With sophisticated market research powered by prodigious profits, corporate real estate investors have long had the upper hand over vulnerable homeowners and the groups trying to protect them.

Investors can identify distressed homes in otherwise gentrifying neighborhoods, snap them up at a discount, and leave them empty for years waiting for nearby home values to rise. They can target longtime, elderly homeowners who may need to sell at a discount. And with plenty of cash on hand—and a new playbook that includes renting out houses rather than just flipping them—they can outbid individual homebuyers as they turn bedrooms into balance sheet items.

Now, a new data mapping tool from the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) can help equip nonprofits, advocates, and local governments with similarly powerful technology to help identify and defend affordable housing stock threatened by real estate speculators and absentee landlords.

“It’s a very uneven playing field between private investors, who have the capital and are willing to invest the capital to get this market intelligence, and nonprofits that are struggling to keep the doors open, let alone invest in platforms like this,” says Jeff Allenby, CGS director of Geospatial Technology. “What you see is governments and nonprofits continuously trying to play catch up.”

Down-to-the-Parcel Data

In the wake of the Great Recession, corporations increasingly started purchasing and then renting out not just apartment buildings, but also single-family homes—especially in Sun Belt metro areas and postindustrial legacy cities, where rents remained stable despite lower property prices. Often, that’s had a cascade of negative impacts on low-income communities.

For one thing, it leaves more renters dealing with absentee corporate landlords, who can be quick to force an eviction and raise rents, but slow to fix a leaky roof or resolve code violations. It also reduces the supply of affordable housing stock available to would-be homebuyers, robbing local renters of opportunity.

In Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood, for example, just 53 of the 464 homes sold since 2017—12 percent—were purchased by owner occupants. In 2022, one of every five homes sold in the neighborhood (19.2 percent) was purchased by an out-of-state business, and nearly half were bought by in-state corporations with multiple-property portfolios.

“You just saw this backfill of corporate ownership come into this neighborhood, and it’s going to take years to come back from that,” Allenby says. Where real estate investors once focused on flipping houses for a quick buck, they now see rental properties as a long-term moneymaker. “These houses are just gone, likely in perpetuity, from a homeownership perspective.”

This grim, granular data is courtesy of a CGS initiative called “Who Owns America?” Starting with Baltimore, CGS used a variety of public data sources to map every parcel in the city by its ownership characteristics, cross-checking postal information with deeds and other records to distinguish owner-occupied properties from those owned by private landlords and large or out-of-state businesses.

After coding city-owned residential parcels, Allenby explains, CGS filters for all properties where the owner’s mailing address doesn’t match the physical address—meaning it isn’t owner-occupied. After that, CGS can differentiate between private, off-site owners—local “mom-and-pop” landlords who may own one or two properties, for example—and more formal corporations, checking the names against a series of business-related keywords and acronyms, such as LLC, LLP, incorporated, and so on. Further filtering reveals whether a business is based in or out of state, and whether it owns multiple properties in the city.

The resulting color-coded maps make it clear where owner occupancy is more prevalent and where corporate landlords are most active. Empowered with this intuitive, down-to-the-parcel data, communities can identify housing stock likely to be targeted by speculators. Then they can take steps to defend (or even reclaim) affordable housing before it’s lost to corporate ownership.

The Right to Fight Back 

One policy cities can employ to thwart predatory investors is a right of first refusal rule, which gives tenants the option to purchase their home before it’s sold to a corporation. Knowing where such investors are active can help community leaders support the rollout of such a program with more targeted public outreach, says Senior Research Fellow Robert “R.J.” McGrail, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Accelerating Community Investment initiative.

“That’s the neighborhood you do flyers in, where you have some community organization go knock on doors to tell people, ‘Just so you know, if the out-of-state company that you write your rent check to ever sells your house, you have the first chance to buy it,’” McGrail says. “The ‘just-so-you-know’ conversation can be incredibly agency building and empowering for an individual, in a way that I think is another downstream potential benefit from this tool.”

Allenby is quick to point out that the formalization of property ownership isn’t in itself a bad thing. For example, if a local landlord dies and his children inherit his three rental properties and put them all into an LLC, that doesn’t fundamentally alter the local real estate landscape. And true investment—companies that buy vacant, dilapidated buildings, restore them to good condition, and get them back into the housing market—is almost always welcome.

“Investor owner doesn’t necessarily mean bad owner,” McGrail agrees. But by overlapping additional layers of parcel-level datasets, CGS can provide more context and reveal bad actors. For example, mapping where corporate ownership coincides with code violations—reports of broken deck railings, lack of heat, leaky toilets, and so on—“tells a dramatically more nuanced, useful story around what is happening and what to do about it,” he says.

In that case, McGrail notes, mapping might offer chronically understaffed inspectional departments a better way to prioritize their code enforcement. Similarly, layering vacancy data over out-of-state ownership maps can inform discussions around land use policies such as a split-rate tax.

“So many times, policy discussions happen in a vacuum of data,” Allenby says. “You’re talking about theoreticals, abstract numbers, abstract concepts, and you don’t really have a good handle on the scale of the issue that you’re talking about. And these tools allow you to frame that conversation very specifically.”

Beyond Baltimore 

CGS can provide a granular data map customized to an organization’s or community’s needs in just a couple of weeks, Allenby says. And it’s not just a tool for cities. CGS has also mapped the entire state of Massachusetts for a housing nonprofit, and is currently documenting timberland ownership across Alabama.

CGS also partnered with the International Land Conservation Network to combine the research of multiple conservation organizations in search of “Consensus Landscapes”—areas that meet not just one conservation priority, such as biodiversity, habitat connectivity, or carbon storage potential, but many such goals, all at once. The goal of this collaborative mapping framework, according to CGS, is to identify “places that everyone can agree are important, and should be the immediate focus of collective conservation efforts” as the United States works to protect 30 percent of its land by 2030.

The Center for Geospatial Solutions created a framework for mapping “consensus landscapes” by assessing and integrating the research of several conservation organizations. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

Jim Gray, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is now working with CGS to study ownership trends among manufactured housing communities, which have also garnered the attention of real estate investors in recent years for their relatively low costs and reliable rents. Gray calls CGS’s work “invaluable” for its ability to transform a largely anecdotal challenge into real data.

“Knowing the extent of the problem, who is responsible, and where the problem is most acute will help inform and target which communities need to prioritize preserving this affordable housing stock, and how to go about that,” he says.

To learn more or to work with the Center for Geospatial Solutions, visit the CGS website or contact cgs@lincolninst.edu.

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

Lead image: This Center for Geospatial Solutions image combines spatial analysis with land parcel data to illustrate different types of property ownership, part of a project intended to help communities better understand how institutional investors are affecting local land markets. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

In his three decades leading the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, Steve Rosenberg saw waves of people moving from cities to the Hudson Valley following major events: 9/11, Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, even Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in Rhinebeck. So when another wave arrived during COVID-19, part of the great migration of urban office workers to rural America, it wasn’t exactly novel.

But this time, things were different in the Hudson Valley, which runs along the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Land and real estate prices were skyrocketing, due to the influx of new residents and the broader pressures of the market. In the region’s cities and villages, gentrification had begun sweeping areas long marred by disinvestment, displacing low-income residents, posing a threat to Black and Brown communities, and making it hard to preserve and create affordable housing.

This “intense pressure on the land,” Rosenberg says, was also making the job of conservation harder. Just a decade earlier, land trusts could more easily assemble three or four parcels of land to create a contiguous protected area that would help preserve wildlife habitat and build climate resilience. Now it would take 10 or 12 purchases to assemble a comparable amount of acreage, and conservation groups were more frequently being outbid. As they vied with outside buyers for land, the region’s conservation and housing organizations faced similar challenges, and some began to wonder if they could accomplish more by working together. At the same time, some conservation organizations, prompted largely by the Black Lives Matter movement, were exploring how they might better address racial justice, public health, and climate equity as part of a more community-centered type of land conservation. But housing and conservation groups also seemed to exist in parallel worlds, with different missions, goals, funding models, and governance structures.

Still, Rosenberg saw potential. When he retired from Scenic Hudson in 2021, he teamed up with Rebecca Gilman Crimmins, a Hudson Valley native and affordable housing professional in New York City, to convene a working group of five conservation land trusts and five affordable housing organizations in the region. The groups began learning about each other’s work, identifying where that work intersects, and mapping potential places where they might partner. They combined census, biodiversity, and climate data with their knowledge about local officials, planning policies, and land use regulations. “Healthy communities need to have both” open space and affordable housing, Rosenberg said. “They shouldn’t be seen as mutually exclusive or in opposition to one another.”

As real estate prices spike, the climate unravels, and America undergoes a racial reckoning, conservation and affordable housing groups are beginning to explore how they can work together. In 2022, the Lincoln Institute convened practitioners and advocates, including Rosenberg and Crimmins, to discuss the potential for collaboration by conservation land trusts and community land trusts. Through a series of virtual and in-person discussions supported by the 1772 Foundation, participants from national, regional, and local groups explored the barriers that have gotten in the way of partnership—and the opportunities ahead.

Shared Concerns, Separate Roots

America’s first conservation land trust, The Trustees of Reservations, was dreamed up in the late 1800s by landscape architect Charles Eliot, whose father was president of Harvard. Eliot saw the nation’s cities yellowing with industrial pollution, and envisioned wild green pockets of open space in every city and town. The state enabled The Trustees to begin acquiring and protecting land in 1891. Today, America has 1,281 land trusts that have protected more than 61 million acres. Mostly operating in rural and suburban settings and often run by volunteers, land trusts protect wildlife habitats, critical ecosystems, and natural, historical, and cultural sites by buying and managing parcels outright or by holding conservation easements—voluntary legal agreements with landowners that limit development and other defined uses on a property.

Community land trusts (CLTs), by contrast, have more recent beginnings. In 1969, a group of civil rights activists led by Charles Sherrod set out to build collective wealth and power among Black farmers in southwest Georgia. They created New Communities, an undertaking that combined community ownership of land with individual homeownership, serving as a model for today’s CLTs. The organization was forced to foreclose on its land in 1985, after the USDA’s discriminatory practices deprived it of crucial grants and aid in the wake of a devastating drought. But it’s still operating as an educational organization, and it ignited a movement: today there are more than 300 CLTs in the country. CLTs are still oriented toward serving marginalized communities, and typically own land while giving individuals the opportunity to own the homes and businesses on top. Despite their rural origins, most CLTs now focus on providing permanently affordable housing in urban settings.

These distinct origins have led to an array of differences, as Katie Michels and David Hindin describe in a working paper prepared for the Lincoln Institute convening. Land trusts have tended to focus on and be led by wealthier, whiter, and more rural constituencies, while CLTs are more often geared to and governed by people of color. The resources available to the groups are also different.

“Compared to CLTs, land trusts may be wealthier organizations with greater access to political power and financial resources,” Hindin and Michels write, noting that public and private funding is usually dedicated to conservation or housing, but not both. Because both groups need land to fulfill their mission, they add, “some local conservation and community land trusts have had negative experiences with each other and may view the other as competitors.”

But that’s beginning to change. “We’re starting to see some conservation land trusts and CLTs really trying to figure out how to work together,” said Beth Sorce, vice president of sector growth at Grounded Solutions Network, a national nonprofit that promotes affordable housing solutions and grew out of a network of CLTs. As cities metastasize and affordable parcels grow scarce, conservation and affordable housing organizations are beginning to see past their differences, says Sorce, who participated in the Lincoln Institute convening: “We have a common goal of a really healthy, livable place. Maybe instead of everyone trying to acquire land individually, we could work together to figure out how to do this in a way that makes our community green.”

Land trusts across the country “are providing so many benefits to our environment and to people’s lives and well-being,” said Forrest King-Cortes, director of community-centered conservation at the Land Trust Alliance (LTA), a national coalition of conservation land trusts. LTA hired King-Cortes—who also participated in the Lincoln Institute convening—to lead its efforts to put people at the center of conservation work, and he sees “more opportunity to have dialogue with other movements like the affordable housing movement.”

As these conversations continue, participants are identifying many possible forms of collaboration, from exchanging ideas and information to jointly pushing for policy reform. In some cases, groups are taking action on the ground. In Ohio, the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, which has long worked with local land banks to acquire properties for public green space, is beginning to partner with CLTs on community-led, joint planning that will include affordable housing. On Mount Desert Island in Maine, where housing constraints and costs lead 54 percent of workers to live off-island, the Island Housing Trust, a CLT, is partnering with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust on a 60-acre project that combines wetland conservation with the development of affordable workforce housing. And in a rapidly developing, predominantly Black suburb of Seattle, the Homestead Community Land Trust and community-led Skyway Coalition are partnering with the support of the Community Land Conservancy to protect affordability and green space as they stave off gentrification.

A Collaborative Model in Athens, Georgia

While conservation and affordable housing advocates explore opportunities for collaboration, they can learn from organizations that have built both goals into their mission. The Athens Land Trust is considered by many to be the shining light at the intersection of these worlds.

In the early 1990s, Nancy Stangle and Skipper StipeMaas were developing a rural intentional community, Kenney Ridge, on 132 acres in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia—about 200 miles north of Albany, where the CLT movement was born. The plan was for Kenney Ridge to consist of private lots for homeowners, a community farmhouse and gardens, and common, conserved open space. But as they laid out the development, they realized that setting aside more land for conservation also made the private lots more expensive, because the costs of building roads, water lines, and sewer lines were divided between the lots, and more conservation amounted to fewer lots—and fewer lot owners to bear the costs. “They were seeing this tension between environmental-type development and affordability,” said Heather Benham, the Athens Land Trust’s executive director. And it was pricing out some of their friends.

Around this time, Stangle was taking her kids to the zoo in Atlanta when her car broke down. A woman pulled over and offered to take Stangle to her office, where she could use the phone. The woman worked at a community land trust, the Cabbagetown Revitalization and Future Trust. After reading up on the CLT model, Stangle and StipeMaas decided to create an organization that would function as both a land trust and a CLT, and the Athens Land Trust was born.

For the first few years, the Athens Land Trust functioned mostly as a conservation land trust. Then in 1999, one of its board members bought a vacant lot in a historically Black neighborhood of Athens and donated it to the group. The local government provided an affordable housing grant, and the organization built its first house.

The two wings of the organization continued to grow—the trust came to hold over 20,695 acres of conservation easements, from farms outside Athens to pine plantations and mountains in north Georgia, and it built and rehabbed homes inside the city—but they remained practically separate. “Basically, when we answered the phone, it was pretty clear if somebody was calling for one thing or the other,” said Benham. The callers were typically either low-income Black families interested in housing, or white farmers wanting to protect land they had owned for generations.

In the early 2000s, these parallel strands of work began to intersect. A board member mentioned that drug activity was taking place on a vacant lot in their neighborhood. Could the land trust turn it into a community garden?

“It didn’t seem like such a far leap to do gardens when you’re protecting farms,” said Benham. “That became a project, and then it just kept growing.” Other neighborhoods began reaching out about starting similar projects. The group partnered with the local university to create a network of community gardens, and an urban farm where neighbors could grow food to sell, supplementing their income. A USDA grant provided funds, and the city also offered some land. To maximize the community’s benefit from the land, the Athens Land Trust began running gardening classes and farm workdays, youth programming around agricultural skills, and a farmers market in a low-income Black neighborhood. These activities support the Athens Land Trust’s goals of fostering economic development and community empowerment, Benham says. “The economic opportunity around the farmers market and the small business development,” she says, weaves the parcels into the “neighborhood ecosystem and economy.”

Where Conservation and Justice Meet

As the urban work of the Athens Land Trust grew, its leaders began applying an equity lens to their rural conservation work too, identifying populations underserved by previous efforts to protect farmland. In April 2023, the land trust was close to reaching a deal for the first conservation easement on a Black-owned farm in Georgia. Throughout the United States, 97 percent of farms and 94 percent of farm acreage belongs to white farmers. Many Black landowners lack clear title—a legacy of unjust property inheritance rules—and are unable to donate or sell easements on their land, while those who have fought to gain clear title may be understandably hesitant to sign over any rights. Benham adds that the scoring mechanisms used by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service to determine whether to conserve a parcel tend to favor farms located on prime agricultural soils. “Well, surprise, surprise—most Black farmers didn’t get the most prime lands,” she notes.

Benham believes the Athens Land Trust has managed to straddle both worlds because its fundamental goal is to give the community control over lands and development. Eschewing tunnel vision toward either housing or conservation, the trust and other similarly minded organizations “might have more shared framework, vocabulary, practices, and ways of engaging” with the environmental justice movement than conservation land trusts do, she said.

That’s reflected in philanthropy too: the funders who seem to understand how the trust’s conservation and housing work align are the ones who recognize their environmental justice–like “sustainability work in low-income neighborhoods.”

In the South Bronx, New York, a community land trust launched in 2020 operates with a similar hybrid model, working to preserve housing affordability and protect open space, including the neighborhood’s network of community gardens. The South Bronx Community Land and Resource Trust grew from the work of local community development corporation Nos Quedamos (We Stay), which started in the 1990s as grassroots resistance to an urban renewal plan that would have displaced a low-income, mostly Latino community. Committed to “development without displacement”—development driven and controlled by the community—Nos Quedamos now has a portfolio of affordable housing. It launched the CLT to “create and support a healthier community by bringing into balance land use, affordability, accessibility to services and open space, environmental sustainability and resilience, community scale and character.” It is designed to be a centralized, community-owned entity.

Julia Duranti-Martínez, who works with CLTs at the national community development organization LISC and is a board member on the East Harlem/El Barrio CLT in New York City, recommends that conversations about collaboration “defer to the groups who come out of environmental justice organizing.” In a real estate market where land is expensive and scarce, housing and conservation group vie for parcels, and new parks are often seen as harbingers of gentrification, the community development projects that have navigated these tensions most successfully have been driven by the same fundamental goal as the environmental justice movement, she says: ensuring that “Black, Indigenous, and communities of color are really the ones in a decision-making role.”

Duranti-Martínez adds that the framework of CLTs has historically shared more in common with environmental justice groups than with the conservation movement. “They are promoting these community stewardship models not in opposition to affordable housing,” she said, but simply because “a healthy community” has “all kinds of different spaces: dignified and affordable housing, affordable commercial space, green space, and community and cultural spaces.”

Moving Forward

Despite promising ideas for collaboration and enthusiasm for these initiatives, ideological and cultural hurdles remain. Success, for land trusts, has historically been measured in the number of acres protected and dollars leveraged, but these conventional measures “don’t really capture the full impact” of smaller or more complex projects, said Michels. Protecting green space and building housing on five acres could take the same time, effort, and resources as conserving 10,000 rural acres, she notes, which means there are some ideological frameworks on the conservation side that have to shift.

Potential collaborators also need to proceed purposefully and thoughtfully; meaningful and inclusive community engagement will be key to the success of combining affordable housing and open space goals, say many involved in this work, whether that effort is happening inside a single organization or as part of a collaboration between groups. “Conservation has a lot to learn about building community stakeholders in as decision-makers within our organizations,” says King-Cortes of LTA. Despite growing interest in broadening the movement’s work, “many of us are not ready, I would say, to jump into partnership with affordable housing groups until we’ve done our homework: until we’ve learned about the roots of the affordable housing movement, the ties to the civil rights movement.”

Yet conservation groups also have a wealth of resources and expertise to offer. For CLTs, “by far the biggest inhibitor to being able to scale is access to land and money,” said Sorce of Grounded Solutions Network. Partnerships often help fill that gap, and conservation groups could help with this too. “They could team up to acquire a larger parcel, some of which is going to be conservation, some of which is going to be housing.”

In fact, this kind of partnership could benefit both sectors. “Everyone’s struggling to fundraise,” said King-Cortes. “Everyone’s trying to make the most of what we’ve got. But by working together on planning, I think both movements can get more done and maximize resources.”

Succeeding at that will take some effort, because most funding for conservation and housing has historically been separate, as Michels and Hindin noted. “All of the public policy-supported programs and funding are totally siloed,” Rosenberg confirmed. A housing group that wants to build a development with trails, parks, or community gardens can typically only get funding to build the housing, while on the flip side, conservation groups can’t get funding to do anything besides conserve land.

However, there are exceptions to that rule. In Vermont, housing and conservation groups organized in 1987 to create a single public funding source, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund, administered by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB). Michels, who worked at VHCB for several years, says it demonstrates a potential model for collaboration. It has nurtured relationships and understanding between the two communities, and both practitioners and policymakers have come to see the dual goals as complementary, not competitive—reinforcing an almost 100-year-old land use tradition of compact settlement surrounded by a working landscape.

Every year, a coalition of affordable housing and conservation groups lobbies the state legislature for VHCB funding. The result is “a lot of relationship building across those communities of practice, and they each know what the other is working on,” Michels said. VHCB has invested in projects with both elements in many towns, ensuring that affordable housing and open space are both available. “There’s a version of collaboration that doesn’t involve working together on a single parcel,” but pulling for the same outcomes, Michels said; when an opportunity does present itself on one parcel, it is widely embraced.

Back in the Hudson Valley, Rosenberg’s working group is also eyeing Massachusetts’ Community Preservation Act as a model. Voters in Massachusetts can opt for their municipality to apply a surcharge on property taxes, which can then be used to fund conservation, affordable housing, outdoor recreation, and historic preservation. New York’s legislature has authorized some municipalities to vote for a local real estate transfer fee to create a community preservation fund, but the proceeds can only support conservation, not housing.

Identifying policy reforms that could help accomplish its work and agreeing on a statement of shared purpose have been priorities for the Hudson Valley group, which has continued its explorations with support from Regional Plan Association, the project’s fiscal sponsor, and the Consensus Building Institute. “There are actually some collaborations that are already beginning,” said Rosenberg. The Kingston Land Trust, which has been studying and promoting the community land trust model since 2017, has partnered with the regional affordable housing group RUPCO to launch a CLT as part of its Land for Homes initiative. The organization also worked with graduate students at Columbia University and Bard College to develop a regional housing vision and a guide for collaboration between conservation and housing groups. The Chatham, New York–based Columbia Land Conservancy, meanwhile, is serving as the fiscal sponsor for another new CLT.

And within the working group, one of the conservation land trusts identified a 113-acre farm parcel for sale in the town of Red Hook that “defines the gateway to the community,” Rosenberg said. Red Hook has a community preservation fund to support conservation, and Scenic Hudson and other groups have long been active there. But having recently expanded its public sewer system, Red Hook was also looking to develop more affordable housing—and, in the case of this property, to fend off private buyers who were interested in developing the whole parcel.

Conditions seemed favorable. So two of the working group’s housing organizations and two of the land trusts met with local officials to discuss collaborating with the town on a project that would achieve both goals: conserving farmland and building some affordable housing. The town now plans to purchase the land, working with one of the land trusts to place a conservation easement on most of it and setting aside the rest for homes to be built by one of the affordable housing groups. “That project is not done, but it is moving forward,” said Rosenberg. “That’s really exciting.”

LINCOLN INSTITUTE COLLOQUIUM ON CONSERVATION AND COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS

During 2022, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy led a yearlong research effort on the potential for collaboration between conservation land trusts and community land trusts (CLTs). With the support of Peter Stein of Lyme Timber Company and a grant from the 1772 Foundation, the institute convened a core group of experts in conservation and affordable housing for a series of meetings, culminating with a colloquium and working paper.

The colloquium has informed ongoing efforts to advance land conservation and affordable housing priorities. In February, working paper coauthors Katie Michels and David Hindin advised the Connecticut Land Conservation Council’s summit for advocates and leaders in the conservation and housing sectors to consider shared agendas and future policy goals. In March, Jim Levitt, director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute, moderated a keynote panel titled “Affordable Housing and Land Conservation: Not an Either/Or” at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition; the panel included a colloquium participant.

“To thrive, communities need permanently affordable housing and permanently conserved land that provides green space, natural infrastructure, and biodiversity-friendly habitat,” says Chandni Navalkha, associate director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute. “By working in greater collaboration, these communities of practice have unique potential in leveraging their decades of success and experience to implement multigoal, multibenefit projects that address communities’ most pressing challenges.”

Audrea Lim is a writer in New York City whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Guardian. Her book Free the Land, on the commodification of land and alternatives in the United States, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Lead image: Graduate students from Columbia University worked with the Kingston Land Trust on a project that envisions new affordable housing models on communally owned property, including medium-density apartments. Credit: “(E)CO-Living: Towards a More Affordable and Green Kingston” by Yiyang Cai, Kai Guo, Lingbei Chen, Wenyi Peng. Urban Design Studio II, Spring 2021, Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Faculty: Kaja Kühl coordinator, with Lee Altman, Anna Dietzsch, Shachi Pandey, Thaddeus Pawlowski and Associates, Zarith Pineda, Victoria Vuono. Local Partner: Kingston Land Trust.

It might not be instantly obvious how housing finance could be considered a land policy, and even less obvious why pundits like me describe national financial regulation like the Community Reinvestment Act as one of the most important land policies of the 20th century. How in the world could national financial regulation influence local land use, and what does the lending and investment activity of banks have to do with land?

As I’ve noted here before, discriminatory federal lending maps devised by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and adopted by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in the 1930s had enduring impact. Some 90 years later, a 2022 review by the Federal Reserve reported on research that definitively linked these maps to contemporary inequities in economic opportunity, health outcomes, access to green space, heat island effects, COVID mortality, and life expectancy.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was one of three congressional actions following the 1964 Civil Rights Act that were designed to undo the damage inflicted on communities by federal housing finance policies. Decades of capital starvation and discrimination-by-design had hollowed out American cities and immiserated millions of Americans and their communities.

Passed in 1977 on the heels of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in real estate transactions, and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, which required lenders to report on their activities with geographic precision, the CRA imposed an affirmative obligation on federally regulated banks to serve the credit needs of all communities in their service areas. It did not tell banks what they could not do, but rather what they needed to do to reverse decades of bad behavior.

Three federal agencies—the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)—were tasked with ensuring that banks complied with this new regulation. Interestingly, the law was only fully enforced a dozen years later, when regulators were asked to approve banks’ geographic expansion, primarily through mergers or acquisitions.

The CRA has been revised many times to respond to the evolving banking industry. Most recently, in 2020, the OCC proposed a modernization rule to address the shift from “bricks and mortar” to digital banking, but the rule was opposed by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and thousands of community groups. The proposal was rescinded in 2021, but few observers would argue that the CRA does not need modernizing. Even more pressing than digital banking are concerns about the huge shift in mortgage lending away from regulated banks to nonbank lenders.

According to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, 10 of the top 12 mortgage lenders in 2021 (and four of the top five) were independent mortgage companies. These nonbank lenders have no affirmative obligation to address historic discrimination. Beyond Home Mortgage Disclosure Act compliance, their lending activity is very weakly regulated. They are not, however, beyond the reach of land policy qua financial regulation.

Nonbank lenders rely on industry giants for capital. According to the Urban Institute, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, purchased around 60 percent of mortgages originated in the United States in 2021. The FHA and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) accounted for an additional 16 percent. Importantly, nonbanks originated around 70 percent of the loans purchased by the GSEs and more than 90 percent of the government-backed loans in 2021. So, if one wanted to continue affirmative efforts to serve the housing finance needs of historically underserved markets, the pathway is fairly obvious: look for existing or new policy frameworks that provide opportunities, by way of regulating the GSEs, to affect the lending behavior of nonbanks.

As luck would have it, the housing finance giants are publicly controlled. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed in federal conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in 2008 when they became insolvent during the foreclosure crisis. In 2017, the FHFA implemented the Duty to Serve program, which imposed statutory requirements on the GSEs to serve three specific underserved markets: manufactured housing, affordable housing preservation, and rural housing. Under Duty to Serve, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are required to submit three-year plans that describe how they will better serve those markets. The plans are finalized based on public input and reported on annually to Congress.

In 2021, the FHFA imposed additional obligations on the GSEs to expand access to safe, decent, and affordable housing opportunities; they are now required to prepare, implement, and report annually on Equitable Housing Finance plans that describe how they will “meaningfully address the racial and ethnic disparities in homeownership and wealth that have persisted for decades.”

The decade following the first enforcement of the CRA in 1989 was a golden era for community development as advocates mobilized to pressure banks to meet CRA obligations. Almost immediately, hundreds of billions of dollars of new lending flowed to CRA service areas. The national homeownership rate rose from 64 percent to 68 percent, with growth in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods double the national rates. Community development corporations prospered, and the community development finance industry was incubated.

We are at a similar moment for the Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans—something I’ve taken to calling “the New CRA.” The FHFA is building more muscular regulatory oversight, and with the Lincoln Institute’s help, the civic sector is again mobilizing to ask for better plans, better enforcement, and better results.

Last year, we convened 20 of the largest nonprofit affordable housing developers to launch the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC). Its objective is to speak with one voice to push, and collaborate with, the GSEs to meet their mission under the Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans. Together we are working with the GSEs to design better lending products to finance the purchase of manufactured homes, build the capacity of Community Development Financial Institutions to originate new mortgages in hard-to-reach markets, and persuade the FHFA to support new pilot lending programs to test new products and processes to better serve these markets.

The UMMC is demystifying the secondary mortgage market—where lenders and investors buy and sell loans and servicing rights—and proposing realistic solutions to make real systems change. In its first full year as a coalition, the UMMC notched an important victory when the FHFA rejected new Duty to Serve plans submitted by the GSEs, asking for more ambitious plans with more specific goals like those reflected in a comprehensive blueprint the coalition had prepared. Recent UMMC efforts include a scorecard showing how well the GSEs followed the blueprint and a dashboard that will provide accessible, detailed quantitative data on their performance.

The Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans are not a substitute for the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA remains the most important land policy in our national arsenal of financial regulation, and is responsible for huge amounts of new credit that flowed back to communities that were denied access for decades. But times have changed. When the CRA was passed, there were an estimated 18,000 banks insured by the FDIC. Today, there are 4,844. On top of that, many banks are closing or shrinking their retail mortgage business, ceding the space to nonbank lenders. We can try to reform the CRA to reflect this new market reality, or we can meet the market where it is.

Racial and ethnic homeownership gaps remain distressingly high, as does an unacceptable and stubborn racial wealth gap. If we hope to make a dent in either, we’ll need to find a way to expand homeownership in unprecedented ways. Nobody expected the CRA to redress all the shameful impacts of misguided lending policies. The Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans are wonderful supplements to the CRA. Perhaps a portfolio of lending regulations is a better approach than one size fits all. It is our hope that the UMMC will empower practitioners and advocates to ask the GSEs and the FHFA for what they need to take on these immense challenges.

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

Image: President Jimmy Carter signs the Community Reinvestment Act into law in 1977. Credit: Federal Reserve.

Realizing a low-carbon future that is economically and racially just is an enormous undertaking at any level, but especially for small and midsize older industrial cities. Following their rapid expansion in the early twentieth century, smaller “legacy cities” tend to have established built environments, access to natural resources, and substantial brownfields that make them ripe for sustainable redevelopment. Yet these places often lack the investment and capacity to create and implement comprehensive sustainability initiatives that contribute to a greener local future.

To advance “green” policymaking and implementation, local governments must build the capacity to integrate three concurrent policy areas: climate resilience, environmental justice, and green economic development. By building this strong policy foundation and leveraging newly available funding streams, these cities can chart bold paths toward green regeneration, according to Greening America’s Smaller Legacy Cities, a new Policy Focus Report written by Joseph Schilling, Catherine Tumber, and Gabi Velasco and published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Even with limited resources and budgets, these cities can pursue accessible, meaningful strategies to facilitate equitable community engagement, coordinate sustainability initiatives, and cultivate cross-sector partnerships. Indeed, the authors write, “‘greening’ cities is essential, despite these hurdles . . . [in part because] these practices offer a promising place-based pathway for equitable economic and environmental rebirth, or ‘green regeneration.’”

For local officials and their partners across the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors, this report offers strategic policy guidance for achieving meaningful climate resilience and climate justice, and for scaling early efforts effectively. It explores the fast-changing world of local-level climate policy and planning, as well as the existing policy levers municipalities can use to reform land use practices, plan for blue-green infrastructure, redevelop brownfields, construct green buildings, and prepare for low-carbon energy build-out.

To help readers take action, the report breaks down the practical strategies, specific steps, and key resources that smaller legacy cities need to link their sustainability efforts to broader partnerships and networks and to secure transformative investments. The authors recommend investing in green intermediaries that can strengthen regional networks, which can help smaller jurisdictions center climate resilience, racial equity, and green economic development. They also recommend integrating climate considerations into existing plans and policies, such as land use plans and codes, electric grid upgrades, and other specific interventions.

“Communities have an unprecedented opportunity to tackle the climate crisis with new federal funding,” said Lisa Wong, the former mayor of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. “This report offers practical steps to implement equitable solutions by creating a road map to increase capacity and integrate policies. With the stakes so high for ourselves and generations to come, this important resource will help local leaders and activists build a better future for legacy cities.”

“Smaller legacy cities bring abundant assets and incredible history to the table when it comes to economic development, but the specific challenges these cities face need tailored solutions, especially when the work is as critical and resource-heavy as green regeneration,” said Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “With this report, smaller legacy cities now have their own array of greening tools for leveraging their unique circumstances—tools committed to equity and justice as essential to enduring regeneration.”

Greening America’s Smaller Legacy Cities offers a novel framework for smaller legacy cities’ leaders and for regional, state, and federal allies and partners to create near- and long-term sustainability programming at every level. With consistent awareness of the budget pressures and myriad other constraints these cities face, the authors explore newer funding and capacity-building opportunities, and they offer an insightful guide to the regional intergovernmental policy ecosystems and players that can help or hinder growth.

“This is crucial work,” said Bill McKibben, activist and author of The End of Nature. “These small cities are often the hubs of large regions, and they can’t be allowed to just molder away. Instead, they have a bright—and bright green—future, if we can come together to help them make the transition!”

Today, smaller legacy cities are regional economic centers and county seats, with a modest sense of scale, history of productive know-how, and access to farmland, forests, and water assets. They are crucial to constructing a more sustainable, equitable low-carbon world. While individual places have different histories, demographics, and spatial challenges to consider, the report ultimately details how, through integrating climate resilience, environmental justice, and green economic development initiatives, each smaller legacy city can forge its own path toward equitable green regeneration.

Allison Ehrich Bernstein is principal at Allative Communications.

Lead image: Providence, Rhode Island. Credit: tupungato via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

En 2021, Los Angeles Times informó que algunos de los nuevos barrios millonarios de la ciudad se encontraban en el sur de Los Ángeles. Muchos residentes de la comunidad históricamente negra se sorprendieron.

Pero Kristin Johnson no. Hace tiempo que ella, nativa de Los Ángeles, y su esposo intentan comprar una casa en la zona, sin éxito. Ambos trabajan y vienen mejorando sus haberes y aumentando sus ahorros desde hace varios años. Pero los precios de las viviendas no paran de aumentar y se vuelven inalcanzables.

En 1965, los abuelos de Johnson compraron una casa en el área de Crenshaw, en el sur de Los Ángeles, en gran parte con un salario. La casa costó US$ 16.500. Hoy, vale casi US$ 1 millón.

La madre de Johson pasó su adolescencia en esa casa. Vio irse a las últimas familias blancas que quedaban y vio a los residentes de color del barrio perder locales de venta minorista, empleos en fábricas y servicios esenciales. Ahora las personas blancas están regresando, y junto a ellas, la inversión: una línea del metro que atraviesa el barrio se inauguró este otoño, y el nuevo SoFi Stadium, que es la casa del equipo LA Rams, se encuentra a 10 minutos. Dichos cambios aumentarán los precios de las viviendas aún más.

“Mucha gente que no es negra ni mestiza se está mudando al barrio y se está quedando con las viviendas”, comenta Johnson. “Pero a mí, incluso con los programas de compra de la primera vivienda, no me alcanza para pagar una casa en el área donde nací y me crie”.

En todo el país hay ciudades que enfrentan desafíos de vivienda graves, y las comunidades negras se ven particularmente afectadas. Muchas se encuentran en situaciones difíciles desde hace años, pero la pandemia exacerbó la situación, y provocó una suba de los precios de las viviendas y de los alquileres, sobre todo en las ciudades grandes. Estos aumentos se ralentizaron un poco desde mediados de 2022, pero no se detuvieron, y los residentes luchan, simplemente, para mantenerse a flote, sin siquiera poder pensar en comprar una vivienda o en aumentar su patrimonio.

Existe una gran brecha en los índices de propiedad de la vivienda en los Estados Unidos (casi el 75 por ciento de los hogares blancos tienen casa propia, en comparación con el 45 por ciento de los hogares negros y el 48 por ciento de los hogares hispanos), y esto representa una gran fuente de disparidad racial de la riqueza en el país. Pero las viviendas unifamiliares asequibles que pudieron empezar a enfrentar este problema no están ni cerca de producirse a la escala necesaria.

Los esfuerzos para preservar y expandir viviendas asequibles a la vez que se consolida la riqueza de la comunidad han enfrentado desafíos que van desde políticas restrictivas de desarrollo local hasta demoras en la construcción causadas por problemas con el personal y las cadenas de suministro. La iniciativa Connecting Capital and Community (Conectar el Capital con la Comunidad o 3C) del Centro para la Inversión Comunitaria, creada en colaboración con JPMorgan Chase, busca abordar estos desafíos con un enfoque completamente diferente.

Lanzado en 2021, en la actualidad, el proyecto incluye equipos en cinco de las principales ciudades de los Estados Unidos: Chicago, Los Ángeles, Miami, Seattle y Washington, DC. Cada equipo está creando estrategias localizadas y a medida para aumentar la reserva de la ciudad de viviendas asequibles para la venta y el alquiler, a la vez que se genera riqueza para las comunidades de personas latinas y negras. Los equipos, que incluyen a los residentes como socios de pleno derecho, están reuniendo a las partes interesadas de los sectores privado, público y sin fines de lucro; diseñando proyectos innovadores que puedan influenciar los flujos de capital, las políticas y las prácticas, y evaluando nuevas formas de combatir la crisis de oferta y propiedad de la vivienda que puedan sentar bases para esfuerzos en otras ciudades.

Un problema nacional con soluciones locales

La iniciativa 3C surgió como una forma de analizar las barreras dentro del sistema de vivienda que han limitado el acceso a la vivienda y la oferta de vivienda, y de identificar las herramientas y las estrategias para derribar esas barreras, que puedan respaldar e impulsar a las comunidades latinas y negras.   

“Sabemos que las comunidades necesitan una diversidad de tipos de vivienda”, expresa Omar Carrillo Tinajero, director de asociaciones e iniciativas del Centro de Inversión Comunitaria (CCI, por su sigla en inglés). “Si apoyamos a las comunidades prósperas, y si, sobre todo, cuidamos a las comunidades en las que se ha invertido poco o nada, tenemos que asegurarnos de usar una gran variedad de herramientas”.

3C es parte de un compromiso filantrópico de cinco años de US$ 400 millones por parte de JPMorgan Chase para apoyar a los hogares de personas hispanas, latinas y negras. CCI y JPMorgan Chase diseñaron el programa a partir de resultados observados en su trabajo de desarrollo basado en el lugar, y su objetivo es respaldar un análisis holístico de las inversiones, en lugar de proyectos únicos. “Queremos promover el cambio de los sistemas, que es crucial para el crecimiento inclusivo en las comunidades”, comenta Mercedeh Mortazavi, vicepresidenta de filantropía global de JPMorgan Chase. “Nuestras inversiones ayudarán a evaluar innovaciones y harán que las personas se reúnan para pensar de forma colaborativa, y pretendemos que se expandan con éxito por todo el país”.

En 2021, en cada ciudad, una organización líder dedicó un tiempo significativo a reunir partes interesadas de los sectores corporativo, filantrópico, municipal y sin fines de lucro, así como de grupos comunitarios que representan a los residentes locales, para formar un equipo central.

Juntos, los integrantes del equipo definieron prioridades compartidas y empezaron a escudriñar sus entornos locales con el fin de identificar brechas y posibles soluciones. Buscaron patrones de uso del suelo que pudieran admitir desarrollos de escala reducida (un número elevado de baldíos, por ejemplo, o estilos de vivienda históricos que puedan admitir tanto a propietarios como a inquilinos), así como herramientas y recursos potencialmente útiles, y luego diseñaron planes en torno a dichos hallazgos. Algunos equipos tienen como objetivo aumentar la reserva de viviendas disponibles para la compra para familias de bajos ingresos; otros intentan combatir el desplazamiento relacionado con el aburguesamiento por medio de la construcción de viviendas de alquiler asequibles.

A pesar de que analizan diferentes problemáticas, los cinco grupos tienen intereses en común. Esto también es válido en la práctica, ya que priorizan la asociación con emprendedores inmobiliarios de color y la colaboración con residentes locales, y a nivel estratégico, ya que investigan modelos innovadores de préstamo, uso del suelo y propiedad que podrían ayudar a las comunidades a transformar las oportunidades de vivienda y de consolidación de la riqueza.

Un marco de acción

A pesar de que la 3C es nueva, el proceso que los equipos usan para concentrar sus esfuerzos ya se viene probando hace tiempo. Conceptos fundamentales como la alineación de prioridades y la asociación con los usuarios finales de un proyecto (en este caso, los integrantes de las comunidades) son parte del marco de absorción de capital, una herramienta desarrollada por Robin Hacke, directora ejecutiva del CCI, y Marian Urquilla, cofundadora de la organización.

Por medio del marco de absorción de capital, muchas comunidades abordaron desafíos sociales y económicos locales, como la vivienda asequible, formulando objetivos compartidos, promoviendo un flujo de desarrollos, en lugar de focalizarse en proyectos individuales, y propiciando un entorno favorable para políticas y procesos pertinentes que puedan allanar y acelerar el encauzamiento del desarrollo y la preservación.

“En última instancia, se trata de reorganizar, rediseñar y repensar cómo una comunidad imagina su futuro, y trazar un plan para llegar allí”, comenta Urquilla. “Es un trabajo muy arduo, pero, al final, dará sus frutos”.

Dana Jackson llegó a probar esos frutos. Jackson, consultora de Louisville, Kentucky, con más de 25 años de experiencia en organizaciones de base y formulación de políticas, es la experta líder de 3C. Supervisa los equipos de Miami y Chicago, y coordina talleres en los que los cinco equipos trabajan en ejercicios centrados en sus entornos específicos y en las necesidades de las partes interesadas.

En estas sesiones, explica Jackson, a cada grupo se le puede pedir que describa el sistema de vivienda de su ciudad y todos los pasos que implica desarrollar una vivienda o poner a quienes compran viviendas y quienes las alquilan en su lugar. Como consecuencia, surgen preguntas como: “¿Dónde se traba o ralentiza el sistema, y cómo podemos, con un conjunto de socios, implementar algunos cambios?”, relata Jackson. “He visto equipos que llegan a entender muy bien cuáles son los déficits del sistema, y luego idean una estrategia para abordarlos”.

Concuerdo con Urquilla en que no es un proceso fácil. Pero es el trabajo preliminar importante para alcanzar el objetivo de la iniciativa 3C: desarrollar enfoques de vivienda específicos para cada ciudad que demuestren una forma de construir viviendas asequibles con mayor facilidad y equidad, y que puedan servir de base para otros esfuerzos donde quiera que sea.

Las cinco ciudades y quienes integran sus equipos comenzaron en diferentes partes. Algunas ciudades albergan a organizaciones sin fines de lucro de gran capacidad y cuentan con infraestructura que respalda su trabajo, mientras otras, a veces, han enfrentado dificultades para obtener recursos. Algunos integrantes de los equipos habían trabajado juntos con anterioridad y pudieron empezar a toda marcha, mientras otros necesitaron tiempo para conocerse y encontrar las mejores formas de alcanzar los resultados deseados.

Los grupos han adoptado diferentes enfoques para desarrollar los proyectos que esperan que fortalezcan la accesibilidad y la equidad en sus ciudades. Echemos un vistazo al trabajo en proceso en tres ciudades de la 3C: Chicago, Miami y Los Ángeles.

Chicago: disminución del umbral de propiedad de la vivienda

Cuando comenzó el proceso de la 3C, quienes integraban el equipo de Chicago sabían que querían centrarse en la expansión de la propiedad de la vivienda. El índice de propiedad de la vivienda de la ciudad para las familias negras e hispanas (35 por ciento y 43 por ciento, respectivamente) se encuentra por debajo del promedio nacional.

Además, sabían que querían trabajar con dúplex o cuádruplex, estilos de vivienda icónicos en Chicago, desarrollados a principios del s. XX para albergar a inmigrantes y migrantes negros provenientes del sur. Estas opciones de vivienda tradicionalmente asequible, que constituyen un cuarto de la reserva actual de viviendas de la ciudad, disminuyeron ya que las personas las convirtieron en viviendas unifamiliares o las reemplazaron por nuevos desarrollos.

La pregunta que el equipo de Chicago enfrentó fue: ¿en qué barrios debían centrarse a medida que desarrollaban su proyecto de demostración inicial? “Queríamos ser reflexivos y estratégicos respecto a dónde podríamos generar un impacto”, comenta Lynnette McRae, directora de la iniciativa 3C en Chicago Community Trust, que es la organización líder del programa. El equipo quería escoger áreas cuyos residentes ya estuvieran trabajando para conseguir la propiedad de la vivienda, y lugares que ya tuvieran una red de dúplex y cuádruplex, y baldíos en los que se pudiera construir.

Con el tiempo, el equipo decidió centrarse en Garfield Park y Humboldt Park, ambos habitados en su mayoría por comunidades latinas y negras. Garfield Park ya formaba parte de dos iniciativas de redesarrollo importantes (una dirigida por la ciudad y otra encabezada por una coalición de organizaciones sin fines de lucro) que el trabajo de la 3C podría aprovechar y amplificar.

El grupo se topó con un obstáculo bastante rápido. Por lo general, los esfuerzos para expandir la propiedad de la vivienda se dirigen a familias que ganan al menos el 80 por ciento de la mediana de ingresos en la zona (AMI, por su sigla en inglés). Pero Garfield Park y Humboldt Park son comunidades de ingresos bajos en las que la mayoría de los hogares ganan mucho menos que dicho valor.

“Realizar un proyecto de vivienda asequible al 100 por ciento de la AMI: eso podría incluir a muchas personas, pero sabemos que la mayoría de nuestros residentes ganan menos del 60 por ciento de la AMI”, explica Mike Tomas, director ejecutivo del Consejo Comunitario de Garfield Park. Él y quienes representan a Humboldt Park, como integrantes del equipo de 3C, presionaron a favor de opciones que pudieran satisfacer las necesidades de más residentes.

Dicho punto generó algo de tensión (Tomas la llama “tensión saludable”), pero, al final, la pregunta de cómo atender las necesidades de residentes de bajos ingresos interesados en poseer una vivienda se convirtió en la misión central del trabajo del equipo de Chicago.

Este año, el equipo está ingresando a una etapa de mayor compromiso, comenta Ashlee Cunningham, directora de la iniciativa en el CCI, que asesora al equipo de Chicago. “Ahora es momento de que construyan canales para los compradores, empiecen a pensar en las tipologías de vivienda, y observen de forma más estratégica cuáles son las oportunidades y necesidades de financiamiento”.

El equipo espera desarrollar un conjunto de soluciones que expandan la propiedad de la vivienda tanto para quienes ganan entre un 60 y un 80 por ciento de la AMI como para quienes ganan entre un 80 y un 120 por ciento. Sin embargo, para lograr alcanzar esos rangos más bajos será necesario resolver tres problemas clave. ¿Puede el programa identificar y preparar mejor a quienes sean potenciales propietarios por medio de un asesoramiento sobre vivienda? ¿Puede la creación de un fondo común de préstamos flexible ayudar a que las familias de bajos ingresos obtengan hipotecas? Y ¿puede el equipo trabajar con emprendedores inmobiliarios y la ciudad para adquirir suelo y construir unidades más asequibles, a fin de que el inventario esté disponible cuando los compradores estén listos?

Son preguntas difíciles, pero el equipo está dispuesto a aceptar el desafío, dice Donna Clarke, directora ejecutiva de operaciones de Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, un integrante del equipo que brinda apoyo, educación y asistencia financiera para ayudar a las familias de clase media y obrera a comprar y mantener sus viviendas. “Nos incita a encontrar soluciones e innovar”.

Cuando el trabajo de 3C se haya completado, explica Cunningham, “podremos decir que este equipo creó una cultura de propiedad de la vivienda, promovió el acceso igualitario al capital y expandió el inventario de viviendas asequibles”. Y por medio de esas tres acciones, habrá creado un modelo para otras comunidades”.

Miami: apostar a lo grande en desarrollos de pequeña escala

El verano pasado, la secretaria del Departamento de Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano (HUD, por su sigla en inglés), Marcia Fudge, declaró a Miami “el epicentro de la crisis de vivienda de este país”. Esto no solo es resultado de presiones habituales como la escasez de oferta y el aburguesamiento. Aspectos normativos y financieros del entorno de vivienda de Florida tienden a favorecer a los grandes emprendedores inmobiliarios privados, y, por tanto, Miami no tiene un ecosistema equilibrado que incluya a los emprendedores inmobiliarios sin fines de lucro o pequeños, o a instituciones financieras de desarrollo comunitario (CDFI, por su sigla en inglés) con experiencia.

En 2018, la organización Miami Homes for All reunió a partes interesadas locales para evaluar dichas necesidades, y creó la alianza Greater Miami Housing Alliance para seguir abordándolas. Dicha coalición trabajó de forma productiva durante dos años, e ideó un conjunto de recomendaciones de políticas para los líderes de la ciudad y del estado.

Así que, cuando la 3C se inauguró en 2021, el equipo de Miami, que incluye a muchos participantes de la iniciativa anterior, tuvo un comienzo prometedor.

Sin embargo, ahora el equipo debía encontrar proyectos que pudieran ilustrar los beneficios de los cambios de políticas que sus integrantes habían recomendado. “La Greater Miami Housing Alliance había logrado grandes avances, pero necesitamos ser capaces de construir dicho enfoque” para demostrar cómo se verían dichas recomendaciones en la práctica, explica Lisa Martinez, quien lidera el equipo de Miami.

El grupo determinó que quería centrarse en las estrategias antidesplazamiento en las comunidades con predominancia de población negra, por medio de la preservación de viviendas y la construcción de desarrollos de pequeña escala. Sus miembros sondearon proyectos de vivienda actuales en la región, y finalmente, eligieron invertir en cinco que ilustran las necesidades clave y prometen aprendizajes significativos.

Los cinco proyectos que seleccionaron difieren bastante entre sí. Uno usa suelo público para un modelo de fideicomiso de suelo comunitario que brinda oportunidades de propiedad de vivienda. Otro ofrece asistencia para la rehabilitación a propietarios de unidades pequeñas que enfrentan violaciones del código y multas. Dos proyectos están realizando rehabilitaciones o desarrollos de escala muy pequeña, pero necesitan un financiamiento previo al desarrollo. Y el quinto busca incluir espacio para oficinas de bajo costo en desarrollos de vivienda asequible.

En la actualidad, todos se encuentran en etapas diferentes, y se estima que el primero terminará a principios de 2024. 3C brindará financiamiento y servicios de gestión de proyectos para ayudar a que todos alcancen su meta. “Cada uno de estos acuerdos encontrará barreras que tendremos que superar”, explica Annie Lord, directora ejecutiva de Miami Homes for All, la organización líder del equipo.

El objetivo es que los gestores de políticas y las instituciones financieras tomen conocimiento de los proyectos una vez que estos ya estén completamente encaminados, haciendo hincapié en que el dinero de 3C fue crucial para su progreso e ilustrando cómo las nuevas fuentes de financiamiento de la ciudad (para ayudar a que los constructores adquieran tierras, por ejemplo, o para ayudar a los propietarios de pequeñas unidades locales a renovar sus viviendas) podrían marcar la diferencia.

A medida que los proyectos avanzan, el equipo de 3C está trabajando con los integrantes de las comunidades de los barrios donde se está implementando la iniciativa. Debido al aburguesamiento, algunos residentes desconfían de cualquier actividad relacionada con urbanización.

Santra Denis es la directora ejecutiva del Centro de Trabajadores de Miami y una integrante central del equipo. Invitó a personas de varios barrios a unirse a un consejo de residentes, con el objetivo de otorgarles una participación clara en los procesos de toma de decisiones. “Sin duda, vamos a volver a centrarnos en los inquilinos”, añade. “Hablaremos con ellos, obtendremos información, nos aseguraremos de que se sientan bien [con estos desarrollos]”. Es la única forma de que la iniciativa funcione, comenta.

Los Ángeles: diversificar los tipos de viviendas

En Los Ángeles, el equipo de 3C está trabajando en el sur de la ciudad, donde dará prioridad a construcciones nuevas para la propiedad de la vivienda y a la preservación de unidades para alquiler asequibles existentes.

Pero Los Ángeles tiene algunas limitaciones internas, a saber, el costo elevado del suelo. Construir nuevas viviendas unifamiliares asequibles en terrenos individuales no es para nada factible allí, y los integrantes del grupo dedicaron meses a investigar formas de reducir los precios. ¿Podrían beneficiarse de la SB9, la nueva ley de California que permite a los propietarios de viviendas cuadruplicar la densidad en sus propiedades? ¿Podrían los modelos de propiedad compartida ayudar a los compradores a consolidar riquezas?

Finalmente, acordaron algo, según parece, más convencional: condominios. “Lo que podría no sonar tan innovador, pero lo es para Los Ángeles. No existen condominios allí”, explica Alejandro Gonzalez, gerente de programa de la iniciativa 3C de Los Ángeles. Los condominios pueden comprarse con hipotecas convencionales, y la comunidad está repleta de estacionamientos subterráneos y franjas comerciales de baja altura que podrían reutilizarse para viviendas de mayor densidad.

Pero, incluso si se consideran los incentivos de uso del suelo y las ayudas para el pago del anticipo a fin de que los compradores de primera vivienda puedan adquirir las unidades, los costos locales son tan altos que el equipo de Los Ángeles no pudo encontrar una forma de que los residentes que ganan menos del 80 por ciento de la AMI puedan acceder a hipotecas, objetivo compartido por muchos integrantes del equipo.

“Nuestro mayor desafío ha sido el deseo de muchos de nuestros socios comunitarios de atender a los ciudadanos de la franja inferior al 80 por ciento; es lo que todos queremos lograr”, comenta Tom de Simone, director ejecutivo de Genesis LA, una gran CDFI que lidera el equipo. En repetidas ocasiones, el grupo debatió sobre la problemática, y algunos integrantes resaltaron que incluso los residentes de Los Ángeles que ganan el 100 por ciento de la AMI tienen dificultades para comprar una vivienda, y que ofrecer condominios a ese precio permitiría a algunos profesionales negros que, de lo contrario, se verían expulsados por los precios, permanecer en los barrios del sur de Los Ángeles.

Marsha Mitchell fue una de las integrantes del equipo que participó en estos debates. Mitchell, directora de comunicaciones de Community Coalition, una organización que trabaja para transformar las condiciones sociales y económicas del barrio, afirma que entiende las realidades financieras de la ciudad que, en última instancia, ayudaron a moldear el enfoque del equipo, y destaca que apreció el ida y vuelta. “El hecho de haber tenido esos debates, es muy importante”.

De Simone dice que el debate también lo influenció. “Me abrió los ojos. Quizás no podamos obtener el 100 por ciento de las unidades estando por debajo del 80 [por ciento de la AMI], pero debemos intentar obtener algunas”, comenta. Piensa que los pequeños ahorros que provienen de los estacionamientos reducidos, las bonificaciones por densidad o la construcción modular podrían reducir los precios lo suficiente como para que las unidades sean más asequibles. Y reflexiona que si los funcionarios locales votados ven la viabilidad de invertir en condominios para expandir la oferta de viviendas asequibles, podrían, con el tiempo, asignar fondos públicos que podrían reducir más el costo para quienes alquilan y compran viviendas.

El equipo también se centra en preservar los alquileres multifamiliares, pero ese trabajo no comenzará hasta finales de este año, cuando se ponga a disposición una nueva fuente de financiamiento estatal. Por ahora, el grupo está muy ocupado adquiriendo bienes inmobiliarios aptos para la construcción de condominios y terminando el diseño del primer proyecto, pasos que se basarán, como todas las decisiones tomadas hasta el momento, en el diálogo y el consenso.

Dicho foco en la comunidad y el consenso es una característica distintiva de la iniciativa 3C, y seguirá guiando los debates y decisiones de los cinco equipos. “Muchas veces, la comunidad se deja en segundo plano”, explica Mitchell. “Esto es algo que diferencia a este proyecto”.

En las cinco ciudades, quienes lideran los programas 3C tienen la determinación de combatir la crisis de vivienda asequible del país de una forma nueva. Si bien reconocen los desafíos sistemáticos compartidos que enfrentan las comunidades negras de todo el país, analizan cada ciudad como un ambiente único, donde los barrios, la historia, el entorno de políticas y la cultura cumplen funciones importantes para la creación de nuevos modelos de vivienda, y donde los gestores de políticas, profesionales y residentes son los más indicados para elaborar estrategias y soluciones que funcionen en las comunidades.

Amanda Abrams es periodista independiente en Durham, Carolina del Norte.

Imagen principal: Casas en el sur de Los Ángeles, con el centro de Los Ángeles visible al fondo. Crédito: Misael Vasquez, Especialista de HUD del sur de California con Century 21 Allstars.

Contenido relacionado

Mensaje del presidente: ¿Piensa que las políticas de suelo no guardan relación con la injusticia racial? Piénselo de nuevo.

Cuando se lanzó el primer programa comercial de bicicletas compartidas en 2008, la propuesta de valor era clara. La mayor circulación de bicicletas en las calles reduciría el uso de automóviles y las emisiones de carbono, proporcionaría a los residentes y turistas una forma de transporte flexible, y ofrecería un beneficio de salud pública como puntapié inicial.

Durante la década siguiente, las bicicletas compartidas se expandieron a lo largo de todo el país. No obstante, debido a que los programas de bicicletas compartidas suelen depender de fondos corporativos o están a cargo de empresas de micromovilidad con fines de lucro, rara vez se implementó el servicio en ciudades y barrios de bajos ingresos en los que el acceso a más opciones de transporte sería beneficioso. Hace poco, este conocido patrón se vio sacudido por la popularidad creciente de las bicicletas eléctricas (es decir, bicicletas equipadas con tecnología de baterías eléctricas que complementan o, en ocasiones, reemplazan a las bicicletas tradicionales a pedal), y por parte de las ciudades y los defensores del ciclismo que tergiversan el esquema habitual de bicicletas compartidas.

Durante los últimos años, se han lanzado o anunciado proyectos experimentales de uso compartido de bicicletas dirigidos a comunidades y residentes de bajos ingresos en ciudades como Denver, Oakland, Búfalo, Nueva York; Youngstown, Ohio; y Worcester, Massachusetts.

Las ventas de bicicletas eléctricas están en auge a nivel mundial, y la tecnología está demostrando que puede cambiar las reglas de juego. “Todas las bicicletas compartidas deberían ser eléctricas”, expresó John MacArthur, gerente del programa de transporte sostenible del Centro de Educación e Investigación para el Transporte (TREC, por su sigla en inglés) de la Universidad Estatal de Portland, que publicó un informe sobre la equidad de las bicicletas compartidas en el año 2020. “No tengo ninguna duda sobre esto”.

La razón clave, añadió MacArthur, es que está demostrado que las bicicletas eléctricas derriban antiguas barreras en relación con quiénes andan en bicicleta. Atraen a adultos mayores, personas con limitaciones físicas, personas que no andan en bicicleta desde su infancia y personas que jamás se identificaron con el deporte ni con la cultura del ciclismo. Con las bicicletas tradicionales, explica, “solo se llega a una cierta cantidad de personas”.

En ciudades como Portland y Nueva York, que construyeron flotas completamente eléctricas (o en su mayoría), los usuarios “andan más en bicicleta y con mayor frecuencia”, afirma MacArthur. TREC descubrió que mientras un viaje típico en bicicleta compartida tiene unos cinco kilómetros y medio, los viajes en bicicleta eléctrica suelen extenderse más de ocho kilómetros, y, a veces, casi el doble.

Esto puede tener un impacto espacial y económico, ya que tendría el potencial de expandir el acceso a barrios, empleos y servicios. “La equidad en el servicio de bicicletas compartidas” ya es un problema reconocido, y las organizaciones sin fines de lucro, así como los emprendedores locales, están involucrándose para satisfacer las necesidades de comunidades y áreas geográficas que, históricamente, han quedado desatendidas. Todas las iniciativas recientes tienen, al menos, el objetivo parcial de no solo expandir las opciones de transporte, sino también estimular la vitalidad de los barrios y la independencia que esta conlleva.

“El uso histórico del suelo, las bancas de crédito hipotecario y otras políticas conformaron un país con una geografía de oportunidades muy irregular”, afirma Jessie Grogan, directora adjunta de Menos pobreza y desigualdad espacial del Instituto Lincoln. “La correlación entre los activos del barrio y la segregación racial y étnica no fue casual, por lo que el proceso inverso tampoco lo será. Si bien debemos trabajar para que todos los barrios ofrezcan oportunidades, mientras tanto, las bicicletas eléctricas pueden ser un puente esencial entre los lugares con abundancia y escasez de oportunidades. Un viaje cómodo y barato o gratuito a otra comunidad para acceder a un buen trabajo o una buena escuela o una oportunidad recreativa podría ser un salvavidas para las personas de barrios desatendidos”.

Shared Mobility, una organización sin fines de lucro para el transporte equitativo con sede en Búfalo, Nueva York, es una de las entidades que intenta ayudar a los socios locales a subsanar las deficiencias. En 2020, la organización adquirió alrededor de 3.000 bicicletas eléctricas que Uber pensaba desechar tras la venta de su negocio de bicicletas compartidas de marca Jump. El grupo se asoció con el East Side Bike Club (ESBC) de la ciudad para usar algunas de las bicicletas e iniciar una biblioteca de bicicletas eléctricas en Búfalo. De esta forma, atendieron las necesidades de un área de bajos ingresos con población predominantemente negra. Las bibliotecas de bicicletas eléctricas ofrecen a los miembros de la comunidad alquileres de bicicletas sin costo y capacitaciones relacionadas con las bicicletas. Entre otros servicios de reparación de bicicletas y programas educativos, ESBC ahora permite el uso de las bicicletas eléctricas durante una semana sin costo alguno. Shared Mobility trabajó con socios de otras comunidades en Nueva York, California y Carolina del Norte para sembrar bibliotecas de bicicletas eléctricas en esos lugares.

Michael Galligano, director ejecutivo de Shared Mobility, comenta que el tipo de compromiso comunitario que ESBC y otros grupos tienen puede ayudarlos a conseguir subsidios y fondos para financiar estos programas. Pero, además, argumenta que las municipalidades deberían implementar programas de bicicletas y bicicletas eléctricas como una forma de transporte público, con la planificación y el financiamiento correspondientes. “¿Dónde termina el transporte público?”, pregunta. “Creemos que no se trata solo de autobuses y trenes. También se trata de andar en bicicleta, caminar, compartir autos y alquilar vehículos con conductor”.

Galligano menciona a la Autoridad de Transporte del Distrito Capital, que brinda servicios a Albany, Nueva York, y a los municipios aledaños, como un ejemplo de un colaborador de larga trayectoria de Shared Mobility que piensa de esta forma, y que, próximamente, financiará de forma parcial su propio programa de bicicletas eléctricas con presupuesto destinado al transporte público. Mientras tanto, en Massachusetts, el gobierno nacional prometió US$ 5 millones para financiar iniciativas que faciliten el acceso a opciones de transporte que utilizan energía limpia, como las bicicletas eléctricas, a poblaciones de bajos ingresos. Dicha propuesta permitirá que la ciudad de Worcester proporcione bicicletas eléctricas a 100 residentes como parte de un estudio de dos años destinado a obtener más información sobre el uso y los efectos de la tecnología.

Otra iniciativa de bicicletas eléctricas en una ciudad posindustrial se basa en un abordaje de financiamiento híbrido. Esta primavera, YoGoBikeshare hace su lanzamiento en Youngstown, Ohio, con cerca de 30 bicicletas distribuidas en cuatro estaciones base. Este negocio de propietarios negros, que se financió con una inversión de estos mismos y con un préstamo de la incubadora de empresas Youngstown Business Incubator, satisface una necesidad en una ciudad que otras empresas de micromovilidad han pasado por alto.

“El transporte en comunidades como Youngstown es un desafío particular, ya que décadas de deterioro económico y demográfico generaron ciudades muy grandes y extendidas en relación con el tamaño de la población”, destaca Grogan. “Además, las ciudades más pobres no suelen tener un buen servicio de transporte público, por lo que es particularmente importante invertir en opciones de movilidad en lugares como Youngstown”.

La comunidad filantrópica también se está involucrando con la expansión del acceso a las bicicletas eléctricas. MacArthur destaca el trabajo de Better Bike Share, fundada por la JPB Foundation, que tiene el objetivo explícito de aumentar el “acceso a sistemas de micromovilidad compartida y su uso en las comunidades de bajos ingresos y de personas negras, indígenas y de color (BIPOC, por su sigla en inglés)”. Su ciudad aliada de mayor reputación es Filadelfia: los esfuerzos realizados durante la última década para construir un sistema de bicicletas compartidas más inclusivo han sentado un precedente, comenta MacArthur, y las becas de Better Bike Share ya financiaron múltiples proyectos en todo el país.

No cabe duda de que todos estos experimentos son pequeños pasos progresivos, y no proyectos de transporte masivos para toda la ciudad ni reformas de infraestructura integrales. Pero el cambio gradual puede aportar su grano de arena. Al menos, el advenimiento de las bicicletas eléctricas como una herramienta para expandir el acceso a oportunidades económicas representa una posibilidad de atraer un mayor apoyo generalizado de la gente para las alternativas de transporte. Y combinar la tecnología con programas barriales que se multiplican como centros comunitarios, por ejemplo, el ESBC en Búfalo, podría ser una forma útil de reforzar dicho objetivo. Incluso si las personas llegan con fines recreativos o por mera curiosidad, dice MacArthur, dicha motivación puede ser la puerta de entrada para que consideren las bicicletas eléctricas como un medio de transporte útil, y puede ayudar a inspirar a los embajadores a expandir ese mensaje.

Por más de una década, la mayor parte de la atención que recibieron los programas de bicicletas compartidas se centró en reducir los kilómetros realizados por los vehículos y las emisiones de carbono, y en aumentar las ganancias. Sin embargo, una evolución parece estar en camino, ya que el acceso a las bicicletas se expande, las percepciones empiezan a cambiar, y los beneficios económicos, así como aquellos relacionados con la equidad de las bicicletas eléctricas, son cada vez más evidentes. El objetivo final del uso compartido de bicicletas, explica Galligano, es expandir el “repertorio de opciones de transporte”, y si esta tecnología innovadora está inspirando experimentos originales y llegando a públicos nuevos, mucho mejor: “No se trata de una solución universal”.

Rob Walker es periodista; escribe sobre diseño, tecnología y otros temas. Es el autor de The Art of Noticing. Publica un boletín en robwalker.substack.com.

Imagen: Shared Mobility, una organización sin fines de lucro para el transporte equitativo con sede en Búfalo, Nueva York, ayudó a varias comunidades a iniciar bibliotecas de bicicletas eléctricas, que brindan servicios gratuitos de alquiler y reparación, entre otros. Shane Paul y Tyler Madell, integrantes del equipo de Shared Mobility, a la derecha, se reúnen con integrantes de la organización sin fines de lucro Pacoima Beautiful, para ayudar a construir una biblioteca de bicicletas eléctricas en Pacoima, California. Crédito: Patrick Cray.

Sometimes community trauma is born of natural disasters or other unexpected events. But in America’s cities, much of the pain of the past century arose from carefully planned decisions that were meticulously mapped out in advance.

New highways that splintered or destroyed Black and brown neighborhoods. Racist zoning rules that intentionally blocked people of color from homeownership. A tendency to see even thriving Black and immigrant neighborhoods as “blighted,” and in need of wrecking-ball revitalization. With these and other actions, the urban planning profession contributed to the systemic racism and segregation that plague our cities. But today’s planners are trying to atone for that legacy.

Dozens of urban planners around the country have signed a Commitment to Change statement that grew out of conversations at the 2020 Big City Planning Directors Institute, an annual conference organized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that brings together top planners from America’s 30 largest cities. “After the murder of George Floyd, it really crystallized that, as people who impact people’s lives, invisibly and visibly, planners needed to be on the right side of history,” says Eleanor Sharpe, Philadelphia’s deputy director of planning and zoning —particularly given “the fraught history of our profession.”

The resulting pledge, crafted by staffers from several cities and hosted by the City of Philadelphia, has two parts. “One is to acknowledge the harm that our profession caused, and is still causing,” Sharpe says. In Philadelphia, for example, highway construction bulldozed or bifurcated neighborhoods of color like Chinatown and Nicetown, and redlining—whereby lenders and others systematically denied mortgages based on race—left lasting scars by blocking access to a key source of intergenerational wealth. “Most analysis of where social issues mushroom in our city, when mapped, align with redlining maps of years past,” Sharpe says. “Redlining still has a stranglehold on our city decades later.”

The second part of the statement focuses on the future, committing the signatories to investments in housing, open spaces, transportation, environmental justice, and public services, among other actions, “with the goal of creating inclusive, equitable communities.” The pledge also prioritizes preserving and strengthening the culture, businesses, and institutions of communities of color, and preventing displacement caused by new investments.

While the public pledge has honed planners’ focus on racial equity, cities everywhere are still struggling to provide equal access to opportunity, and any progress in dismantling entrenched systems of inequality is often slow and incremental. The seeds of today’s systemic racism and inequities were sown decades ago, says Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute, “and the tools that planners have in their toolboxes also take decades . . . it’s not a profession with a lot of quick fixes.” But just as the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now, so it is with planning a more just future. In that spirit, here are some of the ways urban planners are working to restore trust, right historical wrongs, and advance racial equity in their cities.

Zoning for Equity

With the nation’s housing crisis falling hardest on low-income people and communities of color—who are more likely to experience homelessness due to the shortage of affordable housing—American Planning Association President Angela D. Brooks says reforms that lead to more housing are crucial to improving equity, in part because any conversation about equity rings hollow to someone with no place to live. “It’s something we could easily solve and fix, and the first step is really resolving to create more units of all tiers of housing, so people have a decent, safe, affordable place to live,” Brooks says.

That’s one reason Emily Liu, director of Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services, has been focused on updating the city’s zoning rules.

In 2020, Liu and a team of volunteer planners and community members came up with 46 ways they could improve equity in their city; six of the policies stood out as “things we could move on quickly,” Liu says. Among them was allowing Louisville homeowners to build in-law apartments, or accessory dwelling units (ADUs), by right.

Some of those initial efforts received little or no opposition—like allowing urban agriculture on any lot—but loosening restrictions on ADUs did generate some pushback. Organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, and United Way helped produce educational materials and op-eds to counter some of the misinformation that circulated in the community, Liu says, helping to get the change passed. “This was definitely something we couldn’t do by ourselves. There was a lot of support from outside organizations and citizens.”

A federal lending map from the 1930s (left) identified the predominantly white east side of Louisville, marked in blue and green, as the most desirable place to invest. In 2017, a health outcomes map produced by the city illustrated the impact of decades of disinvestment, revealing that life expectancy on the west side, where most residents are Black, was up to 12 years shorter than on the  east side. Planners are working to improve equity in the city through zoning changes. Credit: City of Louisville.

Previously, adding an ADU had required securing a conditional use permit; now, accessory units are allowed by right in Louisville, as long as they meet some basic standards, and can be rented out if the owner lives on site. “The great majority of them are approved in office by our staff, and it only takes a day or two, it’s very easy,” Liu says, noting that the city saw a tenfold increase in ADU applications in the first year after the zoning change went into effect.

Liu also managed to get front setback requirements reduced from 25 or 30 feet down to 15 feet, freeing up more space for potential ADUs. And she pushed for a small but meaningful change that will allow for duplexes on lots smaller than 5,000 square feet if they’re zoned for multifamily use. A mere 6 percent of the city is zoned for multifamily homes, Liu says, and among those lots were “10,000 parcels where, in the past, you were zoned multifamily, but you were not allowed to build even a duplex” because the lot didn’t meet the minimum size requirement.

Those are just a few examples of how small but crucial zoning changes can begin to address inequity. In February, APA released its Equity in Zoning Policy Guide, a user-friendly resource that lays out dozens more specific recommendations to help dismantle systemic inequities through three different aspects of zoning: the rules themselves, the people involved in drafting them, and how they’re applied and enforced.

“It really focuses on the ways that bias and historic patterns of segregation are reinforced through zoning,” Brooks says. “But it also offers specific ways to change drafting and public engagement, mapping, and even the enforcement of zoning regulations to dismantle barriers and expand opportunity.”

Other cities, such as Minneapolis, Portland, and Arlington, Virginia—and even some states, like California, Oregon, and Maine—have managed to pass more sweeping upzoning measures that allow for ADUs or small multifamily homes on almost any residential lot. Atlanta and Denver, among others, are also in the process of making major zoning reforms.

Liu’s department is now working to engage and educate the community around missing middle housing—conducting walking tours, for example, through Louisville’s oldest neighborhoods, to show residents how duplexes and triplexes were once abundant in the city before being zoned nearly out of existence after World War II. “The goal is to see where we can allow this by right,” she says, noting that such smaller, denser homes “are naturally occurring affordable housing.”

‘Relentless’ Outreach

Planning departments are also getting more active in expanding their reach beyond the older, wealthy, white male homeowners who tend to dominate public input sessions—and making a concerted push to connect with residents who have been missing from the conversation.

“A big part of it is going to where people are,” says Washington, DC, Planning Director Anita Cozart—and being “relentless” about it. That means attending community festivals, block parties, and youth group meetings to seek input on any specific plans in the works, or to simply let people know how to engage with the department. “If we have a meeting and somebody says, ‘I didn’t know this process was happening, where’s the outreach been?’” she says, “we’re calling that person up, and asking them about their networks,” and the best way to connect with them.

Representatives of the DC Office of Planning set up shop at a street festival in 2022, part of an effort to expand their reach and engage with more community members. Credit: DC Office of Planning.

For more than a decade, Philadelphia has offered a Citizens Planning Institute, which teaches residents about the city planning process and how they can be a part of it—“and at some point, take that knowledge back to their neighborhood, and leverage it in some way that’s useful to their community,” Sharpe says.

The program has become so popular, staff can’t keep up with demand. There are currently two cohorts a year—a spring and fall session with 30-plus people in each—but upwards of 200 people typically apply.

“We’re setting up citizens for success, we’re pulling the veil down,” Sharpe says, “so people can understand what’s going on, and how things happen in government.” The program’s 700-plus alumni live all over the city and can help improve communication at neighborhood meetings. “They can act as our translators,” she says. “There’s a trust factor there that doesn’t necessarily exist” between residents and planning officials.

Recent alumni of Philadelphia’s Citizens Planning Institute gather in 2022. The program has taught more than 700 residents about the city planning process and how they can participate in it. Credit: Citizens Planning Institute.

Renters, meanwhile, who are more likely than homeowners to be people of color and have lower average incomes, have long been ignored in zoning or development discussions. So in Louisville, when a project involves a public meeting, the city now requires applicants to notify nearby renters, not just abutting homeowners. “Their landlord may live in California, but they’re the ones who live here, who will be impacted by proposed development,” Liu says.

As a renter herself, Brooks favors such efforts and says cities should pursue other channels of communication as well. “In the age of social media, there are so many ways we can get notice out to people that it is irresponsible, and just inexcusable, not to be utilizing more creative ways,” she says. “Even if I owned my home and you sent me a letter, there’s a high probability I won’t see that until long after your meeting.”

Evaluating Everything Through an Equity Lens

Several big cities, including New York and Washington, now require change-of-use or other development applications to include some form of racial equity impact report. Such an assessment injects a measure of accountability into the process that has too often been missing, based on a simple question: Will the proposed change make progress toward advancing racial equity, or will it worsen existing inequities?

Assessing the potential racial equity impacts of new development or zoning changes as part of the official planning process is a simple but important step, Grogan says. “Making sure that you think about the equity impacts of every project is a practice that doesn’t necessarily cost anything, and can add a lot of value to the day-to-day planning work,” she says.

New York City’s Department of City Planning partnered with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to create an interactive Equitable Data Development Tool that maps out neighborhood-level displacement risk and disaggregated data on race, economic security, housing market pressures, health outcomes, and other key indicators. Applicants submitting a newly required racial equity report as part of their land-use review must cite relevant data from the tool and include a narrative statement that explains how their project and its neighborhood context “relate to the city’s commitment to affirmatively furthering fair housing and promoting equitable access to opportunity.”

New York City’s Department of Planning and Department of Housing Preservation and Development created an interactive tool that maps displacement risk and provides disaggregated data on key indicators. Credit: NYC Department of Planning.

In Philadelphia, where Mayor Jim Kenney tasked all city departments with creating racial equity action plans, Sharpe says the city is trying to incorporate equity analysis into the capital programs budget cycle, asking agencies that receive capital funds to explain how each dollar will contribute to or dismantle systemic racism. “We’re trying to very much embed it in the culture and the philosophy of how work is approached,” she says, noting that it’s still a work in progress.

And in Washington, DC, planners use disaggregated data to assess “the benefits and burdens that might come from a change in zoning,” Cozart says, including the potential for displacement. The District’s neighborhood-level small area plans now feature a similar “Equity in Place” analysis, which can yield different priorities in different neighborhoods. In the wealthy, majority white neighborhood of Chevy Chase, for example, the small area plan seeks to add dedicated affordable housing and remedy the area’s long history of discriminatory land use. In Congress Heights, a predominantly Black neighborhood experiencing increased redevelopment, the focus is on anti-displacement and community resilience measures.

“We ask sets of questions, but it’s a different demographic so you end up with different recommendations, different thrusts of the planning effort, even if you’re doing the same things, like disaggregating the data by race, and engaging the folks who have been marginalized from the process,” Cozart says.

A resident leaves a comment at a Racial Equity Action Plan feedback session in Washington, DC. Credit: DC Office of Planning.

Asking Why

When San Diego Planning Director Heidi Vonblum was working on the Build Better SD initiative—an effort to support equitable, sustainable development citywide that was adopted by the city council in 2022—she interrogated longstanding policies in search of a valid reason for their existence. She and her staff would ask why something was done the way it was, and why that was, and why that was, and so on, until they reached a root cause. Spoiler: The origin stories of some policies more closely resembled a greedy villain’s backstory than that of a superhero.

“Sometimes it was a good idea at the time, sometimes it made sense based on information that planners had available to them,” Vonblum says. “And sometimes it was really wrong, and there’s just no need to continue that.”

That philosophy helped Vonblum’s department make a series of changes, approved by the city council in stages over the last two years.

It began with rewriting the almost 70-year-old Parks Master Plan, and challenging traditional community engagement methods that were resulting in public feedback along the lines of, “We love it, don’t change it, everything’s fine,” Vonblum says. “What was interesting about that Phase One input is that everything’s not fine.”

So in addition to seeking input from underrepresented voices, Vonblum and a handful of staff members drove around San Diego during the pandemic and documented the starkly contrasting conditions of the city’s recreational spaces in a StoryMap called One City, Two Realities, to better educate neighborhood groups and other stakeholders. “Parts of our city have glowing, gleaming, beautiful parks, and then we have other parts of our city that have far more people—and more children and seniors, who tend to use parks the most—that have a park, but it’s got nothing to do, or it has broken playground equipment, and that’s not okay.”

During the pandemic, planners from San Diego documented the disparities among the city’s parks. The city is implementing policy changes intended to distribute infrastructure investments more equitably. Credit: City of San Diego Planning Department.

A key aspect of Build Better SD was changing the city’s system of collecting and spending neighborhood-specific development impact fees. These one-time fees, which developers pay to defray the cost of municipal infrastructure and services associated with the new development, varied drastically across the city, and had to be spent in the neighborhood they were raised. Per-unit impact fees were up to 50 times higher in wealthy districts, discouraging denser growth in well-off areas while simultaneously concentrating reinvestment in those same places. The city has now shifted to a citywide fee structure, where impact fees are the same across every neighborhood and infrastructure investments can be prioritized for areas with the greatest need.

Some changes were unpopular at first, and took a couple of tries to get through the city council. But they have laid the groundwork for other equity-driven initiatives. “Progress can be slow and painful, but we’ve made so much progress just in the last couple of years,” Vonblum says. “We went from having very difficult and controversial conversations to like, boom, boom, boom—actions are happening right now,” she adds. “We’re now focusing on increasing access to our coastal resources and increasing connections between communities through a citywide trails master plan,” as well as developing a master plan for a new regional park in an underserved neighborhood whose requests for green space were left on the back burner for 20 years.

As planners, Vonblum says, “we need to take an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, why do we plan for parks this way? Why do we collect development impact fees this way? Why did we prioritize infrastructure investments this way?’ Until we do that, we’re not going to be able to make any forward progress to advance equity, to advance anti-racist zoning policies, and to invest equitably in our communities.”

Building the Planner Pipeline

At the most recent Big City Planning Directors Institute convening in October, Liu shared how inspired she felt by the number of other women and people of color in the room—including Sharpe and Cozart—which marked a big change from Liu’s first such conference 10 years earlier, she recalled.

But despite that encouraging shift in representation at the top, the profession is still largely white. With an eye on building a profession that better reflects the population it serves, Sharpe and other planners take every opportunity to promote planning to young people of color.

“Our staff is always eager and volunteering in high schools and middle schools, because a lot of planners heard about this later in life, and we want to say, ‘Hey, here’s a legitimate profession that you can do, especially if you want to help your neighborhood out,’” she says. “It’s feeding the pipeline, so that hopefully in 10 years, the more people hear about it, then the pipeline is not just producing mostly white people.”

Cozart and her team conduct similar efforts around Washington. “We’ve been visiting with high school students to just talk about planning and to engage them in mapping, to engage them in analyzing data that planners use, and to really think about design—the design of communities and what spaces are going to be welcoming for you,” she says.

After all, Cozart adds, given the 10- and 20-year timelines of neighborhood and comprehensive plans, those high schoolers may be the ones turning today’s recommendations into tomorrow’s more equitable urban reality.

A youth workshop in Congress Heights held by the DC Office of Planning. The event introduced participants to urban planning and gave them a chance to share their dreams for the neighborhood. Credit: DC Office of Planning.

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

Lead image: Members and supporters of the NAACP picket against housing discrimination in Detroit in 1963. Credit: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

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