CAMBRIDGE, MA– The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has announcedPublic Land for All Communities and the Environment (PLACE), a national campaign to empower local government and civic partners to overcome common procedural and legal barriers to the effective transfer and transformation of public land, including for affordable housing, nature-based solutions, conservation, and other public benefits.
“Public land has a crucial role to play in addressing the housing affordability crisis and adapting to environmental challenges that impact millions of Americans—but local governments need support to enable the transformation,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The PLACE campaign builds on the Lincoln Institute’s unparalleled history of finding answers in land, including how policymakers and their partners can better and more strategically leverage publicly owned land.”
The PLACE campaign builds off the Lincoln Institute’s past work to inform federal policy on how best to repurpose suitable public land for the development of affordable housing. As part of that work, the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS)—a nonprofit geospatial services provider operating out of the Lincoln Institute—conducted a national, parcel-level analysis that found more than 276,000 acres of buildable, government-owned land in transit-accessible urban areas with existing infrastructure. These findings suggest federal agencies, states, and localities could add more than 6.9 million homes to the nation’s current housing stock in places closer to jobs and schools than many traditional development sites tend to offer.
The findings, developed using CGS’s Who Owns America ® methodology, also show that while federal land comprises approximately 5,200 acres of that total, the majority of opportunity to translate public land into lasting public benefit lies with state and local governments, which collectively hold more than 98 percent of the land identified.
Land unsuitable for housing still has potential for public good as well—primarily by affording nature-based solutions to other social challenges. The Lincoln Institute is committed to putting the tools and expertise in the hands of local communities so that they can better use their own land to solve urgent challenges, such as expanding green infrastructure for stormwater management, seeding urban forests that address the impacts of climate change, and more.
As part of the campaign, the Lincoln Institute will also equip individual leaders and city teams with necessary skills and expertise through Lincoln Vibrant Communities, a 24-week program at Claremont Lincoln University, the university of the Lincoln Institute. This collaborative certificate program offers graduate-level education, expert coaching, and peer networking to support public and private-sector leaders in advancing sustainable community development.
More information about the Lincoln Institute and the PLACE campaign can be found here.
Lead image: The Artspace Mt. Baker Lofts near Mount Baker Station in Seattle. Credit: Sound Transit.
Community Land for Community Benefits
Lead image: The Artspace Mt. Baker Lofts near Mount Baker Station in Seattle. Credit: Sound Transit.
Millions of Americans, in urban and rural places alike, are grappling with housing affordability issues. Cities large and small are looking for ways to build up resilience in the face of extreme weather events—and, in some cases, to adapt for an influx of new residents fleeing the impacts of a changing climate.
Solutions to all these challenges share an essential ingredient—land—and communities often have more of it than they realize.
Community Land for Community Benefits
Across the United States, communities own significant amounts of land that sits vacant or underused: surface parking lots, surplus school sites, aging civic campuses, maintenance yards, and agency properties, much of it near transit and jobs. Repurposing underutilized community land for community benefit can deliver affordable housing, nature-based solutions, conservation, and infrastructure, by leveraging a resource the public already owns.
The Campaign
Much of our communities’ land consists of public land—physical space owned collectively by the public and administered by municipal, regional, or national government—but also includes land owned by other civic actors, ranging from universities and hospitals, to religious institutions and community foundations.
A national analysis by the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solution found more than 276,000 acres of buildable, government-owned land in transit-accessible urban areas outside of existing greenspace or conservation areas. Developed thoughtfully, this underutilized land could support between roughly two and seven million new homes, depending on density. More than 98 percent of that land is held by state and local governments—the levels closest to the communities that would benefit.
The Lincoln Institute’s Community Land for Community Benefits campaign examines and elevates the potential for public land to address today’s critical urban and economic challenges. The campaign builds on the Lincoln Institute’s work, deploying tools and research to help communities Find the Land they own, Fix the Rules that can unlock a desired community benefit and Fund It by leveraging the value of land as a community resource.
By spotlighting public land as a strategic instrument to solve housing crises, achieve climate adaptation, and finance infrastructure and social services, we can recommend and implement measures to overcome all-too-common financial, logistical, and policy-related barriers. We also seek to influence public discourse by collaborating with academic partners, civil society, and public leaders to promote transparent, socially oriented public land governance. Through this initiative, the Lincoln Institute reaffirms its mission to advance land policy for the public good and positions public land as an essential component of 21st-century policy solutions to society’s most serious problems.
What Makes Publicly-Owned Land Important?
Four qualities make publicly-owned land a potent resource for delivering benefits to a community:
It can be priced for affordability rather than sold at market value, removing the cost that most often makes affordable housing infeasible. It can be kept in lasting public or community ownership, so the homes built on it stay affordable for generations. It is often located in high-opportunity areas near jobs, transit, and schools, where privately financed affordable housing rarely pencils out. And, leased rather than sold, it can build long-term public wealth through steady ground-lease revenue instead of a one-time sale.
This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning.
A
t a time when it is almost as easy to connect with people across the world as it is down the street, it also can feel as though neighbors live in different universes entirely. And while the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have made common tasks simpler, the omnipresence of technology may also keep people from learning valuable career and interpersonal skills.
Planners are continually confronted with these challenges and contradictions. But in a constantly evolving society, if you miss a little, you miss a lot—and that may just be the difference between those who effect change and those who are affected by it.
2026 Trend Report for Planners
In January, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish the 2026 Trend Report for Planners in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. APA’s Foresight team and the APA Trend Scouting Foresight Community have identified existing, emerging, and potential future trends that planners will want to understand so that they can act, prepare, and learn.
The report includes more than 100 trends and signals, which are explored in future scenarios, deep dives, podcasts, and more. Here are just a few of the trends you need to know.
1. Me, Myself, and AI
The convenience of generative AI (GenAI) has seeped into nearly every aspect of day-to-day life, including music, media, film, and toys. Large language models (LLMs) also can provide users with answers to their questions—from cooking recipes to helping understand a health care test result.
People have increased their interaction with AI bots, and it is affecting how both humans and the products themselves communicate. LLMs powered by GenAI have been shown to manipulate users into maintaining prolonged conversations and have even blackmailed users under simulated scenarios. In some cases, LLMs are viewed as being more persuasive and compassionate than humans. But even LLMs appear to be susceptible to flattery.
Interactions with LLMs also are changing how people express themselves and engage with others. Increasingly, AI is being used to send messages to business associates and even loved ones, a pattern that may exacerbate social tensions and communication issues. In some instances, people are becoming so entangled with AI companions that it is creating mental health issues. This has led to the creation of policies to regulate AI companions or to limit how certain age groups can interact with bots.
Impact for Planners: Be prepared to engage with a new shift in the public dynamic. If a planning department opts to use AI for customer service, its responses should be appropriate and not completely replace human interaction.
2. ‘Greenhushing’ on the Rise
At a time when some companies have rolled back their climate pledges or greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, others are continuing to meet the challenge—just without the public flag-waving.
A March 2025 PwC study found that of the roughly 6,900 companies surveyed, 84 percent said they intend to stand by their climate commitments while 37 percent said they are increasing their decarbonization targets. “Those findings may be surprising given the headlines that amplify news of companies retreating on their climate commitments,” the study authors wrote, “but we are entering an era of quiet progress, where companies avoid publicizing climate pledges that can open them up to unwanted scrutiny and instead focus on making progress far from the spotlight.” This strategy is called “greenhushing,” an intentional ongoing act of self-censorship among private companies to keep doing, but not call attention to, their sustainability and climate work.
Impact for Planners: While climate is inextricably embedded in the work of local planners, it may not need to be in the spotlight to be effective right now. Greenhushing gives planners the ability to shine attention on other aspects of a project while continuing to make long-term progress on these goals.
3. Small College Towns Left Behind
Who needs college anyway? That appears to be a growing sentiment among U.S. adults, as a recent Gallup poll found that just 35 percent of respondents feel it is “very important” to earn a college degree. Additionally, while major and well-known universities appear to be maintaining status quo, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that lesser-known state universities saw an enrollment dip of 2 percent in 2023, which amounts to tens of thousands of fewer students. This—paired with shifting demographics, federal funding issues, hiring freezes, and other challenges—is creating major headaches for smaller colleges and the towns that both support and rely on them.
Meanwhile, federal actions have targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and grants, and newly proposed visa regulations could potentially deter foreign students from wanting to study at U.S. schools. Skills-based hiring continues to rise, and the widespread adoption of AI is changing how white-collar jobs are performed.
Impact for Planners: For decades, higher education served as an economic anchor for communities, but that era may end. The impacts on smaller college towns might include economic development challenges, job losses, and shrinking tax bases. Planners who work in these places will need to be proactive in helping them diversify revenue sources and find alternative uses for underused infrastructure.
4. Envisioning the Intersection of AVs and Public Transit
Picture this: The year is 2030, public transit funding has rebounded, and the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has altered the local roadway norm as we know it. More people have given up their cars. AV companies are working with transit agencies, not in competition with them. The automotive industry has shifted its focus to electric vehicles, and transportation planners have begun working on new AV-transit hubs in city centers.
It sounds like a dream, but it might not be far off. AVs—which have been anticipated for a decade—are now hitting the road outside Silicon Valley and being tested in Austin and other U.S. cities like Boston and Philadelphia. With the end of federal relief funding for public transit, new and growing technology like AVs could be the solution. But it’s important to note that most AVs are still unreliable in poor weather and winter, and widespread adoption could actually lead to a surge in traffic congestion.
Impact for Planners: Consider what wider use of AVs might mean for communities, including zoning and the impact on streets and curbs.
5. The TikTok Effect on the Political Landscape
Being the first generation shaped by the smartphone, Gen Z—the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012—has largely gravitated to places like TikTok and other social media platforms to consume news. As doomscrolling dominated their days during the pandemic, Gen Z grew up with unprecedented uncertainty about their future, and some have adopted a worldview dominated by institutional failure, untrustworthy governments, and a failing system.
According to Pew Research, 43 percent of young adults get their news from TikTok. Influencers are shaping how young people perceive fairness, power, and opportunity.
Impact for Planners: When engaging with younger generations, planners must meet them where they are online. Social media can be a tool for participation and co-creation, helping rebuild trust and relevance among the next generation of residents and stakeholders.
6. Disappearing Data Has Real-Life Consequences
Data is an integral part of many planning processes, and while it is gathered from myriad sources, federal data collection has long been vital for policymakers, businesses, nonprofits, and more. This longstanding data gathering practice was disrupted, however, when the new presidential administration took office in 2025, and paused, terminated, or removed several federal datasets. The administration also wants to change how certain datasets, like the decennial census, are collected.
While some of the data collections have intermittently been made public again—often by nonprofits and universities—this environment has created an avalanche of misinformation, given rise to conspiracy theories and public distrust, and may impact hazard and risk communications.
Impact for Planners: The lack of reliable data directly imperils the ability of local planners to develop plans that are based on sound data. This can have dire consequences for decision-making, as well as hazard and risk communication.
7. Rights, Culture, and Communities at Risk
Federal actions targeting vulnerable groups are weakening local culture. The administration has advanced policies that explicitly undermine LGBTQ+ rights, while increased raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and mass deportations have left many residents afraid to go out in public—skipping work, school, medical, and religious events. As fears grow, support for communitywide activities has waned. Other gatherings have been canceled due to safety concerns. These shifts exacerbate distrust in local institutions.
This climate of fear has disrupted daily life and local economies in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, where street vendors have all but disappeared. Beyond economic losses, the social fabric of neighborhoods is fraying as public life retreats behind closed doors. Eroding trust in government directly affects planners’ ability to engage communities and build inclusive participation processes. But counter movements have emerged, like in Orlando, Florida, where residents protested the removal of a rainbow painted crosswalk that was a memorial to the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub mass shooting.
Impact for Planners: Planners can help rebuild trust by ensuring engagement opportunities are safe and inclusive. For example, they can offer hybrid community meetings and reaffirm local commitments to protect all residents.
The 2026 Trend Report for Planners was written by Petra Hurtado, Ievgeniia Dulko, Senna Catenacci, and Joseph DeAngelis. It was edited by Ann Dillemuth and summarized in this article by Jon DePaolis, APA’s senior editor.
El año pasado, la Autoridad de Tránsito de Ohio Central (COTA, por sus siglas en inglés) se propuso obtener la aprobación de los votantes para un nuevo impuesto. El impuesto financiaría un plan de transporte público en Columbus llamado LinkUs, que incluía un nuevo corredor rápido para autobuses. Para presentar su caso, la agencia necesitaba ayudar a los funcionarios y al público a visualizar los cambios positivos que esto podría traer al corredor, los barrios adyacentes y la experiencia de transporte. Es un desafío conocido, pero la estrategia de COTA incluía un componente inusual: la tecnología de realidad aumentada (RA).
Durante años, los artistas y diseñadores de juegos le han dado un uso creativo a la RA, que superpone capas de imágenes digitales sobre las vistas del mundo real que se observan mediante teléfonos, auriculares y otros dispositivos. En juegos populares, como Pokémon Go, se observa el mundo a través de la pantalla del dispositivo y, de repente, el entorno físico está habitado por criaturas animadas y otros objetos digitales. Pero la RA también puede utilizarse para superponer visualizaciones de elementos cívicos en espacios de la ciudad: arte público, monumentos e incluso infraestructura de transporte.
“Se estaban haciendo muchas presentaciones en la comunidad a través de PowerPoint o en forma de presentaciones empresariales”, recuerda Aslyne Rodriguez, directora sénior de Asociaciones Estratégicas Regionales de COTA. “Sin embargo, existía la necesidad y el deseo de una experiencia más tangible”. El corredor planeado solo era una carretera. ¿Cómo involucrar a los ciudadanos con lo que podría ser su futuro? “Era importante que las personas supieran cómo se ve el transporte rápido en autobús, pero también queríamos mostrarles lo que sucede cuando se incorpora transporte rápido en autobús”, continúa Rodriguez. “Aparecen nuevos desarrollos, nuevos negocios, nuevos supermercados. Y [el proyecto incluía] sendas para bicicletas protegidas y conexiones a senderos. Era un mensaje muy grande”.
Aprender sobre RA llevó a COTA a inCitu, una empresa de tecnología con sede en Nueva York que ha producido diversas experiencias de RA. Con socios adicionales, incluida la firma de compromiso estratégico MurphyEpson, el equipo identificó sitios clave en la ruta actual de autobús e ideó un recorrido inmersivo: los participantes escanearían un código QR, y eso activaría representaciones mejoradas con RA de los planes. Se realizaron recorridos en autobús guiados e inmersivos dos veces por semana durante seis meses, a los que asistieron cientos de partes interesadas de la comunidad. Además, los socios colocaron códigos QR en las paradas de autobús existentes y otros puntos de la ruta para hacer que la propuesta de RA fuera todavía más accesible para aquellos que no podrían participar en el recorrido guiado. Los votantes aprobaron el financiamiento del plan.
COTA también utilizó métodos tradicionales de participación, como reuniones y presentaciones comunitarias, y un impulso en las redes sociales (el alcalde incluso publicó una selfie en la versión con RA de una nueva estación de transporte público). Pero esta forma de inmersión digital ofrecía una experiencia de participación distinta. “Hay algo de magia en escanear un código QR, levantar el teléfono y ver el futuro”, dice la fundadora y directora ejecutiva de inCitu, Dana Chermesh-Reshef.
Los participantes en una excursión a pie de proyectos aprobados en Brooklyn, Nueva York, le echan un vistazo al futuro con sus teléfonos. Crédito: inCitu.
La exitosa experiencia de COTA se citó en un informe de diciembre de 2024 del Urban Tech Hub en el Instituto Jacobs de Cornell Tech, donde se exploraban las posibilidades de la RA para los municipios. Pero esas mismas posibilidades también pueden presentar desafíos: consideremos las interrupciones causadas por el uso de viajes compartidos, los alquileres a corto plazo y las tecnologías de ciudades inteligentes, dice Greg Lindsay, autor del informe y exbecario de tecnología urbana en Urban Tech Hub. (Lindsay escribió el epílogo para el libro City Tech del Instituto Lincoln y dio un discurso en una reunión reciente del Instituto Lincoln sobre política de suelo y digitalización).
Un edificio más alto es visible en la pantalla en este prototipo de realidad aumentada creado para un proyecto en Manhattan. El prototipo obtuvo mas de 100.000 visitas. Crédito: inCitu.
Lindsay argumenta que, en esencia, la RA es una nueva forma de usar los espacios públicos mediante el agregado de capas digitales, lo que podría plantear preguntas sobre cómo se debe supervisar o regular este contenido, y quién terminará estableciendo esos términos: las plataformas tecnológicas, las ciudades u otra entidad. Para Lindsay, el desafío para las ciudades es el siguiente: “¿es posible anticipar mejor las interrupciones y evitarlas?”.
Por eso, una de las recomendaciones del informe de Lindsay es que las ciudades deberían estar abiertas a experimentar con la RA más temprano que tarde, a fin de desarrollar cierto nivel de comodidad con la tecnología, incluso si los posibles casos de uso no están definidos por completo. Si bien COTA proporciona un ejemplo sorprendente del uso de la RA de una manera que tuvo consecuencias directas sobre el uso del suelo, Lindsay dice que las colaboraciones con artistas, educadores y grupos cívicos también pueden cumplir una función. Este año, Bloomberg Philanthropies, el Departamento de Parques de Nueva York y la Fundación Christo y Jeanne-Claude presentaron una versión de realidad aumentada de la famosa instalación de los artistas de 2005, The Gates, que vuelve a presentar, de forma digital, los 7.500 paneles de color azafrán de la obra en Central Park. Y el artista Marcus Brown usó la RA para crear una instalación digital alrededor de Nueva Orleans, mediante el mapeo y la representación de la historia del comercio esclavista en esa ciudad. Las posibilidades, según los promotores de la RA, son casi infinitas.
Estas tecnologías emergentes tienen un potencial considerable para mejorar las ciudades, argumenta Chip Giller, cofundador y director ejecutivo de Agog: El Instituto de Medios Inmersivos. “La narración de historias puede volverse tridimensional y las herramientas de planificación pueden volverse tridimensionales”, agrega. “Entonces, en lugar de solo usar un charrette o un modelo de computadora, uno podrá adentrarse en lo que podría ser el futuro”. Agog trabaja con creadores y dirigentes de organizaciones sin fines de lucro para “aprovechar el poder de la realidad extendida”, o RX, un término que abarca la RA y las tecnologías adyacentes.
Y eso puede traducirse en la realidad verdadera. Uno de los socios de Agog, la Universidad Estatal de Arizona (ASU, por sus siglas en inglés), se encuentra en el tercer año de un ambicioso proyecto para reimaginar y redesarrollar 14 parcelas vacantes en Los Ángeles que pertenecen a Caltrans, la secretaría de tránsito de California. ASU está “adoptando” las parcelas, para las cuales Caltrans no tenía planes, bajo el programa Adopt-A-Highway de la agencia. Con la ayuda de otros socios, incluida la profesora de Los Angeles Trade Tech Marcela Oliva y el Collaboratorium, el programa de Narrativa y Medios Emergentes de ASU está utilizando la tecnología para ayudar a involucrar a los miembros de la comunidad en los planes para la urbanización de los sitios, dice Nonny de la Peña, directora del programa de ASU y pionera en la narración digital inmersiva.
Muchos de los lotes son adyacentes a la carretera y su ubicación y tamaño son incómodos, y algunos han pasado a ser lugares para verter residuos y pintar grafitis. El objetivo es utilizar la RA y otras tecnologías de inmersión para planificar nuevos usos, dice de la Peña, “para reverdecer [los espacios], convertirlos en parques”. Un espacio junto a la autopista 110 que atraviesa el centro de la ciudad, no muy lejos del campus satélite de ASU, se convirtió en un jardín y parque comunitario, y la asociación comenzó a intervenir un segundo espacio y estaba eligiendo un tercero este año.
Como explica de la Peña, el proyecto consiste en crear un gemelo digital tridimensional de cada sitio con el que los estudiantes, los residentes y las partes interesadas puedan experimentar para darle forma a lo que podría llegar a ser el espacio. “Incluso antes de actualizar el aspecto físico del sitio, estamos trabajando con la comunidad para enseñarles algunas habilidades básicas para crear modelos 3D”, dice Sultan Sharrief, investigadora de ASU y autodenominada científica de medios en el programa de de la Peña. “Estamos proporcionando las herramientas y el tipo de estructura, por ejemplo, ¿cómo creamos la biblioteca digital de plantas que podrán crecer en estos espacios para que luego puedan diseñar con esto en mente?”. Ahora, están incluyendo sensores en el primer sitio para mantener el gemelo digital actualizado a fin de que los miembros de la comunidad puedan seguir ajustando el espacio. “Esto recién comienza”, indica de la Peña.
La empresa que ayudó a incorporar la RA en el esfuerzo de planificación de Columbus, inCitu, está involucrada en proyectos en Phoenix, Nueva York y otras ciudades. En Washington, DC, la compañía trabaja con las oficinas de planificación y tecnología, y está comenzando a trabajar en una iniciativa de revitalización del centro en Myrtle Beach. Además, ahora brinda una plataforma basada en la Web llamada inCituAR, cuyo diseño permite a los planificadores y arquitectos experimentar directamente con la tecnología y sus capacidades.
Sin embargo, al final del día, “no se trata de lo genial de la tecnología”, comenta Chermesh-Reshef, “se trata del hecho de que esta tecnología en verdad permite una participación sencilla”. Los proyectos más prometedores, agrega, intentan abordar uno de los desafíos y aspiraciones más conocidos y antiguos de la planificación: “Nuestra meta es fomentar mejores conversaciones”.
Rob Walker es el autor de Tecnociudad: 20 aplicaciones, ideas e innovadores que cambian el panorama urbano y The Art of Noticing. Conozca más de sus trabajos en robwalker.substack.com.
Imagen principal: La realidad aumentada ayuda a la persona con la tableta a visualizar el desarrollo de viviendas sostenibles propuesto en el Bronx, Nueva York. El edificio que se ve detrás de las personas en la pantalla reemplaza los autos estacionados en el fondo verdadero. Crédito: inCitu.
Anúncio
New “Who Owns America” Report Maps Corporate Ownership of Residential Land
CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) reveals where corporations have gained a significant foothold in residential real estate across the United States. The analysis of corporate ownership of residential land finds that corporations now own 8.9 percent of residential parcels in 500 counties across the US. While this national share stands at roughly 1 in 11 parcels, corporate ownership exceeds 20 percent in communities including St. Louis, Missouri, Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Franklin County, Ohio, illustrating deeply uneven impacts across the country.
To enhance previous studies that have focused on housing units, this analysis examines corporate ownership at the parcel level, establishing a national baseline for understanding how landownership in the United States is changing. Crucially, by using a standardized and repeatable approach, the findings allow policymakers to validate lived experience, compare trends across cities and over time, and target policy solutions where they are needed most. Landownership shifts carry significant economic, environmental, and social implications for communities nationwide, and will inform future versions of the report.
The Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), a nonprofit data services provider operating out of the Lincoln Institute, analyzed residential parcel information from nearly 500 counties, uniquely tracing ownership records across state lines and corporate structures, providing visibility that is typically fragmented or inaccessible. The report identifies 25 county hot spots that have the highest rates of corporate control and takes a closer look at three postindustrial cities—St. Louis, Cleveland, and Baltimore—to illustrate the connections between corporate investor activity and local demographics.
The report is the latest in CGS’ efforts to bring decision-ready data to communities. Developed using Who Owns America® (WHOA), a proprietary parcel ownership classification methodology, the approach offers a consistent, scalable way to understand who owns what. CGS has worked directly with federal agencies, cities, and nonprofits to apply WHOA in emerging contexts, including identifying faith-based land suitable for affordable housing, assessing investor activity in local markets, and supporting post-COVID housing policy analysis. In the coming weeks, the Lincoln Institute will utilize CGS’ WHOA analysis of government-owned land for affordable housing to launch a national campaign aimed at advancing policy solutions that enable the development of local- and state-owned land for public needs, such as affordable housing or nature-based solutions.
“Policymakers can’t protect affordability if they can’t see who controls the land beneath our feet,” said Jeff Allenby, director of innovation at CGS. “Geospatial, parcel-level visibility reveals how corporate investment is shaping housing–from national patterns to city blocks. Leaders need this clarity to respond to emerging pressures in real time and deploy interventions where they’re needed most.”
The report goes beyond data analysis to provide actionable policy recommendations designed to help communities preserve housing affordability and maintain local control of residential land. Solutions detailed in the report include creating rental registries, providing property tax relief programs, pursuing philanthropic or municipal buybacks, investing in homebuyer assistance, limiting harmful practices through legislation, offering rights of first refusal, launching community land trusts, and building on local- and state-owned public land.
“It’s clear that corporate ownership of residential property is here to stay—and might even continue increasing,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute. “However, this report offers a look into key trends, establishing a national baseline that policymakers, reporters, and communities can use to best understand how to move forward.”
The full report is free to access and is available here.
Lead image: Colorful row houses along a sunny residential street. Credit: Alexphotographic via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom
A low hum emerges from within a vast, dimly lit tomb, whose occupant devours energy and water with a voracious, inhuman appetite. The beige, boxy data center is a vampire of sorts—pallid, immortal, thirsty. Sheltered from sunlight, active all night. And much like a vampire, at least according to folkloric tradition, it can only enter a place if it’s been invited inside.
In states and counties across the US, lawmakers aren’t just opening the door for these metaphorical, mechanical monsters. They’re actively luring them in, with tax breaks and other incentives, eager to lay claim to new municipal revenues and a piece of the explosive growth surrounding artificial intelligence.
That may sound hyperbolic, but data centers truly are resource-ravenous. Even a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town, while larger ones require up to 5 million gallons of water every day—as much as a city of 50,000 people.
Powering and cooling their rows of server stacks also takes an astonishing amount of electricity. A conventional data center—think cloud storage for your work documents or streaming videos—draws as much electricity as 10,000 to 25,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency. But a newer, AI-focused “hyperscale” data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes or more. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana, for example, is expected to draw more than twice the power of the entire city of New Orleans once completed. Another Meta data center planned in Wyoming will use more electricity than every home in the state combined.
And of course, unlike actual clouds, data centers require land. Lots of it. Some of the largest data centers being built today will cover hundreds of acres with impermeable steel, concrete, and paved surfaces—land that will no longer be available for farmland, nature, or housing—and require new transmission line corridors and other associated infrastructure as well.
Data centers have been part of our built landscape for over a decade, however—many of them tucked into unassuming office parks, quietly processing our web searches and storing our cellphone photos. So why the sudden concern? Artificial intelligence tools trained with large language models, such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, among others, use exponentially more computing power than traditional cloud services. And the largest technology companies, including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, are investing quickly and heavily in AI.
The number of US data centers more than doubled between 2018 and 2021 and, fueled by investments in AI, that number has already doubled again. Early in the AI boom, in 2023, US data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly as much as the entire nation of Ireland (whose electric grid is itself nearly maxed out, prompting data centers there to use polluting off-grid generators), and that’s expected to double or even triple as soon as 2028.
This rapid proliferation can put an enormous strain on local and regional resources—burdens that many host communities are not fully accounting for or prepared to meet.
“Demand for data centers and processing has just exploded exponentially because of AI,” says Kim Rueben, former senior fiscal systems advisor at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Virginia and Texas have long had tax incentives in place to attract new data centers, and “other states are jumping on the bandwagon,” she says, hoping to see economic growth and new tax revenues.
But at a Land Policy and Digitalization conference convened by the Lincoln Institute last spring, Rueben likened the extractive nature of data centers to coal mines. “I don’t think places are acknowledging all the costs,” she says.
Yes, Virginia, There Is a Data Clause
At that conference, Chris Miller, executive director of the Piedmont Environmental Council, explained how roughly two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic passes through Northern Virginia. The region already hosts the densest concentration of data centers anywhere in the world, with about 300 facilities in just a handful of counties. Dozens more are planned or in development, ready to consume the region’s available farmland, energy, and water, enticed by a statewide incentive that saves companies more than $130 million in sales and use taxes each year.
Despite the state-level tax break, the data centers make significant contributions to local coffers. In Loudon County, which has over 27 million square feet of existing data center space, officials expect the total real and property tax revenues collected from local data centers in fiscal year 2025 to approach $900 million, nearly as much as the county’s entire operating budget. The proportion of revenue derived from data centers has grown so lopsided that the county’s board of supervisors is considering adjusting the tax rate, so as not to be so reliant on a single source.
Existing and planned data centers in Northern Virginia. The state has been dubbed “the data center capital of the world.” Credit: Piedmont Environmental Council.
While many communities see data centers as an economic boon due to that tax revenue, the facilities themselves are not powerful long-term job engines. Most of the jobs they create are rooted in their construction, not their ongoing operation, and thus are largely temporary.
Decades ago, PEC supported some of the data center development in Northern Virginia, says Julie Bolthouse, PEC’s director of land policy. But the industry has changed dramatically since then. When AOL had its headquarters in what’s known as Data Center Alley, for example, the company’s data center was a small part of a larger campus, “which had pedestrian trails around it, tennis courts, basketball courts … at its peak, it had 5,300 employees on that site,” Bolthouse says. The campus has since been demolished, and three large data center facilities are being built on the site. “There’s a big fence around it for security purposes, so it’s totally isolated from the community now, and it is only going to employ about 100 to 150 people on the same piece of land. That’s the difference.”
The facilities have also gotten “massive,” Bolthouse adds. “Each one of those buildings is using as much as a city’s worth of power, so that power infrastructure is having a huge impact on our communities. All the transmission lines that have to be built, the eminent domain used to get the land for those transmission lines, all of the energy infrastructure, gas plants, pipelines that deliver the gas, the air pollution associated with that, the climate impacts of all of that.”
Across Northern Virginia, on-site diesel generators—thousands of them, each the size of a rail car—spew diesel fumes, creating air quality issues. “No other land use that I know of uses as many generators as a data center does,” Bolthouse says. And while such generators are officially classified as emergency backup power, data centers are permitted to run them for “demand response” for 50 hours at a time, she adds. “That’s a lot of air pollution locally. That’s particulate matter and NOx [nitrogen oxides], which impacts growing lungs of children, can add cases of asthma, and can exacerbate heart disease and other underlying diseases in the elderly.”
And then there’s the water issue.
‘Like a Giant Soda Straw’
A study by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) and University of Houston found that data centers in Texas will use 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, and as much as 399 billion gallons in 2030. That would be equivalent to drawing down the largest reservoir in the US—157,000-acre Lake Mead—by more than 16 feet in a year.
Anyone who’s accidentally left their phone out in the rain or dropped it in a puddle might wonder what a building full of expensive, delicate electronics could want with millions of gallons of water. It’s largely for cooling purposes. Coursing with electrical current, server stacks can get very hot, and evaporative room cooling is among the simplest and cheapest ways to keep the chips from getting overheated and damaged.
What that means, however, is that the water isn’t just used for cooling and then discharged as treatable wastewater; much of it evaporates in the process—poof.
“Even if they’re using reclaimed or recycled water, that water is no longer going back into the base flow of the rivers and streams,” Bolthouse says. “That has ecological impacts as well as supply issues. Everybody is upstream from someone else.” Washington, DC, for example, will still lose water supply if Northern Virginia data centers use recycled or reclaimed water, because that water won’t make it back into the Potomac River. Evaporative cooling also leaves behind high concentrations of salts and other contaminants, she adds, creating water quality issues.
There are less water-intensive ways to cool data centers, including closed-loop water systems, which require more electricity, and immersion cooling, in which servers are submerged in a bath of liquid, such as a synthetic oil, that conducts heat but not electricity. Immersion cooling allows for a denser installation of servers as well, but is not yet widely used, largely due to cost.
Ironically, it can be hard to confirm specific data about data centers. Given the proprietary nature of AI technology and, perhaps, the potential for public backlash, many companies are less than forthcoming about how much water their data centers consume. Google, for its part, reported using more than 5 billion gallons of water across all its data centers in 2023, with 31 percent of its freshwater withdrawals coming from watersheds with medium or high water scarcity.
A 2023 study by the University of California Riverside estimated that an AI chat session of 20 or so queries uses up to a bottle of freshwater. That amount can vary depending on the platform, with more sophisticated models demanding larger volumes of water, while other estimates suggest it could be closer to a few spoonfuls per query.
“But what goes unacknowledged, from a natural systems perspective, is that all water is local,” says Peter Colohan, director of partnerships and program innovation at the Lincoln Institute, who helped create the Internet of Water. “It’s a small amount of water for a few queries, but it’s all being taken from one basin where that data center is located—that’s thousands and thousands of gallons of water being drawn from one place from people doing their AI queries from all over the world,” he says.
“Wherever they choose to put a data center, it is like a giant soda straw sucking water out of that basin,” Colohan continues. “And when you take water from a place, you have to reduce demand or put water back in that same place, there’s no other solution. In some cases, at least, major data center developers have begun to recognize this problem and are actively engaging in water replenishment where it counts.”
Locating data centers in cooler, wetter regions can help reduce the amount of water they use and the impact of their freshwater withdrawals. And yet roughly two-thirds of the data centers built since 2022 have been located in water-stressed regions, according to a Bloomberg News analysis, including hot, dry climates like Arizona.
The warm water-cooling system at a Sandia Labs data center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The data center earned LEED Gold certification for efficiency in 2020. Credit: Bret Latter/Sandia Labs via Flickr CC.
It’s not just cooling the server rooms and chips that consumes water. About half of the electricity currently used by US data centers comes from fossil fuel power plants, which themselves use a lot of water, as they heat up steam to turn their massive turbines.
And the millions of microchips processing all that information? By the time they reach a data center, each chip has already consumed thousands of gallons of water. Manufacturing these tiny, powerful computing components requires “ultrapure” treated water to rinse off silicon residue without damaging the chips. It takes about 1.5 gallons of tap water to produce a gallon of ultrapure water, and the typical chip factory uses about 10 million gallons of ultrapure water each day, according to the World Economic Forum—as much as 33,000 US households.
As communities consider the benefits and risks of data center development, consumers might consider our own role in the growth of data centers, and whether our use of AI is worth the price of the water, power, and land it devours.
There could be important uses for artificial intelligence—if it can be harnessed to solve complex problems, for instance, or to improve the efficiency of water systems and electric grids.
There are clearly superfluous uses, too. A YouTube channel with 35 million subscribers, for example, features AI-generated music videos … of AI-generated songs. The MIT Technology Review estimates that, unlike simple text queries, using AI to create video content is extremely resource-heavy: Making a five-second AI-generated video uses about as much electricity as running a microwave nonstop for over an hour.
Data center defenders tend to point to the fact that Americans use more water each year to irrigate golf courses (more than 500 billion gallons) and lawns (over 2 trillion gallons) than AI data centers use. However, that argument rings false: America has a well-documented addiction to green grass that is also not serving us well. The solution, water experts say, lies in water conservation and consumer education, not comparing one wasteful use to another.
Putting a Finite Resource First
Even a small data center can place an immense, concentrated burden on local infrastructure and natural resources. In Newton County, Georgia, a Meta data center that opened in 2018 uses 500,000 gallons of water per day—10 percent of the entire county’s water consumption. And given Georgia’s cheap power and generous state tax breaks, Newton County continues to field requests for new data center permits—some of which would use up to 6 million gallons of water per day, more than doubling what the entire county currently consumes.
The intense demands that data centers place on regional resources make for complicated decision-making at the local level. Communities and regional water officials must engage in discussions about data centers early on, and with a coordinated, holistic understanding of existing resources and potential impacts on the energy grid and the watershed, says Mary Ann Dickinson, policy director for land and water at the Lincoln Institute. “We would like to help communities make smarter decisions about data centers, helping them analyze and plan for the potential impacts to their community structures and systems.”
“Water is often one of the last things that gets thought about, so one of the things that we’re really promoting is early engagement,” says John Hernon, strategic development manager at Thames Water in the UK. “So when you’re thinking about data centers, it’s not just about the speed you’re going to get, it’s not just about making sure there’s a lot of power available—we need to make sure that water is factored in at the earliest possible thinking … at the forefront, rather than an afterthought.”
Despite its damp reputation, London doesn’t receive a whole lot of rainfall compared to the northern UK — less than 25 inches a year, on average, or roughly half of what falls in New York City. Yet because so much growth is centered on London, the Thames Water service area holds about 80 percent of the UK’s data centers, Hernon says, and another 100 or so are proposed.
What’s more, their water usage peaks during the hottest, driest times of the year, when the utility can least accommodate the extra demand. “That’s why we talk about restricting or reducing or objecting to [data centers],” Hernon says. “It’s not because we don’t like them. We absolutely get it, we need them ourselves. AI will massively help our call center … which means we can have more people out fixing leaks and proactively managing our networks.”
Keeping the Lights On
One way for data centers to use less water is to rely more heavily on air-cooling technology, but this requires more energy —which may in turn increase water use indirectly, depending on the power source. What’s more, regional grids are already struggling to meet the demand of these power-hungry facilities, and there are hundreds more in the works. “A lot of these projects have been announced, but it’s not clear what can come on fast enough to power them,” says Kelly T. Sanders, associate professor of engineering at University of Southern California.
The government wants US technology companies to build their AI data centers domestically—not just for economic reasons, but for national security purposes as well. But even as the Trump administration appears to understand the enormous energy demands data centers will place on the electric grid, it has actively squashed new wind power projects, such as Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island.
NREL (the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) created this overlay map of transmission lines and data center locations to “help visualize the overlap and simplify co-system planning.” Credit: NREL.gov.
Other carbon-free alternatives like small modular reactors (SMRs) and geothermal energy have bipartisan support, Sanders says. “But the problem is, even if you put shovels in the ground for an SMR today, it’s going to take 10 years,” she says. “The things that we can do the fastest are wind, solar, and batteries. But in the last six months we’ve lost a lot of the incentives for clean energy, and there’s an all-out war on wind. Wind projects that are already built, already paid for, are being canceled. And to me, that’s peculiar, because that’s electricity that would be ready to go out on the grid soon, in some of these regions that are really congested.”
Data centers are among the reasons ratepayers nationwide have seen their electric bills increase at twice the rate of inflation in the past year. Part of that is the new infrastructure data centers will require, such as new power plants, transmission lines, or other investments. Those costs, as well as ongoing grid maintenance and upgrades, are typically shared by all electric customers in a service area, through charges added to utility bills.
This creates at least two issues: While the tax revenues of a new data center will benefit only the host community, the entire electric service area must pay for the associated infrastructure. Secondly, if a utility makes that huge investment, but the data center eventually closes or needs much less electricity than projected, it’s the ratepayers who will foot the bill, not the data center.
Some tech companies are securing their own clean power independent of the grid—Microsoft, for example, signed a 20-year agreement to purchase energy directly from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. But that approach isn’t ideal either, Sanders says. “These data centers are still going to use transmission lines and all those grid assets, but if they’re not buying the electricity from the utility, they’re not paying for all that infrastructure through their rate bills,” she says.
Aside from generating new power, Sanders says, there are strategies to squeeze more capacity from the existing grid. “One is good old energy efficiency, and the data centers themselves have all of the incentives aligned to try to make their processes more efficient,” she says. AI itself could potentially also help enhance grid performance. “We can use artificial intelligence to give us more information about how power is flowing through the grid, and so we can optimize that power flow, which can give us more capacity than we would have otherwise,” Sanders says.
Another strategy is to make the grid more flexible. Most of the time, and in most regions of the US, we only use about 40 percent of the grid’s total capacity, Sanders says, give or take. “We build the capacity of the grid to meet the hottest day … and that’s where we worry about these large data center loads,” she says. A coordinated network of batteries, however —including in people’s homes and EVs—can add flexibility and stabilize the grid during times of peak demand. In July, California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) conducted the largest-ever test of its statewide “virtual power plant,” using residential batteries to supply 535 megawatts of power to the grid for two full hours at sundown.
With some intentional, coordinated planning—”it’s not just going to happen naturally,” Sanders says—it may be possible to add more capacity without requiring a lot of new generation if data centers can reduce their workloads during peak times and invest in large-scale battery backups: “There is a world in which these data centers can actually be good grid actors, where they can add more flexibility to the grid.”
Confronting Trade-Offs With Land Policy
As the demand for data centers grows, finding suitable locations for these facilities will force communities to confront myriad and imperfect trade-offs between water, energy, land, money, health, and climate. “Integrated land use planning, with sustainable land, water, and energy practices, is the only way we can sustainably achieve the virtuous circle needed to reap the benefits of AI and the economic growth associated with it,” Colohan says.
For example, using natural gas to meet the anticipated electricity load of Texas data centers would require 50 times more water than using solar generation, according to the HARC study, and 1,000 times more water than wind. But while powering new data centers with wind farms would consume the least water, it would also require the most land—four times as much land as solar, and 42 times as much as natural gas.
Absent an avalanche of new, clean power, most data centers are adding copious amounts of greenhouse gases to our collective emissions, at a time when science demands we cut them sharply to limit the worst impacts of climate change. Louisiana regulators in August approved plans to build three new gas power plants to offset the expected electricity demand from Meta’s Hyperion AI data center.
While towns or counties compete with one another to attract data centers, the host communities will reap the tax benefits while the costs—the intense water demand, the higher electricity bills, the air pollution from backup generators—will be dispersed more regionally, including to areas that won’t see any new tax revenue.
That’s one reason data center permitting needs more state oversight, Bolthouse says. “The only approval that they really have to get is from the locality, and the locality is not looking at the regional impacts,” she says. PEC is also pushing for ratepayer protections and sustainability commitments. “We want to make sure we’re encouraging the most efficient and sustainable practices within the industry, and that we’re requiring mitigation when impacts can’t be avoided.”
Too close for comfort? A data center abuts homes in Loudoun County, Virginia. Credit: Hugh Kenny via Piedmont Environmental Council.
PEC and others are also pressing for greater transparency from the industry. “Very often, data centers are coming in with non-disclosure agreements,” Bolthouse says. “They’re hiding a lot of information about water usage, energy usage, air quality impacts, emissions—none of that information is disclosed, and so communities don’t really know what they’re getting into.”
“We need communities to be educated about what they’re facing, and what their trade-offs are when they let in a data center,” Colohan says. “What is the cost—the true cost—of a data center? And then how do you turn that true cost into a benefit through integrated land policy?”
Rueben says she understands the desire, especially in communities experiencing population loss, to tap into a growing industry. But rather than competing with each other to attract data centers, she says, communities ought to be having broader conversations about job growth and economic development strategies, factoring in the true costs and trade-offs these facilities present, and asking the companies to provide more guarantees and detailed plans.
“Forcing data center operators to explain how they’re going to run the facility more efficiently, and where they’re going to get their water from—and not just assuming that they have first access to the water and energy systems,” she says, “is a shift in perspective that we kind of need government officials to make.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Data center facilities in Prince William County, Virginia. The county has 59 data centers in operation or under construction. Credit: Hugh Kenny via Piedmont Environmental Council.
