Learn more about the climate–land value connection at our Land-Based Climate Finance page. 

In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a manufacturing center located roughly halfway between Beijing and Shanghai, eye-stinging smog routinely put the metropolis on lists of the most polluted cities in the world. About 10 years ago, local leaders joined a comprehensive national clean air action plan, initiated by multiple central government departments and designed to reduce emissions from industry, energy production, land use, and other consumptive activities. 

A few years later, the results were literally clear—nothing dramatic, but more blue skies, and enough of a difference to influence social behavior such as people’s willingness to travel and be outside. And a team of researchers discovered something else: the air-quality improvements correlated with across-the-board increases in property values. 

Using a spatio-temporal model that clearly quantified the association between cleaner air and land values, the researchers determined that improving air quality by 10 percent led to citywide increases in property values of 5.6 percent, said Erwin van der Krabben, professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Over time, that could translate to a potential uplift of $63 billion, Van der Krabben said. 

“We can predict, if you further improve air quality, how much value you will get, and so on,” said Van der Krabben, who is documenting the ramifications of climate action globally. He recently coauthored a Lincoln Institute working paper on air quality and land values in China with Alexander Lord of the University of Liverpool’s School of Environmental Science and Guanpeng Dong, professor of quantitative human geography at Henan University (Lord, Van der Krabben, and Dong 2022). 

The idea that environmental action leads to higher land and property values may seem obvious to some, but for the most part, it has not been well demonstrated. The kind of analysis done in Zhengzhou is important because it directly links environmental improvements to increasing value. Demonstrating that link is crucial in making the case for a financial tool that could be essential for addressing the climate crisis: land value capture. 

Once a little-known financial instrument, value capture is used around the world to help fund transit, affordable housing, open space, and other public infrastructure. The approach calls for developers and landowners to contribute a portion of the increases in property value, or land value increment, that are prompted by public investment and government actions. Municipalities use the resulting revenue for infrastructure or other projects that benefit the public (Germán and Bernstein 2020).  

As the world prepares to spend trillions of dollars in a massive effort to transition from fossil fuels, reduce emissions, and build resilience, value capture could help close the global climate finance gap, particularly at the local level. Establishing that what’s good for the planet is good for the economy, Van der Krabben said, gets to the heart of the fiscal argument to use value capture. In China, where land is state owned and leased to developers, land value increases get built into the price developers pay. “So if Chinese cities act in a rational way, if they invest that additional income from land leases, if they continue investing that in cleaner air, then you have this kind of virtuous cycle,” he said. 

Accordingly, increasingly sophisticated valuation and assessment methodologies are being deployed to describe the impact of government action on land and property values—and not just detailing how a new transit station or a flood-resilient park creates uplift in a local neighborhood, but how broader policies, like clean air requirements or the promotion of walking, biking, and transit, can have a positive economic impact across a wider catchment.  

The “virtuous cycle” analysis may make not only a powerful economic argument for a shared responsibility in financing climate action, but a moral one, too. In many places, private developers and landowners generally walk away with the windfalls created by public investments. 

“There’s a well-documented lack of funding for the action that’s needed to address the climate crisis,” said Amy Cotter, director of Climate Strategies at the Lincoln Institute. “Precious little of it operates like land value capture: created by the very action it enables, within local control.” Land value capture “won’t solve climate finance, but we see its significant potential to fill an important gap,” Cotter said. 

ONE COMPELLING FEATURE of the Zhengzhou air pollution case study is that the benefits were spread across an entire city. But a wide range of projects and policies that can contribute to climate resilience are manifesting themselves economically in urban contexts, whether at the scale of one city block or an entire neighborhood: 

• The Eco Efficiency Ordinance for the Metropolitan District of Quito, which won a Guangzhou Award for Urban Innovation in 2021, incentivizes energy efficiency and density by selling developers the right to construct taller buildings if the projects have green elements and are near transit. Since the city adopted the ordinance in 2016, 35 projects have been approved that penciled out so well, developers had no issues returning a portion of their profits through this value capture tool. The city will invest the $10.7 million raised so far in improvements such as parks and affordable housing, and is making the ordinance part of its new land use and management plan. 
• A study by the Center for Neighborhood Technology and SB Friedman Development Advisors found that green stormwater infrastructure installations in Seattle and Philadelphia, such as rain gardens and swales, resulted in statistically significant increases in sales prices of homes nearby (CNT and SB Friedman Development Advisors 2020). Doubling the square footage of rain gardens, swales, planters, or pervious pavement within 250 feet of a home is associated with a 0.28 percent to 0.78 percent higher home sale value, on average. 
• In Buenos Aires, a similar assessment of proposed blue-green infrastructure projects in the Medrano Stream Basin found strong potential for positive land value impacts stemming from both the reduction of flood risk associated with traditional gray infrastructure, and the improvements in public green space (Kozak et al. 2022). The authors cite a project that improved public access to the Paraná River in Santa Fe, Argentina, as an example of how this can play out; the revitalization of that waterway led to an average land value uplift of 21 percent within a 10-block band of the waterfront. 
• Major transit projects around the globe that are contributing to decarbonization goals, from Tokyo’s Tsukuba Express transit extension to the modernization and electrification of the interurban passenger railway in San Jose, Costa Rica, to London’s Crossrail project—the latter expected to achieve approximately 2.75 million tons of carbon savings over its lifetime—are being financed largely or in part by the assumption that property values will increase all along their corridors. 
• Developers and homeowners alike seek safety from rising seas and other climate impacts, and are willing to pay for that sense of security. Boston has established a Climate Resiliency Fund, to which developers contribute to help the city coordinate the construction of seawalls and natural systems to keep prized urban land high and dry. Contributing toward adaptation is increasingly seen as a small price to pay to safeguard real estate assets and ensure their continued inherent value, said Brian Golden, the recently retired director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency.  

The same appears to be true for individual homebuyers. They’ve always taken into account property characteristics and consumer preferences such as the number and composition of rooms or the quality of the local public schools. Now they want to know about—and might be willing to pay more for—features that make the home more resilient to climate change, according to Katherine Kiel, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts and author of a Lincoln Institute working paper on adaptation and property values (Kiel 2021). 

WHILE THE CONNECTION between environmental interventions and an uplift in values is positive news for property owners and developers, it has a complicated relationship with gentrification and displacement. One prominent recent example of green improvements affecting local economics is the daylighting of the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, New York, which transformed a downtrodden business area so dramatically that housing prices shot up all around the adjacent area, said Cate Mingoya, national director of Climate Resilience and Land Use at Groundwork USA. It was “the perception of a cleaner, greener space” that led to the increases, Mingoya said. 

“There’s nothing about the installation of trees or the daylighting of a river that forces landlords to raise rents so sharply. There’s nothing that says that landholders must be entitled to maximize profit from a system that is highly, and unfairly, regulated to their advantage,” she said. But property owners can and do cash in on these kinds of public investments, said Mingoya, who facilitates cross-sector partnerships to implement climate adaptation measures in vulnerable communities.  

Some communities seeking to temper green gentrification deploy measures that are “just green enough . . . where a limited number of improvements are made to low-income neighborhoods in an attempt to ward off displacement.” These efforts sometimes border on the absurd, Mingoya said: “Should they get 30 trees or 10 trees?” But they clearly demonstrate the growing awareness that green interventions and rising values are linked. (Strategically designed land value capture policies can help mitigate cases where environmental interventions are associated with gentrification and displacement, with provisions to increase affordable housing, for example.) 

Viewed from another perspective, bad environmental conditions that are unaddressed or only partially addressed have a negative economic effect. One recent report by researchers at several universities in Utah estimates that polluted air shortens life expectancy by two years and costs the state nearly $2 billion a year. Some local and state governments are keeping a running tally of the damage caused by climate change, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, in preparation for litigation against fossil fuel companies. 

The absence of climate action—in cases when municipalities can’t or won’t implement resilience infrastructure and other measures to halt flooding, sea-level rise, mudslides, and the like—drives down values precipitously. A study of land subsidence in Java, Indonesia, where homes have sunk into unstable soil, found that the local practice of rebuilding on sinkhole sites—sometimes two or three times, done in the hopes of salvaging economic viability—did nothing to halt the decline in property values. The only solution for plummeting values, says the study, which was also led by Van der Krabben, would be a massive overhaul of water and soil management—or to give up on the land entirely. Indonesia is moving ahead with the wholesale relocation of its capital city, Jakarta, largely for this reason. 

In Miami, a big part of the argument for private sector contributions to resilience infrastructure is that without speedy action, more real estate is virtually guaranteed to be underwater. Seen in this way, protective measures do more than enhance land and property values; they stop values from being less than zero, by keeping land from becoming uninhabitable. 

EVEN AS EVIDENCE OF THE LINK between environmental action and economic uplift grows, many barriers must be overcome to make land value capture work. National urban development laws need to be reformed to authorize more local governments to mobilize land value increments and permit own-source revenue. Around the world, a pressing need remains to improve institutional capacity, good governance, land controls, and tenure systems. 

Governments will also need to keep in mind that land-based finance is just one way to fund climate and environmental initiatives, more suitable for closing gaps than for serving as the sole or primary source of revenue for a carbon-neutral world. 

Policy makers may also have to guard against overreach. The benefits of a new transit station on adjacent properties are “plain as day,” said Van der Krabben, so developers are more eager to contribute to such infrastructure. The ultimate payoff of an environmentally progressive citywide or regional policy—say, bans on fossil fuel heating and cooling systems in new construction, such as the natural gas bans enacted in major U.S. cities including Seattle, San Francisco, and New York—may be a tougher sell.  

“What you really want is for developers to contribute to regional investments, but that’s more difficult to negotiate. The benefits are more indirect,” Van der Krabben said. 

All the more reason, scholars say, to revisit the valuation and assessment practices that establish land and property value increases in the first place. More sophisticated valuation methods have improved assessment accuracy, said Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow Joan Youngman, citing the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO)’s technical standard on mass appraisal of real property designed to improve the fairness, quality, equity, and accuracy of valuation. Mass appraisal is defined in that standard as “the process of valuing a group of properties as of a given date and using common data, standardized methods, and statistical testing.” 

The assessment process may soon be aided by some technological wizardry. The International Property Tax Institute and IAAO both issued recent white papers on the potential use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in property assessment. While AI poses some challenges and uncertainty, the hope is that it could produce more accurate values than those obtained by traditional approaches. 

When it comes to identifying the effects of public action and investment on land value, modern tools, data analytics, and statistical techniques will help identify and measure value increments, Youngman said.  

Armed with good practices, a theoretical rationale, and a growing list of cities around the world that have put value capture to use, those addressing the climate crisis hope the connection is becoming clearer between the massive public investments necessary to salvage the planet’s future and the economic bounty they provide—and, ultimately, the ways that bounty can be reinvested for the public good (Bisaro and Hinkel 2018, Dunning and Lord 2020, Van der Krabben, Samsura, and Wang 2019). 

Golden, the outgoing Boston planner, said he has sensed a “cultural shift” among landowners and developers, who recognize that public investments in resilience infrastructure plainly protect private real estate assets, making them more likely to help foot the bill. Requiring developers to help finance the berms, seawalls, and natural systems restoration that will guard against an estimated 40-inch sea-level rise along the city’s 47-mile coastline is seen as a matter of self-interest, Golden said—not only for individual development sites, but also for the continued prosperity of Boston as a regional economic engine. The private sector has exerted virtually no pushback on initiatives like the resiliency fund. “We have a lot of work to do,” Golden said. “They get it.” 

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

Lead image: Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China. Credit: Zhang mengyang via iStock/Getty Images.

REFERENCES 

Bisaro, Alexander, and Jochen Hinkel. 2018. “Mobilizing Private Finance for Coastal Adaptation: A Literature Review.” WIREs 9(3). 

CNT and SB Friedman Development Advisors. 2020. “Green Stormwater Infrastructure Impact on Property Values.” November. Chicago, IL: Center for Neighborhood Technology. 

Dunning, Richard J., and Alex Lord. 2020. “Viewpoint: Preparing for the Climate Crisis: What Role Should Land Value Capture Play?” Land Use Policy Volume 99. December. 

Germán, Lourdes, and Allison Ehrich Bernstein. “Land Value Return: Tools to Finance Our Urban Future.” Policy brief. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (January). 

Kiel, Katherine A. 2021. “Climate Change Adaptation and Property Values: A Survey of the Literature.” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (August). 

Kozak, Daniel, and Hayley Henderson, Demián Rotbart, Alejandro de Castro Mazarro, and Rodolfo Aradas. 2022. “Implementación de Infraestructura Azul y Verde (IAV) a través de mecanismos de captación de plusvalía en la Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires: El caso de la Cuenca del Arroyo Medrano.” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (February). [English version available.] 

Krabben, van der, Erwin, Samsura, Ary, and Wang, Jinshuo. 2019. “Financing Transit Oriented Development by Value Capture: Negotiating Better Public Infrastructure.” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (June). 

Lord, Alexander, Erwin van der Krabben, and Guanpeng Dong. 2022. “Building the Breathable City: What Role Should Land Value Capture Play in China’s Ambitions to Prepare for Climate Change?” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (June). 

Food systems have always been defined by uncertainty, from unpredictable weather to shifting consumer proclivities. But escalating threats such as climate change, resource depletion, and economic crises are presenting a bounty of new challenges to the global landscapes and systems that grow and provide our food. Over the coming year, six research projects commissioned by the Lincoln Institute will apply scenario planning to anticipate these forces and plan for their effects on various communities around the world, from Wisconsin to the West Bank.  

The research projects were identified through a recent request for proposals issued by the Consortium for Scenario Planning, a program of the Lincoln Institute. The RFP invited proposals for research focused on several types of places: regions where external forces (such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, or economic uncertainties) threaten the viability of agriculture; areas that support vital commercial agriculture; areas with a healthy or limited local food supply; communities that wish to encourage the growth of family or small-scale farming; or urban and rural areas that struggle with food accessibility.  

“As climate change and economic instability have greater impacts on communities, food systems planning can be a key part of a community’s resilience,” said Heather Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. “Planning for food systems in particular touches on many of the Lincoln Institute’s core initiatives, such as establishing resilient communities, addressing spatial inequality, sustainably managing land and water, and promoting fiscally healthy communities.”  

“We are always looking for ways to stretch our scenario planning practice into new areas,” said Ryan Handy, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute. “We hope this latest RFP cycle on food systems planning will introduce new models that other communities can use to address similar issues.”  

The following research projects were selected by the Lincoln Institute:   

• Gabriel Cuéllar and Athar Mufreh, assistant professor in practice and lecturer respectively at the University of Minnesota, will use scenario planning to address the complex relationship between land access and food in Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank. Their work will identify models, spatial resources, and access to local markets for food-based businesses.  
• Researchers from the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at Canada’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University will develop a toolkit of best practices in bioregional food systems planning to help communities run scenario planning processes around food uncertainty. 
• Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will develop an adaptable workshop model for food systems and scenario planning. They will partner with local groups to test the model in the agricultural town of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. 
• The National Young Farmers Coalition will write a scenario planning guide as part of its Young Farmer Organizing Handbook. The guide will assist farmers and communities in managing locally led scenario planning exercises to address climate change and other uncertainties.   
• Gabriela Rengifo Briceño and Carolina Zegarra Tipismana, researchers based in Lima, Peru, will develop a scenario planning workshop model to address food crises and uncertainty in Lima’s peripheral areas. 
• Food Systems Foresight, a U.S.-based consulting firm, will run two scenario workshops, one in the Hudson Valley of New York and the other in Cape Town, South Africa, to address food systems planning and uncertainty.    

All projects will be completed by June 2023. The Lincoln Institute issues an annual RFP for scenario planning projects; learn more about the projects selected in 2021, which focused on using scenario planning to advance climate strategies in communities, and those selected in 2020, which focused on equity and low-growth scenarios.      

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

Image: A farmer working in an olive grove in Aboud, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. Credit: Joel Carillet via E+/Getty Images.

Across every region of the world, countries of all sizes have demonstrated that land value capture is an effective tool for financing infrastructure, affordable housing, and other public goods using the land value generated by the public sector’s own actions, according to a new publication from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
 
The Global Compendium of Land Value Capture Policies is the most comprehensive profile of land value capture published to date. The publication identifies five major land value capture instruments and shows how they have been implemented in all 38 OECD countries and 22 additional countries. It draws on deep expertise from the two organizations and the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), as well as surveys that shed light on the legal frameworks and policy issues in all 60 countries. 
 
“This compendium will provide policy makers with a unique resource as they develop ambitious plans to make cities more livable and sustainable,” Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, director of the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, and George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, write in the publication’s preface. “It reveals the huge potential for land value capture to unlock important new infrastructure and land uses: from social housing to transport, from water to energy.” 
 
The five main land value capture instruments identified in the compendium are infrastructure levies, developer obligations, charges for development rights, land readjustment, and strategic land management. These instruments vary greatly in their design, but they all enable the public sector to recover and reinvest land value generated by two main types of activity—the creation of infrastructure, and enactment or amendment of regulations that govern land use. Often, these two types of activity occur in tandem—e.g., a rezoning that accompanies the construction of a new rail station. 
 
The compendium explores how governments use value capture instruments in different contexts. For example, it explains how large municipalities in Brazil have implemented charges for development rights as part of the master planning process. Developers pay the charges for the right to build at higher density, often in districts where the municipality is also investing in infrastructure and redevelopment. 
 
The publication explains the constitutional, legal, and administrative frameworks for land value capture, and identifies different methods for land valuation—a critical component of each instrument. It explores common challenges and considerations for policy makers who implement land value capture. Finally, it includes a detailed profile of each country. 
 
Policy makers who seek to implement land value capture in their jurisdictions can use the compendium as a guide, and scholars can use it as a platform to conduct more detailed research. It will be followed by the creation of a searchable database with additional details for each country. 

The compendium is available at no cost: https://www.oecd.org/publications/global-compendium-of-land-value-capture-policies-4f9559ee-en.htm. 

Image by R. M. Nunes via iStock Getty Images Plus.

Competition among providers of infrastructure is often limited, because the investments required to build and maintain infrastructure are so extensive, durable, and immobile that the cheapest way to serve a given market is often with a single firm. This phenomenon is known as natural monopoly in economics jargon. How best to protect consumers from this lack of competition has been a topic of intense debate in infrastructure circles, and it’s one that is summarized in the recently published Lincoln Institute book Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives. 

Privatization   

In the 19th century, virtually all modern infrastructure—including canals, railroads, steamships, electric power, streetcars and subways, telegraph and telephone systems, and local water supplies—was built and operated by private companies. Most of these systems were nationalized or municipalized only after the turn of the century, and often not until the 1960s and 1970s in those developing countries that declared their independence around that time. 

These new state-owned enterprises (SOEs) sometimes performed well at first, but often grew less efficient, provoking consumer complaints of high prices and poor service as well as government concerns about the burden of funding large SOE deficits. These concerns helped provoke the most recent round of privatization reform, starting in the 1990s and 2000s. Privatizations were relabeled as Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to emphasize the hoped-for cooperative nature of the reforms. Greater emphasis was placed on developing the means to regulate prices that would be accepted as fair by both investors and their customers. 

Antonio Estache, a professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, summarizes research on this recent round of privatizations in chapter 11 of the book. Estache’s findings will leave both critics and supporters of privatization disappointed. For example, he estimates that private finance accounts for only 17 percent of total finance for the typical PPP project, with the bulk of the remainder still to be raised through government bonds and loans or by grants or loans from international financial institutions. By sector, privatization is much more common in ports and electricity generation and relatively rarer in electricity distribution, roads, water, or sanitation. 

Particularly troubling are Estache’s interpretations of research on the effects of private ownership on performance. Ownership alone does not appear to significantly improve infrastructure access and affordability for the poor. Ownership may have an effect on costs, but that influence may weaken once the “easy” measures to increase labor force productivity have been exploited. Estache blames this disappointing performance on the failure to address major governance issues including “corruption, lack of technical skills, lack of commitment to allocate the resources needed to get the regulatory job done, and lack of accountability for failing on any or all of the previous issues.”  

Regulation 

Given that controversy over monopoly played an important role in the nationalization of private infrastructure companies in the first half of the 20th century, it is not surprising that a great deal of energy has been devoted to devising price-setting schemes for PPPs that would be accepted as fair by both consumers and investors. The most popular approach has been to use competitive bidding, to award a contract to build and operate an infrastructure facility for a fixed term, say 10 or 30 years. However, this approach works well only if the contract is relatively complete, in that it anticipates all important future developments and provides workable contingencies for them. Contracts that prove to be incomplete typically require politically controversial renegotiation. Furthermore, the risk that a contract will prove to be incomplete increases greatly with the duration of the contract, and infrastructure investments typically require long contracts. 

In chapter 12, Sock Yong Phang, professor at Singapore Management University, uses several case studies to examine two alternative strategies to competitive contracting: cost-of-service regulation and price-cap regulation. The former allows the regulated firm to charge prices sufficient to recover specified accounting costs; the latter specifies the maximum increase in prices allowed in a set period, usually five years, but allows the firm to keep the difference as profit if the actual price increases are less than the increases allowed under the cap. 

Phang argues that the evaluation of these two approaches depends on the priorities and objectives of the regulator. The use of cost-of-service regulation implies concern about the financial health of the regulated firm, and especially its ability to raise capital, while the use of price-cap regulation suggests concern about the firm’s technical efficiency and record of innovation. Other possible goals include access and affordability for the poor or protection from monopoly abuse.  

In chapter 13, Sir Ian Byatt—a pioneer in the practice of price-cap regulation as the regulator of Britain’s water industry during the first two decades after its privatization—describes the challenges faced and the lessons learned during his tenure. Two themes emerge: first, the importance of the regulator being politically sensitive and proactive, and second, how many other critical decisions a regulator faces besides periodically setting the allowed caps on prices. These decisions include the firm’s capital structure, quality of service, treatment of ancillary activities, and the possibility of competitively contracting for major stand-alone facilities. The combined lessons of Phang’s cases and Byatt’s tenure illustrate the practically irresistible pressures for, and potential pitfalls of, regulatory mission creep. 

State-Owned Enterprises 

SOEs were considered a key to economic growth by many developing countries in the post-colonial period of the 1950s and 1960s. The private sector often consisted of small traders and enterprises without the resources or appetite for the heavy investment that was generally thought to be needed at the time for development. The attraction of SOEs faded in the face of their disappointing performance, leading to various reform efforts in the 1970s and 1980s and ultimately to the privatization of many in the 1990s and 2000s. However, SOEs remain significant players in the infrastructure sector, especially in China and India. 

In chapter 14, O. P. Agarwal, who has worked on transportation and energy policy for the government of India, the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute, and Rohit Chandra, an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, examine the changing roles of SOEs. 

Agarwal and Chandra map the global landscape of SOEs and compare the performance of SOEs versus the private sector. Despite their less efficient performance, SOEs still have plausible reasons to exist; for example, the inability of the market to supply classic public goods such as local road networks. Most important, Agarwal and Chandra recognize the evolving role of SOEs over the last decade as they have become more versatile through innovations in organizational form, financial management, PPPs, and private contracting. 

In the end, no single solution has emerged to the competition problems caused by infrastructure’s reliance on costly, durable, and immobile investments. Private ownership is common in many developed countries, particularly in certain sectors such as telecommunications and electricity generation. SOEs are very important as well, however, and dominate infrastructure in China and India, the world’s most populous countries. A great deal of effort has gone into the design of regulatory schemes to replace the standard approach of long-term contracts awarded by competitive bidding processes. While there have been notable advances, particularly with price-cap regulation, so far every scheme has its limitations. 

José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Harvard University. Zhi Liu is senior fellow and director of the China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. They are the editors of Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives. 

Image: London Skyline Credit: Nikolay Pandev via GettyImages.

Infrastructure upgrades and facilities are desperately needed around the world, but governments often struggle to pay for the high costs of developing and maintaining them. The newly published Lincoln Institute book Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives includes two chapters that address issues related to infrastructure finance, including the development of innovative and replicable financing models. 

Basics of Infrastructure Finance 

In Chapter 9, economist Akash Deep of the Harvard Kennedy School explains why financing is a key challenge in infrastructure development. Governments must typically pay the costs of infrastructure up front, while the benefits are spread out over many years. This difference between the timing of costs and benefits is generally bridged through borrowing.  

It is important to note that financing differs from funding. The funder is the entity that ultimately bears the cost of the infrastructure, either the general public (in the form of taxes) or the direct users (in the form of user charges). Those who finance the project are the borrowers and lenders who reconcile the timing of the benefits and costs. Those borrowers and lenders can be public or private. The capital structure can be determined to reflect the riskiness, and the cost of financing, and thereby the financial value of infrastructure. Proper structuring and risk allocation can make infrastructure finance more efficient and less risky. 

Because infrastructure investments often have a long payback period, investors are typically less interested in infrastructure than other assets. Deep illustrates the potential for innovation in financing infrastructure, including efforts to tap the huge and growing savings in insurance and pension funds. Managers of such funds prefer the combination of modest but stable long-term returns that infrastructure offers, but they are often required to maintain their debt portfolio at investment grade or higher. One solution developed by the European Investment Bank is to provide direct financing (in the form of subordinated debts) or financial guarantees to make the investment less risky for insurance and pension funds. 

A more widely imitated innovation is infrastructure funds modeled after those pioneered by Australia’s Macquarie Group in 1996. The Macquarie Group introduced features such as pooling equity from multiple projects, active asset management, financial engineering, and listing on capital markets–reforms that made infrastructure equity funds more liquid and especially attractive for pension funds. Infrastructure funds have attracted both institutional and retail investors, thereby significantly expanding the pool of equity available for infrastructure investment. 

Infrastructure Finance through Land Value Capture (LVC) 

The benefits and costs of infrastructure are typically specific to the location where the project will occur. In urban locations, where the supply of land is limited and the infrastructure on it is often immobile, the benefits created by infrastructure often result in an increase in the value of land. In such cases, the public sector can fund infrastructure improvements by imposing property taxes, selling development permissions, or utilizing similar measures to capture all or part of the uplift in land value that the improvements create. Such measures ensure that the parties who benefit from the improvements pay to support them. 

Chapter 10, written with Yu-Hung Hong, former director of the Samuel Tak Lee Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab at MIT, and Du Huynh of Fulbright University Vietnam, examines the record of land value capture around the world. Value capture is especially promising in developing countries, which have enormous infrastructure needs but fewer alternative funding sources. Chapter 10 focuses on the experiences of Brazil and Vietnam with one of the most important types of value capture—the sale of development rights.  

The case of São Paulo, Brazil, is internationally known and widely praised; the city developed a market-oriented value capture program, auctioning Certificates of Additional Construction Potential, or CEPACs, to developers in exchange for the right to build at greater density in designated areas. The city has used the proceeds to pay for affordable housing, transportation upgrades, and other public goods. 

The case of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is more controversial: through ad hoc procedures, the city sold the development rights to convert rural land for urban development. Both cases confirm that sales of development rights can generate substantial proceeds, often more than enough to pay for the extra infrastructure needed for the associated development. But the examples also show that successful implementation requires a clear and widely accepted delineation of property rights. Also important are a system of registries and impartial courts to record and protect those rights, a realistic and reasonably detailed land use master plan, and politically skilled sponsors. 

As both chapters illustrate, governments around the world are finding innovative ways to finance infrastructure. Given the urgent need for global infrastructure investments and upgrades, these methods should be more widely implemented and embraced.  

José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Harvard University. Zhi Liu is senior fellow and director of China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. They are the editors of Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives. 

Image: Octavio Frias de Oliveira Bridge, São Paulo, Brazil. Credit: R. M. Nunes via iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

Several major sources of radical uncertainty are currently affecting the performance of infrastructure and will likely shape infrastructure in the future: climate change, automation, the sharing economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our book, Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives, recently published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, attempts to determine how the infrastructure sector should cope with these radical uncertainties. 

Three chapters of the book assess the impacts of climate change, automation, and the sharing economy, respectively, and discuss how public policies should respond to these challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic erupted while we were preparing the book, and little evidence was available on which to assess its impacts on infrastructure. These impacts are becoming increasingly clear now as data and empirical studies are emerging, and we have included our thoughts on them below.  

Climate Change 

Severe weather conditions and natural disasters due to climate change can seriously disrupt infrastructure services and damage or destroy infrastructure facilities, from transit lines to power lines. These impacts typically vary from one locality to another. For example, forest fires are a major concern in California, while rising sea levels are more important to Miami. As a result, Henry Lee, the author of chapter 18 of the book and a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues that effective adaptation policies will mainly emerge at lower levels of government, in a bottom-up process.  

Lee predicts that the magnitude of investments in climate-resilient infrastructure over the next few decades will be unprecedented. He discusses the characteristics of these investments and the scope of the transitions that will be required in the transportation, electricity, and water sectors. After identifying the governance challenges that underlie all climate mitigation and adaptation options, Lee proposes changes in governance to enable more effective planning, delivery, and management of infrastructure. His main messages are as follows: 

• Honoring the commitments made by many nations to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 will require unprecedented investments in infrastructure.  
• Local governments are likely to lead in developing adaptive policies, since the nature and extent of climate damages vary so much by location. 
• The electricity sector will be by far the most affected by efforts to mitigate emissions as electricity replaces direct burning of fossil fuels for mobility, heating, cooling, and manufacturing and as countries shift to solar, wind, and other renewable sources that require more sophisticated and extensive grids and standby capacity to remain reliable. 
• In the water sector, changes in precipitation will require some areas to import water, increase desalinization, or encourage conservation by raising prices. 
• Transportation infrastructure will be the least affected, although many vehicles are likely to be powered by electricity or hydrogen.  
• For these investments to succeed, four changes in the governance of infrastructure are needed: (1) reduce the number of agencies and levels of government with overlapping responsibilities; (2) streamline the process for siting facilities; (3) address stranded financial and human assets; and (4) reduce the bias for spending on disaster relief rather than disaster prevention. 

Autonomous Vehicles 

The second radical uncertainty examined in the book is automation and other new technologies that have emerged rapidly in recent years, thanks to advancements in information technologies such as cloud computing, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. Whether these new technologies will revolutionize the infrastructure sector is the central question examined in chapter 19 by Shashi Verma, director of strategy and chief technology officer at Transport for London (TfL). Verma reminds us that fundamental infrastructure change typically comes only very slowly. Then, using autonomous vehicles (AV) as a case study, he discusses the economics of AVs, the likely impacts of automation on other modes and consumer behavior, and the institutional challenges it faces before its widespread acceptance. He offers the following advice: 

• AVs may prove to be among the rare fundamental changes in infrastructure technology, on par with the invention of the internal combustion engine, and especially disruptive to our cities. 
• Policy makers should take actions to prepare for the arrival of the technology, including licensing, allocation of road space, economic support to public transportation, and control over pricing structure. 
• Between one-half and three-quarters of the cost of a taxi ride covers hiring the driver. If AVs could save on driver cost, this would stimulate an increase in travel and pose an existential threat to public transportation. The latter would be competitive with AVs only during peak hours and even then, only where it is protected from traffic congestion. 
• Road congestion would likely increase greatly with the rising use of AVs unless there is a large increase in ride-sharing. The only unmitigated benefit would be a large reduction in the land required for parking. 

The Sharing Economy 

The third radical uncertainty examined in the book is the sharing economy. Sharing is an economic model of acquiring, providing, or sharing access to goods and services using online platforms. What impacts might the sharing economy have on infrastructure services and assets? In chapter 20, authors Andrew Salzberg and O.P. Agarwal explore this question using a case study of urban transportation. Salzberg is responsible for public policy at Transit, a leading public transportation app in North America, and before that worked as an executive at Uber. Agarwal served in the Indian Administrative Service and the World Bank and is currently chief executive officer of World Resources Institute India.  

Over the last decade, new methods of sharing motor vehicles (Zipcar, Car2Go, Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Ola, and others) and smaller motorized electric vehicles like e-bikes and scooters (Bird, Lime, Gojek, etc.) have grown rapidly around the globe. Salzberg and Agarwal discuss the potential benefits, costs, and risks of shared vehicles, and argue that the sharing economy model has the potential to improve the use of fixed assets and thereby allow wider access to services. However, the current experience of shared vehicles in the U.S. indicates that the market penetration remains tiny, as most people still prefer individualized mobility services. Therefore, whether the service will grow to a significant size remains uncertain. The authors predict that new regulations will emerge to address the disruptive impact of this model on traditional businesses. More important, public policies related to road and parking pricing and congestion charges will be crucial to the future of the sharing economy in the urban transportation sector. Their chapter also delivers the following specific messages: 

• The sharing economy is not an altruistic neighbor-to-neighbor exchange, but a digital transaction connecting asset owners with users by taking advantage of improvements in technology. 
• In theory, car sharing could greatly increase asset utilization, since personal cars are used only about five percent of the time. Simulations have shown that a ubiquitous shared vehicle network—using right-sized vehicles, potentially including AVs, and moving 100 percent of motorized travel—could dramatically reduce peak-hour congestion, the number of vehicles on the road, and the roadway and parking infrastructure needed to accommodate a given quantity of passenger travel. These model results are optimistic, however, in that they assume that travelers will shift to a sharing mode that is highly efficient from a systemic perspective. In reality, the long-term decline in carpooling suggests how difficult it is to convince two or more people to ride together in the back of a car. 
• Infrastructure managers could encourage sharing by imposing per-vehicle congestion charges or by designating priority lanes for carpools. 
• The future of micromobility services, such as electric scooters and bikes, seems especially dependent on designating street space where the vehicles could be safely operated by people with different levels of skill. 

The COVID-19 Pandemic 

During the production of the book, researchers were actively studying both the effects of infrastructure on pandemic severity as well as the effects of the pandemic on infrastructure. One of the first studies of the former appears in chapter 3, in which the World Bank’s Sameh Wahba, Somik Lall, and Hyunji Lee argue that infrastructure shortages and affordability challenges have exacerbated exposure and community contagion risk from COVID-19 across poor neighborhoods in developing cities around the world. Many other cities, including some of the major cities in China and Europe, adopted the opposite policy of attempting to reduce contagion by deliberately limiting access to infrastructure through lockdowns, quarantines, and other similar measures. How successful these measures have been in reducing the spread of disease and whether those reductions are worth their often-substantial economic costs is a matter of continuing and intense debate. Other emerging takeaways include: 

• Public transit systems around the world lost much of their ridership and passenger revenues. Moreover, these systems seem unlikely to be able to fully bounce back even after the pandemic is over. Former riders are now more used to working at home and meeting online, and are more inclined to view riding on crowded public transportation as a health hazard.  
• The consequences of a long-term shift from public transit to driving would be a financial disaster for public transit operators and traffic gridlock in our largest and most congested cities. It is important to consider what public policies are required to revitalize public transit systems, and to enable them to cope with future pandemics. 
• A likely increase in public infrastructure spending is an important part of post-pandemic economic recovery programs. The primary objectives of these programs are to increase employment and revitalize the economy, and this funding can speed up the delayed construction of public infrastructure works, clear maintenance backlogs, and perhaps finance some “shovel-ready” projects. The key question is whether this is the right time for increased public investment for new mega-infrastructure projects. 

Policy makers often assume that infrastructure investment would have significant multiplier effects on other parts of the economy. However, a review of empirical analyses of economic stimulus programs, presented in chapter 2—authored by Gregory Ingram (former president of the Lincoln Institute) and Zhi Liu—suggests that in developed economies, infrastructure spending has little stimulus effect in the first several years, after which the economy is likely to have begun growing again anyway. These analyses find little to no short-term economic impacts, even when the long-term economic impacts are clearly positive. The small short-term impacts are due in part to the substantial time required to prepare and construct a project and in part to the crowding out of private investment by public investment. Therefore, it is important to select and include the most valuable and shovel-ready projects in the stimulus programs.  

José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Harvard University. Zhi Liu is senior fellow and director of the China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: A woman in the back seat of a rideshare. Credit: halbergman via GettyImages.

Amid claims by corporations and other institutions of lowered carbon footprints and net-zero pledges, the city of Burlington, Vermont, is going green with a special commitment, promising to eliminate fossil fuel use across the board by 2030. 
 
Vermont has long been a progressive kind of place with a population dedicated to environmental measures, whether solar and wind power, electric vehicles, or sustainable farming practices. Burlington, its change-agent capital—the place that gave rise to Bernie Sanders, after all—became the first city in the country to source 100 percent of its energy from renewables in 2014. Now, city leaders are ready to go even further. 

“This isn’t just a governmental goal, it’s a community-wide goal,” said Miro Weinberger, Burlington’s four-term mayor, in an interview on Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
 
With its electric power coming from renewable sources, the conversion can proceed for “electrifying everything,” he said, from cars and trucks to heating and cooling systems for buildings. The strategy is a mix of incentives and regulation, such as a planned ordinance to phase out fossil fuel-based mechanical systems in major buildings. 

Green-minded utilities have been a critical element, bolstering the political will that has only grown in strength over time, Weinberger said. But he adds that “we are still fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back because it is not a level playing field for new electrification and renewable technologies. The costs of burning fossil fuels are not properly reflected in the economics right now.” 

Getting the energy mix right is especially important given Vermont’s growing population. Reflecting on a surge of both climate and pandemic “refugees” moving to Vermont for the quality of life, Weinberger acknowledged that “We’ve seen big new pressures on our housing markets . . . It’s worse than it’s ever been. The silver lining of that may be [that] it may finally force Vermont to get serious about putting in place land-use rules at the local and state level that make it possible to build more housing.” 

A native Vermonter who was first elected in 2012, Weinberger attended Yale and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and worked for Habitat for Humanity before founding his own affordable housing development company. He’s also a part-time athlete, playing catcher in an amateur over-35 baseball league.  
 
The net-zero pledge has become a full-time occupation, but one that has underscored the importance of mayors and cities in confronting the climate crisis, he said. 
 
“This is making a decision to lead in this area and to make change, and you can have a big impact,” he said. “At a time when clearly the climate emergency is an existential threat, at a time when clearly the federal government is paralyzed in (its) ability to drive change, and when many state governments are similarly gridlocked, mayors and cities can really demonstrate on-the-ground progress. I think when we do that, we show everybody else what’s possible.” 
 
The edited interview will appear in print and online as the Mayor’s Desk feature in Land Lines magazine—a series of Q&As with innovative chief executives of cities all around the world.  
 
The Lincoln Institute’s work on climate change is spelled out on the website page Our Work. 
 
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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. 

Image: Burlington, Vermont Mayor Miro Weinberger. Credit: Miro Weinberger

 
Further reading 
 
Burlington Issues 2021 Net Zero Energy Roadmap Update (City of Burlington) 

Armed with new regulatory power, Burlington City Council commissions plan to reduce carbon output (VT Digger) 

Vermont’s largest city on track to hit ‘net zero’ by 2030 (Associated Press) 

Power to the People: Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous (The New Yorker) 

This interview, which has been edited for length, is also available as a Land Matters podcast. 

When he was elected in 2017, Randall L. Woodfin became the youngest mayor to take office in Birmingham in 120 years. Now 40 and nearly a year into his second term, Woodfin has made revitalization of the city’s 99 neighborhoods his top priority, along with enhancing education, fostering a climate of economic opportunity, and leveraging public-private partnerships. 

In a city battered by population and manufacturing loss, including iron and steel industries that once thrived there, Woodfin has looked to education and youth as the keys to a better future. He established Birmingham Promise, a public-private partnership that provides apprenticeships and tuition assistance to cover college costs for Birmingham high school graduates, and launched Pardons for Progress, which removed a barrier to employment opportunities through the mayoral pardon of 15,000 misdemeanor marijuana possession charges dating to 1990.  

Woodfin is a graduate of Morehouse College and Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law. He was an assistant city attorney for eight years before running for mayor, and served as president of the Birmingham Board of Education. 

ANTHONY FLINT: How do you think your vision for urban revitalization played into the large number of first-time voters who’ve turned out for you?  

RANDALL WOODFIN: I think my vision for urban revitalization—which, on the ground, I call neighborhood revitalization—played a significant role in not just the usual voters coming out to the polls to support me, but new voters as well. I think they chose me because I listen to them more than I talk. I think many residents have felt, “Listen, I’ve had these problems next to my home, to the right or to the left of me, for years, and they’ve been ignored. My calls have gone unanswered. Services have not been rendered. I want a change.” I made neighborhood revitalization a priority because that’s the priority of the citizens I wanted to serve. 

AF: With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act bringing unparalleled amounts of funding to state and local governments, what are your plans to distribute that money efficiently and get the greatest leverage? 

RW: This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really supercharge infrastructure upgrades and investments we need to make in our city and community. This type of money probably hasn’t been on the ground since the New Deal. When you think about that, there’s an opportunity for the city of Birmingham citizens and communities to win.  

We set up a unified command system to receive these funds. In one hand, in my left hand, the city of Birmingham is an entitlement city and we’ll receive direct funds. In my right hand, we have to be aggressive and go after competitive grants for shovel-ready projects. 

With our Stimulus Command Center, what we have done is partner not only with our city council, but we’ve partnered with our transportation agency. We have an inland port, so we partner with Birmingham Port. We partner with our airport as well as our water works department. All of these agencies are public agencies who happen to serve the same citizens I’m responsible for serving. For us to approach all these infrastructure resources through a collective approach, that’s the best way. We have an opportunity with this funding to supercharge not only our economic identity, but also to make real investments in our infrastructure that our citizens use every day. 

AF: The Lincoln Institute has done a lot of work aimed at equitable regeneration in legacy cities. What in your view are the key elements of neighborhood revitalization and community investment that truly pay off? 

RW: This is how I explain everything that happens from a neighborhood revitalization standpoint. I’ll first share the problem through story. The city of Birmingham is fortunate to be made up of 23 communities in 99 neighborhoods. When you dive deep into that, just consider going to a particular neighborhood in a particular block. You have a mother in a single-family household where she is the responsible breadwinner and owner. She has a child or grandchild that stays with her. She walks out onto her front porch, she looks to her right, there is an abandoned, dilapidated house that’s been there for years that needs to be torn down. She looks to her [left], there’s an empty lot next to her. When she walks out to that sidewalk, she’s afraid for her child or her grandchild to play or ride the bicycle on that sidewalk because it’s not bikeable. That street, when she pulls out from the driveway, hasn’t been paved in years. The neighborhood park she wants to walk her child or grandchild down to hasn’t had upgraded, adequate playground equipment in some time. She’s ready to walk her child or grandchild home because it’s getting dark, but the streetlights don’t work. Then she’s ready to feed her child or grandchild, but they live in a food desert. These are the things we are attempting to solve for.  

One is blight removal, getting rid of that dilapidated structure to the right of her. We need to go vertical with more single-family homes that are affordable and market rate so [we don’t have] “snaggletooth” neighborhoods where you remove blight, but now you have a house, empty lot, house, empty lot, empty lot. 

That child, we have to invest in that sidewalk so they can play safely or just take a walk. We have to pave more streets. We have to have adequate playground equipment. We have to partner with our power company to get more LED lights in that neighborhood, so people feel safe. We have to invest in healthy food options so our citizens can have a better quality of life. These are the things related to neighborhood revitalization that I frame and address to make sure people want to live in these neighborhoods. 

AF: What are your top priorities in addressing climate change? How does Birmingham feel the impacts of warming, and what can be done about it? 

RW: Climate change is real. Let me be very clear in stating that climate change is real. We’re not near the coast and so we don’t feel the impact right away that other cities do, like Mobile would in the state of Alabama. However, when those certain weather things happen on the coast in Alabama, they do have an impact on the city of Birmingham. We also have an issue of tornadoes where I believe they continue to increase over the years and they affect a city like Birmingham that sits in a bowl in the valley. Around air quality, Birmingham was a city founded from a blue-collar standpoint of iron and steel and other things made here. Although that’s not driving the economy anymore, there’s still vestiges that have a negative impact. We have a Superfund site right in the heart of our city that has affected people’s air quality, which I think is totally unacceptable. Addressing climate change from a social justice standpoint has been a priority for the city of Birmingham and this administration. What we are doing is partnering with the EPA for our on-the-ground local issues. 

From a national standpoint, Birmingham joined other cities as it relates to the Paris Deal. I think this conversation of climate change can’t be in the isolation of a city and unfortunately, the city of Birmingham doesn’t have home rule. Having the conversations with our governor about the importance of the state of Alabama actually championing and joining calls of, “We need to make more noise and be more intentional and aggressive about climate change” has been a struggle. 

AF: What about your efforts to create safe, affordable housing, including a land bank? 

RW: I look at it from the standpoint of a toolbox. Within this toolbox, you have various tools to address housing. At the height of the city of Birmingham’s population, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, there was about 340,000 residents. We’re down to 206,000 residents in our city limits. 

You can imagine the cost and burden that’s had on our housing stock. When you add on homes passing from one generation to the next and not necessarily being taken care of, we’ve had a considerable amount of blight. Like other cities across the nation, we created a land bank. This land bank was created prior to my administration, but what we’ve attempted to do as an administration is make our land bank more efficient. Then driving that efficiency is not just looking toward those who can buy land in bulk, but also empowering the next-door neighbor, or the neighborhood, or the church that’s on the ground within that neighborhood to be able to participate in purchasing the lot next door to make sure, again, that we can get rid of these snaggletooth blocks or snaggletooth neighborhoods, and go vertical with single-family homes. 

Another thing we’re doing is acknowledging that in urban cores, it’s hard to get private developers at the table. What we’ve been doing [with some of our ARPA funds] is setting aside money to offset some of these developer costs to support not only affordable but market-rate housing within our city limits, to make sure our citizens have a seat at the table so they can feel empowered, if they choose to want to actually have a home, that there’s a path for them. 

AF: Finally, tell us a little bit about your belief in guaranteed income, which has been offered to single mothers in a pilot program. You’ve joined several other mayors in this effort. How does that reflect your approach to governing this midsize postindustrial city? 

RW: The city of Birmingham is fortunate to be a part of a pilot program that offers guaranteed income for single-family mothers in our city. This income is $375 over a 12-month period. That’s $375 a month, no strings attached, no requirements of what they can spend the money on. 

Every city in this nation has its own story, has its own character, has its own set of unique challenges. At the same time, we all share similar fates and have similar issues. The city of Birmingham has its fair share of poverty. We don’t just have poverty, we have concentrated poverty, [and] guaranteed income is another tool within that toolbox of reducing poverty. Birmingham has over 60 percent of households led by single women. That is not something I’m bragging about. That is a fundamental fact. A lot of these single-family mothers struggle. 

I think we all would agree, no one can live off $375 a month. If you had this $375 additional funding in your pocket or your homes, would that help your household? Does that help keep food on the table? Does it help keep your utilities paid? Does it help keep clothing on your children’s backs and shoes on their feet? Does it help you get from point A to B to keep your job to provide for your child? 

This is why I believe this guaranteed income pilot program will be helpful. We only have 120 slots, so it’s not necessarily the largest amount of people, but I can tell you over 7,000 households applied for this. The need is there for us to do every single thing we can to provide more opportunities for our families to be able to take care of their families.  

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

Image courtesy of Anthony Flint.