many low-income Black people.”

And in Detroit, roughly a quarter of residents refused to accept free street trees in front of their homes—not because they didn’t understand the benefits of tree canopy, but due to lingering distrust of the city, according to a study by Christine Carmichael, then at the University of Vermont.

If cities don’t acknowledge and seriously address the potential for displacement caused by green interventions, Connolly says, “then what we end up with is a really diminished political support for urban greening, because we end up with a lot of people that just sort of see it as, ‘That’s not for me, so why would I support it?’”

‘Yes, and’ Policymaking

The tension between urban greening intended to improve quality of life and the economic displacement that often follows is an issue that demands “Yes, and” planning and policymaking. “You can’t have residential security at the expense of environmental security, and you can’t have environmental security at the expense of residential security,” Connolly says. “These two things cannot be traded off against one another—we need both.” He also notes that urban greening doesn’t always lead to displacement; in almost half of the cities studied, greening had little to no gentrification impact.

A city can use any number of specific policy tools to help mitigate displacement when greening a neighborhood; indeed, the remedies are similar regardless of what’s causing the displacement pressure, but they must be applied in tandem with (or even before) green interventions.

Community land trusts, for example, can help residents take an ownership stake in their neighborhood and ensure permanent housing affordability. Rent stabilization measures can keep rent hikes in check, so tenants aren’t priced out of their community. “Opportunity to purchase” laws, such as those in Washington, DC, allow tenants or cities first dibs on purchasing a home if a landlord decides to sell. Inclusionary zoning, affordable housing requirements, developer fees, and other tools can all help ease displacement pressure, too.

“It’s not one thing, it’s a package of tools,” says Isabelle Anguelovski, research professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and head of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), who coauthored the gentrification study and working paper with Connolly and BCNUEJ researcher Emilia Oscilowicz.

“It’s something that is both tax-driven and incentives-driven,” she continues. “Vancouver has a tax on empty housing. Some states, like Washington, have rent control at the broader state level. Portland, Oregon, has something called a ‘Right to Return’ policy, which is for residents who were gentrified out in past decades or displaced by urban renewal in the 1960s.”

Other taxes and developer fees can be used for public housing construction, rental subsidies, or supporting small local retailers who might otherwise be priced out of their longtime community. “At the local level, if taxes are earmarked very clearly the right way, cities can use those funds to buy vacant lots or derelict buildings and transform them into social and public housing.”

Incentives, meanwhile, can take the form of density bonuses, which permit developers to build taller structures than would otherwise be allowed in exchange for setting aside more units for income-restricted housing—say, 30 percent of the building. “Oftentimes, municipalities don’t manage to get more than 10 or 15 percent,” Anguelovski says. “But growing cities that are attractive to developers have the ball in their court. So they should not be afraid of pushing developers, because those are cities that have an array of assets that people want.”

Community-Led Greening, with Collaborative Intention

None of these displacement interventions are particularly mysterious or difficult to implement, Cotter says. But doing it well requires collaboration among agencies that might not normally work together: “It’s not the urban forester’s job to think about rent stabilization.”

That’s why Connolly and Anguelovski, who presented research for a forthcoming Policy Focus Report at a Lincoln Institute workshop in June, say it’s essential for cities to take a coordinated, cross-sectoral approach to greening. Even if the parks department or water commission is taking the lead on a particular green intervention, Connolly explains, the effort should involve other key city departments as well, so that “green infrastructure is going in with a plan for housing and transportation infrastructure integrated into the plan.”

Barcelona showed this approach is possible, if not perfect, under the mayorship of Ada Colau, Connolly says. “From the mayor’s office down, they mandated that a lot of their agencies start to have more of this transversal conversation about how the existing resource planning gets integrated with other dimensions of the government and other city operations,” Connolly says.

“Try, to the extent possible, to avoid putting these two things in conflict, to avoid having your greening agency create things that make the housing affordability measures more difficult to achieve,” he says. “Just have those conversations together—which doesn’t mean don’t do housing affordably, and doesn’t mean don’t do greening—it means do them in close conversation with one another, as well as bringing in things like social supports and transit infrastructure and things like that … I’m not saying that’s a simple thing. But Barcelona did make some nice movements in this direction.”

Another bigger, almost philosophical shift that Connolly thinks cities should make is moving away from an “opportunistic” approach to greening, in which cities with specific climate or environmental targets jump at any chance they get to add green interventions to advance those goals. If there’s an opportunity to plant some trees or put in a park somewhere, they reflexively do it, Connolly explains. “But those opportunities are created for certain reasons, usually associated with development. So if you have a solely opportunistic approach to greening, then you’re always going to be linking greening to these development cycles and therein lies a challenge.” Instead, he recommends taking a more intentional, big-picture approach. “Even if there’s not an opportunity for greening, how can we ourselves create one?”

Spirn, of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, who has spent much of the past five years working with her students on strategies to prevent displacement related to urban greening, agrees: “It’s really important to start thinking about how you help people stay in their homes before you start building new green infrastructure projects,” she concludes. And whatever strategy a city employs to do that needs to be resident-focused, she adds. “Green infrastructure needs to be about more than just greening. It needs to be about people.”

Some worry that this approach—greening with more intention, and with more input and agency from empowered community residents—can’t keep pace with the urgency of the climate crisis. “There’s a concern that being equitable, respecting self-determination, will slow us down in a dangerous way—and I get that, but I also reject that assumption,” Cotter says. “It’s an equity imperative for us to tackle climate change as quickly as possible, because the people who are going to suffer most are the populations that always get marginalized, the same people whose self-determination and agency has been undermined by systems of structural racism.”

If communities can lead decision-making in the face of climate change, Cotter continues, “I don’t think they’d be slower. I think they’d be clear-eyed about what needs to happen, do it faster, and come up with solutions that actually reflect local conditions and local needs.”

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

Lead image: A residential street in West Philadelphia. Credit: City of Philadelphia.

This article is reprinted with permission from Bloomberg CityLab, where it originally appeared. It was first published on May 29, 2025.

Last month, a sandstorm in Iraq turned day into night, blinded drivers in a thick orange haze, grounded flights, and left thousands with respiratory illness. The gusty waves of dust, swept around more intensely than many could remember, penetrated every possible crack in the physical realm, clogging up everything from kitchen vents to car engines to computer processors.

The nightmarish phenomenon, known as the haboob in Arabic, joins the growing roster of violent weather patterns exacerbated by climate change, from wildfires and mudslides to hurricanes and flooding. Though sandstorms have been around for millennia, scientists believe they are intensified by warming temperatures and drought, which creates more dry particulates that the wind can pick up and hurl around the landscape—much the way warmer ocean temperatures provide greater fuel for tropical storms. Observers note both an increase in ferocity and frequency.

Sandstorms are also showing up in some uncharacteristic places: Haboobs aren’t uncommon in the southwestern US, but on May 16 a wall of airborne dirt swept up from bone-dry Midwest farmland struck downtown Chicago—the first significant dust storm to hit the city since 1934, deep in the days of the Dust Bowl.

Still, most of these calamities are specific to geographic regions. Boston need not worry about a haboob, just as Riyadh will not have to prepare for a hurricane. Earth science has shown that climate impacts are highly customized in terms of how they hit on the ground. That heterogeneity—the notion that discrete categories of places are dealing with specific challenges on a warming planet—has led some cities to band together to confront what they have in common.

I was inspired to think about this concept of municipal knowledge-sharing networks—the global collaboration of mayors known as C40 has been a model for many years—after being asked to moderate a recent conversation in Doha, Qatar. The topic: an Arid Cities Network proposed by the Earthna Center for a Sustainable Future, a nonprofit policy research and advocacy center established by the Qatar Foundation. The city-level partnership aims to “accelerate the delivery of sustainable and resilient solutions for cities in arid, semi-arid, and desert regions that are uniquely on the front lines of the climate crisis, confronting water scarcity, extreme temperatures and ecosystem fragility.” (Disclosure: The Qatar Foundation supported my travel to and accommodation at the second annual Earthna summit.)

The need for such an effort became obvious when “we looked at the map and saw this is the driest country in the world,” said Gonzalo Castro de la Mata, executive director of the Doha-based Earthna Center. “There is no water. There is no agriculture. There is no forest. How can people survive here? What does sustainability mean? We started thinking about it and developed a work program around hot and arid countries.”

In addition to Doha, the initial grouping for this fledgling community of practice includes Muscat, Oman; Marrakesh, Morocco; Jaipur, India; Seville, Spain; and Lima, Peru. Each of those places is dealing with extreme heat and water scarcity, as well as challenges in air quality, waste management, food security, and energy use, according to David Simon, professor of development geography at the Royal Holloway, University of London, who was commissioned to study the needs of the six pilot cities.

There is no shortage of potential future member cities. An additional candidate is surely Phoenix, where the parched Colorado River basin is demanding better integration of land use planning and water resource management. Extreme temperatures in places like the Indian city of Ahmedabad and Amman, Jordan, are increasingly straining grids and imperiling residents. According to the European Commission’s World Atlas of Desertification, nearly 600 cities are located in arid regions—about 35 percent of the world’s big cities—and UN-Habitat projects there may be 600 more in this century.

Identifying the threats these cities have in common is in some ways the easy part. The value of a subnational platform is to promote an exchange of ideas about interventions, successful or not, Castro de la Mata said. “We believe that the tendency will be to reinvent solutions,” he said.

The setting for the Earthna summit, Doha’s brand new Msheireb downtown district, is a model for how to manage life in environments where it easily surpasses 100 degrees Fahrenheit day after day. Built on underutilized land previously hosting ramshackle shops for electrical supplies, the 77-acre redevelopment showcases strategies like shading and natural ventilation to adapt to the heat. Compact development and placemaking under the framework of the “15-minute city”—which calls for siting basic needs within a walkable radius—needed to be adjusted for local conditions: The reality of moving around in the heat means this is more like a six-minute city, planners say.

Under the claim that the entire neighborhood is LEED certified, Msheireb boasts thousands of solar panels, a distributed energy system for air conditioning, recycled greywater for irrigation and cooling, and locally sourced and recycled building materials. Buildings and streets are positioned to optimize shade and airflow; the city’s planning was informed by traditional knowledge in architecture and passive cooling techniques.

Much of Msheireb’s infrastructure—pipes carrying chilled water, loading docks, waste management—is underground, giving the surface a pristine appearance. One never sees a garbage truck.

Not many cities—not by a long shot—have the vast resources of Qatar to do this kind of five-star citybuilding. But there are takeaways, especially as the lower-cost strategies, like shading and natural ventilation, are measured and fine-tuned.

There is also much knowledge to share on the topic of desalination, another conversation that is uniquely situated among arid cities. In Qatar, like other nations in the desert environment, virtually all the potable water comes from the sea. The process requires an enormous amount of energy; desalination is the second-largest source of emissions in the country, after power plants. It also produces, by definition, massive piles of salt, intermingled with chemicals, that must be dumped somewhere (most commonly now in the Persian Gulf, filling shallow waters and disrupting that ecosystem).

Engineers are constantly working on making desalination more efficient, improving on the established system of reverse osmosis with new, technologically advanced materials. Ultimately the goal is to run desalination plants on solar power, a renewable source that is obviously very effective in the desert sun. Qatar launched two new solar facilities last month, and has set goals for solar to become a greater portion of domestic energy by 2030.

An accompanying ethos is to regard whatever water is produced by desalination as a precious resource, with few gallons wasted. Treated sewer effluent is used for landscaping, and native plants are being promoted that aren’t as thirsty.

Many of these strategies carry longer timelines, while a growing number of cities are dealing with drought and extreme heat more as a matter of triage.

The scarcity of water resources in a major city can feel very much like an emergency, said summit attendee Rafael López Aliaga, mayor of Lima. He said he feels a kind of anguish that the poor in informal settlements pay 10 to 20 times more for bottled water than in the formal city. The Peruvian capital is in the throes of drought as the flow of the three rivers converging in the city continues to dwindle, due to lack of rainfall and dramatic fluctuations in seasonal snowmelt in the Andes.

But some interventions—particularly shading—can provide more immediate relief. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the city installed fabric shades throughout open-air marketplaces to spare the sellers of wares, primarily women, of suffering under the blistering sun.

All these innovations and practices should be shared and celebrated, said Ibrahim Thiaw, undersecretary-general and executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, who was also on the panel at the Earthna summit.

The regular summits known in UN parlance as “conference of the parties” or COP are perhaps better known for addressing climate change and biodiversity. But the high-level meetings addressing desertification and drought—sometimes referred to as the “land COP”—concerns a big swath of the planet, he said. COP17 is set for Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2026; the most recent summit was in Riyadh, last December.

It is notable if not ironic that an initiative aimed at mitigating and adapting to climate change is springing from the Middle East, whose massive wealth is so closely connected to the use and export of fossil fuels. Qatar has the highest per capita energy use in the world, and some of the megaprojects proposed by Gulf States appear to be anything but green. But the region also recognizes the reality of global warming impacts that are already underway.

And it might just be part of the genetic makeup of this part of the world to figure out how to survive in an inhospitable climate. Three thousand years ago, before all that oil and gas was discovered, Persian engineers made the best of a bad situation by creating the qanat system—a network of underground tunnels that carried water across miles of desert, using only gravity—to service emerging new urban centers.

It’s hard to say if those innovators knew they were helping build the cradle of civilization. More likely, they were determined to put their heads together and solve a problem—the task before hot and arid cities today.

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

Lead image: The city of Doha, Qatar, is participating in the pilot of an Arid Cities Network, designed for places facing desertification and drought. Credit: hasan zaidi via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.