We have a severe affordable housing shortage in the United States — an urgent need for millions of additional homes. But exacerbating that housing shortage is a housing mismatch.

In much of the US, existing residential neighborhoods — the places where people already like to live, near their jobs, friends, and family members, and that are already served by utilities, transit, and other infrastructure — are overwhelmingly, and often exclusively, composed of single-family homes. While a four-bedroom Colonial can make good sense for a high-income family of five, it shouldn’t be the only housing option available in a community, given the kaleidoscopic variety of humanity and its households, from aging seniors to young adults to single parents.

“We’re going to have more people over the age of 65 than under 18 in the next decade,” says Rodney Harrell, AARP’s vice president of family, home, and community. The organization has a long history of advocating for better housing conditions and options for seniors. “People want to be near grocery stores, parks, libraries, transportation options — things that make them feel connected. But one of the challenges is that people want to stay in their existing neighborhoods, and there aren’t enough options there.”

Adding new housing options to existing communities, however, routinely elicits complaints about changes to the “neighborhood character.” This loaded phrase can contain exclusionary attitudes and bad-faith arguments within its ample ambiguity, but it can also be a response to dubious development decisions. A homeowner in a neighborhood of century-old Craftsman bungalows may understandably be put off by the idea of a sleek new seven-story steel and concrete building on the corner.

Therein lies the appeal of the humble accessory dwelling unit, or ADU — more colloquially known as an in-law apartment, carriage house, secondary suite, or casita, among other aliases. By converting a garage, attic, or basement to a separate apartment, or adding a small, detached cottage to a backyard, homeowners can create an extra space for family members or a small rental property that helps generate income. At the same time, they help increase the supply of affordable and accessible housing options in their neighborhood — without a dramatic impact to the local aesthetic. And making it easier for homeowners to do that can help communities everywhere address the local and national housing crunch.

Over the past decade, many cities and some states have relaxed decades-old restrictions on ADUs. California, for example, legalized ADUs on all single-family lots in 2017; a few years later, the nearly 27,000 ADUs permitted statewide in 2023 represented a 20-fold increase over 2016, and comprised more than 20 percent of all new housing permitted. In 2024, Los Angeles alone granted permits for more than 6,000 ADUs.

That’s not enough to singlehandedly solve California’s housing crisis — no one step is. But it’s certainly one piece of the puzzle, and a solution that many communities can get behind.

Still, making it legal to build an ADU at all is just the first hurdle. Making it easier for someone to accomplish is the next step — one that cities can assist in by removing unnecessary barriers.

For example, to encourage and accelerate the adoption of ADUs, many cities across the US and Canada have begun offering residents access to preapproved design plans for detached ADUs — complete technical schematics that have already been reviewed by building officials.

“The system can be a little bit stacked against the local homeowner who wants to be able to do this,” Harrell says. Between site reviews, utility plans, and architectural approvals, “there are so many things that you have to go through that you’re doing for the first time,” he adds. “Having these preapproved designs takes away one of those barriers. It says, ‘You don’t have to be a designer, or have enough money to hire one. Here are some designs that can work.’”

Preapproved ADU Plans in California

Los Angeles offers residents a growing catalog of preapproved ADU plans, including a standard one-bedroom architectural plan commissioned by the city, called the YOU-ADU (pictured), that any resident of Los Angeles can use for free.

Dozens of other plans are also preapproved, but require a modest licensing fee paid to their respective architects, most of whom can also be hired for site-specific consultations.

While a preapproved ADU plan already meets certain city codes (e.g. building, fire, and energy regulations), and thus can advance through the plan-check and permitting process more quickly than a custom design, it doesn’t mean a homeowner can just plop one in their backyard with no questions asked. There are still site-specific approvals required, such as land use or stormwater reviews.

But using a preapproved plan can shave weeks or even months off the process, and offers predictability for both homeowners and local officials. The efficiency of a standard design can also create cost savings.

“Custom plans not only take more time and money to design, they’re much more complex to deliver in the field,” says Whitney Hill, co-founder and chief executive of SnapADU in Southern California, whose standard design plans have been selected for preapproval in multiple cities around San Diego.

All of that drives up prices, she adds, noting that a fully custom ADU typically costs $30,000 to $50,000 more to build than a standard one of the same size and bed-and-bath count. “On the other hand, plans that we have built before have already been vetted for real-world constraints; we know we can build them efficiently.”

Hill says that faster permitting times on standard designs can also translate to lower costs. “Building an ADU in 12 months versus 18 months is far more economical from an overhead cost perspective for us,” she says. “We share that savings with the homeowner.”

Even when using a preapproved plan, homeowners should still be prepared for site-specific costs and work, she notes. “It’s critical to understand your site’s topography, existing utility locations, and existing utility loads,” she says. Some projects may require water service upgrades to accommodate an additional bathroom, for example, or an upgraded electrical panel—both of which can be costly.

But one of the biggest benefits to using a standard design, Hill says, is the predictability. “Build costs for an existing floor plan are available before you even kick off your own project,” Hill says, “[which] is great for homeowners who are trying to stick to a specific budget.”

Seattle’s ADUniverse

While Washington State recently passed legislation requiring cities to allow four homes on all residential lots (and six units near transit), Seattle began embracing ADUs over a decade ago, loosening some local restrictions that stood in the way of their adoption, such as minimum lot sizes. “That was an important first step, and a viable one, because land use regulations are what the city most directly controls,” says Nicolas Welch, senior planner in Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development.

Still, most homeowners have little if any experience with housing development, so the idea of hiring an architect and applying for permits to build a backyard cottage can feel overwhelming — even before the considerable cost involved. Seattle soon decided it should do more than simply improve its regulations, and developed a resource-rich website called ADUniverse.

“The site was meant to provide all the resources that a homeowner might need in one place with better, clearer information for folks who are basically trying to take on development for the first time without a background in it,” Welch says. “Offering some preapproved designs was one component of that, as well as letting them look up their property to see what’s actually feasible on their lot.”

The city invited architects to submit their ADU designs and then had a jury select 10 plans — out of about 150 submissions — to get preapproved by the building department. In the five years since, Welch says, “Some 350 permits have been issued for the preapproved designs,” or roughly 10 percent of all ADUs approved in that time; the city now permits an average of about 900 new ADUs per year.

“On the one hand, it’s a very small number in a city and county that has a shortage of hundreds of thousands of units, so I do think it’s important to right-size the expectations,” Welch says. “It’s very small and incremental. But it’s also hundreds of units that now exist, and that people are living in.”

Using a preapproved plan noticeably speeds up the early permitting process, Welch says: “If you don’t have something weird going on, like you’re on a very steep slope or you’re removing a gigantic tree or something, then you’ll get your permit in two to six weeks, rather than three or four months.”

While celebrating Washington’s statewide dissolution of single-family exclusive zoning, Seattle’s Director of Planning and Community Development, Rico Quirindongo, acknowledges that such a sea change in policy can also hasten gentrification pressure by opening up a new market.

“The challenge of gentrification in cities — and Seattle is no exception — is that an upzone happens, property values go up, property taxes go up, and then low- and middle-income families do not see the benefit of the upzone, they only feel the burden,” Quirindongo explains. “An opportunistic developer says, ‘I can buy you out for 10 percent over asking, and then you don’t have to worry about this anymore, you can go live somewhere else.’ That is how we have seen the Central District, a traditionally African American community here in Seattle, go from 75 percent Black families to 10 percent Black families over the last 20 to 25 years,” he says.

Easing the process, and cost, of building an ADU provides an “opportunity for homeowners to be a part of the development opportunity, where they’re building generational wealth,” he says. Whether a homeowner uses an ADU to generate long-term rental income or to house an aging relative or grown children, it can help them stay in their neighborhood and share in the benefits of local growth. “They are building a multi-generational campus that is their house and property. And you’re creating infill, missing middle housing, that is consistent with the context and feel of historic neighborhoods.”

Still, even if future rental income from an ADU might offset the cost of a construction or home equity loan, building one typically requires significant upfront investment. So Quirindongo helped devise a unique pilot program intended to open up the opportunity to more lower-income residents. Here’s how it works:

1. Selected homeowners (the pilot will begin with 10 parcels) will enter a partnership with the city and a developer, who will take out a 12-year ground lease on a portion of the homeowner’s lot.
2. In the first two years, the developer builds two detached ADUs in the homeowner’s backyard, at no cost to the homeowner.
3. The developer then rents out and manages both ADUs for 10 years. The developer keeps about half of the rental income, while the other half is split: a portion provides monthly revenue to the homeowner, while the rest is deposited in a set-aside account.
4. At the end of 10 years, the ground lease expires, and there’s enough money in that account to buy out the developer’s remaining interest and make them whole, so the homeowner ends up with two ADUs on their property, which they can continue to rent out or convey with the property should they sell their home. “Over that period of time, the homeowner builds up enough money in that account to buy out the partner, so they own those units outright after that 12-year period,” Quirindongo explains.

Preapproved ADU Plans in Oregon

Beyond creating unobtrusive infill housing, ADUs are, almost by definition, small — and thus inherently more affordable than most new single-family homes, which averaged 2,405 square feet in the third quarter of 2025.
In Oregon, Portland’s Residential Infill Project has yielded more than 1,400 new permits for ADUs and missing middle housing in single-family neighborhoods, comprising almost half of new development in the city from 2022-2024, even as other construction lagged. But as importantly, the project capped building sizes in an effort to encourage more small homes instead of fewer large houses — and that has demonstrably improved affordability. In 2023 and 2024, sale prices of new missing middle homes averaged $250,000 to $300,00 less than new single-family houses in the same Portland neighborhoods, largely due to their smaller sizes.

In a heartening example of municipal collaboration, Portland was able to borrow and tweak a preapproved plan from the city of Eugene, Oregon—the Joel, shown here—to offer its own residents a set of similar preapproved ADU plans.

Preapproved ADUs in Louisville, Kentucky

AARP published its first model ADU ordinance over two decades ago. Since then, the organization has helped a number of cities, including Louisville, Kentucky, to re-legalize ADUs by right locally, and helped communities hold contests to create free architectural plans for residents.

Louisville invited architects to submit their designs, and then purchased the rights to three preapproved ADU plans, which it offers for free to all residents.

Rodney Harrell, of AARP, says ADUs can enhance freedom for seniors by giving them more and better options in the places they already live. “What I love is that it’s a solution that gives more options to people who want to be in the communities that work best for them,” he says.

“I’ve talked to so many people who are stuck,” Harrell says. “They’ve got a house, and at some point it may have been their dream home, but now it’s become a nightmare. They’ve got too many stairs. Maybe it’s too big and their spouse passed, and they can’t afford it anymore.”

A senior who can no longer manage the stairs in their house can stay in the community they love by building a fully accessible, universally designed ADU in their backyard, he explains, and renting out the main house. “That gives you more freedom,” he says. “If you want to stay in your main house and have a caregiver stay in the ADU, that also gives you more freedom. Or maybe you just need a little bit of money to be able to afford to stay in your house, and maybe you’re able to rent out the ADU and stay in your main house.”

And Beyond

In Seattle, Welch says the city’s efforts to legalize ADUs in single-family neighborhoods helped pave the way for more middle housing (duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes). “The sky didn’t fall, and so then state legislators felt more emboldened and empowered,” he says.

Many other cities and states across the US and Canada are now embracing ADUs as well, and providing design plans, guidance, and “ADU lookbooks” for residents interested in building one. Here’s a look at just a few preapproved designs offered in cities around North America.

There are dozens more examples across the country, and many cities continue to add new designs to their lists of approved plans. It’s merely one step in the right direction—but it’s a step nonetheless.

“People can be scared of things that are different,” AARP’s Harrell says. “But one thing that always gets me is that the ADU is really an old form of housing in a lot of the country. It’s just that we’re re-legalizing it. We’re making it able to be built again, and up to standards and codes of the modern day. So we shouldn’t put unnecessary barriers in place.”

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

Several years ago, news broke of a major FBI sting in Tallahassee, Florida. Federal agents had gone undercover to infiltrate city government, posing as real estate developers, and successfully bribed local economic development officials to win votes and contracts.

Kerry Fang, who was teaching at Florida State University in Tallahassee at the time, watched as multiple arrests and convictions followed. And in the treasure trove of email correspondence, meeting records, and other subpoenaed evidence that became public, Fang—now an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—saw a valuable research opportunity.

“I was able to obtain all that material, which is especially rich and rare to find, and to look at, when it’s a corrupt project, are there specific patterns of communication going on? Can we see some clues of corruption from their email exchanges?” Fang says. “I’m now working on a book looking into corruption in economic development projects as a whole, because, unfortunately, it’s actually more common than we think.”

The title of the book? “The working title is The Most F—d Up Place: An Anatomy of Corruption in Urban Economic Development,” Fang says. The profanity comes from an FBI agent’s colorful description of Tallahassee.

Fang says her students at the time were by turns appalled, dismayed, and motivated by the corruption scandal. “I’m really proud of some of my former students at Florida State, because they listened to me talk about this in class, and they got pissed,” she says. “One of my former students ran for the seat of the city commissioner in Tallahassee, and she is now proudly a city commissioner.”

In 2020, Fang was awarded an International Fellowship from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s China program to study the impacts of land tenure on children’s health in rural China. Research from her resulting working paper was published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Feminist Economics.

In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Fang shares more insights from her research, why planners need to learn to navigate local politics, and why she’s found action and research to be antidotes to despair.

JON GOREY: What is the general focus of your research, and how did your Lincoln Institute fellowship support that work?

KERRY FANG: My research is primarily focused on land use policy and its impact on equity and sustainability, as well as economic development policy. Both of these fields are very, very important pillars of urban planning, and they are also closely connected to each other.

The Lincoln fellowship helped me tremendously. As somebody who was brought up in China [where, prior to 2003, collective land rights in rural villages were typically allocated by household size and periodically adjusted], the particular question I was interested in was, does the ban on land adjustments, which was aimed at ending instability for rural households, have unintended consequences by denying land rights to women and children who came into a village after the ban? Would that affect their standing inside the family, and does that affect how the family distributes resources?

A lot of the prior research was focusing on the family as a whole—as though, if you benefit the family, everybody benefits. We all know that’s not the case. Who is the head of the family, who is really in charge of the resources of the family? Especially in the context of rural China, the man of the house is the one who will have the resources, and now he may also be the only one who is entitled to land rights. So what does that mean?

I was fascinated by the question, and with the Lincoln fellowship, I was able to do the survey and ask explicitly, who has land rights within this household, and look into how that affects the resource distribution, how that affects children’s health—which is becoming more of an issue in China. I found that when you deny children their land rights, their health deteriorates, and they are more likely to be obese. If the wife, the mother, has land rights, it’s more likely the family will have better health coverage. And if a girl has land rights, it’s more likely the father will spend some time with his daughter.

JG: What are you working on now, or hoping to work on next?

KF: On the land use front, I’ve always been looking into transfer of development rights. [While at Florida State University], I started to collaborate with other scholars who are really interested in coastal adaptation, and I started to look into using transfer of development rights as a tool to facilitate coastal adaptation. Because theoretically, it is the tool that can transfer development rights from high-risk areas to lower-risk areas. So it makes sense theoretically, but the practical applications are really lacking.

There are only a handful of programs with applications in the US. So far, there have only been either theoretical studies or individual case studies that have not systematically tracked their performance or the various challenges they have encountered. So that’s why I’ve started this work, to really look into these existing applications of using TDR for coastal adaptation, and to systematically track their performance.

On the other front of economic development, I’ve looked into how planners communicate with politicians, and whether the communication will shape the politicians’ decisions. I’m also collaborating right now with some computer scientists to do some text mining into the email exchanges from the Tallahassee case, to try to see, can we see some clues of corruption from their email exchanges? Is it possible to detect corruption from those materials?

For so many years I studied economics from more of a rational perspective. We are rational planners trying to come up with what’s best for the city, we do cost benefit analyses for public projects to determine what’s right for the city. But is that really what’s going on? A lot of these things are heavily shaped by politics, and power dynamics, and sometimes outright corruption. In almost every big city in the US, if you search ‘corruption in land development’ or economic development, chances are you’ll find something.

And the major projects that require so much public subsidy, they get passed anyway, despite overwhelming empirical evidence telling us mega projects mostly do not pay off. They still go through. So my book project is really going to explicitly address that issue, showing that this is what’s happening, this is the power dynamic and power imbalance that infiltrates urban economic development projects, and here are some of the clues to look for, to see it happening throughout every stage of the development, and warning signs so you may be able to catch it.

JG: What’s something that has surprised you in your research?

KF: The corruption piece definitely surprised me. I mean, I’m not naive, I know there’s corruption. I had not realized how deeply infiltrated it is to our lives, and how widespread it is, because we don’t talk about it that often, especially in the United States. In the literature, it’s treated like a developing country issue.

A lot of it happens exactly in the realm of my studies—in land development, economic development—because that’s where the money is, that’s where the power is. And we, trained as planners, in these government institutions, we more likely function as technician types. We have technical expertise, but we’re really not very good at navigating the political landscape.

JG: What’s something you wish more people understood about urban planning, land use, or economic development?

KF: That they are connected together, and that’s really important. I feel like we are a little bit over specialized in things, and we silo ourselves into different categories of things.

A lot of what I do is try to make connections. So my work in land use and environmental planning is trying to make a connection of using land use to promote environmental planning and coastal adaptation, which also supports economic development and broader social sustainability and equity. And my work in corruption and economic development is really connecting economic development and land development with urban politics, urban governance.

You can’t just look from one perspective without looking at the others. The urban system is a whole system.

JG: I was intrigued by one of the classes you teach, called Urban Informatics. Can you talk about that term, and some of the data journalism your students have done?

KF: This is an undergrad class that I’ve only taught once so far, but we are trying to make our students able to effectively use data to solve urban planning issues. The class has three modules. The first one is statistical methods as well as mapping and spatial analysis, and that’s really important for planning. The second module, I’m focusing on data visualization and data journalism, because effective communication [is so important]—as planners, not only do you have to be able to use data, but how do you communicate the data to your audience, and to different types of audiences? That means you have to effectively visualize your data, map your data, and tell a story with your data.

And the last module, I’m taking my students to the forefront of machine learning methods like web scraping, POI (point-of-interest), text mining, and interactive graphing. All the new stuff that as an urban planner, more and more, you will be exposed to—new data, new methods, real-time data that will be really important in the management of cities.

My students in last year’s class looked into different neighborhoods in Chicago, looking at the different demographic and economic characteristics. And as we all know—it’s not particularly shocking, but it’s still really amazing to see the students pull the data and to visualize it, and it’s just sharply being laid out how much spatial disparity there is in Chicago. They integrated a lot of good visualization techniques that they learned from the class to make really good maps of that. And they were able to tell a really good story about the driving forces of all these phenomena, all the sharp distinctions you’re seeing—what are some of the policies behind that, the social forces behind that, and what planners can do to address those issues.

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

KF: Both the political power thing and the climate issue. Both of these are the crises of our time, and on a dark day, I will feel like we’re hopeless on both fronts. The political power, they’re very powerful out there, and sometimes I feel like, how am I going to counter that? The climate issue is such a big issue that really needs a lot of global collaboration, but everybody is looking out for themselves. So that’s what’s keeping me up at night.

For me, what’s empowering is if I can do something. I think that’s part of why I’m studying using land use policy to help facilitate coastal adaptation to climate issues, and studying the power dynamics and the political process in urban economic development. Both of these are ways to keep my sanity and make me feel like I am doing something. I’m actively publishing these things to, first of all, raise awareness on these issues. Even if I cannot, myself, necessarily change things, if more people know about them, maybe I’m able to mobilize more people to action, like the actions my students have taken. That’s something I’m really proud of.

Especially for coastal adaptation, I felt like there are concrete, practical implications that can come out of my work that can directly factor into practice. As I am talking to the planners who are in charge of these TDR programs, I can really help them to run their programs better. And if that’s the case, I can help some of these communities cope with the climate change issue a little bit better, and that makes me feel empowered and more hopeful for the future.

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

Lead image: Kerry Fang, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Credit: Courtesy photo.

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

Managing major municipal accounts for BellSouth telecommunications for two decades, Darryl Washington learned a lot about the inner workings of local government. So in 2012, he started his own consulting firm, and has since led economic and community development efforts for a number of Alabama cities, including Birmingham and Montgomery.

Now Washington is back in Birmingham as the chief executive of Jefferson County Greenways, a new public-private organization formed in 2024 by the merger of three public green spaces. These outdoor spaces, Washington says, “are really infrastructure for our city … they’re also connective tissue for our communities.”

In 2024, Washington was invited to participate in the inaugural cohort of the Lincoln Vibrant Communities fellowship, a joint initiative of the Lincoln Institute and Claremont Lincoln University. The six-month LVC program, which aims to equip fellows with the leadership, policy, and public sector practice skills needed to grapple with vexing local challenges, combines online graduate courses, peer networking, and individual and group coaching with immersive, in-person training sessions.

In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Washington shares his passion for the outdoors, explains why governments need nonprofit partners, and reveals his newfound fascination with England’s centuries-old canal system.

JON GOREY: After many years working in economic development, you’ve taken on a new role, leading an organization focused on public green spaces. Can you talk a bit about your career arc and how you got to where you are now?

After I left BellSouth, I started my own consulting firm, and my first big client was the city of Irondale, a small city right outside of Birmingham. My scope of work for that contract was to help the city adopt their very first comprehensive plan. I did consulting for about five years, and then went to work for a community development corporation called Urban Impact, to create a plan to get the Birmingham Civil Rights District ready to become a national monument. Instead of relying strictly on local resources, we sought after national programs. We became a national Main Street-designated community [the 4th Avenue Historic District], which opened up all kinds of avenues for us and for the businesses in that district. We also connected with the Co.Starters program, which is a national program that teaches entrepreneurship.

After leaving Urban Impact, I had an opportunity to work for the city of Montgomery, to create their first-ever department of economic and community development. One of the big wins we had was bringing a national Main Street-designated community to Montgomery to focus on downtown revitalization. We also started several entrepreneurship and small business programs, like the Small Business One Stop Shop to connect local businesses, no matter where they are in the business cycle, to about 15 different resource providers to help them get their questions answered—whether they need assistance with a business plan, are seeking funding, or are looking at strategies to scale.

I got a call to come back to Birmingham to interview for a newly formed public-private partnership, Jefferson County Greenways, which merged the county’s three largest public green spaces: Red Mountain Park, Ruffner Mountain, and Turkey Creek Nature Preserve. This was a great opportunity for me because it merged my love for economic and community development with outdoor recreation, hiking, and mountain biking.

The Lincoln Institute has been tremendous for me in this role; I really have to highlight my LVC advisor, Stephanie Varnon-Hughes. She’s served as a business coach and a leadership coach for me as we begin to do a five-year strategic plan.

JG: The Lincoln Vibrant Communities leadership cohort included fellows from all over the country—what has that experience been like?

DW: When you do the kind of work I do … it’s kind of hard to describe what I do when I come home at night. But when you’re around practitioners who do similar work throughout the United States, it really is an opportunity to learn best practices, to build friendships and partnerships. And now I have in my Rolodex an extra 30-plus people I can reach out to, from New Orleans, New Mexico, Hawaii, and other places, and that has been the real value.

Our in-person convenings have all been rewarding, going to a different city and touring some of the things that are working for them. I’m thinking back to our tour of Chicago, and most recently, Denver, to learn what some people are doing locally on the ground. And more than anything, we all face similar challenges—funding, especially, is always an issue in this current environment, for both nonprofits and local governments. But being able to talk to people who are doing the same or similar things that you are doing, or different things, has truly been one of the most beneficial aspects of the cohort.

The combination of the academic and the practical expertise that comes with this program has been just a tremendous opportunity for me. We’re leaning toward utilizing the Teams program in our strategic planning process. I think the beauty of that opportunity is that my staff can be very involved in the strategic planning process.

JG: What’s something that has surprised you in your long career?

DW: Sometimes, no matter what you propose, there are going to be people who are diametrically opposed to it—just because. Birmingham is building out what’s called the Red Rock Trail System. It’s an aspiration of about 700 miles of connected bike lanes and trails and pedestrian walkways. And one of the trails, I remember, just as I was leaving Birmingham, they were announcing the trail in the neighborhood, and you had a couple of people come out to say, ‘We don’t want that, it’s going to bring crime.’

There was one lady, in particular, who was very vocal. Three years later, they interviewed her, and she now has a walking group that walks on the trail. She marveled at how property values have gone up, how businesses in close proximity to the trail are vibrant. A lot of times people don’t know what they don’t know, but you’ve got to always anticipate opposition.

JG: What is something you’ve learned or encountered in your work that you wish more people understood?

DW: Having worked for and with local governments, the government can’t do everything. It is government combined with nonprofits—the nonprofits are the gap fillers. Oftentimes, especially in the South, people think the government is supposed to solve all the problems. The cities that get it right are the cities that have an innovative local government, but also a myriad of different public-private partnerships, corporate partnerships, and regional collaborations. It truly is a team approach.

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

DW: In my current role, I have a team of about 27 highly mission-driven staff, and what keeps me up at night is retaining my talented staff. But what keeps me refreshed? I’m in my mid-50s, and most of my team is 25 to 35, my kids’ age. So what keeps me motivated? They keep me motivated, just how talented they are—they are sponges for wanting to learn—and just how innovative they are. It took me a while to acquiesce to being called “OG,” but I’m good in that role, because I like teaching, I like storytelling. And unlike my kids, they actually like to listen to my stories. So that keeps me refreshed.

JG: What’s a good book you’ve read recently, or a TV show you’ve streamed?

DW: I’m reading, for the third time, Joan Garry’s Nonprofits Are Messy. That’s a book about nonprofit leadership, and she also has a podcast that gives you practical tools that you can use if you’re in nonprofit leadership.

As far as streaming, I found myself recently enchanted with narrow boats in England, watching a lot of documentaries about people who live in narrow boats using the canal system. I think it’s called “Canal Boat Diaries,” and it chronicles different people who have adopted the narrow boat lifestyle. There’s a narrow boat hotel, there’s a narrow boat that sells art … there’s actually a narrow boat that does bicycle repair. I find it really intriguing. I guess from a historical perspective, those canals predated trains, that was the way industry and commerce took place throughout England, they built this elaborate canal system that is now being repurposed for tourism and lifestyle.

JG: What are some of your goals for Jefferson County Greenways in the coming years?

DW: There’s an opportunity for us to acquire more land for public use. There are also opportunities for us to expand our partnerships and programs. Our programs are unique in that we do a lot of educational programs with local schools, and we also do a lot of programs in the corporate community, where companies have volunteer work days. We connect with the Scouts, whether it’s building benches or bridges at our spaces. If we could expand our program staff, we could make even more impact.

And on a personal level, we have a hiking group that started organically, and we meet every Saturday at seven o’clock. And over 12 years, we’ve had over 800 different people join us, from all walks of life, all ages. Our youngest hiker is two years old, and she hikes on her dad’s back.

It’s amazing to see kids get introduced to nature for the first time. There are so many stories, like one of our board members, he and his wife, their first date was hiking on a trail. I’m on a mission to get as many people outdoors as possible, because for me, there’s a trilogy. When you’re outside, you connect spiritually, you definitely connect physically, to clean air and walking. But it’s also mental; I do some of my best journaling while I’m hiking. So I’m on a mission to share with others the euphoria I feel when I’m outside, because it’s free and it is so beneficial.

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

Lead image: Darryl Washington. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Some 50 miles inland from the iconic San Francisco Bay—east of the Golden Gate Bridge, beyond the Berkeley Hills and Mount Diablo—is the lesser-known California Delta, more than 1,100 square miles of lowlands and estuaries near the city of Stockton, at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

Those two waterways alone drain about half of California, and much of that water gets pumped southward and westward to more populous areas of the state. Almost all the land in the delta—98 percent, much of it farmland—has been reclaimed since the 19th century with the help of hundreds of miles of levees and channels that drained what was once an inland sea during the wet winter months.

However, those drained wetlands, deprived of their natural sogginess, have been subsiding for decades as the peaty soil gets exposed to oxygen. “When you dry those out and make them terrestrial, they subside, the land elevation sinks,” says Brett Milligan, professor of landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of California, Davis. Despite its inland setting, “you have many places in the delta that are up to 20 or 25 feet below sea level.”

As sea levels rise, tidal saltwater intrusion from San Francisco Bay is increasingly a problem—especially during droughts and the summer dry season, when there’s less freshwater draining from the rivers to push back against rising tidal flows. Higher sea levels also put added strain on protective levees as the delta behind them sinks, increasing the risk of their potential failure.

An increase in salinity creates a lot of problems—for agriculture, for the ecosystem, and for the drinking water supply of millions of Californians. “We have one of the largest water infrastructure systems in the world,” Milligan says, largely focused on moving water from the wetter northern parts of the state to the more arid southern regions—“and the delta is sort of that switching point from north to south.”

This tangle of interconnected issues is why the delta is often regarded as a “wicked problem,” Milligan says. “There are so many factors involved. It’s very complex; conditions are also changing quite fast.” Climate change is exacerbating nearly every challenge facing the delta: Tides are getting higher. Droughts are getting more frequent and more intense. Winter snowpack in the uplands would once have held back freshwater long into the spring, but it now melts earlier, and more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow to begin with.

That variety of factors makes the problem more complex, but it also means there are multiple ways of looking at—and perhaps addressing—the overarching issue of salinity in the delta. To help the delta community discuss and better understand some of the available solutions, Milligan and colleagues are conducting a series of participatory scenario planning workshops focused on salinity management as part of a four-year, multi-campus University of California project called Just Transitions in the Delta.

Exploring Multiple Futures to ‘Liberate the Present’ 

Scenario planning is a type of collective visioning process that invites community members to imagine and evaluate a set of specific, possible futures. It’s an inherently participatory process, but Milligan is foregrounding that idea of inclusion and equity, intentionally seeking out voices who don’t typically have a seat at the decision-making table.

By engaging dozens of people from across the delta’s diverse population—from farmers to Indigenous tribal members to residents of communities bearing a disproportionate burden of environmental pollution—Milligan hopes to build a broader understanding of the adaptation strategies available, and what tradeoffs each one presents. “We were really interested in trying to explore, within a context where people are often at odds, could this type of scenario planning around salinity management options be a way to build trust and mutual understanding?” he says.

The project is now in its third year, and Milligan and his colleagues presented their progress at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Consortium for Scenario Planning conference in 2025. (Registration is now open for the 2026 conference, to be held February 4–6, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah.)

So far, Milligan’s team has conducted more than half a dozen workshops with well over 100 total participants—including two main public workshops in 2024 and 2025, as well as smaller sessions requested by Indigenous groups and vulnerable communities—with the goal of first deciding upon the suite of scenarios to be included, then designing and refining them.

“The first thing we did was a lot of outreach and interviews,” Milligan says, to determine and design the six main scenarios to be considered. The questions ranged from what people valued most about the delta, to which salinity management practices they wanted the team to explore, to who else ought to be included in adaptation discussions. Notably, Milligan says, 83 percent of respondents felt that past decision-making in the delta had not been equitable.

Using feedback from those interviews, the team designed a set of six scenarios for evaluation, which continue to be refined as workshops yield more feedback, and created an immersive, interactive exhibition of scenario narratives and maps ahead of the second full public workshop.

The first scenario is simply “Business as Usual,” which extrapolates current trends into the future as a sort of baseline from which to compare other adaptation measures. The second scenario models the Delta Conveyance Project, a long-discussed, partially permitted 40-mile water supply tunnel that could be built beneath the delta. The controversial tunnel is not particularly popular among many residents, Milligan explains, “but a lot of people wanted us to model that, to compare it to the other options.”

The third and fourth scenarios are nature-based restoration solutions. The “Eco Machine” approach would use strategically placed green infrastructure to reduce salinity intrusion and create recreational and ecological benefits. The “New Green Watershed,” meanwhile, is more ambitious in scope, phasing in green infrastructure across the entire region, along with carbon banking, land repatriation to Indigenous communities, and wet soil agriculture (such as rice farming) to reverse land subsidence and transition the delta to a regenerative green economy.

“That was driven by tribal input asking us to think about the delta more holistically,” Milligan says. “A lot of people are concerned about flooding, and interested in what can be done upstream in terms of land management, better fire stewardship, restoration of meadows, and things like that, that will influence when and how water comes down,” he says. “Could you reinvent the delta in a way that’s more sustainable and make that economically viable?”

The last two scenarios focus on more traditional infrastructure, but implemented and managed in smarter ways. “Bolster and Fortify” models how major engineering investments in the delta’s gray infrastructure—such as barriers, operable gates, and augmented levees—could reduce salinity and protect subsided land from levee breaches. “Calling on Reserves” focuses on operating upstream dams and reservoirs differently—allowing more water out when necessary to push back against tidal intrusion, for example—combined with statewide investments in increased water efficiency and storage.

In the large public workshops, participants have so far ranked the two nature-based solutions most favorably (with the tunnel and business-as-usual scenarios battling it out for last place).

Those workshops also sought input on how each scenario ought to be assessed. The team is now using hydrodynamic and other modeling methods to evaluate and score each scenario according to six criteria participants selected: water quality and flow, ecological restoration, Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, recreation, and economy. A final public workshop in 2026 will present the fully modeled and scored scenarios, and ask participants to rank their preferences.

“What I find most useful about scenario planning is exploring multiple futures as a way to kind of liberate the present and how we think about futures. There’s not just one way the world can be,” Milligan says. He notes that people seem to be more open to understanding other people’s perspectives in the context of specific scenarios.

Encouragingly, post-workshop surveys have confirmed that participants feel the process has been useful. “We get very positive feedback from people saying they felt heard,” Milligan says. But voicing opinions is not the only reason people are attending the workshops; many have said they specifically came to hear what others had to say. “I’ve never heard that in my 12 years working in the delta,” he says.

“People are showing up because they’re curious about how other people experience this and think about this, which was a goal for our project—can we foster that kind of learning space? It seems that many people are coming to these because they want to learn; they want to understand other ways of how it can be.”

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

Lead image: Middle River Bridge near Discovery Bay in the California Delta. Credit: toddarbini via iStock/Getty Images Plus.