Topic: Recuperação de Mais-Valias

Encontrar inspiración fiscal en São Paulo

Por Jon Gorey, Agosto 2, 2025

En São Paulo, Brasil, entre rascacielos corporativos, tiendas de lujo y hoteles de alta gama del barrio Vila Olímpia, se encuentra un complejo de viviendas de interés social de 272 unidades. Construido en el terreno de la antigua favela Coliseu, el altísimo edificio de condominios no es solo un hogar nuevo y más seguro para cientos de familias de bajos ingresos que vivieron en el asentamiento informal durante décadas, en medio de incendios, inundaciones y ratas. También es, según sus promotores, una prueba de que la inversión en un vecindario no necesariamente significa el desplazamiento de los residentes, y de que las viviendas de interés social se pueden construir incluso en la zona más cara de una ciudad.

En marzo, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo invitó a un grupo diverso de investigadores y profesionales de todo el mundo a participar en un viaje de estudio de cuatro días junto con algunos miembros del personal del instituto. El viaje de estudio, que combinó sesiones en el aula con visitas de campo, permitió a los participantes explorar de primera mano este reconocido ejemplo de recuperación de plusvalías. También llamada captación de la plusvalía, la recuperación de plusvalías se refiere a un conjunto de políticas que le permiten a una comunidad recuperar y reinvertir las plusvalías del suelo generadas por la inversión pública u otras acciones gubernamentales, como una nueva estación de transporte o un cambio en los requisitos de zonificación.

“En São Paulo, tenemos al menos dos buenos ejemplos de asentamientos informales que se mejoraron en lugares donde el suelo es muy caro”, explica Paulo Sandroni, un economista que desarrolló el curso en conjunto con la urbanista Camila Maleronka. “Tuvimos la idea de presentarles y explicarles a los demás los instrumentos que usamos; primero, para recuperar las plusvalías, y, segundo, para garantizar que las personas de asentamientos informales sigan viviendo en el mismo lugar, pero ahora en cómodos apartamentos”.

El proceso funciona de la siguiente manera: La ciudad elige un área para realizar una intervención pública como parte de una “Operación Urbana”. Los emprendedores inmobiliarios que deseen construir estructuras más grandes de lo permitido en esa zona pueden comprar Certificados de Potencial Adicional de Construcción, o CEPAC, que se venden en el mercado público de valores. Por ende, es el sector privado quien determina el precio en última instancia. Los ingresos de esas subastas de CEPAC luego financian obras públicas y viviendas de interés social en el mismo vecindario.

Sin embargo, el hecho de que sea posible recuperar las plusvalías y reinvertirlas en viviendas de interés social no significa que suceda inevitablemente, en especial, en vecindarios caros. “La comunidad de Coliseu tuvo que luchar contra muchas adversidades y muchas fuerzas, ya sea de emprendedores inmobiliarios, de vecinos que no querían que se quedaran allí e incluso de algunos miembros del gobierno”, dice Sandroni. “Pero los líderes de este movimiento dijeron: ‘Tenemos derecho a estar aquí. La legislación nos dio las herramientas para quedarnos aquí, y hay dinero para construir estos edificios’. Fue un maravilloso ejemplo de desarrollo urbano inclusivo”.

Un retrato de una mujer que sostiene un llavero. El enfoque está en el llavero, que tiene un colgante metálico con forma de casa. Las palabras en el llavero están en portugués y la traducción es ‘Ciudad de São Paulo. Vivienda’.
Una residente de Coliseu con la llave de su nuevo hogar. Crédito: Marcelo Pereira/SECOM vía Ciudad de São Paulo.

Las herramientas de recuperación de plusvalías de São Paulo han sido el foco de muchos estudios de casos; pero ver los resultados en persona, in situ, ayudó a materializar el concepto para muchos participantes de organizaciones como la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE), el Banco Europeo de Reconstrucción y Desarrollo (BERD) y el Centro para el Financiamiento de Viviendas Asequibles en África, entre otros.

“Lo que vi en São Paulo me sorprendió mucho”, dice Line Algoed, una antropóloga urbana de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “Sabía sobre la recuperación de plusvalías, pero nunca había visto los resultados en persona. No sabía nada sobre los CEPAC y los otros instrumentos utilizados en São Paulo, que posicionan a esta ciudad como referente del urbanismo innovador”.

Los resultados en São Paulo no fueron perfectos, agrega Algoed, “pero es muy bueno ver que el gobierno local está tratando de mitigar las consecuencias de la especulación inmobiliaria desenfrenada”.

Hiro Ito se unió al curso interesado por los mecanismos financieros que podrían ayudar a las ciudades a pagar infraestructura climática. Ito es el gerente de programa del Plan de Acción para Ciudades Verdes del BERD, donde trabaja con gobiernos municipales para identificar inversiones y políticas que puedan ayudarlos a prepararse para desafíos ambientales y el cambio climático. “Hemos desarrollado planes de acción con 47 ciudades”, indica Ito. “Pero muchas de esas acciones, sobre todo las relacionadas con la naturaleza o la adaptación al clima, no se están implementando”, muchas veces por falta de fondos.

“Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza, la protección contra inundaciones y la mitigación del efecto isla de calor urbano no son proyectos que usualmente generen ingresos”, explica Ito. “Esperamos que esta sea otra forma de fortalecer las finanzas municipales para que las ciudades de todo el mundo puedan aprovechar en mayor medida esos espacios”.

En un recorrido a pie que incluyó tanto el edificio Coliseu como el icónico puente Octavio Frias de Oliveira de São Paulo, Ito quedó impresionado con el alcance y la escala de las inversiones de la ciudad, y se preguntó si un método similar de recuperación de plusvalías podría funcionar en Ankara, Turquía, donde el BERD ayuda a financiar la construcción de una nueva línea de metro. Al regresar del viaje, Ito y sus colegas comenzaron a estudiar cómo implementar una herramienta de financiamiento con base en el suelo para la Municipalidad Metropolitana de Ankara, ya que hay varios terrenos de propiedad pública que podrían urbanizarse en la zona. “¿Podríamos introducir mecanismos como los CEPAC para recaudar a partir de esa reurbanización? En última instancia, es para cubrir el costo de las ampliaciones del metro, pero potencialmente las áreas de regeneración urbana podrían traer otros beneficios sociales y medioambientales”.

Rosana Maria dos Santos habla a un grupo de oyentes reunidos en un sendero de ladrillo al aire libre con árboles detrás de ellos.
Los participantes del viaje de estudio del Instituto Lincoln de São Paulo escuchan a la líder de la comunidad de Coliseu, Rosana Maria dos Santos. Crédito: Instituto Lincoln.

Ito valoró que los instructores del curso, Sandroni y Maleronka, también explicaran algunas de las deficiencias, limitaciones y desafíos del enfoque de São Paulo. Reconoce que alcanzar un éxito similar depende de ciertas condiciones.

“La idea de aplicar este método en Turquía surge porque la población urbana está creciendo y hay una fuerte demanda de viviendas adicionales. Tiene sentido para algunos emprendedores inmobiliarios comprar derechos adicionales”, dice Ito. “Pero no todos los países donde opera el BERD tienen una tendencia demográfica similar”, agrega, y señala que los mercados inmobiliarios de las ciudades más pequeñas de Bulgaria o Rumanía, por ejemplo, pueden no ser lo suficientemente fuertes como para sostener el financiamiento con base en el suelo. “Pero nos gustó mucho este enfoque basado en el mercado para determinar el precio… me pareció una forma muy inteligente de aprovechar al máximo el espacio”.

Lo que más llamó la atención de Kecia Rust, fundadora y directora ejecutiva del Centro para el Financiamiento de Viviendas Asequibles en África, fue la afirmación del Estado de que los derechos de aire son un bien público.

“El enfoque general que hizo que sean posibles Coliseu y otras inversiones en viviendas de interés social, así como también la entrega del icónico puente de São Paulo, el monorraíl, las carreteras, los carriles para bicicletas y otras inversiones en obras públicas proviene de una filosofía subyacente de que los derechos de propiedad privada pueden extenderse en términos de longitud y latitud, pero no en altura”, escribió Rust en una entrada de blog que reflexiona sobre el curso. “Los derechos de aire son un bien público, que el sector público vende para generar ingresos para invertir en obras públicas y viviendas de interés social”, continuó. “La ciudad no tiene que endeudarse cuando invierte en la construcción de carreteras, puentes y viviendas de interés social”.

“Creo que el desafío clave que enfrentamos en el contexto africano es que realmente no tenemos los datos o la capacidad de gestión a nivel local para llegar a hacer lo que se está haciendo en São Paulo”, dice Rust. “Pero lo que vi y entendí fue muy inspirador”.

Varios miembros del personal del Instituto Lincoln también se unieron al curso, muchos de los cuales, fuera del equipo de América Latina, nunca habían tenido la oportunidad de ver en persona este prominente ejemplo global de recuperación de plusvalías. “Esta idea de desarrollo sin desplazamiento, de cómo salvaguardar o reducir el riesgo de desplazamiento cuando se invierte en las comunidades, es un tema que está en primer plano en gran parte del trabajo que estamos realizando en el instituto”, dice Enrique Silva, director de programas del Instituto Lincoln. Silva invitó intencionalmente a miembros del personal de todos los sectores de la organización: “Esta idea de aprender juntos, compartir y aprender e intercambiar, es algo que me encantaría que sucediera con mayor frecuencia”.


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

Imagen principal: El complejo de viviendas de interés social Coliseu, de 272 unidades, rodeado por los edificios más altos del distrito Vila Olímpia de São Paulo, es un ejemplo de recuperación de plusvalías.Crédito: Ciudad de São Paulo. 

Finding Fiscal Inspiration in São Paulo

By Jon Gorey, Agosto 2, 2025

In São Paulo, Brazil, wedged among the sky-scraping office towers, luxury retailers, and high-end hotels of the Vila Olímpia neighborhood, sits a 272-unit social housing development. Built on the site of the former Coliseu favela, the high-rise condo building isn’t just a safer, new home for hundreds of low-income families who lived in the informal settlement for decades, enduring fires, floods, and rats. It’s proof, advocates say, that neighborhood investment doesn’t have to result in resident displacement, and that social housing can be built even in the most expensive area of a city.

In March, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy invited a diverse group of researchers and practitioners from around the world to join several of its staff members for a four-day study tour. Blending classroom sessions with site visits, the study tour allowed participants to explore firsthand this well-known example of land value capture. Sometimes called land value return, land value capture refers to any set of policies that allows a community to recover and reinvest increases in land value that result from public investment or other government action, such as a new transit station or a change in zoning requirements.

“In São Paulo, we have at least two good examples of slums that were upgraded in places where land is very expensive,” explains Paulo Sandroni, an economist who co-developed the course with urbanist Camila Maleronka. “We had the idea to present to people and explain the instruments that we used—first, to capture land increment value, and second, to maintain the people living in slums in the same place they were living, but now in very good apartments.”

The process works like this: The city chooses an area to receive some public intervention as part of an “Urban Operation.” Developers who wish to build larger structures than what’s allowed in that zone can purchase Certificates for Additional Construction Potential, or CEPACs, which are sold on the public stock exchange—meaning the private sector ultimately sets their price. The revenue from those CEPAC auctions then funds public works and social housing in the same neighborhood.

But just because it’s possible to capture and reinvest land value increments into social housing doesn’t mean it’s inevitable, especially in pricey neighborhoods. “The community of Coliseu had to fight against many odds, many forces, from developers, from neighbors that didnt want them to stay there, including some people from the administration,” Sandroni says. “But the leaders of this movement, they said, ‘We have the right to be here. The legislation gave us the tools to stay here, and there is money to build these buildings. It was a wonderful example of inclusionary urban development.”

A soft focus, head and shoulders portrait of a woman in a colorful striped dress. In the foreground, her hand is in focus, holding a key ring with a metal, house-shaped keychain. The words on the keychain are in Portuguese and the translation is 'City of Sao Paulo Housing.'
A Coliseu resident with the key to her new home. Credit: Marcelo Pereira/SECOM via City of São Paulo.

São Paulo’s value capture tools have been the focus of many case studies—but seeing their results in person, in place, helped bring the concept to life for many participants, who hailed from organizations like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, among others.

“I was really struck by what I saw in São Paulo,” says Line Algoed, an urban anthropologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “I knew about land value capture, but I had never seen the results in person. I didn’t know about CEPACs, and the other instruments used in São Paulo—it puts this city at the forefront of innovative urbanism.”

The results in São Paulo haven’t been perfect, Algoed adds, “but it is so good to see that the local government is trying to mitigate the consequences of unbridled land speculation.”

Hiro Ito joined the course with a curiosity about financial mechanisms that could help cities pay for climate infrastructure. Ito is the program manager for the EBRD’s Green City Action Plan, where he works with municipal governments to identify investments and policies that can help them prepare for environmental challenges and climate change. “We’ve developed action plans with 47 cities,” Ito says. “But many of those actions, particularly those related to nature or climate adaptation, are being left unimplemented,” often due to a lack of funding.

“Nature-based solutions, flood protection, mitigation for urban heat island effect—these projects are not traditionally revenue generating,” Ito explains. “Hopefully this will be another way to strengthen municipal finances so that cities around the world can do a lot more in those spaces.”

On a walking tour that included both the Coliseu building and São Paulo’s iconic Octavio Frias de Oliveira bridge, Ito was impressed with the scope and scale of the city’s investments—and wondered whether a similar land value capture tool could work in Ankara, Turkey, where EBRD is helping to finance the construction of a new metro line. Right after the trip, Ito and colleagues began studying “how we could potentially implement a land-based financing tool for the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality,” he says, since there are several publicly owned sites that could be developed nearby. “Could we introduce mechanisms like CEPACs to collect fees from that redevelopment? Ultimately, it’s to cover the cost of the metro extensions, but potentially those urban regeneration sites could incorporate other social and environmental benefits.”

Rosana Maria dos Santos speaks to a group of listeners who are gathered on an outdoor brick walkway with trees behind them. She is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and gesturing with her hands.
Participants in the Lincoln Institute São Paulo study tour listen to Coliseu community leader Rosana Maria dos Santos. Credit: Lincoln Institute.

Ito appreciated that the course instructors, Sandroni and Maleronka, explained some of the shortcomings, limitations, and challenges of São Paulo’s approach as well. He recognizes that similar success hinges on certain conditions.

“We are testing this in Turkiye, because the urban population is growing, so theres a strong demand for more housing—it makes sense to some developers to buy additional rights,” Ito says. “But not all of the countries where the EBRD operates have a similar population trend,” he adds, noting that the real estate markets of smaller cities in Bulgaria or Romania, for example, may not be strong enough to support land-based financing. “But we did really like the idea of this market-based approach to set the price … I think that was a very clever way of getting the most out of the space.”

What resonated most with Kecia Rust, founder and executive director of the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, was the state’s assertion that air rights are a public good.

“The overall approach that made Coliseu and other social housing investments, as well as the delivery of São Paulo’s iconic bridge, the monorail, roads, bicycle paths, and other public works investments possible, comes from an underlying philosophy that private property rights can extend in terms of longitude and latitude, but not in height,” Rust wrote in a blog post reflecting on the course. “Air rights are a public good, which the public sector sells to generate revenue to invest in public works and social housing,” she continued. “The city doesn’t have to go into debt when it invests in the construction of roads, bridges, and social housing.”

“I think the key challenge we face in an African context is that we don’t really have the data or the management capacity at local city level to do the extent of what we saw being done in São Paulo,” Rust says. “But what I saw and understood was so inspiring.”

Several Lincoln Institute staff joined the course as well, many of whom, outside of the Latin America team, had never had the chance to see this prominent global example of land value capture in person. “This whole idea of development without displacement, of how to safeguard or de-risk displacement when you invest in communities—thats a topic that is front and center with so much work that we’re doing at the institute,” says Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute. Silva intentionally invited staff from across the organization: “This idea of learning together, sharing and learning and exchanging, is something I would love to see happen more.”


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

Lead image: The 272-unit Coliseu social housing complex, surrounded by the taller buildings of São Paulo’s Vila Olímpia district, is an example of land value capture. Credit: City of São Paulo.

In Denver, Mike Johnston Confronts Success: The City’s Popularity Has Made It Pricey

July 9, 2025

By Anthony Flint, July 9, 2025

 

Mike Johnston, a one-time high school English teacher, has been overseeing a significant boom in one of the most prominent cities in the Intermountain West. Denver has been attracting people and businesses with its temperate climate and outdoorsy quality of life, but this popularity has also caused growing pains, starting with increasingly high housing costs, homelessness, and recently some significant municipal budget woes.

Johnston has tackled the challenges one by one, beginning with a permitting process overhaul, steps to reduce costs in building, and tax abatements and other incentives, like a density bonus, to encourage more construction.

“We have a lot of people that want to move to Denver. That’s driving a lot of economic growth. We’re thrilled about it. It also drives lots of housing demand,” Johnston said in an interview for the Mayor’s Desk series, recorded on the Land Matters podcast. “The overarching theme is, we have to add a lot more housing supply.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Johnston also reflected on his aggressive campaign to clear out homeless encampments in the city. As part of this effort, officials have provided customized relocations to private transitional housing units with services and support for the unhoused.

“When you have high cost of housing cities, you get more people who can’t afford to pay that cost. That is just a mathematical fact. And so that means many of the cities that are growing and are in high demand, like the Denvers, or the San Franciscos, or the Austins, or Seattles, are the places where we see this struggle.”

The strategy of individualized housing solutions, while expensive, has been working, he said. “We think it can work for other cities, and we’ll share these lessons with anyone who’s willing to take them on, because we think we should set the expectation in every American city that street homelessness can be a solvable problem.”

He also expressed confidence that the state and the metropolitan region will have continued success fighting climate change, as federal policy backs away from addressing that global crisis. He said incentives for electrification, electric vehicle infrastructure, and energy-efficiency upgrades like heat pumps are contributing to the city’s goal of being carbon neutral by 2040.

“We don’t want to make it too expensive to do business in Denver, and yet we still want to be aggressively committed to hitting climate goals,” he said. “People do care. And there’s a lot we can do,” such as encouraging residents to take more trips by bike or walking, or to consolidate trips made in single occupancy vehicles.

“We want to encourage people to take more local action now, in the face of federal abandonment of [climate action] … we’ll keep setting our own targets for how our vehicles, our businesses, and our residents try to hit aggressive climate goals, knowing that we’re still all in this together, even if the President doesn’t want to make it a priority.”

Being mayor is the latest step in a professional journey that began with teaching English in the Mississippi Delta. From there, Johnston returned to Colorado to become a school principal, leading three different schools in the Denver Metro area. In 2009 he was elected to the Colorado State Senate, where he served two terms representing Northeast Denver. He was also a senior education advisor to President Obama and CEO of Gary Community Ventures, a philanthropic organization, where he led coalitions to pass the state’s first plan for universal preschool and spearheaded efforts to fund affordable housing and address homelessness statewide. He lives in East Denver with his wife Courtney, who is a chief deputy district attorney, and their three children.

Johnston, 50, was part of the Lincoln Institute mayor’s panel at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Denver this spring, along with Aaron Brockett and Jeni Arndt, mayors of the Colorado cities of Boulder and Fort Collins, respectively. Senior Fellow Anthony Flint caught up with him several weeks later for this interview, which will also be available in print and online in Land Lines magazine.

Listen to the show here or subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 


Further reading

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s latest affordable housing strategy: tax rebates for developers | Denverite

Will Denverites Come Back to the Newly Renovated 16th Street? | 5280

Opinion: Denver Parking Minimums Increase Housing Costs | Westword

Mayor says downtown Denver has made a ‘dramatic change’ | Denverite

Denver City Hall Takes a Page from NASA to Tackle Housing Barriers |  Bloomberg CityLab

Zoning Report: Colorado | National Zoning Atlas

Who Should Pay to Fix the Sidewalk? | Bloomberg CityLab

 


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.


Transcript

Anthony Flint: Welcome back to land matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. I’m your host, Anthony Flint. On this show, we’re continuing our Mayor’s Desk series –- our Q&A’s with municipal chief executives from around the world — with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who was inaugurated as the 46th mayor of that city pretty much 2 years ago this summer in July 2023. It’s fair to say he’s been overseeing a significant boom in one of the most prominent cities in the Intermountain West, which has been attracting people and business with its temperate climate and outdoorsy quality of life. Yet Denver has had its growing pains, too, with increasingly high housing costs. We see modest bungalows in several neighborhoods in Denver, easily selling for a million dollars or more … a not-unrelated homelessness problem, and recently some significant municipal budget woes.

Mayor Johnson started his career as a high school English teacher in the Mississippi Delta, and returned home to Colorado to become a school principal, leading 3 different schools in the Denver Metro area. He later served as a senior education advisor to President Obama. In 2009 he was elected to the Colorado State Senate, where he served 2 terms representing Northeast Denver, working on issues, including immigration, gun safety and the clean energy transition. He later served as the CEO of Gary Community Ventures, a local philanthropic organization where he led coalitions to pass the State’s 1st plan for universal preschool and spearheaded efforts to fund affordable housing and address homelessness statewide. Mayor Johnston grew up in Colorado, speaks Spanish and lives in East Denver with his wife Courtney, who is a chief deputy district attorney and their 3 kids. Your honor, thank you for joining the conversation at Land Matters, and being part of the Mayor’s Desk series.

Mayor Mike Johnston: I’m delighted to be on. Thank you so much for having me.

Anthony Flint: Well, as I mentioned in the intro, like a lot of booming metropolitan regions, Denver is facing down a housing affordability problem. So, first question, what are the key elements for addressing this crisis?

Mayor Mike Johnston: You bet, Anthony, and again thank you for having me, and I think the opening frame for me which you mentioned … My dad used to say, the only thing worse than being hated is being loved, you know, and what we know for Denver is, we do have folks from all over the country and all over the world who want to move to Denver. And that is a great problem to have. I have friends who are mayors and cities facing very different challenges, which is declining populations and lots of vacant buildings, because people don’t want to move there. Denver is now, I think, the number 2 desired destination for people under age 30 in the United States. And so we have a lot of people that want to move to Denver. That’s driving a lot of economic growth. We’re thrilled about it. It also drives lots of housing demand.

So for us there are three big top priorities here. The overarching theme is, we have to add a lot more housing supply, as you know, but we think there are three ways to do that. One is to make it faster to build housing for us. That means an aggressive strategy on permitting reform to make our permitting system go from what was a two and a half to three-year process to now, what will be a commitment from us to have every permit only take 180 days of time in the city’s hands. We created a new citywide permitting office that unifies all of the functions of permitting that were spread across seven departments, now into one director, who reports directly to me so part of that is making it easier to build in Denver.

The second is reducing the costs of building wherever we can. And so we’re doing that, obviously making the process faster. Reduce the cost. But also we’re doing more to provide our own tax abatements and our own tax programs. We launched a middle class housing strategy this week. That’s focused on providing property tax abatements for up to 10 years in exchange for a 30 year, commitment on deed, restricted affordability for people that are middle class Denverites who need to be able to afford to live in the city. So we think those incentives matter. And then, of course, we are investing more in affordable housing. We know that the city can’t solve this alone, and the market can’t solve it alone. We need a partnership where we will invest city resources into projects where we can be hopefully a smaller and smaller part of the capital stack. But just enough of the stack to be able to buy long-term affordability in the form of deed restrictions. And so for us, it’s making the city build faster. It’s making costs cheaper. And it’s making more public investment with really clear public goals. We’ve set a clear public goal to bring on 3,000 affordable units every year, and provide access for 3,000 households to affordable units every year. That’s about twice the rate what the city was bringing on before we got into office. And so we know we have to be really aggressive about bringing on a lot more housing, a lot more quickly and a lot more affordably.

Anthony Flint: Your campaign to address homeless encampments in Denver triggered a little bit of backlash, including some criticism of the expense. Can you explain your approach, and how it might apply to other cities? And is there anything you would do differently?

Mayor Mike Johnston: Yeah, I think this is one that we are really excited about, because I think many Americans have given into the belief that homelessness is an unsolvable problem that we are just stuck with this as a component of modern life. And, as you said accurately, Anthony, what we know is homelessness exists in the greatest acuity in cities, not because there’s high rates of poverty, not because there’s high rates of unemployment, not because of the political ideology of those cities. It exists in direct correlation to the cost of housing. In those cities. When you have high cost of housing cities, you get more people who can’t afford to pay that cost. That is just a mathematical fact. And so that means many of the cities that are growing and are in high demand, like the Denver’s, or the San Francisco’s, or the Austins, or Seattle’s, are the places where we see this struggle. But what we have really seen is that this is a problem that can be solved by addressing those core needs. And so I’ll lead with the headline that … we set an ambitious goal to try to end street homelessness in my 1st term. Four years. That seems impossible. Well, I’ll tell you, we’re two years in right now, and we have now reduced our street homelessness in Denver by 45% in a little less than two years. That is … the largest reduction of street homelessness in any city in American history, over two years, of which we’re very proud. But it’s also a clear sign that halfway through the term. We’re halfway on the path of that goal. We think other cities should be ambitious. And believing that this is a solvable problem, let me talk about the way we’ve done this, which we think is also really scalable.

What we’ve done is first really focused on bringing on what we call transitional housing units which are dignified, individual private units. A lot of these are hotels we’ve bought and converted. They’re tiny home villages that we’ve built. But critically, it’s not shelter like sleeping on a gym floor with 100 people on a mat. It is a place where you have a locked door. You have privacy, you have access to showers and bathrooms and kitchens. You can store your stuff when you go to work for the day.

And we brought on wraparound services on each of these sites. So our first big effort was to bring on 1,000 units of transitional housing, you know, like many cities, previous Administration fought this battle, and took 2 or 3 years to fight, to put one tiny home village of about 40 units into one neighborhood with a number of lawsuits. We said, we have to bring on units at the scale of the problems. We brought on a thousand units, and (over) six months I did 60 town halls all across the city, talking to neighbors and all of those locations about why this would make such a big difference. We put wraparound services — mental health addiction, support, workforce training, long-term housing navigation — on each of those sites. So people don’t have to always return just to downtown to get those services. And once we brought those units on, then we went geographically to the places where encampments existed in Denver, and instead of sweeping those encampments from block to block, where they just show up in front of someone else’s house or someone else’s church or hospital, we would actually go to those encampments and resolve them. We would close that encampment entirely by moving all 50 people or 100 people. In one case we had almost 200 people in one encampment, closing those encampments, resolving them, moving all those folks into housing, and then importantly keeping that block or that region of the city permanently closed to future camping. So the result is, two years in, we’ve now closed every encampment in the city. We haven’t had a single tent inside of our downtown business district for more than a year and a half we have cut family homelessness by 83%. We’ve become the largest city ever to end street homelessness for veterans. We have no veterans anymore on the streets who can’t get access to housing, and, importantly, anyone can walk down any street or sidewalk or public park, and none of them have tents or encampments in them, so we’ve both made sure there’s a real change in the experience for residents of Denver and those people who are most at risk of starving to death, freezing to death, overdosing on the streets … we moved off of the streets into transitional housing that has really worked for us. We think it can work for other cities, and we’ll share these lessons with anyone who’s willing to take them on, because we think we should set the expectation in every American city that street homelessness can be a solvable problem.

Anthony Flint: Are you satisfied with the number of people using this very impressive and extensive light rail network in Denver Metro, and the number of people living essentially in transit oriented development? Or is the system facing growing pains, and if so, why? A related question … any lessons learned from the relatively light ridership on the free bus on the 16th Street Transit Mall, which is finally concluding its renovation after long delays? But first the light rail network, transit-oriented development … How is it going.

Mayor Mike Johnston: As you, said, Anthony, we’re not satisfied yet, and that is because, as you know, transit and housing have to be connected strategies. Housing is a transit strategy. If you’re mindful about actually building housing and building density of housing around our public transit networks. And so we had this great transit network built. We did not have density of housing around any of those spots. And so what we’re doing now is undertaking a series of very large catalytic investments in a number of areas around the city that are on these light rail lines. So we can build thousands and thousands of units of housing along that corridor. We just, for instance, acquired the largest piece of private property in city history to turn into a public park. It will be a 155-acre park. It is right next to a light rail stop, so we can now add housing and housing density all around that site — beautiful location, and people can get on light rail and get right to downtown or do a Broncos game or anything else. We just won a franchise expansion, the one franchise expansion for the National Women’s Soccer League, and so we’ll have a new women’s soccer franchise. We’re building a new women’s soccer stadium also at a TOD site that we’ll have on that campus … a lot of dense housing commercial activities also connected to public transit. We’re rebuilding our stock show in a historically Latino part of North Denver — Globeville, Elyria, Swansea — that’ll allow us to add about 60 acres of new housing, public spaces, commercial activation also all on public transit. So our belief is, you have to actually be deliberate about building real density around your public transit as much as you want to build your public transit around well traveled lines of travel in the city. And so that’s a big part of our strategy. When we add that density, we know most of the major cities like ours that aren’t yet a New York, or a DC, with a full functioning subway line. You can’t just throw in that infrastructure and hope the city accommodates because people have lots of places to go to. You have to build nodes of real density around the city. So even though you might have 3 or 4 different jobs over the next 10 years, those jobs can be concentrated among different regions, and your housing can, and your activities can (as well). So that’s our big strategy around that. And you’ll see us make historic investments in doing that in the next couple of years.

But a part of that is downtown, is our downtown strategy. And you mentioned our 16th Street bus that we have, that’s free downtown. We’re making the largest investment in our downtown, also of any city in the country, per capita. Right now, about $600 million through a tax increment financing system that will focus on one getting more people to live downtown. We want downtown to be a neighborhood, not just a business district. And so we’re going to add about 4,000 units of housing in our city center, using these funds that we have from our downtown Denver authority, because we know that means more people that will use that bus every day that we’ll get to and from work they will go to see friends. So that’s a big part of our strategy. We’re working on filling up about 7 million square feet of vacant office space — like many cities, have about 4 million of that, we will use with residential conversion. We think one of the most ambitious residential conversion plans in the country. The other 3 million we’ll use by bringing people back to the office, recruiting businesses to come downtown, stay downtown, we think the more we activate that location the more folks will use the public transit, and the more people can use the connected public transit of coming from a neighborhood in East Denver or North Denver, take the light rail down to downtown, use the 16th Street ride to get up and down 16th Street … we have the second largest theater complex in the country off of Broadway. We have 5 professional sports franchises in our city center. We have Michelin Star restaurants. We’ll have the Sundance film festival coming to Colorado. There’s so much to be attracted to seeing. We want to make it easy to get to downtown and around downtown, and this will do that.

Anthony Flint: Given the current municipal fiscal challenges in Denver, what is your thinking about alternative financing systems such as a land value tax or value capture, as seen in the 38th & Blake incentive overlay? I’m hoping you might explain the concept as you see it and how or whether its rationale makes sense to you.

Mayor Mike Johnston: We are interested in every incentive we can find to encourage folks to build more housing. The 38th and Blake overlay was really kind of a density bonus, where we allow folks to build higher buildings than what the zoning might allow in exchange for adding more affordable housing, and we are always looking at ways to incentivize folks to add more affordable housing. So we’re delighted to do that. I think that also links to the program I described briefly which is our our middle class housing program we launched yesterday, which is also focused on a property tax abatement. We’ll offer up to 10 years of property tax abatement for people that are going to build middle class affordable housing. So think about that as people making sixty to a hundred thousand a year as an individual … and that’s about a 10 year property tax abatement for a 30-year commitment of affordability. So that’s a great deal for us. We’re also looking at partnership on places where we have public land. We’re looking at working with city-owned land, working with Denver public schools where they have land, our regional transit system, if they have land. And so we’re always looking to contribute public land as a way to incentivize more affordability. But we want to do a all of the above strategy. But wherever we can add more housing without having to invest more dollars in these fiscal times that’s a big help

[Re-stated] Our belief is we want to do an all of the above strategy on every way we can incentivize people to build more affordable housing. So for us, that means we want to use city land. Whenever we can do that, we’ll use public land to be able to incentivize a deal. We’ll partner with other public agencies like the Denver public schools, or like the regional transit system or the State. That’s always a great way for us to incentivize. And that’s why we’ve used strategies like this middle class housing program we launched, which is a property tax abatement where folks can get 10 years of property tax abatement for a 30 year, commitment of deed, restricted affordability through a special limited partnership. So we’re going to use every strategy we have, particularly in tough economic times, and you don’t have big new dollars to invest in supporting affordable housing. We have to find other creative ways and density. Bonuses are a great way, and we’ll keep doing that as well as everything else we can.

Anthony Flint: Finally, how would you assess the progress of your climate action plans which I see includes incentives for electrification, electric vehicle infrastructure, hot and cold weather heat pumps, energy efficiency … Do you see a tangible embrace at the local level for addressing climate change, especially in the context of retrenchment at the federal level. I mean, just as a practical matter, the federal government is getting out of the climate business. So can cities and states take that over and be effective?

Mayor Mike Johnston: We don’t see any change at all in our city’s commitment to climate action or our conviction that this is a still existentially important effort for us to undertake. And so we are not slowing down at all. We’re not changing our path, and what we are doing is trying to make sure we’re committed to an aggressive vision to meet our climate goals, which for us is a 2040 plan to be entirely carbon free by 2040, to have 100% renewable energy. And also to make sure we’re driving economic growth. We want to do both. And so we don’t want to make it too expensive to do business in Denver, and yet we still want to be aggressively committed to hitting climate goals. And we’re doing that. We’ve done things like we had, I think, one of the nation-leading efforts on making our commercial buildings more energy efficient through a program we have called Energize Denver. We also had concerns from the business community about how to comply with the cost to make those adjustments to buildings. And so we spent a lot of time with our landowners and building owners and business leaders, and we revised that plan to both decrease the penalties, extend the amount of time folks can comply, put a cap on the overall amount of changes they have to make, which drops the cost dramatically for our business partners, but still keeps us on path to hit aggressive 2040 climate goals. So people do care. And there’s a lot we can do. There’s behavior change. We’re doing a whole campaign on behavior change, to encourage folks to take more trips by bike or walking … Can they consolidate or condense the number of single occupancy vehicle trips that they take. And so part of it is about awareness. Part of it’s about behavior change and part of it’s about a good policy on things like banning plastic bags. Obviously, and being able to incentivize more and more solar and wind. So we think this is purely a part of Denver’s brand. We want to be able to be a great city and a good city. We want to be able to have a great economy, and also have great connection to the natural environment of the outdoors. And so for us, it’s it’s good climate and good business, and we’ll continue to do both.

Anthony Flint: And local and state government taking this over, are you optimistic about that? The question is, can they really take this over, a planet-wide issue, and really be effective.

Mayor Mike Johnston: I think we don’t believe that we should give up here or step away. Our campaign, we call, do more or do less, but do something, whether it’s going to do more in the way of recycling, or less in the way of using a single occupancy vehicle or doing something in terms of being able to make decisions about where and how you use energy. We want to encourage people to take more local action now, in the face of federal abandonment of this. The things that we’ll need help on are the things that made a big difference. The federal tax credits on electrical vehicle purchases — those are big drivers of behavior change. I sponsored when I was in the Senate a state credit that does the same thing — provide incentives, tax incentives for electric vehicle purchases. Here we’re building out aggressively, charging station infrastructure to make it easier for us to convert our fleet vehicles to be electric to get more Ubers and Lyfts and Fedexes and Amazons and UPS (vehicles) to do the same. And to convince regular residents do the same. So we’ll keep building the infrastructure to do this. We’ll keep incentivizing people to do it. We’ll keep changing behavior to do it, and we’ll keep setting our own targets for how our vehicles, our businesses, and our residents try to hit aggressive climate goals, knowing that we’re still all in this together, even if the President doesn’t want to make it a priority.

Anthony Flint: Mike Johnston, Mayor of Denver, Colorado. Thank you once again for this conversation.

Mayor Mike Johnston: Thanks so much for having me, Anthony. It’s great to meet you.

Anthony Flint: You can learn more about all the issues we covered — strategies for affordable housing, sustainable urbanism, transit-oriented development, value capture, and of course, the challenge of climate change, pursuing both mitigation and resilience — all of that and more at the Lincoln Institute website, www.lincolninst.edu. While you’re there, scroll to the bottom and join our mailing list to get periodic updates on our work. And also on social media, the handle is @landpolicy. Finally, don’t forget to rate, share and subscribe to the Land Matters podcast. For now, I’m Anthony Flint, signing off until next time.

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Course

Políticas e Instrumentos para Financiamento do Desenvolvimento Urbano

Agosto 5, 2025 - Outubro 23, 2025

Offered in português


Infelizmente, este curso foi cancelado devido ao baixo número de inscrições.

Este curso propõe um aprofundamento dos conhecimentos relacionados à gestão da cidade, tendo como referência os agentes envolvidos, os instrumentos disponíveis e a eficácia da utilização de instrumentos capazes de viabilizar o financiamento do desenvolvimento urbano. O objetivo do curso é preparar os participantes para enfrentar os desafios contemporâneos da urbanização e aprimorar a eficácia das políticas urbanas.

Destinado a profissionais de nível superior completo, principalmente aqueles que atuam nas áreas de urbanismo e planejamento urbano e regional; planejamento e gestão ambiental urbana e regional; planejamento governamental (administração pública municipal, estadual ou federal) e no campo das políticas públicas relacionadas ao ambiente urbano-regional.

Inscreva-se e amplie sua expertise na gestão do desenvolvimento urbano. As inscrições terminam em 25 de julho de 2025 às 23h59.


Details

Date
Agosto 5, 2025 - Outubro 23, 2025
Registration Deadline
July 25, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Language
português

Keywords

Desenvolvimento, Desenvolvimento Econômico, Economia, Uso do Solo, Planejamento de Uso do Solo, Valor da Terra, Tributação Base Solo, Planejamento, Finanças Públicas, Desenvolvimento Urbano, Valoração, Recuperação de Mais-Valias

Course

Financiación urbana y políticas de suelo: revisión a partir de la experiencia colombiana

Março 17, 2025 - Março 21, 2025

Offered in espanhol


El curso de “Financiación urbana y políticas de suelo” examina las alternativas que ofrecen la gestión del suelo y la movilización de plusvalías para atender algunos de los principales desafíos que enfrentan los gobiernos subnacionales, como son la financiación de infraestructuras de movilidad y la provisión de vivienda asequible. Se centra en la experiencia colombiana analizada en el contexto de América Latina, y combina la discusión de aspectos conceptuales interdisciplinarios con la revisión de experiencias y casos de estudio.

El curso, además, promueve espacios de debate, análisis comparativos, aproximaciones al enfoque de desarrollo urbano orientado al transporte sostenible (DOT), y ejercicios de medición de las plusvalías y sus posibilidades de movilización, al tiempo que analiza los principales instrumentos de planificación y gestión en el marco de la financiación basada en el valor del suelo, los cuales se han aplicado en Colombia. En el último día del curso, se realizará una visita técnica para observar proyectos de movilidad, gestión del suelo, y vivienda de interés social en la ciudad de Bogotá.

Relevancia

Las ciudades de América Latina y el Caribe enfrentan grandes desafíos para orientar y financiar sus procesos de desarrollo urbano, ante los cuales la planeación territorial y el fortalecimiento de fuentes de financiación basada en el valor del suelo ameritan especial atención y consideración.

Colombia es uno de los países en la región que cuenta con marcos legales que proporcionan una base para la implementación de instrumentos de gestión y financiación con base en el suelo. La experiencia colombiana permite identificar y evaluar avances, aprendizajes y alternativas para aportar a la discusión sobre el uso de estos instrumentos en América Latina. El curso aborda el potencial de los instrumentos en relación con dos aspectos específicos: la movilidad y el acceso a vivienda asequible, en el marco de la planeación territorial en Colombia.

La lista de seleccionados estará disponible a partir del 10 de febrero en lugar del 5 de febrero como se anunció inicialmente.

Ver detalles de la convocatoria.


Details

Date
Março 17, 2025 - Março 21, 2025
Application Period
Dezembro 13, 2024 - Janeiro 26, 2025
Language
espanhol
Educational Credit Type
Lincoln Institute certificate

Keywords

Infraestrutura, Regulação dos Mercados Fundiários, Valor da Terra, Governo Local, Saúde Fiscal Municipal, Planejamento, Finanças Públicas, Políticas Públicas, Desenvolvimento Orientado ao Transporte, Desenvolvimento Urbano