When Jacob Gonzalez moved from Seattle back to his hometown of Pasco, Washington, to work for the region’s Council of Governments in 2013, his housing needs were both seemingly straightforward and surprisingly difficult to address. “All I wanted was a tiny apartment for me and my CDs. I didn’t even have a pet,” he explains. “But there weren’t many apartments, and I wasn’t going to stress myself out by paying for space I either didn’t need or couldn’t afford, or by paying for an older apartment that didn’t have what I wanted it to have.” So he moved in with his parents. 

Gonzalez joined the City of Pasco as a planner in 2018 and is now the planning manager for the city’s Community and Economic Development department. These days, he rents a small cottage a few miles from his childhood home. He recognizes that his option to fall back on family for temporary housing is a luxury most of his fellow residents of Pasco do not have. “Thanks to my parents, I had choices. Maybe I didn’t like my choices, but at least I had them, whereas a lot of our community members don’t have that flexibility. For many of them, housing is a challenge on a month-to-month basis.” 
 
Like virtually every community in the United States, Pasco is facing a significant shortage of affordable housing. Located on the rich soils of the Columbia Basin in southeastern Washington, Pasco is a city of about 80,000 residents and is part of the Tri-Cities, a regional hub that includes the cities of Kennewick and Richland and is collectively home to about 300,000 people. Established by the Northern Pacific Railway Company in the late nineteenth century, Pasco is largely agricultural. For many decades it has been considered an affordable place to buy a home in a region with high housing costs. 

Until a few years ago, Pasco could accommodate those buyers with housing stock that is 70 percent detached single-family and mostly built prior to 2000. However, Pasco has grown significantly in the past two decades and is now one of the fastest-growing cities in Washington. Today, Pasco is home to a relatively young and demographically diverse population; the median age in the city is 29, compared to 38 nationally, and more than half of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino. The rapid population growth is due at least in part to Pasco’s rapidly diversifying economy, which has expanded beyond its agricultural base to include job opportunities in public health and local government services. 

As the population has grown, land and housing costs have risen. In Pasco, the median home price has increased about 60 percent in less than five years, from $237,600 in 2017 to $379,000 in 2021. That’s in line with an average increase of 66 percent across Washington during the same time, but dramatically higher than the 21 percent national increase. According to Pasco’s 2018–2038 Comprehensive Plan, more than 15,000 additional units of housing will be required by 2038 to accommodate the projected 48,000 new residents. At its current rate of production, city staff estimate, Pasco will fall about 5,000 units short of that target.  

Pasco is not alone in grappling with housing issues related to rapid growth, says Martha Galvez, executive director of the Housing Solutions Lab at New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “Growth has been a really common theme among small and medium-sized cities,” Galvez notes. “Some of that growth is due to people migrating out of the big, hot coastal cities to smaller places where you can get more space for your dollar. And some of it is because these places are gaining jobs and attracting industries.” That’s the case in Pasco, where Amazon is building two warehouses, each more than one million square feet, and Darigold recently announced plans to build North America’s largest whey processing center. 

Broadly speaking, the shortage of affordable housing options plaguing nearly every community in America is at least partially the result of a significant decline in the production of single-family homes beginning in the mid-2000s, combined with stagnant wages and rising land and housing costs. The shortage has only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic: low interest rates have stoked demand just as construction costs have increased due to labor and material shortages and supply chain challenges.  

Across the country, places like Pasco are exploring how land use decisions can help address the housing affordability crisis. Last year, Gonzalez and his colleagues participated in the Housing Solutions Workshop run by the Furman Center and Abt Associates, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute. Designed to help leaders from small and midsize communities develop and implement balanced and comprehensive local housing strategies, the program invited applications from communities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000, and selected participants through a competitive national process. Gonzalez says the workshop helped him and his colleagues better identify barriers to increasing the availability of affordable housing in Pasco and meaningful actions they could take. 

It was good timing. Two years earlier, the state of Washington had passed House Bill 1923, which offers communities the opportunity to qualify for planning grant assistance in exchange for a range of actions that promote urban density, such as authorizing multifamily zoning in areas previously zoned for single-family homes and approving smaller lot sizes. That legislation created an opportunity for Gonzalez and his colleagues. 

“We could apply for a grant, so that’s always appealing,” says Gonzalez. “And the legislation included a list of proposed code amendments we could make. So my department recommended three code amendments to the city council and the mayor.” 

In January of this year, the city of Pasco became one of 52 communities across Washington that have adopted some of the code amendments proposed in HB 1923. By doing so, Pasco is reforming the city’s approach to land use and demonstrating the critical role local governments can play in promoting housing affordability. 

Zoning for All 

Pasco’s historic approach to land use reflects its longstanding identity as a place where homeownership is affordable to people priced out of the region’s better-known cities. Because of this cultural expectation of affordable homeownership, the city’s primary focus has been ensuring a supply of single-family homes, and that was reflected in its zoning. Prior to the city council vote, 84 percent of the land that was zoned residential in Pasco was restricted to single-family homes. 

The result of zoning like this, which is common in communities across the country, can be not only a housing shortage, but also numerous missed opportunities for a more affordable, diverse range of housing options, says Michael Andersen, a senior housing researcher at the Sightline Institute, which researches economic and policy issues in the Pacific Northwest. 

“The effect of only allowing multifamily housing in such a small area is that you constrain the volume of lots that could be plausibly built on,” Andersen says. “And you then have to wait until whoever owns one of those lots is interested in doing something with it. Part of the way to increase the number of homes being built is to increase the odds on any given property that it is time to do something on that land. In hockey they say that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. With this zoning, Pasco decided not to take 84 percent of the shots.” 

Gonzalez and his colleagues understood this, so they worked with the city council to revise the city’s housing policies. Under an amendment to the city’s municipal code adopted in late January, 68 percent of land that is zoned residential will now be eligible for some forms of multifamily housing, including duplexes, triplexes, and, in some instances, small apartment buildings oriented around a courtyard. This represents a roughly fourfold increase in land available for multifamily properties, and allows for the development of “missing middle” housing—properties that occupy the middle of the housing spectrum, between detached single-family homes and massive multifamily developments. Missing middle housing usually includes two to twelve units, and can be built in a neighborhood of single-family homes without seeming out of place or altering the feel of the area. 

Creating opportunities for missing middle housing offers numerous benefits. For starters, missing middle housing can accommodate developers who would like to build properties other than detached single-family homes, and residents who would like to live in a smaller unit. It can also increase the availability of affordable housing, says Andersen. “Depending on the style, the homes may share walls or wood frames or exteriors, which not only reduces the cost of building missing middle housing but also helps to keep down the price of existing housing by providing affordable alternatives. Additionally, missing middle units can help tip a neighborhood into a level that it can support a bus line or a small commercial hub with a little corner grocery store, a coffee shop, something like that, which makes for a more walkable community and is also good for local economic development and social interactions.” 

While not everyone in Pasco supports the idea of denser housing, Gonzalez is confident that the community benefits from at least having the option to build it. “Our community is growing very quickly. People are moving here in their twenties and maybe they don’t want to buy a home, and we also have people who are older and want to age here. They can’t do that if the only option is to buy a detached single-family home,” he says. “That’s why we need a lot of everything—detached homes, townhomes, apartments—because, as a municipality, we have to plan for the needs of the community, and not just for preferences. Sure, there may be a preference for a big house on a large lot, but that should not preclude us from removing barriers and restrictive policies to make other forms of housing more attainable.” 

In addition to accommodating missing middle housing, the Pasco City Council passed a second code amendment that allows for “lot size averaging,” which allows individual lots in a multiparcel housing development to fall below the city’s minimum lot size requirements as long as the project’s average lot size can meet the requirement. In Pasco, where residential lots tend to be quite large—an average of 13,068 square feet, compared to 6,345 square feet in the western United States and 8,177 square feet nationally—allowing for smaller lots is a smart idea, says Andersen. 

“When you’re talking about lot sizes, you’re effectively telling residents that in order to live here you have to purchase or rent a certain amount of land,” says Andersen. “When the lot sizes are as large as Pasco’s, that’s a lot of land, and that cost can be a barrier to entry.” Larger lots also typically mean increased infrastructure costs. According to research by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, urban sprawl can increase the cost of providing public services and infrastructure by 10 percent to 40 percent. As Andersen explains, that can lead to increased housing costs. 

The code amendments are also designed to encourage the creation of housing that increases access to hospitals, schools, major transportation routes, parks, and other critical services by allowing for slightly more flexibility. As Gonzalez explains, the emphasis on access stems from the fact that transportation costs are high in Pasco. According to the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, Pasco residents spend 24 percent of their income on transportation and have the third-largest transportation costs as a percentage of total household costs among the state’s 20 largest cities (CNT 2022). By increasing access, the planning staff hopes to reduce transportation costs, in turn reducing overall household costs. 

To further reduce barriers to creating more housing, the Pasco City Council passed a third code amendment that authorizes the creation of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) on all residential parcels that contain a single-family home. The amendment allows the ADU to be either attached—to a garage, for example—or freestanding, does not include a minimum parking requirement, and does not require the owner of the ADU to occupy the primary residence. While there is a maximum allowable size—the smaller of either 1,000 square feet or 55 percent of the primary dwelling—there is no minimum size requirement, nor are there design requirements beyond ensuring that the ADU complements the home. 

“We don’t want to overburden people or unnecessarily complicate the process,” explains Gonzalez. “That’s why we ultimately decided not to require parking. If we did, there would be many fewer lots that could feasibly have an ADU because the only place to put parking would be in the front yard. We wanted to avoid a situation in which our policies technically allow something, but in practice make it almost impossible to do.” 

Pursuing a Balanced, Comprehensive Strategy 

Pasco’s rezoning efforts are just one of the steps the city is taking to address housing affordability. The city also offers a down payment assistance program to first-time homebuyers, is working to identify opportunities to partner with local and regional stakeholders to better address housing needs, and is about to undertake a Housing Action Plan. Officials in Pasco are also exploring tax incentives and taking advantage of House Bill 1406, a revenue-sharing program for local governments that allows a percentage of local sales and use taxes to be credited against the state sales tax for housing investments. 

Still, Pasco aims to do more, says Gonzalez: “There was a lot of focus in the workshop on taking a balanced housing approach that addresses all the different aspects of our housing needs. We aspire toward it, but we aren’t there yet.” 

That idea of a balanced and comprehensive strategy is critical to effectively tackling housing issues, says Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University and the faculty director for the Furman Center. “There is no magic bullet to solve a jurisdiction’s housing challenges,” says Ellen, who coauthored Through the Roof: What Communities Can Do About the High Cost of Rental Housing in America, a Lincoln Institute Policy Focus Report (Ellen, Lubell, and Willis 2021). “Housing problems are complex and usually touch on a lot of different functions and policies that implicate different parts of local government, including the housing department, the planning department, and the buildings and finance departments.” 

Given the multifaceted nature of housing shortages, Ellen encourages local governments to adopt comprehensive strategies that use the full set of tools available to the various departments. As she explains, “localities that do not adopt a comprehensive approach run the risk of creating well-intentioned, well-designed housing plans that could be thwarted by, say, zoning codes that don’t allow for certain types of construction, or a tax code that disincentivizes the development of rental housing when it is rental housing you’re trying to promote through subsidies.” In taking a more comprehensive approach, local governments can take full advantage of their entire suite of resources, and can also align agencies that may otherwise remain siloed and at risk of unintentionally undermining each other.  

In addition to a housing plan that is comprehensive, Ellen advocates for one that is balanced, by which she means a plan that addresses a range of housing issues rather than a single barrier. “Partially, that’s a political issue,” she explains. “If you focus on a range of goals, then you are more likely to gain political acceptance and support.” She says a balanced plan is more likely to succeed by recognizing and addressing the multidimensional nature of housing challenges.  

In Through the Roof, Ellen and her coauthors Jeffrey Lubell and Mark A. Willis provide a framework for a balanced and comprehensive housing strategy that centers on advancing four broad goals (see figure 1). 

“This four-part framework for a balanced and comprehensive housing strategy groups individual policies into broader categories, so communities can assess where there are gaps in their local housing strategy and work to close them,” says Adam Langley, associate director of U.S. and Canadian programs at the Lincoln Institute. “The number of local housing programs and their scope often matters less than ensuring that a community has implemented at least one tool to address each part of the framework—that’s why it’s so important to consider comprehensiveness.” 

This framework is central to Local Housing Solutions, a joint initiative of the Furman Center and Abt Associates that provides actionable resources and step-by-step guidance to help cities develop, implement, and monitor housing strategies. With an emphasis on affordability and equity, the program is specifically targeted to local governments, both because their role is frequently overlooked in discussions of housing challenges, and because of their significant and unique power to address housing problems. 

“While all levels of government are important, local governments are particularly well-positioned to quarterback their local housing strategies,” Ellen explains, citing the local nature of the housing market and the power local governments have over the most critical tools affecting housing policy, including land use, building codes, permitting, and, at least to some degree, property taxes. “Even though the majority of the funding is coming from the federal government, and to a lesser degree the state government, it’s not just spending that matters. Those key decisions over how much housing can be built, what kind of housing can be built, and who can live where are really important and happen at the local level.” 

The Furman Center launched the Housing Solutions Workshop to support local governments as they make those decisions. In addition to Pasco, the 2021 cohort included teams of five to six senior leaders from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the City of Bozeman and Gallatin County, Montana; Huntsville, Alabama; and the City and County of Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

“In the workshop, our delegation kept finding ourselves talking about the fact that we have all these great policies, yet our development standards don’t get us there,” Gonzalez says. “The more we talked—and continue to talk—about it, the more I understand the importance of focusing on the implementation piece, which is the most difficult part. It’s especially true in a place like Pasco, where we have had years of rapid growth, years of not producing enough housing, and years of not having the right regulatory structure in place. I’m seeing now that we really have to dive into our objectives and measurements and strategies. We have to ask ourselves if our strategies are feasible. Are they practical and relevant for Pasco or are we just copying and pasting a policy from another city?”  

For Gonzalez, that shift in focus toward implementation is exemplified in the city’s recent passage of the three code amendments. “We didn’t make any mandates. We aren’t requiring property owners to build these types of housing. We are just making it an option, whereas two weeks ago it wasn’t an option. And by doing so, not only do we save builders and residents from the headache of not being able to do what they want to do, but we also streamline the permitting process, which is often a significant barrier, because we’ve made it so that there’s no longer a need to rezone the property. So it better aligns our comprehensive plan with our development standards.” 

Gonzalez knows that the recently adopted code amendments are not a panacea, and that Pasco has more to do to ensure that it is providing affordable housing options for all. And he is excited to continue with that work. In the coming year, he hopes to work with the Pasco City Council to reconsider existing development standards, including height and lot coverage, in order to identify opportunities to create a more modern, and more flexible, code. He also hopes to look into the policies that govern nonconforming properties—those that comply with earlier standards but not current ones—in an effort to ensure that policies are applied “based on health and safety, and not aesthetics.” He’d like to work more closely with neighboring cities Kennewick and Richland, which are experiencing similar shortages of affordable housing. And he wants to investigate density bonuses and tax exemptions for multifamily developments, among other things. 

“There is an urgency to the work,” he explains. “Fifteen years ago, when our comprehensive plan was adopted, there was no such thing as Uber or apps or on-demand pizza delivery. We have to change our policies so that they make sense for today’s residents, and for future residents. I think our community members deserve that.” 

Housing Affordability Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute 

In 2020, the Lincoln Institute embarked on several new housing-related projects, recognizing the importance of land policy in the housing affordability debate and its implications for reducing poverty and inequality, which is one of the Lincoln Institute’s six core goals. As part of this work, a cross-departmental team issued a call for research proposals, seeking to better understand barriers to implementing housing solutions at the scale needed to effectively address the U.S. housing affordability crisis and strategies to overcome those barriers. The commissioned papers cover a diverse set of topics and geographies, from case studies of U.S. political coalitions built to advance housing affordability to an exploration of the impact and applications of France’s fair-share housing law. The Lincoln Institute partnered with the NYU Furman Center and Abt Associates on the 2021 Housing Solutions Workshop described in this article, and hopes to offer another iteration of the workshop. The team will also undertake new research on state and local policies to improve housing markets. 

Loren Berlin is a writer and communications consultant specializing in housing and economic opportunity. Read more about her at www.lorenberlin.com. 

Lead image: The population of Washington’s Tri-Cities region, which includes Pasco, Richland, and Kennewick, grew 19.8 percent between 2010 and 2020. Credit: alohadave via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

For years, innovations in alternative mobility—scooters, e-bikes, autonomous vehicles—have focused on how individuals get around. But the pandemic era has put fresh emphasis on a different mobility goal: moving stuff around. 

The demand for rapid delivery has increased sharply in the past two years, and it doesn’t seem to be abating. By some estimates, companies like Door Dash see the quick delivery of groceries alone adding up to a $1 trillion market. With major companies from UPS to Domino’s trying out new ways to deliver their products, the pace and range of vehicle experiments has accelerated—and that is likely to impact the design, planning, and regulation of urban and suburban spaces. 

While it’s unclear which of these experiments will pan out, it’s undeniable that new kinds of delivery vehicles are or soon will be on our streets. With new questions arising, urban design thinkers, retail and technology companies, and municipalities are working to address the convergence of increasing delivery demand and new vehicle forms. Leading the micro-mobility pack is the e-bike, a form that’s been around for decades but has lately become strikingly popular: with sales up 145 percent since the pandemic started, e-bikes now reportedly outsell electric cars. John MacArthur, a program manager at Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), has been researching their potential—including the “tantalizing hope” that micro-mobility tech gets more people out of cars—for the better part of a decade. Last year, he taught a new class focused on cities dealing with all manner of new micro-mobility experiments, or “technologies being thrust in the public right of way.” 

Students in that class found that the pandemic was inspiring a range of responses from cities. On the one hand, work-from-home trends reduced and reconfigured car-centric commuter patterns. In Portland and elsewhere, MacArthur notes, that led to the creation of more bike and bus lanes. On the other hand, delivery demand spiked, leading to concern about a corresponding spike in single-occupancy delivery vehicles. 

MacArthur’s research connected him to Portland’s B-Line Urban Delivery, a 12-year-old firm that operates a fleet of electric cargo trikes that can handle 500-pound loads. With input from TREC and B-Line, Portland is now considering ways to create “micro-delivery hubs.” In this model, a truck brings a load of deliveries to a strategic location, with e-bikes or other micro-vehicles handling the last mile for each delivery, reducing traffic congestion. Such experiments are already underway in Europe, where delivery giant UPS has been experimenting with e-bikes, delivery hubs, and other “sustainable logistics solutions.” 

MacArthur acknowledges that complicated zoning and other issues are involved. But the bigger point is that Portland is among the cities proactively grappling with the future of mobility and how cities can respond to it and, more important, shape it. Shaping the response to new vehicle forms was a theme of a recent “Rebooting NYC” research project spearheaded by Rohit Aggarwala, a senior fellow at the Urban Tech Hub of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Aggarwala—who previously led mobility work for Sidewalk Labs and recently joined New York City government as commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection and the city’s chief climate officer—sketches the broader context. “If a vehicle is designed to fit well in traditional traffic, then it is almost by definition not designed to be a good urban vehicle,” he says. Cars, pickups, and SUVs are built for highways; their makers put far less emphasis on, say, turning radius or other factors that would make them more suited to the narrower confines of urban streets. 

Thus the rise of new, smaller autonomous vehicles such as the Nuro, shaped like a diminutive van and about half the width of a conventional sedan; with no driver, it’s designed to haul up to 500 pounds of cargo. The startup might be best known for a limited pilot program in Houston with Domino’s, offering “the world’s first fully automated pizza delivery service.” 

While such wee vehicles are pitched as virtuously reducing not just pollution but also traffic congestion, the reality is that they’re often fundamentally unsuited to real-world traffic. So where can they go? 

Another recent pilot program involving startup Refraction AI’s REV-1 had the three-wheeled, washing machine–sized autonomous vehicle hauling pizzas via bike lanes in Austin, Texas—a development that some cyclists were not pleased about. “What if in two years we have several hundred of these on the road?” one bike advocate asked a local journalist. Yet another startup, Starship, has been testing its small mobile robot—a 55-pound object with the footprint of a wagon—in several cities, using sidewalks. This, too, has met with a mixed response. Such responses signal a major potential flashpoint, but also, perhaps, an opportunity. Aggarwala points out that in New York and other cities, bicyclists and e-bike users (who are often delivery workers) have long battled over bike lane use. In many cases, bike advocates have fought for years or decades to establish dedicated lanes, and have little interest in seeing them clogged with newfangled motorized vehicles of any kind.  

But the problem isn’t the e-bikes or AVs or robots, each of which offers positive alternatives to traditional cars, Aggarwala says: “The problem is all these alternative vehicles being shoehorned into an incomplete network of generally unprotected lanes that are way too narrow.” Thus the “Rebooting NYC” proposals include creating New Mobility Lanes. This would involve widening and expanding the city’s existing bike lanes into a “network that can accommodate both bicycles and these new vehicles.” 

Other researchers have made similar proposals for “light individual transport lanes,” with varying specifics but a common goal. “You’re basically providing more space for different kinds of vehicles,” says MacArthur of PSU. “That’s the big question that planners will have to face in the next five years.” It’s a knotty challenge for municipalities caught between the ambitions of tech companies, the limits on local regulation resulting from superseding state or federal rules, and the reality that even designating bike lanes in the first place depends more on mustering political will and popular support than it does on the planning that underpins it. 

On that last point, Aggarwala suggests a potential opportunity. As a political matter, bike lanes are often seen as benefiting just a portion of the population at the expense of everyone else. But pretty much everyone has been stuck behind a delivery vehicle. And, maybe more to the point, more of us than ever have come to depend on those delivery vehicles. So rejiggering the way road space is divided doesn’t just benefit the few—it’s for nearly everyone. In other words, Aggarwala asks: “What if you broaden the relevance of a bike lane by expanding its use?” 

Clearly a wave of new-vehicle experimentation is poised to disrupt the delivery business, in a time of unprecedented demand. It’s worth thinking about how planners and policy makers can not just respond to that wave, but harness it to help make city streets more functional and accessible for all. 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Nuro, an autonomous vehicle company founded by two former Google engineers, has partnered with companies including Domino’s, CVS, Walmart, and FedEx on delivery pilot projects in several U.S. states. Credit: Domino’s.

Citing the increasing demand for water even as drought is shrinking supplies, several national organizations representing planners, water utilities, and other key stakeholders have issued a call to action urging more comprehensive integration of land and water planning and management.  

The statement emerged in the wake of Connecting Land and Water for Healthy Communities, a virtual conference held in July 2021 that was cosponsored by the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) and the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. After the conference, which was attended by more than 200 water and planning professionals from around the country, organizers released the findings to address why fragmentation of land and water management occurs and how to repair and prevent it. They also released a set of guiding principles to help land and water managers better recognize and build upon the connections between their work. In addition to AWRA and the Babbitt Center, the American Planning Association’s Water and Planning Network and the American Water Works Association (AWWA) signed on to the statement. 

“The fact that multiple organizations signed off on this statement is a really good outcome of the conference, and we hope to build upon that,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, who cochaired the 2021 conference with Jim Holway of the Babbitt Center. “Places all over the world are feeling pressure to their water supplies due to water quality concerns and the changing climate,” said Megdal, who is also a board member for AWRA. “Taking available water resources into account is critically important when planning for land uses, [but] there is a lack of connection between water planners and land planners.”  

There are many reasons for that disconnect, including the fact that decisions related to land and water have historically been made by different departments or agencies. “Siloing didn’t start as a bad thing,” notes Bill Cesanek of APA’s Water and Planning Network, which provides a platform for interdisciplinary exchange about water-related issues and boasts approximately 500 members. “Different agencies focused on different problems and created different solution sets.” Too often, though, those solutions didn’t take into account the complicated relationship between land and water, leading to issues ranging from supply shortages for new developments to contamination in water sources.  

“We need to make sure we don’t stay in these siloes,” said Chi Ho Sham, president of AWWA, a nonprofit scientific and educational association dedicated to managing and treating water. AWWA’s membership includes 4,300 utilities that supply about 80 percent of the country’s drinking water and treat almost half of its wastewater. “We need to reach across to other disciplines to take a holistic view on the availability and quality of water—the world’s most vital resource.”  

That’s true whether you’re in the drought-stricken West, the flood-prone East, or somewhere in between, says Joanna Endter-Wada, professor of natural resource and environmental policy at Utah State University: “Growth-related plans have to take water into account.” Endter-Wada, who coauthored the findings statement and cochairs AWRA’s Policy Committee, noted that she knows of at least one state-level water official who has already brought the statement into policy conversations. In April, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute will use it as a backdrop to a seminar series on opportunities and challenges facing communities due to the Colorado River Basin shortage declaration.  

“This is not just a one-off statement,” Endter-Wada says. “Given the challenges the world is confronting, we will keep sharing the science and making the argument. The power of words and the power of action go together.” 

That steady drip of communication is key, agree Cesanek and his Water and Planning Network cochair Mary Ann Dickinson, who send a regular newsletter to their members and maintain a collection of reports, toolkits, and other resources on the APA website. Cesanek thinks the message about the importance of integrating land and water seems to be getting out; he pointed to a new book about comprehensive planning written by David Rouse, a Water and Planning Network steering committee member and former APA director of research. The book touches on both green infrastructure, a nature-based urban stormwater management approach, and One Water, an integrated approach to water management that prioritizes sustainability and community vitality. This type of integrated approach “needs to be applied universally, and climate change has made that all the more apparent by exacerbating not only a lack of water but excess water,” Cesanek says. 

Promoting conceptual, scientific, and management frameworks and techniques like One Water is one of six guiding principles laid out in the joint statement. The others include balancing the health of human and ecological communities; incorporating diverse perspectives; honoring and learning from traditional and tribal knowledge; protecting land critical to drinking water source protection; and utilizing collaboration, engagement, and boundary-spanning tools.  

The call to action, which marks the first such collaboration between the four organizations, “was just one example of the partnerships that emerged from the AWRA conference,” said Faith Sternlieb, senior program manager at the Babbitt Center and coauthor of the findings statement. Sternlieb noted that plans are in the works for a follow-up conference in 2023, and said organizers hope to focus on the “action” part of the recent call to action.  

Sham said he is optimistic about the collaborations underway and looking forward to the 2023 conference, as well as other opportunities to keep this conversation going: “We need time for folks to meet up, think about the big issues, and come up with solutions.” 

It’s a conversation that is increasingly urgent in an era marked by history-making drought, floods, and extreme weather. “We face a lot of challenges due to climate change,” said Megdal of the University of Arizona, who published a reflection inspired by the findings statement. “We can only do a better job if we put our heads together.” 

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines.

Image: A national call to action recommends embracing frameworks like One Water, an integrated approach to water management that prioritizes sustainability and community vitality. Credit: Courtesy of Brown and Caldwell.

Stretching from Portland, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia, the Northeast megaregion is a powerhouse of the knowledge economy. Yet it struggles with grinding congestion, escalating climate change risks, and skyrocketing housing costs—problems that too often fall to the region’s more than 1,500 individual cities, towns, villages, and boroughs to solve. 

The Northeast and a dozen other U.S. megaregions will shape the country’s future over the next century. Each one is a network of metropolitan areas united by history, culture, economics, and shared infrastructure and natural resource systems. They contain only 30 percent of the nation’s land, but most of its people. As a new book makes clear, they face complex challenges that require planning, policy, and governance that cross traditional political boundaries. 

Written by planning scholars Robert D. Yaro, Ming Zhang, and Frederick R. Steiner, Megaregions and America’s Future explains the concept of megaregions, provides updated economic, demographic, and environmental data, draws lessons from Europe and Asia, and shows how megaregions are an essential framework for governing the world’s largest economy. 

Far from being a substitute for a strong national government, megaregions are, in the authors’ view, the perfect geographic unit for channeling federal investment and managing large systems such as interstate rail, multistate natural resource systems, climate mitigation or adaptation, and major economic development initiatives. 

“Creating national, megaregional, and metropolitan governance systems will require a reinvention of the federal system and a nationwide program of innovation and experimentation unlike any that the country has undertaken since the New Deal almost a century ago,” the authors write. 

The book pays particular attention to defenses against sea-level rise and storm surges, calling for regional alternatives to the “go-it-alone approach” of cities like Boston and New York, and to high-speed rail, which could open access to opportunity as it has in other highly industrialized countries. Building better rail networks within cities and regions is critical to the success of high-speed rail, the authors write. 

Geared to urban and regional planners and policy analysts, staff and decision makers in transportation, environmental protection, and development agencies, faculty and students in related fields, as well as business leaders, Megaregions and America’s Future includes a case study of the Northeast—the nation’s oldest megaregion and the source of the concept—but delves deeply into every megaregion, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast to Southern California. 

The book builds on two decades of Lincoln Institute scholarship on megaregions, including several books on the European model and Regional Planning in America: Practice and Prospect, a foundational text in the field of regional planning.

“This ambitious book makes the case for recognizing American megaregions as a driver of policy, planning, and investment,” said Sara C. Bronin, a planning professor at Cornell University. “It provides a road map for breaking down jurisdictional boundaries to address urgent needs in affordable housing, ecosystem vulnerability, and transportation-system connectedness—and it is essential reading for anyone hoping to broaden their thinking about our national trajectory.” 

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

Image: DKosig/iStock.

Last fall, water levels in Utah’s Great Salt Lake reached historic lows. Severe drought fueled by climate change and increased demands on upstream water systems have shrunk the lake to nearly half of the 1,700 square miles it covers in an average year, making it “a puddle of its former self.” Scientists warn that the lake could disappear entirely in the not-too-distant future. 

The losses at the Great Salt Lake represent just one aspect of a looming water crisis in Utah. The entire state is suffering from drought, with statewide reservoir storage capacity at 50 percent. Lake Powell, a reservoir that plays a critical role in the Colorado River Basin’s complex water storage and delivery system, is at just over 26 percent capacity. “It’s not just the Great Salt Lake,” said Utah Governor Spencer Cox at a press conference in November. “It’s the Colorado River Basin, it’s all our lakes and streams and [water] storage capacity . . . . This is an all-hands-on-deck issue.” 
 
During the past few years, policy makers in Utah—one of the most arid U.S. states and one of the fastest-growing—have begun to address this crisis with strategies designed to promote water conservation while supporting population growth. As part of that effort, the state appropriated funds for a project led by the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and Western Resource Advocates that will help communities better coordinate land and water planning and create more sustainable futures. 

“As one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, how we grow and develop today will set our water use for decades to come,” said Candice Hasenyager, director of the state Division of Water Resources (DWR). “The Division of Water Resources has been a strong proponent of water conservation for decades. The next logical step toward adapting to climate change by adopting waterwise practices is integrating water considerations into the planning process.” 

More Demand, Less Water 

Projections suggest that the number of households in Utah could double by 2060, from 1.1 million to 2.2 million. As the realities of supporting a swelling population with a dwindling water supply began to hit home, the state released a water strategy in 2017, followed by regional water conservation goals in 2019. These plans aim for a statewide reduction in per capita water use of about 16 percent by 2030 and 26 percent by 2065.  

The state legislature has taken action to support these goals, creating a multi-year water banking pilot project, enacting a state water policy, and, in 2021, appropriating $270,000 for the water and land use planning integration project. (These legislative acts are significant accomplishments in a state where water-related legislation is frequently contentious.) In addition, a bill passed by the state legislature in early 2022 will require water use and preservation elements to be included in municipal and county comprehensive plans, a step the Babbitt Center recommends in the U.S. West and beyond. 

The recent water shortages, especially in highly visible locations like the Great Salt Lake, “have caught people’s attention in a way that’s making them realize solutions are needed now,” said Marcelle Shoop, director of the Saline Lakes Program for the National Audubon Society. Shoop, who served on a statewide steering committee charged with ensuring adequate water supplies for Great Salt Lake, says improving the integration of land and water planning was a key recommendation that came out of that process. “When you make land use decisions, you’re making a water use decision,” she said. “And you’re locking it in for a very long time.” 

To help spread that message, DWR embarked on the land and water integration project in 2021, with initial funding from the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council. The primary output of the first phase of that work was the development of a Utah-specific framework for community action—refined with input from 12 local governments, water providers, and community organizations—that illustrates how communities can better integrate water and land use planning. The framework recommends four stages of work: form a core water and land use planning team per community; assess local conditions; identify points of impact; and take action. As part of Phase One, the Babbitt Center and Western Resource Advocates also shared a stakeholder checklist and community self-assessment tool that can provide tangible guidance for communities.  

Interviews with community stakeholders were enlightening, said John Berggren, policy analyst at Western Resource Advocates. “Only one community said they could continue to grow with existing supplies without many constraints in the coming decades,” he said. “Some communities anticipate most of their growth will be in redevelopment or infill, while others are preparing for new development, but there was widespread concern about having enough water for current and future demands—and this is compounded by climate change.” 

Growing Water Smart 

The 2021 appropriation makes it possible for the Babbitt Center, Western Resource Advocates, and Utah State University’s Center for Water-Efficient Landscaping to embark on a second phase of the project, working directly with communities via the Growing Water Smart program.  

Growing Water Smart, which originated as a joint program of the Sonoran Institute and Lincoln Institute, brings small groups of community stakeholders together for several days to learn, collaborate, and create plans applicable to their local residents and needs. Participants gain a better understanding of the connections among land use, water supply and demand, and climate change, and they also build professional relationships—with each other and with peers throughout their regions. Launched in 2017, the program is also operating in Arizona, California, and Colorado, and discussions are underway with partners in Mexico about adapting it for communities there. 

“The heart of Growing Water Smart is getting land use planners and water managers from the same communities together to talk to each other, sometimes for the very first time,” says Faith Sternlieb, who oversees the program and its expansion for the Babbitt Center and helps facilitate community workshops. “Once they start sharing resources, data, and information, they see how valuable and important collaboration and cooperation are.” 

After each workshop, the project team follows up with participants for up to 12 months to help participant groups implement the strategies developed in the workshop, which often take the form of a one-year action plan. The team typically provides additional resources and technical assistance opportunities specific to each participant community’s needs as well. 

Sternlieb expects this phase of the project to include at least two workshops that could include as many as 12 communities (six community teams per workshop). She is hopeful that the Growing Water Smart team will be able to continue to build partnerships and raise funds to hold a third workshop in the state: “That will help ground the program and allow us to draw important lessons learned, recommendations, and case studies that will be helpful for communities across Utah.” 

Hasenyager of DWR said she hopes the upcoming Growing Water Smart workshops will serve as examples for other Utah communities, contribute to more widespread understanding and implementation of integrating land use and water planning, and help build relationships between water planners and land use planners at the local level. 

“At the conclusion of the workshops, the Division will continue to pursue opportunities to assist Utah communities to integrate water considerations into their planning processes,” Hasenyager said. Ultimately, she added, “we want to make better decisions on how we grow and use water in the state.” 

Image: Residential development in Utah. Credit: RichLegg/E+ via Getty Images.

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

During the first session of the virtual Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP) conference in early February, participants were asked to name the biggest disruptors they are experiencing in their work. Their typed answers flooded onto the presenter’s screen, creating a shifting, multi-colored cloud of words. As the most common answers grew larger and moved to the center, it became clear that three would dominate the conversation: funding, COVID, and climate change. 

Over the course of the next two days, the conference—which drew more than 165 registrants from 11 countries and 27 U.S. states—addressed all three of these issues, with a focus on planning for climate change and building climate resilience. “The impacts of climate change on a day-to-day basis are hard to ignore,” said Ayano Healy of Cascadia Partners, during a presentation on participatory planning in California’s San Joaquin County. “There’s a lot of momentum both at the social level and at the political level for getting organized around climate resilience and taking action.” 

Scenario planning can be a helpful tool for communities confronting the local impacts of climate change. A practice with roots in the military, scenario planning guides planners, community members, and other stakeholders through considerations of various futures and how to effectively respond to and plan for them. Practitioners and researchers at the conference described how communities are using this approach, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 

In a session focused on greenhouse gas scenario planning tools, Mauricio Leon of the Metropolitan Council—the regional planning agency of Minnesota’s Twin Cities region—described working with a team of researchers to help local governments create paths to net-zero emissions. “It’s great to create a portfolio of strategies to meet net-zero emissions, but [we have to] acknowledge that there are things that we don’t know,” Leon said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.” He cited the pandemic and its effects on urban demographic projections as an example of how plans can go awry.  

Tim Reardon of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Massachusetts described a similar tool his organization has developed to help communities in the Boston region benchmark greenhouse gases. “Being able to provide information that is reflective of [specific communities] reduces a barrier to a conversation about the big moves that have to happen” to reduce emissions at the local level, Reardon said. One goal of the tool, he said, is to help communities feel more engaged in the planning process. 

The notion of scenario planning as a form of community conversation, rather than a technical exercise, came up throughout the conference. “When scenario planning is really done well, it can serve as a kind of platform for social learning where different jurisdictions and stakeholders can talk about different values, not just debate technical issues,” said Ryan Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in city and regional planning at Cornell University who is studying regional efforts to prepare for climate impacts in the Great Lakes region. “It allows multiple jurisdictions that have different interests to be able to preserve those within the scope of a collaborative process.”  

Thomas was one of several researchers supported by the Consortium for Scenario Planning who provided updates on projects related to climate adaptation and growth scenarios in legacy cities. That work includes an exploration of how scenario planning can be used in rural communities, the development of a tool that uses scenarios to explore the impacts of land use and water policy, and the creation of an exploratory scenario planning how-to guide that legacy cities can use to prepare for a potential influx of new residents migrating from more climate-vulnerable places. 

As the breadth of this research indicates, scenario planning can be applied in many contexts, says Heather Sauceda Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. Hannon says both the practice and the CSP conference are gaining momentum. 

“This was the fifth year of the conference, and we had the most people we’ve ever had, with attendance at sessions ranging from 30 people to 90 people,” said Hannon. “It’s great to see new people entering this field and wanting to learn more, and the conference is designed to give them the chance to share ideas, learn from one another, and make connections they can follow up on.”  

To learn more about the Consortium for Scenario Planning, visit https://www.lincolninst.edu/research-data/data-toolkits/consortium-scenario-planning.

Image: Disruptors named by participants in the Consortium for Scenario Planning conference. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

American cities need to pursue creative new strategies as they rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic and work to address longstanding social and economic inequities. Too often, however, cities face stiff headwinds in the form of state laws and policies that hinder their efforts to build healthy neighborhoods, provide high-quality public services, and foster vibrant economies in which all residents have an opportunity to thrive, according to a new Policy Focus Report by Center for Community Progress Senior Fellow Alan Mallach from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Community Progress.  

With a massive infusion of funds from the American Rescue Plan into cities and states, advocates for urban revitalization have an unprecedented opportunity to engage with state policy makers in creating a more prosperous, equitable future, Mallach writes in the report, From State Capitols to City Halls: Smarter State Policies for Stronger Cities. “If there’s one central message in this report, it’s that states matter—and that those who care about the future of our cities need to direct far greater attention to them,” he writes.  

Based on a detailed analysis of the complex yet critical relationship between states and their cities, the report illustrates how state policies and practices affect the course of urban revitalization, from the ways cities raise revenues to the conditions under which they can finance redevelopment. The report provides a rich picture of how state laws and practices can help or hinder equitable urban revitalization, drawing upon examples and strategies from across the country and highlighting the recurrent city–state tug-of-war that both must move beyond to work together for mutual benefit.  

The report also breaks down what goes into successful revitalization, and how leaders can use legal and policy tools to bring about more equitable outcomes. Mallach recommends five underlying principles that should ground state policy related to urban revitalization: target areas of greatest need, think regionally, break down silos, support cities’ own efforts, and build in equity and inclusivity.  

“This report is thorough, relevant, and timely—and it provides a critical perspective on the importance of building capacity to ensure stronger alignment between state and local policy makers to improve equity and inclusion,” said Sue Pechilio Polis, the director of health and wellness for the National League of Cities. “A detailed accounting of all of the ways state laws impact municipalities, this essential report will be a must read for state and local policy makers.”  

“As this Policy Focus Report details, state governments must be true partners with their cities in order to realize meaningful, equitable revitalization across the board,” said Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “By deliberately incorporating equity into economic growth and community work across locations and sectors, leaders at every level can foster truly progressive change.”  

From State Capitols to City Halls offers specific state policy directions to help local governments build fiscal and service delivery capacity, foster a robust housing market, stimulate a competitive economy, cultivate healthy neighborhoods and quality of life, and build human capital, all with the goal of bringing about a more sustainable, inclusive revival in American cities and towns. The report’s recommendations offer a practical roadmap to help state policy makers take a fresh look at their own laws and further more effective advocacy for substantive change by local officials and non-governmental actors.  

“We all deserve access to stable jobs, affordable housing, and green spaces, but unfortunately our systems aren’t built to guarantee that for future and even current generations,” said Massachusetts State Senator Eric P. Lesser, who chairs the Gateway Cities Caucus and the Economic Development Committee. “This report takes a thoughtful look at how we as policy makers can have a direct impact on building inclusive cities for all. From State Capitols to City Halls: Smarter State Policies for Stronger Cities provides real tools to support our communities, break down policies that breed inequality, and give everyone a fair shot at a high quality of life.”  

While successful strategies will vary from state to state, Mallach stresses that all policy makers must remember that every state is fundamental to its cities’ futures as places of equity and inclusion. “In the final analysis,” he notes, “states play a central, even essential, role in making revitalization possible—or, conversely, frustrating local revitalization efforts. This report should encourage public officials and advocates for change to make states more supportive, engaged partners with local governments and other stakeholders in their efforts to make our cities stronger, healthier places for all.” 

The report is available for download on the Lincoln Institute’s website: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-focus-reports/state-capitols-city-halls
 

Image: USA/Alamy Stock Photo