Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is the most urbanized region in the developing world, with 81 percent of its population—539 million people—living in cities, according to UN-Habitat. While there are differences in urbanization patterns across the region—for example, countries in Central America are less urbanized, but experiencing one of the fastest urbanization rates in the world, while South America is already home to major cities—poverty and inequality have characterized this growth regionwide, leading to the creation of precarious settlements whose populations face multiple vulnerabilities. These settlements are the result of insufficient access to adequate housing and unjust distribution of wealth and opportunities. The resulting vulnerabilities get reinforced and magnified by external factors such as migration and climate change.

To reflect on and tackle these related challenges, the Lincoln Institute’s Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) co-organized a one-day workshop in early 2024. This event was part of an emerging initiative led by the Lincoln Institute and MIT that seeks to foster a call to action and build a regional vision that addresses critical challenges and advocates for systemic change.

Rooted in the experiences of team members from both institutions who have worked on these issues in their respective countries—Lincoln Institute LAC Program Director Anaclaudia Rossbach (Brazil), SPURS fellow Agustina Rodriguez Biasone (Argentina), and SPURS fellow Carina Arvizu Machado (México)—the workshop was designed to bridge the gap between academia and practical experience. It was an opportunity, said SPURS program director Bish Sanyal, to “theorize from practice.”

The workshop explored the multifaceted challenges facing vulnerable territories in Latin America and the Caribbean. One in five individuals in the region (110 million people) live in informal settlements. These areas face conditions of poverty and social exclusion, marked by inadequate housing, poor public services, and limited access to urban infrastructure and green spaces. In addition, the region is particularly vulnerable to climate change and has experienced significant migration flows in the past decades. LAC hosts approximately 3 million migrants from other areas and about 11 million internal migrants. Drawing inspiration from four case studies, the workshop explored innovative and integrated approaches that are paving the way for sustainable development and systemic change.

The workshop brought together over 50 individuals from diverse backgrounds, spanning academia, government, nonprofit organizations, and more, with a slate of speakers that included over 20 experts from Latin America and the Caribbean. Among them were former government ministers, executive directors, and professors from institutions such as Oxfam Mexico, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Yale University, The New School, Columbia University, and more.

The real-world cases showcased innovative approaches to addressing urban challenges. From the Neighborhood Integration program in Buenos Aires led by María Migliore (former Buenos Aires minister of Human and Housing Development), to México’s Urban Improvement Program spearheaded by Martha Peña Ordóñez (current head of the planning unit of the Secretariat of Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development, SEDATU), passing by the Utopias project for rehabilitation of public spaces in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, implemented by Raúl Basulto (current head of Urban Development of Iztapalapa), and the Manzanas del Cuidado, or care blocks, championed by Maria-Mercedes Jaramillo (former Bogotá secretary of Planning). After participating in discussions about the challenges in the region and exploring the four case studies, attendees imagined and discussed integrated strategies for effective solutions. Participants engaged in lively debates, shared best practices, and explored ways to leverage interdisciplinary approaches for positive impact.

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Participants also explored the relationships among interventions in informal settlements, city planning, and the broader urban system, reimagining the relationship between nature and cities. Rethinking planning scales and alternative territorial governance, such as through elements like water supply and management, was at the forefront of the discussions, especially on the panel about climate change, moderated by Amy Cotter, director of climate strategies at the Lincoln Institute. Looking back to move forward, the panelists and participants drew inspiration from the historical constitution of cities through migration, and past interventions in informal settlements.

The resounding commitment echoed among participants was a determination to forge a more equitable and sustainable future for urban communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. As Enrique Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute, mentioned, this workshop was a great opportunity to build upon similar events in the past, such as the 2018 symposium “Slums: New Visions for an Enduring Global Phenomenon,” held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and consolidate a more robust community of practice. The group agreed to continue this journey together, building bridges and creating lasting impact for the vulnerable territories of the region, forging new paths toward systemic change.

Key themes for future discussion based on the reflections at the workshop include:

1. Exploring further the links and interdependencies of informality and informal settlements with migration, climate change and inequality, and the implications and complication of political polarization in the region.
2. Connecting interventions in informal settlements to city planning, and the broader urban system.
3. Reimagining the relationship between nature and cities, considering and integrating indigenous communities and their concepts and practices.
4. Rethinking the scales of planning and alternative territorialities of governances, through alternative elements such as water.
5. Looking back to better move forward, including looking at indigenous knowledge, how migration has affected the growth and development of cities, and previous interventions around informal settlements.

This initiative was made possible thanks in part to a grant from MIT’s Office of Experiential Learning.

Carina Arvizu Machado is a 2024 SPURS fellow at MIT and former Cities Director for Mexico and Colombia at the World Resources Institute, Mexico. She is the former national deputy secretary of Urban Development and Housing for Mexico, sustainable urban mobility consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, and chief of urban projects for Mexico City.

Lead image: Utopía Aculco, part of the Utopía series of 12 parks and public cultural and sports facilities in Mexico City’s Iztapalapa neighborhood. The name doubles as an acronym for Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social (Units of Transformation and Organization for Inclusion and Social Harmony). Credit: Government of Mexico City.

In 1903, Elizabeth Magie, an East Coast office worker, introduced a game designed to illustrate the economic consequences of monopolizing land ownership. An avid follower of Henry George, Magie wanted more people to understand how unregulated rents enriched property owners at the expense of tenants. The Landlord’s Game was played in two rounds: the first involved buying, selling, and renting property, with the goal of making money; in the second round, players who landed on a property paid into a public treasury instead of paying the owner, showing how a land tax could undo the economic and social damage caused by unregulated land ownership.

Magie’s game was a forerunner of contemporary teaching games designed to reveal the consequences, either intended or unintended, of complex systems. For our purposes at the Lincoln Institute, it illustrates the use of land policy as a potential remedy to social and economic challenges. But it also inspired, and was ultimately usurped by, a popular game with a very different message.

The game of Monopoly is iconic. It is also ironic. The original Landlord’s Game was designed to offer solutions to the intrinsic unfairness of consolidated property ownership; Monopoly is a celebration of ruthlessness and greed that promotes unbridled large-scale land ownership. The popularity of Monopoly, now the world’s best-selling board game, helped normalize the idea that unregulated private property was sacrosanct.

More than a century after the invention of The Landlord’s Game, we still struggle to navigate the space between our cultural attachment to unfettered individual dominion over private property and our need to manage land to meet collective needs. A big part of the challenge is that property ownership in the US is still as opaque and almost as unregulated as it was in 1903. How can we regulate something we know so little about?

Property ownership is a matter of public record in the US, but it cannot be determined from any single public source. Our land ownership data is inaccessible, fragmented, and, in many cases, outdated or incomplete. To identify all the US property owned by a single individual or corporation with any certainty, for example, one would need to consult paper records held in 3,142 county offices across the country. Although many counties have digitized property records, the records that do exist are rife with errors and infrequently updated. Some private data providers have tried to compile property records nationally into machine-readable form, but these datasets are expensive, incomplete, and prone to repeat the errors found in the digitized county records. They are also typically tailored for individual use cases, like examining the activity of a particular entity or studying the dynamics of a local market.

It is also very difficult to determine actual property owners from the owners of record. This is because corporate ownership of property can be obscured by the corporate structure itself. The owner of record might be a division of a larger holding company, a managing partner of a national real estate investment trust, or simply a person or corporation doing business under a different name.

To make matters worse, land regulations are similarly opaque and complex. There are more than 30,000 zoning codes in use in the US, dictating how each parcel of land can be developed, and 89,000 local governments across the country that influence how land can be used and taxed. These local governments have overlapping jurisdictions, so different rules can apply to different properties on the same street.

Since joining the Lincoln Institute in 2014, I have wanted to be able to answer simple questions about the state of the nation’s land. For instance, how much prime farmland has been lost to urban sprawl since we began building the interstate highway system? To what extent are natural resources like forests owned and controlled by foreign investors? How many units could be added to the national housing stock if we rezoned and redeveloped abandoned strip malls? As it turns out, finding answers to questions like these was more complicated than I had anticipated. But now, a decade later, we’re making some headway.

In 2023, the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute (CGS) launched Who Owns America℠ (WHOA), a nationwide effort to uncover property ownership patterns with unprecedented ease, precision, and nuance. As a first step, this ambitious data mapping endeavor used best-in-class parcel-level data—optimized for analysis at an aggregate level—to respond to specific questions about the ownership of single-family housing in US cities. Starting with Baltimore, we were able to report block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and across the city the extent to which institutional investors were snatching up single-family homes and converting them from owner-occupied properties to rentals—an increasingly common trend across the country.

Now, dozens of entities—from municipal agencies to national affordable housing organizations—have asked CGS to help them better understand the changing reality of their local housing stock. By equipping organizations like the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America and the Salt Lake County Office of Regional Development with precise and enhanced maps of property ownership, CGS is helping to inform strategies they can use to defend their housing stock—and to track their progress. (Our work was the subject of a recent article in Context, a Thomson Reuters media platform about climate change, technology, and inclusive economies.)

Without an available stock of starter homes, homeownership might disappear as a pathway to “the American dream.” Similarly, our chances of closing racial and ethnic wealth gaps will be greatly diminished if we cannot close racial and ethnic homeownership gaps (which are, incidentally, higher than they were when we passed the Civil Rights and the Fair Housing Acts in the 1960s).

But ownership of the nation’s housing stock is only the tip of a very large iceberg of questions that this data-based approach can help answer. The unique “data fusion” expertise of CGS reflects the interconnected nature of our most pressing challenges. By layering multiple environmental and social datasets with land ownership data, their work stands to enrich our collective understanding of the obstacles we face—and how to surmount them.

For example, by weaving in legal-entity information, which is typically dispersed across hundreds of business registers, we can figure out where corporate investors are the most active—in land or housing. We can better understand the impact of large-scale institutional investors compared to that of small, family-owned LLC holdings. We can determine which corporate investors target their housing purchases in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color; which companies are finding loopholes in development regulations intended to protect water supplies in the parched Southwest; and which out-of-state investors are snapping up local timberlands.

Last month, we got two requests in the same week from practitioners hoping to figure out how much land is owned and controlled by places of worship in their respective states. Drawing inspiration from California’s recently passed SB4, which allows religious organizations and nonprofit colleges to build affordable housing on their property, our partners wanted to better understand the potential of such legislation to engage relatively new players and resources in solving the housing crisis. CGS responded by providing a preliminary analysis estimating the total count of parcels owned by religious organizations, as well as the average and total acreage breakdown by state and county, and is now developing an interactive platform that will make it possible to refine this dataset and investigate potential redevelopment sites.

We’re now contemplating how Who Owns America℠ can help answer many other questions like these—including questions no one has thought to ask yet. The possibilities are endless and exciting.

Understanding property ownership in America involves navigating a complex web of legal, economic, cultural, and historical factors. Balancing private property rights, public interest, and sustainable land use remains an ongoing challenge—in the face of the climate crisis, it might be the biggest challenge of our lifetimes—and the tension between private ownership, government control, and public interest will continue to shape land policies and regulations. But for the first time, it seems possible that better informed and more transparent policies, buttressed by accurate, accessible data, will help to resolve this tension.

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

Image: Segment of a data map produced by the Center for Geospatial Solutions to identify different types of property ownership in Baltimore. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.