Housing costs are putting unbearable pressure on household budgets and threatening the American Dream of homeownership. The statistics are sobering. The Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) estimates that 40 million households—half of all renters and a quarter of all homeowners—are cost-burdened. The main culprit is a chronic shortage of new housing production, accumulated over the last 25 years and abetted by other factors including the great financial crisis, the pandemic, and extreme global wealth inequality. Starter homes are vanishing as institutional investors buy up tens of thousands of them each year and convert them from owner-occupancy to rentals.

Estimates of the magnitude of the housing shortage range from 1.5 million to 5.5 million units. Zillow estimates that we need 4.5 million new units for families who are currently doubled up—i.e., multiple households sharing a single residence. The shortage of affordable housing is even more acute. The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that the United States needs 7.3 million more affordable housing units to accommodate extremely low-income renters. No matter how we count it, this amounts to one to five years of new production at current rates.

Suffice it to say we need a lot of new housing. Most of it needs to be affordable. And we need to build it where people want to and need to live.

To do that well, we need to understand how housing markets work. Important new research from the JCHS shows that new housing added in suburbs has almost no effect on adjacent urban markets. The authors suggest that “a more targeted approach is required if policymakers want to reduce costs in the least affordable neighborhoods” and “building more housing will make cities more affordable for low- and middle-income families only if the newly built housing is relatively affordable and located near those families.”

At the Lincoln Institute, we’re all about solutions—and our solutions always start with land. The biggest obstacle to building new affordable housing is the cost of land. The primary reason for our chronic habit of building affordable housing where we don’t need it is cheap land. So any solution to the nation’s housing crisis will have to start by identifying land that meets three important criteria: it is appropriately located, available, and affordable. Interestingly, that isn’t as hard as it might seem.

Where is the land we need, and how much housing could we build on it? Using a novel geospatial analysis called Who Owns America®, the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) at the Lincoln Institute can map and count housing potential with precision. When we began thinking about urban land that is ripe for housing development, publicly owned land emerged as an obvious candidate—places like underused urban parking lots and brownfields.

How much prime buildable land (large parcels in transit-rich urban locations) is owned by various levels of government in the United States? The CGS analysis, detailed in a new report published today, estimates over a quarter million acres.

This includes over 237,000 acres of land owned by local government (cities and counties), nearly 34,000 acres of state-owned land, and about 5,200 acres of federal land. These parcels all have at least 20,000 square feet of developable area with no building larger than 1,000 square feet. CGS’s team of geospatial data experts screened out wetlands, parks and other green space, and rights of way.

This is the lowest-hanging of low-hanging fruit. If we developed these parcels to low-density standards (seven units per acre), we could produce more than 1.9 million housing units. If we got ambitious and built out to higher-density standards of 25 units per acre, government-owned land could yield 6.9 million units of new housing.

Skeptics might argue that this land is not distributed where we need it or where people want to live. Interestingly, the states with the largest amounts of buildable public lands are Florida, Massachusetts, Washington, Texas, and California—home to some of the most expensive housing markets in the country. It is stunning to see that many of the places where we need affordable housing most are the places with significant amounts of public land available for development.

There is an additional portfolio of other opportunities to build housing on nongovernment land. For example, redeveloping underperforming urban and suburban malls and strip malls to higher density multi-use standards. This approach, applied to just 30 percent of the estimated total stock of these shopping centers, could add 3.4 million units of housing nationally. Or consider the emerging “Yes in God’s Back Yard” effort allowing multifamily housing to be built on church-owned land as of right. CGS estimates that churches own more than 32,000 acres in transit-rich urban areas. If developed to the more aggressive transit-oriented development standards (25 units per acre), they would yield more than 800,000 units.

Building on prime land owned by various levels of government and by churches could allow our country to completely overshoot even the highest estimates of what we need to address the housing shortage. This does not even include the new housing potential of redeveloped derelict or underperforming malls, accessory dwelling units, or converting Class B office buildings to residential use. And this would all be additive to the “normal” pace of housing development of about 1.4 million units per year.

These are ballpark estimates, offered to suggest that the housing crisis is not an unassailable challenge. It might be hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible.

So what would it look like to take this challenge on? Maybe we can set a goal of adding 7 million new units to our “normal” rate of housing production in the next 10 years. That would mean building an average of 2.1 million units per year for the next decade. Is it reasonable to think we can ramp up housing production by 50 percent? Sure. We completed 2.1 million units of new housing in 1973 when the economy was about one-quarter the size it is today (as measured by real GDP). In 2006, we produced 1.98 million new units when the economy was a little more than half the size it is today. Thus, ramping up production sufficiently to meet this goal is clearly not out of the realm of possibility.

What we need is a new public-private-civic partnership like the one that built the suburbs and millions of units of affordable urban housing after World War II. Assembling the land is the first step. Next, we’ll need to mobilize the financing. At $400,000 per unit (this is the median price of a new house today according to Redfin; per-unit costs would be lower for more modest homes), we’ll need $2.8 trillion to get the job done—about 1 percent of GDP each year for 10 years. This is about half of what we spent for COVID-19 relief, and a lot of the expenditure will be covered by the private sector and recovered through home sales, rent revenues, and land leases. We’ll need to train and employ hundreds of thousands of construction workers. At a full-time job creation rate of 2.9 jobs per house, that will mean about 2 million jobs per year. And we’ll need to work with local governments to streamline the approval process. But the estimated additional $7.8 trillion in tax revenues and fees generated by the new housing should sweeten the pot.

We know how to do these things; we just need the will to take them on. Sure, there are lots of details to be ironed out and real costs involved, but there is also real and precisely measurable opportunity in the land all around us. Finding adequate shelter for our families is critical—and a government created by the people and for the people should not hesitate to find ways to put its own buildable land to work.

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

Lead Image: Residential buildings in Tampa, Florida. Credit: DraganSaponjic via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

In the Carondelet neighborhood of St. Louis, where once-busy shipyards gave way to vacancy and blight during the waning decades of the 20th century, a global specialty minerals company is building a $400 million factory to produce highly efficient batteries for energy storage. 

Another new factory is rising up amid the shuttered steel mills and closed coal mines of Weirton, West Virginia, built by a different manufacturer whose battery technology involves mixing iron particles and air.  

And in Schenectady, New York—where the production of electric lights, appliances, and engines by Thomas Edison’s General Electric company spurred an economic boom that began in the late 1800s and had faded away by the mid-1900s—the first of a class of super-tall, highly efficient onshore wind turbines recently rolled out from a pristine assembly line at a new GE plant. 

“It’s a win-win for the environment and the local workforce,” beamed New York State Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara in a TikTok video recorded outside the plant, which will ultimately employ 200 people including skilled union labor. The end result, he said, will be “a more affordable, reliable, sustainable, and secure energy future.” 

All of these projects and dozens more across the country are manifestations of a new federal, place-based industrial policy, fueled by more than $1 trillion in tax credits and grants under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, American Rescue Plan, CHIPS and Science Act, and most of all, what is essentially sweeping climate action legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Facing the urgent need for manufacturing the components of the clean energy transition—electric vehicles, batteries and energy storage, equipment for charging stations, wind turbines, solar panels, and many other components of the transition from fossil fuels, like high-capacity carbon-fiber power lines to bolster the nation’s overburdened power grid—the Biden administration has made several strategic decisions. 

First, the White House declared that the United States should not cede all this advanced industry to China, currently the world’s leader in producing wind and solar equipment and inexpensive electric vehicles. And if these items are to be made in America, administration officials say, it should happen in postindustrial legacy cities and distressed counties—the “places where opportunity has left,” as White House climate czar Ali Zaidi said at a Columbia University conference last fall. 

Since President Biden took office, companies have announced more than $250 billion in private investments, an unprecedented amount, to manufacture “the nuts and bolts of clean energy,” said Ben Beachy, special assistant to the President for Climate Policy, Industrial Sector, and Community Investment. “The administration is committed to ensuring that hard-hit communities and workers reap the rewards of this boom, including deindustrialized communities.” 

Leaders in legacy cities, which have been struggling with manufacturing and population loss for decades, say they welcome the boost. Many perceive something poetic about the heavily polluting manufacturing processes of a century ago being replaced with industry that both functions sustainably and produces equipment that will help reduce fossil fuel emissions. The pivot, as much cultural as having to do with economic development, is already leading some to rechristen the Midwest and Southeast the “Battery Belt.” 

“Cities like ours were built on energy innovation, but it extracted a price,” said Paige Cognetti, mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, a city known since the turn of the 20th century for its sooty coal and electricity industries. Cognetti cites Biden’s childhood roots in the working-class city as a factor in the initiative to help legacy cities engage in the clean energy transition. “I think he understands that it takes major investment to set up regions for economic success and climate resilience.”  

Many questions remain about implementation, however, including whether economically distressed regions can conjure the necessary ecosystem to support the new industry—first and foremost a trained workforce, but also other elements such as infrastructure, housing, and vibrant civic and higher education institutions to provide not only training but also research and development. 

In addition, the massive amount of federal investment flowing from Washington will require a keen administrative capacity at the state and local level to discover the opportunities, manage transactions, and comply with rules and regulations. 

Finally, land use issues are expected to complicate the effort. The amount of space needed by many of the private companies—for building electric vehicles, in particular—is such that the best sites are at the periphery of cities, requiring greenfield development, rather than in the urban core. Urban infill redevelopment is possible, but there are significantly higher costs associated with adaptive reuse or brownfield regeneration.  

The challenges are very real, but so is the opportunity. While federal spending from the IRA could be disrupted if there is a change in administrations, repeal would require Congressional action.  In the meantime, billions of dollars in federal funding have begun to flow from the first investments of that law. Local, regional, and state governments and their partners should be ready with thoughtful and actionable plans for implementation, said Peter Colohan, director of Federal Strategies at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

“The money and incentives flowing out of the government at a rapid pace are making private investment irresistible—in clean energy, nature-based climate solutions, and advanced manufacturing,” he said. Issues of land use and equity will surface regularly, he added, requiring state and local governments, philanthropies, and nonprofit organizations to help “create virtuous circles of community investment, and avoid unintended harms.”

* * * 

The history of subsidy in American manufacturing has some twists and turns, but ultimately government support in one form or another has supported industry for over two centuries. From the first flour mills in the late 18th century to the advent of the automotive assembly line, manufacturing in the United States fulfilled a market need for goods and supplies that was driven largely by individual entrepreneurship, though generally welcomed with open arms by local officials happy to make sure land transactions, for example, went smoothly to establish factories and nearby worker housing. 

During that early era of industrial growth, government also stepped in to provide the infrastructure to support commerce, from a national rail network to ports and canals. Factories were generally located well within city limits, their access to waterways and rail lines making it relatively easy to get the goods to market, both domestic and overseas. The physical imprint of this growth on America’s cities was transformational, with blocks-long multi-story structures built to employ 10,000 workers or more, and an adjacent density of housing and amenities. 

World War II turned the nation’s industrial might toward building tanks and planes for the military, and began a tradition of decentralized defense spending, with contractors establishing themselves in Congressional districts that made sure the pipeline of Pentagon funds kept flowing. The Interstate Highway Act of 1959 was another important source of federal investment for cities, powered by the argument that new freeway infrastructure was needed for the swift movement of goods.  

As the economies of Japan and Europe came back online in the decades after the war, manufacturing in Rust Belt cities gradually petered out. From the 1950s through the 1970s, private companies increasingly took advantage of cheaper labor overseas, and technological automation in production and distribution thinned the payroll even more. Thus began the decline of once prosperous cities across a swath from the Mississippi River to the Northeast, from St. Louis to Cleveland, Allentown to Hartford. 

The spate of factory closings through the 1970s was devastating, said Alan Mallach, coauthor of “Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities,” a report published by the Lincoln Institute. “Start with the proposition that in the 1950s and early 1960s, as many as half of all the jobs in cities like Cleveland or Youngstown were in manufacturing, and then factor in that most of the retail and service jobs were supported by the wages factory workers were making, you have to figure that 70 to 80 percent of the local economies in these cities was based on their manufacturing sector. So ‘doomed’ may be a bit strong, but it comes close.” 

Add in the phenomenon of white flight, which saw white residents move en masse from downtown areas to suburbs, and what is remarkable is that legacy cities survived in any form at all, Mallach said. With both the physical urban environment and the social and economic fabric changing dramatically, he says, “a lot of credit goes to the thousands of working-class and middle-class Black families who moved into the neighborhoods being vacated by white families and stabilized them for the next few decades.” 

Over the last half-century, certain types of manufacturing continued to be propped up on an ad hoc basis by the US government, in the form of selective tariffs—imposed on foreign competitors to benefit American-made steel, for example—or outright bailouts, as enjoyed by the automotive industry after the Great Recession. Tech companies including Amazon, meanwhile, have frequently been given red-carpet treatment involving significant tax breaks and other incentives as local leaders compete to have businesses set up shop in their city or town. 

Notably, it is the energy sector that has benefited from the longest and most robust history of subsidy, beginning with federal rewards for depleting oil wells in the 1920s and continuing with tax breaks and subsidies to this day—conservatively estimated to be $20 billion a year for producers of coal, natural gas, and crude oil. 

Now that fossil fuels are set to be replaced by renewables including wind, solar, and hydro, the White House is attempting to execute the equivalent of a three-cushion billiards shot: fight climate change by making the transition away from fossil fuels, make clean energy components and systems in America, and restore jobs in struggling places. 

“We will not achieve our climate goals without mobilizing trillions of dollars in support of climate action. Properly guided, that wave of investments can flow into good union jobs,” said Beachy, from the climate policy office. “Properly guided, it can flow into communities that have endured decades of divestment. Our climate strategy is a job strategy, it is an equity strategy. That’s the basic logic.” 

For an initiative that has been operating relatively under the radar, the place-based approach does appear to be off to a strong start. According to two federal government databases, at the Department of Energy and the White House’s Investing in America inventory, an estimated 700 clean energy projects are already online or in the works, across sectors including: 

• Batteries and materials. High-performance batteries are much in demand for increasingly popular EVs, including the Ford F-150. Power storage is a huge need in the clean energy grid, to extend and preserve energy provided by renewables. Driven by innovation, battery factories and critical minerals facilities are popping up in Michigan (Our Next Energy), Georgia (Anovion Tech, SK Battery), North Carolina (Albermarle Corp.), and  Mississippi, where a new truck battery joint venture will create more than 2,000 clean new jobs—more than any single investment has ever brought to the state.   

• Electric vehicles. Given the head start by the heavily subsidized EV makers in China, as well as a competitive position by the pioneering company Tesla, expanded production in the United States has been halting. Administration officials say there is growing demand, aided by the $7,500 tax credit individuals can claim upon purchase; since the passage of the IRA in 2022, there were a record 1.46 million passenger clean vehicle sales,  according to the Treasury Department. In addition to new EV plants, such as Rivian’s in Illinois, billions are available for retooling existing automaking facilities and encouraging the manufacture and deployment of the all-important network of charging stations, which are poised become as ubiquitous as gas stations. 

• Wind. Here again, China is the leading producer of wind turbines, with 60 percent of the world’s production capacity. But American companies, like GE Vernova in Schenectady, are making strides in developing more efficient and effective towers, blades, and associated infrastructure to better connect to the grid. Technological innovations are opening up new possibilities as well, such as less expensive bladeless turbines that capture prevailing winds or turn to harvest wind from different directions. 

• Solar. The world’s fastest-growing source of energy is another difficult challenge, as the cheapest solar panels continue to be made in China—and indeed, the seven major Chinese solar companies recently provided more power to the world than oil companies, according to Bloomberg. But a few standouts have been successful, especially poetic in places that used to produce coal or heavy manufacturing. In Farmington, New Mexico, a solar farm is being built near a decommissioned coal-fired power plant and mine. As with wind technology, solar is evolving rapidly; one company has developed sun-harvesting crystal spheres that would take up a fraction of the space now required for panels. 

• Other ancillary support. Several programs under the IRA are providing general support for new industry by improving roads, bridges, airports, and drinking water systems, with notable upgrades in the works in Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Allentown.  The White House is also intent on bolstering the supply chain of materials like aluminum, which is critical in solar panels, EVs, and power lines—and making sure that the production of those materials is less polluting. As an example, Century Aluminum is receiving funding from the Department of Energy for a $3.9 billion project to build a new, clean primary aluminum smelter in the Mississippi River Basin.   

It is difficult to overstate the unprecedented volume of federal support for these efforts. Keeping track of what funding is available and where it’s going has become a cottage industry. In part because the main instrument is the tax credit, the ultimate cost to the federal budget  depends on the number of private companies that collaborate with local regions on projects (as well as individual households that take advantage of rebates for EVs, energy efficiency, and climate-friendly systems such as hot and cold weather heat pumps). 

The baseline figure provided by the Biden administration was that the IRA, a multi-year program, would provide at least $370 billion for the clean energy transition, in spending and tax credits. Brookings estimates that $780 billion could be coursing through the US economy by 2031, while Goldman Sachs calculates the total potential amount at $1.2 trillion. 

“It is an extraordinary policy moment,” said Mark Muro, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who coauthored a report listing some 70 distressed counties that have received some kind of investment already. “This is a new, modern, distinctly American industrial strategy, rebalancing the economy. This will bring hope and genuine economic activity to places that have been without that for years.” 

Supporters point to dozens of ribbon-cuttings for plant openings that have already occurred—part of what they compare to manufacturers coming forward for the war effort 80-plus years ago, as a kind of patriotic national mobilization symbolized by Rosie the Riveter flexing her bicep and proclaiming, “We can do it.”  

Where the Funding Is Coming From 

On paper, the Biden administration has made available more than $3.6 trillion in federal funding for infrastructure, manufacturing, and community resilience since 2021, including hundreds of billions to support the transition away from fossil fuels. At present, only a fraction of the multi-year spending plans has actually been distributed. 

Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): The chief feature of this nearly $500 billion law signed by President Biden in 2022, in addition to inflation-curbing measures such as reducing the federal budget deficit and lowering prescription drug prices, is the unprecedented investment in clean energy to combat climate change. A multi-year spending plan based largely on tax credits, the IRA could have a total cost of $1 trillion, according to some estimates.  

CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS): Also signed into law in 2022, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act is intended to bring microchip manufacturing back to the United States after decades of semiconductors being made overseas, primarily in China. About $60 billion is being directed to strengthen American manufacturing, supply chains, and national security, and invest in research and development for high-tech industry including nanotechnology, clean energy, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. 

Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law): This law authorizes $1.2 trillion in spending that includes about $550 billion in funding for America’s roads and bridges, water infrastructure, resilience, Internet, and more. The White House describes the legislation, signed into law in 2021, as a boost to U.S. competitiveness that will create jobs and “make our economy more sustainable, resilient, and just.” 

American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA): The $1.9 trillion stimulus package, passed by Congress and signed by President Biden, included $30.5 billion in federal funding to support the nation’s public transportation systems and other capital investments. The legislation was largely a response to the economic disruption caused by the Covid pandemic. 

***

Although the federal largesse is welcome, some wonder if a single factory can really make a dent in the problems of deep-seated poverty, underperforming schools, vacant properties, and persistent crime that have metastasized over decades in legacy cities. 

“Reindustrialization around clean energy and technology is a good thing as far as it goes, but I don’t think it goes anywhere as far as its boosters seem to believe,” said Mallach. 

There is much baggage to overcome. Revival in places like Cleveland or St. Louis has been uneven. Some smaller legacy cities have struggled in part due to a lack of robust civic institutions and “eds and meds,” the nonprofit anchor institutions providing employment and innovation. 

The traditional manufacturing city was sustained by a kind of factory that hardly exists any more— facilities with large footprints and employing 10,000 people or more. That configuration is not easily replaced, Mallach said. New manufacturing is much less labor intensive.  

As an example, he cited a new steel mill in Youngstown, Vallourec Star, which replaced a prior facility. “It probably produces more than the old mill did, but it does it with 700 to 800 workers, not 10,000 to 15,000. And most of those workers sit at consoles operating machinery and robots, which, of course, means that they need a respectable level of computer literacy.

“Now, 700 jobs matter, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s been lost,” Mallach said. 

Others have concerns at a higher policy level, expressing doubt about the government’s ability to pick winners and losers in private markets, and recalling the failure of the solar company Solyndra during the Obama administration. Some start-ups don’t pan out. Coal miners may not transition to being electricians at a wind turbine factory. Already the EV maker Rivian had to pause construction of a 13 million-square-foot plant in Georgia because of financial losses as the company tries to ramp up production. 

“My thinking is that there should be a pretty high bar to clear to justify” government support for private industry, said Colin Grabow, associate director at the Cato Institute. “If there’s some need that’s not being met by the market, government might intervene,” he said, or if there are national security issues at stake, as is the case with microprocessors. 

But Grabow questions the emerging industrial policy in practical terms as well, suggesting that the world should have access to the cheapest clean energy possible, whether made in America or not.  

“If the overriding goal says, ‘hey, we’re facing a planetary emergency, and we need to do this transition’ . . .  if the Chinese want to give us cheap EVs and solar cells and all the rest, then that should be welcomed. The economy and jobs should take a back seat to that,” he said. 

Still, supporters argue that if there was ever a time to boost the clean energy transition, it is now, with essentially the future of the planet at stake. Many bemoan a perceived pattern that the clean-energy sector is being unreasonably scrutinized and questioned, in light of the history of the government so willingly supporting other industries. 

Steering the factories to postindustrial regions is seen as an appropriate measure to address economic inequities, especially those places that were ultimately harmed by the environmental and health impacts of coal mining or heavily polluting industries. 

“Dealing with climate change offers a real chance to take on the inequality that plagues our country as well,” said Bill McKibben, a professor at Middlebury College and founder of the climate action organizations 350.org and Third Act. The Biden administration “has been putting factories in places based on real need.” 

So far, the federal funding to support made-in-America clean energy manufacturing is going to blue and red states alike—and indeed one analysis by Politico showed that most of the projects are in red states.  

“We want to be able to see energy—clean energy—produced in every pocket of the country. Blue states, red states, really it helps to save people money, so it’s all about green,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters at a White Housing briefing last year when discussing how Republican districts were using the clean-energy investments. 

At least three major challenges remain if the implementation of the place-based industrial policy is to be successful, however. The first is the capacity of state and local governments to take advantage of all the funding and programs that have been very quickly made available. 

States and municipalities are scrambling to apply for dozens of new programs to leverage the tax credits and rebates, which requires extensive knowledge of grant-writing and compliance rules. The administration has tried to make the process as user friendly as possible, and established “direct pay,” which extends eligibility for funds to nonprofits and municipalities for the first time. “You qualify, you get a check,” senior White House adviser John Podesta told state and local officials at the US Conference of Mayors winter meeting in January in Washington, DC. “We hope you will be evangelists” in spreading the word, he added. 

Despite the effort, six out of ten mayors said in a survey by the Boston University Initiative on Cities that bureaucratic complexities were weighing down the process, citing a “challenging grant application process and the public’s lack of familiarity with its details.” 

Some states like Illinois and Nevada have set up offices to make sure federal funding is efficiently and effectively used. Massachusetts recently also did something similar, to help distressed communities become aware of the federal funding opportunities that can help nurture the interest of private investment. Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, established a “command center” to keep track of applications and deadlines. 

Another, more complicated hurdle is the need to support the new factories with an ecosystem of workforce training, child care, and the all-important engagement of nonprofit, civic, and higher education institutions. And that, in turn, will guide the land use decisions that will unlock economic activity in an equitable manner, said Bruce J. Katz, director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. 

“This is a remarkable transition. It’s phenomenal. But location matters,” said Katz, who is also cofounder of New Localism Advisors, which seeks to help cities design, finance, and deliver transformative initiatives that promote inclusive and sustainable growth. “The devil is in the details as to where the large plants are located, and all these pieces of the puzzle that need to come together, whether it’s supply chain, spillover effects, or workforce readiness.” 

The country “tends to have an invest-first, plan-later perspective on the world,” he said, leading to a highly decentralized system. “We turn on the faucet and corporate investment is right there ready. Well, the cities need to have the sites ready.”

In addition to determining suitable locations, adds Amy Cotter, director of Climate Strategies at the Lincoln institute, “cities are going to need to be really intentional about planning for new industry in concert with resilience and inclusion.” Thoughtful urban planning, she notes, “can give rise to clean industry in a supportive ecosystem that enhances equitable prosperity for longstanding and new residents alike.” 

Several state and local governments are setting a foundation for this boom. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro established a $500 million initiative to make sure commercial and industrial sites are ready for development. West Virginia Northern Community College promised to set up courses and internships to prepare students for jobs at Boston Metal, a maker of clean-power alloys. 

Technological advances will help. Artificial intelligence can turbo-charge a range of higher education institutions, large or small, to provide research and development support to burgeoning clean energy industries. “There’s no question universities and research ecosystems can support and inform clean energy manufacturing, and AI can be a huge factor in discovery and innovation and scaling,” said John Werner, chief innovation officer at MIT Connection Science, a cross-disciplinary program facilitating networks of entrepreneurs. 

Muro, from Brookings, said workforce development and training is key to securing employees who may not have a college degree, who seek fulfilling and rewarding livelihoods that are a step up from the burdensome grind of the fossil fuel era. “It’s not your grandfather’s factory work,” he says.  

Nothing about it will be particularly easy. Trying to grow a supportive ecosystem “is not for the faint-hearted,” Muro said. “Resources, transportation, wrap-around services, support for midnight shifts, childcare . . . There’s a lot to wrestle with in this transition.

Still, he says, the moment is unprecedented, and it holds real promise: “Some legacy cities will do a great job and some will struggle, but at least they will be in the mix and will have this opportunity.” 

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

When heavy rains unload on Beaumont, Texas—which is to say, pretty often, in this small Gulf Coast city 80 miles east of Houston—flash flooding can turn the underpasses beneath train tracks and bridges into unpassable, sewage-laden lakes, as pump systems get overwhelmed.

It’s a citywide issue, but it’s especially problematic in Beaumont’s historic South End. Ringed on three sides by heavy industrial facilities—including a 2,400-acre ExxonMobil refinery and chemical plant, the 100-acre Port of Beaumont, and a facility that holds thousands of rail cars—such inundation can essentially leave residents and workers stranded in the neighborhood, with no way out.

“We’ve always had an issue where our underpasses flood, and so we’re trapped without access to emergency medical facilities,” says Christopher Jones, founder and director of the South End Charlton-Pollard Greater Historic Community Association. “During events like Harvey or Imelda, we’re trapped within that industrial horseshoe.”

The prospect of getting stranded by an everyday downpour creates anxiety for residents, as well as tangible health hazards. “Our streets fill up with sewer and rainwater, and there’s no cleanup that happens afterward, whether it’s from the city or the state of Texas,” Jones says. “Then that sewage matter dries up and becomes an airborne pathogen that we breathe,” along with other pollutants, such as limestone dust, sulfur, and petrochemical byproducts produced or transported nearby. Indeed, between the dangerous chemicals in nearby rail cars and refineries, its hurricane-prone location, and the increasing frequency of extreme heat waves, flooded roadways are hardly the only disaster-related risk facing the Charlton-Pollard neighborhood.

So when Jones heard about a request for proposals issued by the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP), he proposed a series of exploratory scenario planning workshops that would gather ideas and input from community members, city officials, emergency agencies, and local businesses, to formulate and prioritize resilience strategies.

The review committee found the Beaumont proposal unique and compelling for a couple of different reasons, says Heather Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. “It’s the first community organization awarded through this process,” Hannon says, as opposed to a municipal department, planning agency, or research team. What’s more, the proposal specifically focuses on the “dual-threat landscape” of both natural and man-made disasters.

The neighborhood is well aware of the “escalating risks posed by climate change, industrial accidents, and other man-made hazards,” Jones explained in his proposal. “Our community’s proximity to a dense concentration of industrial operations elevates the risk of chemical spills, industrial explosions, and air quality emergencies, in addition to natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and severe weather events.”

Jones says the old housing stock in his neighborhood isn’t very suitable for sheltering in place, whether it’s during a storm or a chemical spill. “My neighborhood dates back to the 1800s, and many of the homes here are, if not the same age as ExxonMobil, a little bit older.” Many of those homes lack the kind of weatherization upgrades—insulation, storm windows, air sealing—that would better protect them from storms and air quality issues.

“I definitely want my neighbors to have the opportunity to not only weatherize their homes, but to be able to seek safety and shelter inside of their homes if there’s anything like an explosion from ExxonMobil,” Jones says. When a series of chemical explosions rocked a TPC plant in nearby Port Neches in 2019, “We felt it—we smelled it,” Jones says.

“So if we were to experience something like, God forbid, a big waste of benzene, everybody here is [in serious trouble], because they don’t have the knowledge or adequate facilities to shelter in place,” he adds. “And that includes schools that are in our area, businesses in our neighborhood, elders . . . that, to me, is our starting point for our resilience.”

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The South End Charlton-Pollard project is one of five that the Consortium for Scenario Planning has chosen to support in response to the RFP. From Colombia to Canada, each project will design exploratory scenario planning workshops focused on disaster recovery and resilience. The awardees will have the opportunity to present and describe their work in early 2025 at the annual Consortium for Scenario Planning conference.

Awardees are tasked with designing workshops that use exploratory scenario planning (XSP) to help members of their community—which could be a neighborhood, city, or entire region—explore disaster recovery and resilience strategies. Applicants were encouraged to address both one-off disasters as well as those that are part of a larger cycle of “cascading hazards, where the effects of one disaster bleed into or cause another”—such as droughts that contribute to wildfires or landslides, or floods that destroy homes and then trigger sanitation crises.

In addition to the XSP workshops that the South End Charlton-Pollard Greater Historic Community Association will design and conduct in Beaumont, CSP selected four other proposals to support:

• Building off its recent completion of a participatory climate risk assessment, the Rural Municipality of Piney in Manitoba, Canada, will use a seven-step XSP framework to develop workshops and educational resources to help the region better prepare for a spectrum of disasters, particularly wildfires.
• Casa del Sur/Encuentro in Santa Fe, Argentina, will focus on building resiliency awareness among vulnerable citizens, who have been affected by both record floods and record lows of the Paraná River, urban heat, and fires in the past two decades.
• A team from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, will develop a framework for rural communities to plan for and adapt to sea level rise flooding and increased storm flooding impacts, using rural Virginia as the target audience and a special emphasis on nature-based features.
• A team from the Urban Mapping Agency, BuroDAP, and Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia, will conduct XSP workshops with a special focus on vulnerable communities and informal settlements facing flood risk in the urban peripheries of two major cities—Policarpa in Cartagena, and the Tunjuelo River floodplain in Bogotá.

All five projects, scheduled to be completed by May 2025, were selected as part of an annual RFP process managed by the Consortium for Scenario Planning. Past projects have focused on housing affordability (2023), changing food systems (2022), climate strategies (2021), and equity and low-growth scenarios (2020).

To learn more about all Lincoln Institute RFPs, fellowships, and research opportunities, visit the research and data section of our website.

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

Lead image: A member of the Coast Guard inspects flooding in Beaumont, Texas, as part of a search and rescue mission after Hurricane Harvey. Credit: Petty Officer 3rd Class Brandon Giles/US Coast Guard/US Department of Defense.

The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

After earning her PhD in applied economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 2018, Lindsay Relihan was invited to join the Lincoln Institute Scholars program, an opportunity for recent PhDs focused on public finance or urban economics to work with senior academics and journal editors. Now an assistant professor of economics at Purdue University, Relihan has lately focused her work on the question of how remote work is reshaping downtown retail—with many stores following their customers to the suburbs or smaller cities. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Relihan shares what intrigues her about the retail industry and why she’s still bullish on the future of cities.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research and the work you presented at the Lincoln Scholars program?

LINDSAY RELIHAN: Broadly speaking, my research agenda is about trying to understand how technology is reshaping cities.

The job market paper I presented at the Lincoln Institute is all about the rise of online retail, and how online retail was reshaping consumer shopping patterns. The big lesson there is that we often tell this ‘retail apocalypse’ story about online retail, where Amazon opens up and all the bookstores and other kinds of goods stores close. And that’s actually true—but it’s a very limited view of what online retail is doing to the economy, and to the retail economy specifically.

What I find in my work is that when people become online grocery shoppers, they go to the grocery store less, which is that classic substitution effect that we always talk about. But one thing they can do is turn around and use all that time savings from going to the grocery store to go somewhere else instead. And that’s what I find they do: they go to the grocery store less, but they go out to restaurants more. So restaurants can win from the rise of online retail, being something you can do with that extra time that you can’t replicate online. It’s not just restaurants . . . they go out to more salons, and they go out to more entertainment venues, like theaters or bowling alleys, those kinds of things that you can’t do online.

JG: What are you working on now, and what do you have planned next?

LR: Most of the story about work-from-home has focused initially on what it’s doing to things like office real estate. But retail is a big part of the economy, and it’s tied to both where you live and where you work. So if you go into the downtown office less, well, maybe you don’t go to Chipotle for lunch, and maybe you don’t go to happy hour after work, or you don’t go out for coffee—that’s a big part of downtown commerce.

If you’re instead having lunch at home, the question is: Do you go to Chipotle in the suburbs? In which case, Chipotles might just change where they locate. Or, because it’s a lot easier just to make a sandwich, do you just stay home, and that restaurant visit just disappears entirely? We find that people are leaving downtowns for the suburbs, and sometimes we also see people leaving big cities for smaller cities. That’s happening. But these retail establishments are also following the people, in a way that intuition would suggest.

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In that original paper, I ignored the supply side as if stores were not changing anything about their strategies, but we have good intuition and our everyday experience to expect that grocery stores should do something else to compete. And so we’re going to try and figure out what does that response look like? Are they going to change their product offerings, are they going to change their prices, are they going to change where their stores are? So we’re going to try and really trace out that supply side response.

JG: What sparked your interest in studying retail?

LR: It was recognizing that retail is this large, less explored aspect of commercial real estate. And I feel like it speaks to the way that people live their everyday lives, and that’s why I really like it.

I actually came to studying real estate and urban economics through an interest in the residential housing market. I worked with Chip Case at Wellesley, who developed one of the canonical models of house price indices, and I went to work at the Federal Reserve after undergrad and worked in their housing and real estate finance section, and then I went to Wharton to work on housing. And one day, my dissertation chair called me into his office, and—in his French accent—he was like, ‘Lindsay, you cannot be Miss Mortgage, you have to branch out.’ And I was like, okay, fair, but this other thing I’m interested in is still about the everyday of people’s lives, but how space shapes people’s consumption decisions, and the distributional consequences of that.

JG: What do you wish more people knew about economics?

LR: What I say to my undergrads when I’m teaching is the most beautiful economics is something that was obvious in retrospect—that says something true about the way the world works, and illuminates something new to you about the way that the world works in a very intuitive way . . . I think the best example from my work is when you shop online, you get more time, then you can do something else. Good economics makes concrete a lot of our really strong intuitions that will help us to understand how the world is really working so we can make better policy.

Something else I wish people knew is that economics is extremely nonpartisan, when it feels like everything else in the world is super partisan. It’s really about trying to understand people’s incentives and how we should distribute resources to achieve some kind of policy goal, and I think it’s very powerful in uniting people who maybe have very different personal opinions about a lot of things to speak a common language about tools and objectives.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

LR: During the housing boom of the 2000s, there was a big move away from the traditional 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage, toward mortgages that had teaser rates, or interest-only periods, or that could negatively amortize—they just had very exotic, nontraditional features that could allow you to have a cheaper mortgage payment every month than you could get on a standard contract. And what my research on that time period says is that a lot of that was really driven by this need by private banks and lenders who were packaging mortgage-backed securities to continue originating mortgages despite increasing interest rates after about 2003.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that in the current economic climate. We were puzzled back in the mid-2000s—interest rates are rising, why aren’t house prices falling?—and we actually have a very similar situation and discussion today. I think a lot about where in the system we are allowing mortgages to continue to get made, and whether those new mortgages being made today are risky in ways that are reminiscent of what happened in the 2000s.

[What gives me hope is that] every time we’ve had a technology shock, cities as a whole have come out on top. I mean, that’s not to say that individual cities can’t rise and fall . . . but I have hope overall. Every time we invent a new technology that allows easier communication across space, people predict the death of cities. They invented the telegraph, and people were like, ‘Distance doesn’t matter, so cities will disappear,’ or they invented the telephone, and they were like, ‘Cities don’t matter, we can just call each other, why would we ever need to be in person?’ The internet was the same way. And through all of those episodes, cities did the exact opposite, they got denser and became more valuable places to live; what changed was why people wanted to live there, and why cities were super valuable. I think both online retail and work from home have a good chance of following that path. So I am definitely part of the faction that bets long on cities.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

LR: Something I’ve been really into lately is trying to revisit lessons in philosophy. And one book that I read recently that really spoke to me as an urban economist was The Just City by Jo Walton. It’s a science fiction novel that imagines what would happen if you actually tried to set up Plato’s Republic by stealing people from across time that ever wished aloud to live there, and trying to run it in accordance with the way that Plato set down as being the way that cities should be run. So they put up a city that’s just like Plato’s prescription, and then of course, things get very interesting and run amok in ways that I thought were great.

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

Lead image: Lindsay Relihan. Credit: Courtesy photo.