Aftab Pureval, electo en 2021, está haciendo historia como el primer alcalde asiático estadounidense de Cincinnati. Se crio en el suroeste de Ohio, fue hijo de primera generación de estadounidenses y trabajó en una juguetería cuando estaba en la secundaria. Después de graduarse en la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad Estatal de Ohio, Pureval ejerció varios cargos en la comunidad jurídica, entre ellos, abogado en Procter & Gamble, antes de ingresar al servicio público. Ejerció como secretario del Tribunal del condado de Hamilton de 2016 a 2021, y fue el primer demócrata en ocupar dicha oficina en más de 100 años. Pureval reside en el norte del barrio de Clifton, en Cincinnati, con su esposa y sus dos hijos. A principios de este año, habló con nuestro miembro sénior, Anthony Flint, para el pódcast Land Matters. Esta transcripción se editó por motivos de espacio y claridad.

Anthony Flint: Has atraído mucha atención por lo que algunas personas denominan una “responsabilidad heroica” de preservar el parque de viviendas unifamiliares de la ciudad y mantenerlo lejos de las manos de los inversionistas externos. Explíquenos brevemente cuáles fueron los logros en colaboración con Port of Cincinnati.

Aftab Pureval: Solo para brindar un poco más de contexto, Cincinnati es una de las antiguas ciudades industriales. Tenemos una larga y orgullosa tradición de ser el destino final del Ferrocarril Subterráneo. Fuimos la puerta de entrada a la libertad para muchos esclavos que escapaban de esa experiencia horrible. Tenemos muchos vecindarios históricos, muchas construcciones históricas, y tenemos mucha infraestructura antigua y viviendas unifamiliares antiguas, lo que, sumado al hecho de que somos una ciudad asequible en el contexto nacional, nos convierte en el blanco principal de los inversionistas institucionales.

Desafortunadamente, Cincinnati figura en lista nacional tras lista nacional en cuanto a la tasa de aumento de los alquileres. El factor principal que impulsa esta situación proviene de esos inversionistas, que no son de la ciudad y no tienen ningún interés en el bienestar de Cincinnati y sus inquilinos, y que acaparan todas las viviendas unifamiliares baratas, no hacen nada para invertir en ellas, pero duplican o triplican los alquileres de un día para el otro. La ciudad está haciendo muchas cosas a través de litigaciones, por medio de la aplicación del código . . . para hacerles saber que no estamos jugando. Si vas a tener un comportamiento depredador en nuestra comunidad, no te defenderemos.

Además, hemos tomado medidas en una etapa temprana para prevenir que esto suceda al asociarnos con The Port . . . Cuando muchas propiedades salieron a la venta porque un inversionista institucional las incluyó en un bloque de venta, The Port gastó US$ 14,5 millones para comprar más de 190 viviendas unifamiliares, y superó las apuestas de otros 13 inversionistas institucionales . . . Durante el año pasado, The Port trabajó para modificar esas propiedades a fin de que cumplan con los requisitos [y de encontrar] compradores calificados, a menudo, ciudadanos que están trabajando en la pobreza o de clase media-baja, que jamás han poseído una vivienda.

Este año estamos trabajando en tres de las 194 de esas viviendas disponibles para la venta. Es un gran éxito en desde donde se lo mire . . . pero es solo una herramienta en la que The Port y la ciudad están trabajando para aumentar la capacidad de pago de la vivienda en todos nuestros barrios.

AF: ¿Qué aprendió de esto que pueda transferirse a otras ciudades? Se requiere mucho capital para superar la apuesta de un inversionista institucional.

AP: Es verdad, se requieren muchos fondos. Por eso es que necesitamos más flexibilidad del gobierno federal y del estatal para brindarles a las municipalidades las herramientas necesarias para evitar que esto suceda en una primera instancia. Ahora, una vez que un inversionista institucional clava sus garras en una comunidad, no hay mucho que la ciudad pueda hacer para responsabilizarlo.

Como hemos visto, la mejor estrategia es comprar grandes cantidades de propiedades en una etapa temprana. Muchas ciudades reciben muchos dólares del gobierno federal por medio del Plan de Rescate Estadounidense (ARP, por su sigla en inglés). Hemos usado gran parte de los dólares del ARP no solo para que el dinero llegue a las manos de las personas que más lo necesitan, lo que es de vital importancia en este momento, sino también para asociarnos a otras alianzas público-privadas o a The Port, a fin de proporcionarles los recursos necesarios para comprar grandes cantidades de suelo y conservarlo.

Este es un momento único para las ciudades que tienen más flexibilidad [con] los recursos que provienen del gobierno federal. Incentivaría a todos los alcaldes y consejos a que realmente piensen de forma crítica sobre el uso de los fondos, no solo en el corto plazo, sino también en el largo plazo, para enfrentar a algunas de estas fuerzas macroeconómicas.

AF: Cincinnati se convirtió en un destino de residencia más atractivo, y la población aumentó ligeramente tras años de recesión. ¿Considera a Cincinnati como un refugio del clima o de la pandemia? ¿Qué implicaciones tiene este crecimiento?

AP: Lo que amo de mi trabajo como alcalde es que no me centro necesariamente en los próximos dos o cuatro años, sino en los próximos 100 años. En este momento, estamos atravesando un cambio de paradigma debido a la pandemia. La forma en la que vivimos, trabajamos y jugamos está cambiando drásticamente. El trabajo remoto está transformando por completo nuestro estilo de vida económico en todo el país, pero, en particular, aquí en el Medio Oeste.

No me cabe duda de que debido al cambio climático, debido al aumento del costo de vida en la costa, habrá una migración hacia el interior. No sé si será entre los próximos 50 o 75 años, pero sucederá. Estamos viendo cómo grandes empresas toman decisiones con base en el cambio climático. Tan solo a dos horas al norte de Cincinnati, Intel está invirtiendo US$ 200.000 millones para crear la planta semiconductora más amplia del país, atraída por nuestro acceso a agua dulce y la resiliencia climática de nuestra región.

Ahora, no me malinterpreten: el cambio climático nos afecta a todos . . . pero en Ohio y Cincinnati, no observamos los incendios forestales, las sequías, los huracanes, los terremotos, la erosión costera que vemos en otras partes del país, lo que nos hace un refugio seguro del cambio climático no solo para la inversión privada sino también para las personas.

Cincinnati está creciendo, en parte, porque, en este momento, nuestra economía se está expandiendo, pero creo que realmente veremos un crecimiento exponencial en las próximas décadas debido a estos factores masivos que empujan a la gente hacia el interior del país. Para asegurarnos de que en el futuro las inversiones y el crecimiento demográfico no desplacen a nuestros residentes actuales, tenemos que estabilizar el mercado ahora y prepararnos para tal crecimiento..

AF: ¿Cuáles son los cambios en el uso del suelo y las mejoras de transporte en las que se está concentrando con relación a esto?

AP: Si queremos que esto salga bien, debemos hacer una revisión y una reforma integrales de nuestras políticas. Nos estuvimos reuniendo con las partes interesadas para [explorar cómo] se vería una Cincinnati moderna. Creo que se vería como un barrio denso y diverso por el que se podría caminar, y tendría un buen transporte público e inversiones en arte público. Ahora mismo, la zonificación de la ciudad de Cincinnati no está promoviendo esos tipos de barrios. Cerca del 70 por ciento de nuestra ciudad se zonificó exclusivamente para uso unifamiliar, lo que representa una restricción artificial en la cantidad de oferta que podemos crear. A su vez, esto está aumentando los alquileres y los impuestos a la propiedad de forma artificial, lo que está haciendo que muchos de nuestros antiguos residentes, incluso aquellos que poseen sus viviendas, se vean desplazados.

Si nos tomamos con seriedad la desconcentración de la pobreza y la desegregación de nuestra ciudad, entonces tenemos que analizar las prohibiciones de unidades multifamiliares. Tenemos que analizar los requisitos de estacionamiento para empresas y viviendas. Tenemos que considerar el desarrollo orientado al transporte público junto con nuestras líneas de tránsito rápido de autobuses. Tenemos que considerar oportunidades creativas para crear más viviendas como unidades accesorias, pero nada de esto es fácil . . . Tengo la convicción de que podemos lograr algunos cambios sustanciales para nuestro código de zonificación a fin de propiciar una mayor capacidad de pago, fomentar más transporte público y, simplemente, ser una ciudad más ecológica. En este punto, asumimos el compromiso de que, cuando estén disponibles, solo compraremos vehículos para la cuidad que sean eléctricos. Tenemos la granja solar administrada por una ciudad más grande de todo el país, lo que contribuye significativamente a nuestro consumo de energía.

AF: Un poco de esto es volver al futuro, porque la ciudad tenía tranvías. ¿Tiene la sensación de que existe una apreciación de eso, de que esos tiempos, en realidad, hicieron que la ciudad funcione mejor?

AP: La ciudad solía ser densa, solía tener tranvías increíbles, transporte público, y luego, lamentablemente, las ciudades, no solo Cincinnati sino en todo el país, vieron una disminución constante de la población, y una pérdida de residentes desplazados a los suburbios. Ahora las personas quieren regresar a la ciudad, pero tenemos el trabajo duro de deshacer lo que muchas ciudades intentaron hacer, que fue crear vecindarios de suburbios dentro de una ciudad para incentivar que la gente de los suburbios regrese. Se trata de deshacer un poco el pasado a la vez que nos concentramos en lo que supo existir.

AF: ¿Qué le preocupa más sobre este tipo de transiciones, y qué identifica como el problema principal que enfrentan las personas de ingresos bajos y comunidades de color en Cincinnati?

AP: Desplazamiento. Si no podemos ser una ciudad asequible para sus residentes, estos se irán, lo que es perjudicial en muchos aspectos. Si la ciudad no crece, una ciudad de nuestra magnitud y con nuestra ubicación dentro del país, entonces muere, muere rápido. Las ciudades de magnitudes como la nuestra tienen que crecer, y para que esto ocurra, no solo debemos reunir talento, sino también preservar a las familias y las comunidades antiguas que han estado aquí desde el primer momento..

Ninguna ciudad del país descubrió una forma de crecer sin desplazamiento. Los factores del mercado, los factores económicos son tan profundos y es tan difícil influir sobre estos, y los recursos de la ciudad son tan limitados, que es realmente difícil . . . A menudo, supongo que me frustro por no contar con suficientes recursos, suficiente autoridad para tener un impacto significativo en las fuerzas macroeconómicas que están ingresando a la ciudad. Ya que, si alcanzamos nuestro sueño, que es más inversión, más crecimiento, esto conllevará consecuencias negativas, y es realmente difícil de gestionar ambos..

AF: La página web de la alcaldía dice que Cincinnati está bien posicionada para ser líder en el cambio climático localmente y en el exterior. ¿Qué cree que la ciudad tiene para ofrecer que hace que se distinga en términos de acción climática?

AP: Todas nuestras iniciativas políticas se analizaron con dos lentes. El primer lente es el de la equidad racial y el segundo, el del clima. Esto se aplica a todo lo que hacemos, ya sea nuestra valuación de la silvicultura urbana, el análisis de un mapa de calor de nuestra ciudad o las inversiones en árboles no solo para limpiar el aire sino también para enfriar nuestros barrios, [o] nuestras inversiones en biocarbón. Somos una de las únicas tres ciudades en todo el mundo que recibieron un copioso subsidio por parte de Bloomberg Philanthropies para seguir innovando en el mundo del biocarbón, que es un subproducto de la quema de madera, que es un imán de carbono increíble que ayuda con la escorrentía de aguas pluviales a la vez que captura el carbono del aire.

Últimamente, las empresas y personas que miran hacia el futuro consideran al cambio climático en ese futuro. Si busca una ciudad que sea resiliente ante el cambio climático y además realice inversiones cuantiosas en tecnología climática, entonces Cincinnati es el destino indicado para usted.

Anthony Flint es miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo, conduce el ciclo de pódcasts Land Matters y es editor colaborador de Land Lines.

Imagen principal: Aftab Pureval. Crédito: Amanda Rossmann/USA Today Network.

Puede que el hecho de que el financiamiento de la vivienda pueda considerarse una política de suelo no sea evidente a simple vista, e incluso menos evidente el motivo por el que los opinólogos como yo describimos la regulación financiera nacional, como la Ley de Reinversión Comunitaria, como una de las políticas de suelo más importantes del siglo XX. ¿Cómo diablos podría la regulación financiera nacional influir sobre el uso del suelo local, y qué tiene que ver la actividad de inversión y préstamo de los bancos con el suelo?

Como ya he señalado aquí en otras ocasiones, los mapas de préstamos federales discriminatorios diseñados por la Corporación de Préstamos para Propietarios de Viviendas y adoptados por la Administración Federal de Vivienda (FHA, por su sigla en inglés) en la década de 1930 tuvieron un impacto duradero. Unos 90 años más tarde, una revisión de 2022 llevada a cabo por la Reserva Federal informó sobre una investigación que finalmente vinculó estos mapas con inequidades contemporáneas en cuanto a oportunidades económicas, resultados sanitarios, acceso a espacios verdes, efectos de islas de calor, mortalidad por la COVID y expectativa de vida.

La Ley de Reinversión Comunitaria (CRA, por su sigla en inglés) fue una de tres acciones del Congreso, posteriores a la Ley de Derechos Civiles de 1964, diseñadas para remediar el daño infligido a las comunidades por las políticas federales de financiación de la vivienda. Décadas de escases de capital y discriminación intencionada han vaciado las ciudades de los Estados Unidos y empobrecido a millones de estadounidenses y sus comunidades.

A raíz de la Ley de Vivienda Justa de 1968, que prohibió la discriminación en las transacciones inmobiliarias, y la Ley de Divulgación de Hipotecas para Viviendas de 1975, que exigió que las entidades crediticias informen sobre sus actividades con precisión geográfica, la CRA impuso una obligación positiva, que se aprobó en 1977, a los bancos regulados por el estado para que satisfagan las necesidades crediticias de todas las comunidades en las áreas en las que ofrecen servicios. No le indicó a los bancos lo que no podían hacer, sino lo que tenían que hacer para revertir décadas de mal comportamiento.

Tres agencias federales, la Reserva Federal, la Corporación Federal de Seguro de Depósitos (FDIC, por su sigla en inglés) y la Oficina del Contralor de la Moneda (OCC, por su sigla en inglés), se encargaron de garantizar que los bancos cumplieran la nueva regulación. Curiosamente, la ley solo se aplicó por completo doce años más tarde, cuando a los reguladores se les encomendó que aprobaran la expansión geográfica de los bancos, principalmente a través de fusiones o adquisiciones.

La CRA se ha revisado en numerosas oportunidades para responder a la industria bancaria en crecimiento. Recientemente, en 2020, la OCC propuso una regla de modernización para abordar el cambio del mundo físico a los bancos digitales, pero la Reserva Federal, la FDIC y miles de grupos comunitarios se opusieron. La propuesta se revocó en 2021, pero pocos supervisores argumentarían que la CRA no necesita una modernización. Más apremiante que el banco digital son las preocupaciones sobre el enorme cambio en la concesión de préstamos hipotecarios, que se aleja de los bancos regulados y se consolida cada vez más en entidades crediticias no bancarias.

Según el Consejo Federal de Examen de Instituciones Financieras, en 2021, 10 de las 12 entidades crediticias más importantes (y cuatro de las primeras cinco) eran empresas hipotecarias independientes. Estas entidades crediticias no bancarias no tienen obligaciones positivas de analizar la discriminación histórica.  Más allá de la observancia de la Ley de Divulgación de Hipotecas para Viviendas, la regulación de su actividad crediticia es muy deficiente. Sin embargo, no están fuera del alcance de las políticas de suelo en cuanto a la regulación financiera.

Las entidades crediticias no bancarias dependen de las grandes corporaciones de la industria para obtener capital. Según el Urban Institute, las empresas patrocinadas por el gobierno (GSE, por su sigla en inglés), Fannie Mae y Freddie Mac, compraron alrededor del 60 por ciento de las hipotecas que surgieron en los Estados Unidos en 2021. La FHA y el Departamento de Asuntos de los Veteranos (VA, por su sigla en inglés) de los Estados Unidos fueron los responsables de otro 16 por ciento. Cabe destacar que las entidades no bancarias dieron origen a alrededor del 70 por ciento de los préstamos comprados por las GSE y a más del 90 por ciento de los préstamos respaldados por el gobierno en 2021. Por lo tanto, si alguien quisiera continuar las medidas positivas para satisfacer las necesidades de financiamiento de la vivienda de los mercados desatendidos, el camino es bastante obvio: buscar marcos de políticas nuevas o existentes que brinden oportunidades, por medio de la regulación de las GSE, para afectar el comportamiento crediticio de las entidades no bancarias.

Por suerte, las grandes corporaciones de financiamiento de la vivienda se someten a controles públicos. En 2008, la Agencia Federal de Financiamiento de Vivienda (FHFA, por su sigla en inglés) colocó a Fannie Mae y Freddie Mac bajo la tutela del estado, cuando se volvieron insolventes durante la crisis de ejecución hipotecaria. En 2017, la FHFA implementó el programa Duty to Serve, que impuso obligaciones legales a las GSE para que se ocupen de tres mercados específicos desatendidos: viviendas prefabricadas, preservación de la vivienda y viviendas rurales. Bajo el programa Duty to Serve, Fannie Mae y Freddie Mac tuvieron que presentar tres planes anuales que describieran cómo atenderían mejor tales mercados. Los planes se ultiman con base en la participación del público y se informan en el Congreso anualmente.

IEn 2021, la FHFA impuso obligaciones adicionales a las GSE para ampliar el acceso a oportunidades de vivienda asequible, decente y segura: ahora deben preparar e implementar planes de Financiamiento de la Vivienda Equitativa de forma anual, y presentar informes sobre estos, en los que se describa cómo “resolverán sustancialmente las diferencias étnicas y raciales en la propiedad de la vivienda y la riqueza que han persistido por décadas”.

La década posterior a la primera aplicación de la CRA en 1989 fue la época dorada para el desarrollo de las comunidades ya que los defensores se movilizaron para presionar a los bancos a fin de que cumplieran sus obligaciones en virtud de la CRA. Casi de inmediato, cientos de miles de millones de dólares de nuevos préstamos se dirigieron a las áreas de servicio de la CRA. La tasa nacional de propiedad de la vivienda subió de un 64 por ciento a un 68 por ciento, y el crecimiento de los barrios de ingresos bajos y medios duplicó las cifras nacionales. Prosperaron las corporaciones de desarrollo comunitario y se incubó la industria de financiamiento de desarrollo comunitario.

Nos encontramos en un momento similar en cuanto a los planes de Financiamiento de la Vivienda Equitativa y Duty to Serve, que he decidido llamar “la Nueva CRA”. La FHFA está construyendo una vigilancia regulatoria rigurosa, y, con la ayuda del Instituto Lincoln, el sector civil ha vuelto a movilizarse para pedir por mejores planes, mejor observancia y mejores resultados.

El año pasado, reunimos a 20 de los mayores desarrolladores de viviendas asequibles para lanzar la Coalición de Mercados Hipotecarios Desatendidos (UMMC, por su sigla en inglés). El objetivo es transmitir un mensaje unificado que aliente a las GSE, junto con nuestra colaboración, a que cumplan su misión respecto de los planes de Financiamiento de la Vivienda Equitativa y Duty to Serve. Juntos podemos trabajar con las GES para diseñar mejores productos crediticios para financiar la compra de viviendas prefabricadas, fortalecer la capacidad de las Instituciones de Financiamiento de Desarrollo Comunitario para crear hipotecas nuevas en los mercados de difícil alcance, y persuadir a la FHFA para que apoye los nuevos programas pilotos de préstamos para evaluar los productos y procesos nuevos a fin de atender mejor estos mercados.

La UMMC está desmitificando el mercado hipotecario secundario (donde las entidades crediticias y los inversionistas compran y venden préstamos y derechos de servicio) y proponiendo soluciones realistas para fomentar un cambio real en los sistemas. En su primer año como coalición, la UMMC alcanzó una importante victoria cuando la FHFA rechazó los nuevos planes del Duty to Serve presentados por las GSE y pidió planes más ambiciosos con objetivos más específicos como aquellos reflejados en un proyecto integral que la coalición había preparado. Entre las iniciativas recientes de la UMMC se encuentran un sistema de puntuación que muestra en qué medida las GSE respetaron el proyecto y un tablero que brindará datos cuantitativos detallados y accesibles sobre su desempeño.

Los planes de Financiamiento de la Vivienda Equitativa y Duty to Serve no sustituyen la Ley de Reinversión Comunitaria. La CRA sigue siendo la política de suelo más importante de nuestro arsenal nacional de regulaciones financieras, y es responsable de las inmensas cantidades de crédito nuevo que regresó a las comunidades a las que se les había negado el acceso durante décadas.

Pero los tiempos han cambiado. Cuando se aprobó la CRA, la FDIC aseguró alrededor de 18.000 bancos. Hoy en día son 4.844. Y, por si fuera poco, muchos bancos están cerrando y reduciendo su negocio hipotecario minorista, para ceder el espacio a entidades crediticias no bancarias. Podemos intentar reformular la CRA para reflejar esta nueva realidad de mercado, o podemos cumplir con las expectativas del mercado tal como está.

Las brechas raciales y étnicas respecto a la propiedad de la vivienda siguen siendo dolorosamente altas, al igual que la inaceptable y persistente desigualdad racial de ingresos. Si esperamos hacer mella en cualquiera de estos aspectos, tendremos que encontrar una forma de expandir la propiedad de la vivienda de formas sin precedentes.

Nadie esperaba que la CRA reparara losimpactos vergonzosos de políticas de préstamos engañosas. Los planes de Financiamiento de la Vivienda Equitativa y Duty to Serve son un maravilloso complemento de la CRA. Quizás una cartera de regulaciones de préstamos sea un enfoque más apropiado que una solución universal. Deseamos que la UMMC empodere a los profesionales y defensores para que les exijan a las GSE y la FHFA lo que necesitan a fin de afrontar estos inmensos desafíos.

Imagen: El presidente Jimmy Carter firma la Ley de Reinversión Comunitaria en 1977. Crédito: Reserva Federal.

We can trace the origins of the Lincoln Institute to a chance encounter between a Cleveland inventor and industrialist and a barnstorming political economist in the 1890s. John C. Lincoln, an engineer who invented arc welders, high-torque electric motors, braking systems for streetcars, and even an electric car, was deeply moved by Henry George’s impassioned account of the stubbornness of urban poverty in the face of the unprecedented wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. Lincoln subsequently devoted years of his life—and a big chunk of his fortune—to advancing George’s ideas for social improvement.

George showed in a powerful and persuasive way that poverty was the result of distributive injustice. The wrong people were benefiting from economic growth. Idle landowners could sit and watch land values increase exponentially, while the productive classes, labor and capital, were taxed to support the government. George proposed replacing corporate and income taxes with a new tax that expropriated the unearned value of land from its owners. He estimated that land tax revenue would be sufficient both to eliminate poverty and to fund the government.

Given his own disposition toward social justice, ethics, efficiency, and basic fairness, this proposition resonated with John Lincoln. But the failure of George’s policy prescriptions to gain any political traction mystified him. One reason he could see was the lack of general academic embrace of George’s analytics and his conclusions. Quite frankly, except for a handful of universities like Columbia, UC–Berkeley, or the University of Chicago, George’s work was marginalized if it was taught at all.

It was never considered a mainstream component of the training of economists or political scientists. Lincoln decided to remedy this by creating the Lincoln Foundation and partnering with universities to establish programs in land economics and taxation. And that’s what the Lincoln Foundation did from 1946 until 1974. In 1974, John’s son, David C. Lincoln, took a hard look at the impact of the foundation’s efforts to mainstream land economics and taxation in the fields of economics and political science. He was underwhelmed. The programs supported with the foundation’s resources were evanescent and land economics remained specialized in a few universities. He decided to try a new approach and established the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to bring research and training under our own roof. And David was clear about one thing that he often repeated: “Henry George’s work was not about promoting the land tax—it was about eliminating poverty.” Thus, the Lincoln Institute was founded on the notion that land policy was not an end, but a means to solve bigger economic, social, and environmental challenges.

With that clarity, measurable impact quickly followed. In the 1980s, the arrival of Boston lawyer and conservationist Kingsbury Browne as a Lincoln Institute fellow led to the scaling up and national networking of private land conservation in the United States. Today, members of the Land Trust Alliance, an organization that evolved from Browne’s work, have protected more than 57 million acres of private land in perpetuity in the United States. In the 1990s, the Lincoln Institute invented computer-assisted mass appraisal. Systems built on that legacy are now used by local governments everywhere. In the 2000s, new international programs in Latin America supported, tested, and documented modern land value capture tools and techniques. Dozens of countries and thousands of jurisdictions are now studying ways to use these tools to mobilize their own public revenue. In the 2010s, the Lincoln Institute went global, establishing the International Land Conservation Network to promote private land conservation and sharing our work on the global stage at venues like Habitat III.

There is an important point here (and I know I buried the lede): we accomplished decades of significant work even though we could not easily define the discipline in which we operated. Over the last few years, we’ve been trying to rectify that. This spring, the board and management of the Lincoln Institute tried to effectively define land policy. By effectively, I mean clearly, accessibly, and efficiently. We found the task so daunting that we even consulted artificial intelligence. In my spring column, I shared our challenges and asked for your help. I asked you to submit your best definitions of land policy and offered a prize.

I’m delighted to report that we got many submissions. They ranged from the artistic to the theological. They arrived from four continents, with the furthest submission coming from New Zealand. They came mainly from individuals, but included a group effort from a network of 40 practitioners in Latin America. They ranged in length from 12 to 548 words. I even submitted my own definition.

While the judges were duly impressed with the scope and creativity of the submissions, I’m afraid I have unsettling news for the Luddites among us: they did not think we outperformed the AI bot. To remind you, here is the 85-word definition offered by ChatGPT:

Land policy refers to the rules and regulations that govern the use, ownership, and management of land. It involves making decisions about how land should be used, who should have access to it, and what activities are permitted on it. Land policy can affect a wide range of issues, from urban development and environmental conservation to property rights and social equity. Its goal is to balance the interests of different stakeholders and ensure that land is used in ways that benefit society as a whole.

That doesn’t mean, however, that accolades aren’t due. In the view of the judges, the best submission was from Harvey Jacobs:

Land policy is about the rules, the culture that underlies those rules, and the social expectations for the use of land. It draws together government, the market, and private actors. It has formal and informal outputs. Formal outputs are often plans, regulations, and programs. Informal outputs are often socially accepted patterns for how land is to be used and our behavior upon land.

The most economical submission was a haiku written by PD Blumenthal—

Use, control, share land
Protect earth, water, and air
To benefit all

—and the most creative submission was a poem entitled “A More Stealthy Georgist Cat,” by David Harold Chester. It is too long to reprint here, but you can read it in its entirety elsewhere on our site.

The pithiest submission was from Ben Brown:

Land policy is the bundle of rules through which governments formalize wishful thinking for responding to competing demands for land use in a future that is both inevitable and uncertain.

Even though we haven’t yet outperformed artificial intelligence, I am very happy with the outcome of this exercise. It affirms a couple of important things. First, land policy has a vast scope, and it touches many aspects of life. As such, maybe it is okay that it eludes easy definition. Second, it is possible to spend years doing something that you cannot easily explain. I’m guessing land policy experts aren’t the only people who cannot explain at get-togethers with their extended families what exactly they do.

It occurs to me that the problem might be taxonomical. In taxonomy, it might be harder to define a classification than it is to give an example of something in that classification. For the life of me, I can never remember the differences between class, order, family, genus, or species, but if pressed I can give an example of something in each.

In the end, I’m going to give everyone who submitted an entry in the contest a book of their choice from our impressive and ever-expanding library of land policy publications. In addition, I will give the authors of each of the four distinguished submissions above their choice of five books each.

It was a great exercise, and we appreciate the thought and effort put into all the submissions. We appreciate even more your collegiality, and we’re honored to share this hard-to-define endeavor with all of you. What started with a chance encounter between a barnstorming reformer and an inventor more than a century ago is even more relevant today: finding answers in land to improve the quality of life.

Lead image: Devonyu via iStock/ Getty Images Plus.

With sophisticated market research powered by prodigious profits, corporate real estate investors have long had the upper hand over vulnerable homeowners and the groups trying to protect them.

Investors can identify distressed homes in otherwise gentrifying neighborhoods, snap them up at a discount, and leave them empty for years waiting for nearby home values to rise. They can target longtime, elderly homeowners who may need to sell at a discount. And with plenty of cash on hand—and a new playbook that includes renting out houses rather than just flipping them—they can outbid individual homebuyers as they turn bedrooms into balance sheet items.

Now, a new data mapping tool from the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) can help equip nonprofits, advocates, and local governments with similarly powerful technology to help identify and defend affordable housing stock threatened by real estate speculators and absentee landlords.

“It’s a very uneven playing field between private investors, who have the capital and are willing to invest the capital to get this market intelligence, and nonprofits that are struggling to keep the doors open, let alone invest in platforms like this,” says Jeff Allenby, CGS director of Geospatial Technology. “What you see is governments and nonprofits continuously trying to play catch up.”

Down-to-the-Parcel Data

In the wake of the Great Recession, corporations increasingly started purchasing and then renting out not just apartment buildings, but also single-family homes—especially in Sun Belt metro areas and postindustrial legacy cities, where rents remained stable despite lower property prices. Often, that’s had a cascade of negative impacts on low-income communities.

For one thing, it leaves more renters dealing with absentee corporate landlords, who can be quick to force an eviction and raise rents, but slow to fix a leaky roof or resolve code violations. It also reduces the supply of affordable housing stock available to would-be homebuyers, robbing local renters of opportunity.

In Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood, for example, just 53 of the 464 homes sold since 2017—12 percent—were purchased by owner occupants. In 2022, one of every five homes sold in the neighborhood (19.2 percent) was purchased by an out-of-state business, and nearly half were bought by in-state corporations with multiple-property portfolios.

“You just saw this backfill of corporate ownership come into this neighborhood, and it’s going to take years to come back from that,” Allenby says. Where real estate investors once focused on flipping houses for a quick buck, they now see rental properties as a long-term moneymaker. “These houses are just gone, likely in perpetuity, from a homeownership perspective.”

This grim, granular data is courtesy of a CGS initiative called “Who Owns America?” Starting with Baltimore, CGS used a variety of public data sources to map every parcel in the city by its ownership characteristics, cross-checking postal information with deeds and other records to distinguish owner-occupied properties from those owned by private landlords and large or out-of-state businesses.

After coding city-owned residential parcels, Allenby explains, CGS filters for all properties where the owner’s mailing address doesn’t match the physical address—meaning it isn’t owner-occupied. After that, CGS can differentiate between private, off-site owners—local “mom-and-pop” landlords who may own one or two properties, for example—and more formal corporations, checking the names against a series of business-related keywords and acronyms, such as LLC, LLP, incorporated, and so on. Further filtering reveals whether a business is based in or out of state, and whether it owns multiple properties in the city.

The resulting color-coded maps make it clear where owner occupancy is more prevalent and where corporate landlords are most active. Empowered with this intuitive, down-to-the-parcel data, communities can identify housing stock likely to be targeted by speculators. Then they can take steps to defend (or even reclaim) affordable housing before it’s lost to corporate ownership.

The Right to Fight Back 

One policy cities can employ to thwart predatory investors is a right of first refusal rule, which gives tenants the option to purchase their home before it’s sold to a corporation. Knowing where such investors are active can help community leaders support the rollout of such a program with more targeted public outreach, says Senior Research Fellow Robert “R.J.” McGrail, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Accelerating Community Investment initiative.

“That’s the neighborhood you do flyers in, where you have some community organization go knock on doors to tell people, ‘Just so you know, if the out-of-state company that you write your rent check to ever sells your house, you have the first chance to buy it,’” McGrail says. “The ‘just-so-you-know’ conversation can be incredibly agency building and empowering for an individual, in a way that I think is another downstream potential benefit from this tool.”

Allenby is quick to point out that the formalization of property ownership isn’t in itself a bad thing. For example, if a local landlord dies and his children inherit his three rental properties and put them all into an LLC, that doesn’t fundamentally alter the local real estate landscape. And true investment—companies that buy vacant, dilapidated buildings, restore them to good condition, and get them back into the housing market—is almost always welcome.

“Investor owner doesn’t necessarily mean bad owner,” McGrail agrees. But by overlapping additional layers of parcel-level datasets, CGS can provide more context and reveal bad actors. For example, mapping where corporate ownership coincides with code violations—reports of broken deck railings, lack of heat, leaky toilets, and so on—“tells a dramatically more nuanced, useful story around what is happening and what to do about it,” he says.

In that case, McGrail notes, mapping might offer chronically understaffed inspectional departments a better way to prioritize their code enforcement. Similarly, layering vacancy data over out-of-state ownership maps can inform discussions around land use policies such as a split-rate tax.

“So many times, policy discussions happen in a vacuum of data,” Allenby says. “You’re talking about theoreticals, abstract numbers, abstract concepts, and you don’t really have a good handle on the scale of the issue that you’re talking about. And these tools allow you to frame that conversation very specifically.”

Beyond Baltimore 

CGS can provide a granular data map customized to an organization’s or community’s needs in just a couple of weeks, Allenby says. And it’s not just a tool for cities. CGS has also mapped the entire state of Massachusetts for a housing nonprofit, and is currently documenting timberland ownership across Alabama.

CGS also partnered with the International Land Conservation Network to combine the research of multiple conservation organizations in search of “Consensus Landscapes”—areas that meet not just one conservation priority, such as biodiversity, habitat connectivity, or carbon storage potential, but many such goals, all at once. The goal of this collaborative mapping framework, according to CGS, is to identify “places that everyone can agree are important, and should be the immediate focus of collective conservation efforts” as the United States works to protect 30 percent of its land by 2030.

The Center for Geospatial Solutions created a framework for mapping “consensus landscapes” by assessing and integrating the research of several conservation organizations. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

Jim Gray, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is now working with CGS to study ownership trends among manufactured housing communities, which have also garnered the attention of real estate investors in recent years for their relatively low costs and reliable rents. Gray calls CGS’s work “invaluable” for its ability to transform a largely anecdotal challenge into real data.

“Knowing the extent of the problem, who is responsible, and where the problem is most acute will help inform and target which communities need to prioritize preserving this affordable housing stock, and how to go about that,” he says.

To learn more or to work with the Center for Geospatial Solutions, visit the CGS website or contact cgs@lincolninst.edu.

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

Lead image: This Center for Geospatial Solutions image combines spatial analysis with land parcel data to illustrate different types of property ownership, part of a project intended to help communities better understand how institutional investors are affecting local land markets. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

In his three decades leading the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, Steve Rosenberg saw waves of people moving from cities to the Hudson Valley following major events: 9/11, Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, even Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in Rhinebeck. So when another wave arrived during COVID-19, part of the great migration of urban office workers to rural America, it wasn’t exactly novel.

But this time, things were different in the Hudson Valley, which runs along the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Land and real estate prices were skyrocketing, due to the influx of new residents and the broader pressures of the market. In the region’s cities and villages, gentrification had begun sweeping areas long marred by disinvestment, displacing low-income residents, posing a threat to Black and Brown communities, and making it hard to preserve and create affordable housing.

This “intense pressure on the land,” Rosenberg says, was also making the job of conservation harder. Just a decade earlier, land trusts could more easily assemble three or four parcels of land to create a contiguous protected area that would help preserve wildlife habitat and build climate resilience. Now it would take 10 or 12 purchases to assemble a comparable amount of acreage, and conservation groups were more frequently being outbid. As they vied with outside buyers for land, the region’s conservation and housing organizations faced similar challenges, and some began to wonder if they could accomplish more by working together. At the same time, some conservation organizations, prompted largely by the Black Lives Matter movement, were exploring how they might better address racial justice, public health, and climate equity as part of a more community-centered type of land conservation. But housing and conservation groups also seemed to exist in parallel worlds, with different missions, goals, funding models, and governance structures.

Still, Rosenberg saw potential. When he retired from Scenic Hudson in 2021, he teamed up with Rebecca Gilman Crimmins, a Hudson Valley native and affordable housing professional in New York City, to convene a working group of five conservation land trusts and five affordable housing organizations in the region. The groups began learning about each other’s work, identifying where that work intersects, and mapping potential places where they might partner. They combined census, biodiversity, and climate data with their knowledge about local officials, planning policies, and land use regulations. “Healthy communities need to have both” open space and affordable housing, Rosenberg said. “They shouldn’t be seen as mutually exclusive or in opposition to one another.”

As real estate prices spike, the climate unravels, and America undergoes a racial reckoning, conservation and affordable housing groups are beginning to explore how they can work together. In 2022, the Lincoln Institute convened practitioners and advocates, including Rosenberg and Crimmins, to discuss the potential for collaboration by conservation land trusts and community land trusts. Through a series of virtual and in-person discussions supported by the 1772 Foundation, participants from national, regional, and local groups explored the barriers that have gotten in the way of partnership—and the opportunities ahead.

Shared Concerns, Separate Roots

America’s first conservation land trust, The Trustees of Reservations, was dreamed up in the late 1800s by landscape architect Charles Eliot, whose father was president of Harvard. Eliot saw the nation’s cities yellowing with industrial pollution, and envisioned wild green pockets of open space in every city and town. The state enabled The Trustees to begin acquiring and protecting land in 1891. Today, America has 1,281 land trusts that have protected more than 61 million acres. Mostly operating in rural and suburban settings and often run by volunteers, land trusts protect wildlife habitats, critical ecosystems, and natural, historical, and cultural sites by buying and managing parcels outright or by holding conservation easements—voluntary legal agreements with landowners that limit development and other defined uses on a property.

Community land trusts (CLTs), by contrast, have more recent beginnings. In 1969, a group of civil rights activists led by Charles Sherrod set out to build collective wealth and power among Black farmers in southwest Georgia. They created New Communities, an undertaking that combined community ownership of land with individual homeownership, serving as a model for today’s CLTs. The organization was forced to foreclose on its land in 1985, after the USDA’s discriminatory practices deprived it of crucial grants and aid in the wake of a devastating drought. But it’s still operating as an educational organization, and it ignited a movement: today there are more than 300 CLTs in the country. CLTs are still oriented toward serving marginalized communities, and typically own land while giving individuals the opportunity to own the homes and businesses on top. Despite their rural origins, most CLTs now focus on providing permanently affordable housing in urban settings.

These distinct origins have led to an array of differences, as Katie Michels and David Hindin describe in a working paper prepared for the Lincoln Institute convening. Land trusts have tended to focus on and be led by wealthier, whiter, and more rural constituencies, while CLTs are more often geared to and governed by people of color. The resources available to the groups are also different.

“Compared to CLTs, land trusts may be wealthier organizations with greater access to political power and financial resources,” Hindin and Michels write, noting that public and private funding is usually dedicated to conservation or housing, but not both. Because both groups need land to fulfill their mission, they add, “some local conservation and community land trusts have had negative experiences with each other and may view the other as competitors.”

But that’s beginning to change. “We’re starting to see some conservation land trusts and CLTs really trying to figure out how to work together,” said Beth Sorce, vice president of sector growth at Grounded Solutions Network, a national nonprofit that promotes affordable housing solutions and grew out of a network of CLTs. As cities metastasize and affordable parcels grow scarce, conservation and affordable housing organizations are beginning to see past their differences, says Sorce, who participated in the Lincoln Institute convening: “We have a common goal of a really healthy, livable place. Maybe instead of everyone trying to acquire land individually, we could work together to figure out how to do this in a way that makes our community green.”

Land trusts across the country “are providing so many benefits to our environment and to people’s lives and well-being,” said Forrest King-Cortes, director of community-centered conservation at the Land Trust Alliance (LTA), a national coalition of conservation land trusts. LTA hired King-Cortes—who also participated in the Lincoln Institute convening—to lead its efforts to put people at the center of conservation work, and he sees “more opportunity to have dialogue with other movements like the affordable housing movement.”

As these conversations continue, participants are identifying many possible forms of collaboration, from exchanging ideas and information to jointly pushing for policy reform. In some cases, groups are taking action on the ground. In Ohio, the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, which has long worked with local land banks to acquire properties for public green space, is beginning to partner with CLTs on community-led, joint planning that will include affordable housing. On Mount Desert Island in Maine, where housing constraints and costs lead 54 percent of workers to live off-island, the Island Housing Trust, a CLT, is partnering with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust on a 60-acre project that combines wetland conservation with the development of affordable workforce housing. And in a rapidly developing, predominantly Black suburb of Seattle, the Homestead Community Land Trust and community-led Skyway Coalition are partnering with the support of the Community Land Conservancy to protect affordability and green space as they stave off gentrification.

A Collaborative Model in Athens, Georgia

While conservation and affordable housing advocates explore opportunities for collaboration, they can learn from organizations that have built both goals into their mission. The Athens Land Trust is considered by many to be the shining light at the intersection of these worlds.

In the early 1990s, Nancy Stangle and Skipper StipeMaas were developing a rural intentional community, Kenney Ridge, on 132 acres in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia—about 200 miles north of Albany, where the CLT movement was born. The plan was for Kenney Ridge to consist of private lots for homeowners, a community farmhouse and gardens, and common, conserved open space. But as they laid out the development, they realized that setting aside more land for conservation also made the private lots more expensive, because the costs of building roads, water lines, and sewer lines were divided between the lots, and more conservation amounted to fewer lots—and fewer lot owners to bear the costs. “They were seeing this tension between environmental-type development and affordability,” said Heather Benham, the Athens Land Trust’s executive director. And it was pricing out some of their friends.

Around this time, Stangle was taking her kids to the zoo in Atlanta when her car broke down. A woman pulled over and offered to take Stangle to her office, where she could use the phone. The woman worked at a community land trust, the Cabbagetown Revitalization and Future Trust. After reading up on the CLT model, Stangle and StipeMaas decided to create an organization that would function as both a land trust and a CLT, and the Athens Land Trust was born.

For the first few years, the Athens Land Trust functioned mostly as a conservation land trust. Then in 1999, one of its board members bought a vacant lot in a historically Black neighborhood of Athens and donated it to the group. The local government provided an affordable housing grant, and the organization built its first house.

The two wings of the organization continued to grow—the trust came to hold over 20,695 acres of conservation easements, from farms outside Athens to pine plantations and mountains in north Georgia, and it built and rehabbed homes inside the city—but they remained practically separate. “Basically, when we answered the phone, it was pretty clear if somebody was calling for one thing or the other,” said Benham. The callers were typically either low-income Black families interested in housing, or white farmers wanting to protect land they had owned for generations.

In the early 2000s, these parallel strands of work began to intersect. A board member mentioned that drug activity was taking place on a vacant lot in their neighborhood. Could the land trust turn it into a community garden?

“It didn’t seem like such a far leap to do gardens when you’re protecting farms,” said Benham. “That became a project, and then it just kept growing.” Other neighborhoods began reaching out about starting similar projects. The group partnered with the local university to create a network of community gardens, and an urban farm where neighbors could grow food to sell, supplementing their income. A USDA grant provided funds, and the city also offered some land. To maximize the community’s benefit from the land, the Athens Land Trust began running gardening classes and farm workdays, youth programming around agricultural skills, and a farmers market in a low-income Black neighborhood. These activities support the Athens Land Trust’s goals of fostering economic development and community empowerment, Benham says. “The economic opportunity around the farmers market and the small business development,” she says, weaves the parcels into the “neighborhood ecosystem and economy.”

Where Conservation and Justice Meet

As the urban work of the Athens Land Trust grew, its leaders began applying an equity lens to their rural conservation work too, identifying populations underserved by previous efforts to protect farmland. In April 2023, the land trust was close to reaching a deal for the first conservation easement on a Black-owned farm in Georgia. Throughout the United States, 97 percent of farms and 94 percent of farm acreage belongs to white farmers. Many Black landowners lack clear title—a legacy of unjust property inheritance rules—and are unable to donate or sell easements on their land, while those who have fought to gain clear title may be understandably hesitant to sign over any rights. Benham adds that the scoring mechanisms used by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service to determine whether to conserve a parcel tend to favor farms located on prime agricultural soils. “Well, surprise, surprise—most Black farmers didn’t get the most prime lands,” she notes.

Benham believes the Athens Land Trust has managed to straddle both worlds because its fundamental goal is to give the community control over lands and development. Eschewing tunnel vision toward either housing or conservation, the trust and other similarly minded organizations “might have more shared framework, vocabulary, practices, and ways of engaging” with the environmental justice movement than conservation land trusts do, she said.

That’s reflected in philanthropy too: the funders who seem to understand how the trust’s conservation and housing work align are the ones who recognize their environmental justice–like “sustainability work in low-income neighborhoods.”

In the South Bronx, New York, a community land trust launched in 2020 operates with a similar hybrid model, working to preserve housing affordability and protect open space, including the neighborhood’s network of community gardens. The South Bronx Community Land and Resource Trust grew from the work of local community development corporation Nos Quedamos (We Stay), which started in the 1990s as grassroots resistance to an urban renewal plan that would have displaced a low-income, mostly Latino community. Committed to “development without displacement”—development driven and controlled by the community—Nos Quedamos now has a portfolio of affordable housing. It launched the CLT to “create and support a healthier community by bringing into balance land use, affordability, accessibility to services and open space, environmental sustainability and resilience, community scale and character.” It is designed to be a centralized, community-owned entity.

Julia Duranti-Martínez, who works with CLTs at the national community development organization LISC and is a board member on the East Harlem/El Barrio CLT in New York City, recommends that conversations about collaboration “defer to the groups who come out of environmental justice organizing.” In a real estate market where land is expensive and scarce, housing and conservation group vie for parcels, and new parks are often seen as harbingers of gentrification, the community development projects that have navigated these tensions most successfully have been driven by the same fundamental goal as the environmental justice movement, she says: ensuring that “Black, Indigenous, and communities of color are really the ones in a decision-making role.”

Duranti-Martínez adds that the framework of CLTs has historically shared more in common with environmental justice groups than with the conservation movement. “They are promoting these community stewardship models not in opposition to affordable housing,” she said, but simply because “a healthy community” has “all kinds of different spaces: dignified and affordable housing, affordable commercial space, green space, and community and cultural spaces.”

Moving Forward

Despite promising ideas for collaboration and enthusiasm for these initiatives, ideological and cultural hurdles remain. Success, for land trusts, has historically been measured in the number of acres protected and dollars leveraged, but these conventional measures “don’t really capture the full impact” of smaller or more complex projects, said Michels. Protecting green space and building housing on five acres could take the same time, effort, and resources as conserving 10,000 rural acres, she notes, which means there are some ideological frameworks on the conservation side that have to shift.

Potential collaborators also need to proceed purposefully and thoughtfully; meaningful and inclusive community engagement will be key to the success of combining affordable housing and open space goals, say many involved in this work, whether that effort is happening inside a single organization or as part of a collaboration between groups. “Conservation has a lot to learn about building community stakeholders in as decision-makers within our organizations,” says King-Cortes of LTA. Despite growing interest in broadening the movement’s work, “many of us are not ready, I would say, to jump into partnership with affordable housing groups until we’ve done our homework: until we’ve learned about the roots of the affordable housing movement, the ties to the civil rights movement.”

Yet conservation groups also have a wealth of resources and expertise to offer. For CLTs, “by far the biggest inhibitor to being able to scale is access to land and money,” said Sorce of Grounded Solutions Network. Partnerships often help fill that gap, and conservation groups could help with this too. “They could team up to acquire a larger parcel, some of which is going to be conservation, some of which is going to be housing.”

In fact, this kind of partnership could benefit both sectors. “Everyone’s struggling to fundraise,” said King-Cortes. “Everyone’s trying to make the most of what we’ve got. But by working together on planning, I think both movements can get more done and maximize resources.”

Succeeding at that will take some effort, because most funding for conservation and housing has historically been separate, as Michels and Hindin noted. “All of the public policy-supported programs and funding are totally siloed,” Rosenberg confirmed. A housing group that wants to build a development with trails, parks, or community gardens can typically only get funding to build the housing, while on the flip side, conservation groups can’t get funding to do anything besides conserve land.

However, there are exceptions to that rule. In Vermont, housing and conservation groups organized in 1987 to create a single public funding source, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund, administered by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB). Michels, who worked at VHCB for several years, says it demonstrates a potential model for collaboration. It has nurtured relationships and understanding between the two communities, and both practitioners and policymakers have come to see the dual goals as complementary, not competitive—reinforcing an almost 100-year-old land use tradition of compact settlement surrounded by a working landscape.

Every year, a coalition of affordable housing and conservation groups lobbies the state legislature for VHCB funding. The result is “a lot of relationship building across those communities of practice, and they each know what the other is working on,” Michels said. VHCB has invested in projects with both elements in many towns, ensuring that affordable housing and open space are both available. “There’s a version of collaboration that doesn’t involve working together on a single parcel,” but pulling for the same outcomes, Michels said; when an opportunity does present itself on one parcel, it is widely embraced.

Back in the Hudson Valley, Rosenberg’s working group is also eyeing Massachusetts’ Community Preservation Act as a model. Voters in Massachusetts can opt for their municipality to apply a surcharge on property taxes, which can then be used to fund conservation, affordable housing, outdoor recreation, and historic preservation. New York’s legislature has authorized some municipalities to vote for a local real estate transfer fee to create a community preservation fund, but the proceeds can only support conservation, not housing.

Identifying policy reforms that could help accomplish its work and agreeing on a statement of shared purpose have been priorities for the Hudson Valley group, which has continued its explorations with support from Regional Plan Association, the project’s fiscal sponsor, and the Consensus Building Institute. “There are actually some collaborations that are already beginning,” said Rosenberg. The Kingston Land Trust, which has been studying and promoting the community land trust model since 2017, has partnered with the regional affordable housing group RUPCO to launch a CLT as part of its Land for Homes initiative. The organization also worked with graduate students at Columbia University and Bard College to develop a regional housing vision and a guide for collaboration between conservation and housing groups. The Chatham, New York–based Columbia Land Conservancy, meanwhile, is serving as the fiscal sponsor for another new CLT.

And within the working group, one of the conservation land trusts identified a 113-acre farm parcel for sale in the town of Red Hook that “defines the gateway to the community,” Rosenberg said. Red Hook has a community preservation fund to support conservation, and Scenic Hudson and other groups have long been active there. But having recently expanded its public sewer system, Red Hook was also looking to develop more affordable housing—and, in the case of this property, to fend off private buyers who were interested in developing the whole parcel.

Conditions seemed favorable. So two of the working group’s housing organizations and two of the land trusts met with local officials to discuss collaborating with the town on a project that would achieve both goals: conserving farmland and building some affordable housing. The town now plans to purchase the land, working with one of the land trusts to place a conservation easement on most of it and setting aside the rest for homes to be built by one of the affordable housing groups. “That project is not done, but it is moving forward,” said Rosenberg. “That’s really exciting.”

LINCOLN INSTITUTE COLLOQUIUM ON CONSERVATION AND COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS

During 2022, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy led a yearlong research effort on the potential for collaboration between conservation land trusts and community land trusts (CLTs). With the support of Peter Stein of Lyme Timber Company and a grant from the 1772 Foundation, the institute convened a core group of experts in conservation and affordable housing for a series of meetings, culminating with a colloquium and working paper.

The colloquium has informed ongoing efforts to advance land conservation and affordable housing priorities. In February, working paper coauthors Katie Michels and David Hindin advised the Connecticut Land Conservation Council’s summit for advocates and leaders in the conservation and housing sectors to consider shared agendas and future policy goals. In March, Jim Levitt, director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute, moderated a keynote panel titled “Affordable Housing and Land Conservation: Not an Either/Or” at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition; the panel included a colloquium participant.

“To thrive, communities need permanently affordable housing and permanently conserved land that provides green space, natural infrastructure, and biodiversity-friendly habitat,” says Chandni Navalkha, associate director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute. “By working in greater collaboration, these communities of practice have unique potential in leveraging their decades of success and experience to implement multigoal, multibenefit projects that address communities’ most pressing challenges.”

Audrea Lim is a writer in New York City whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Guardian. Her book Free the Land, on the commodification of land and alternatives in the United States, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Lead image: Graduate students from Columbia University worked with the Kingston Land Trust on a project that envisions new affordable housing models on communally owned property, including medium-density apartments. Credit: “(E)CO-Living: Towards a More Affordable and Green Kingston” by Yiyang Cai, Kai Guo, Lingbei Chen, Wenyi Peng. Urban Design Studio II, Spring 2021, Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Faculty: Kaja Kühl coordinator, with Lee Altman, Anna Dietzsch, Shachi Pandey, Thaddeus Pawlowski and Associates, Zarith Pineda, Victoria Vuono. Local Partner: Kingston Land Trust.