Massachusetts is requiring many communities to update their zoning codes to allow more multifamily housing near transit stations, at a minimum of 15 homes per acre. Most localities are complying, but the zoning legislation — known as the MBTA Communities law — has also prompted some pushback.

Some of that resistance no doubt arises from a wariness of change — and “homes per acre” is an unfamiliar, abstract concept for many people. This StoryMap explores what the metric looks like in the real world, with photographs of street scenes around Greater Boston where the gross neighborhood density is currently about 15 homes per acre or more.

Tishaura Jones was sworn in as the 47th mayor of St. Louis—and the first Black female mayor in the city’s history—on April 20, 2021. Described as a history maker on a mission, Jones served two terms in the Missouri House of Representatives, was selected as the first African American woman in Missouri history to hold the position of assistant minority floor leader, and was also the first African American woman to serve as treasurer of St. Louis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Hampton University and a master’s degree in health administration from the St. Louis University School of Public Health. Jones is also a graduate of the Executives in State and Local Government program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She spoke with senior fellow Anthony Flint earlier this year for the Land Matters podcast. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anthony Flint: For those rooting for a rebound for legacy cities, St. Louis has been a bit of a roller coaster, from the renaissance of Washington Avenue to the post-COVID downtown doom loop and continuing population loss. What’s your assessment of the city’s strengths and weaknesses at this point?

Tishaura Jones: I would say that in the past three years, we have been laser focused on doing the nonsexy work to lay the foundation for future growth. And that is, the work within City Hall to make City Hall easier to navigate, easier to participate in, and easier to understand. And then adding different pieces that are looking to the future. We just opened an Office of New Americans because we realized that part of population growth is going to come from our refugees and other international citizens who choose St. Louis as a home who may be fleeing violent situations. We’ve accepted refugees from Afghanistan, from Ukraine, and back in the ’90s, we accepted refugees from Bosnia. So we have the largest Bosnian population outside of Europe. Knowing those things and knowing those pieces of the puzzle, also looking at our severe population loss of African Americans, we are laying the groundwork to make sure that St. Louis is equitable and a city that everybody can participate in; we’re focused on rebuilding areas and investing in areas that haven’t seen investment in decades.

AF: Speaking of investment, we’ve been looking at the Inflation Reduction Act and how it is pumping billions for clean energy manufacturing into economically distressed areas, including St. Louis. Do you consider the region part of a potential new “battery belt,” and can this clean energy transition be a savior?

TJ: I would say partly. We haven’t seen a lot of companies investing and exploring that technology. We only have one company that has taken advantage of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to expand its business. Where we see the most growth is in defense and geospatial, as well as advanced manufacturing. Those are the areas and industries that we have focused our attention on.

AF: Tell us more about the investments that are going on. With the backdrop of federal funding, you also have the $250 million NFL settlement from the loss of the Rams. There seems to be an unprecedented amount of funding and an approaching deadline for spending it. How are you managing that?

TJ: We received almost $500 million in ARPA funding, which is really large for a city our size. We’ve made intentional decisions to put that money out in communities that haven’t seen investment in decades. For St. Louis, that’s North St. Louis, which is 99 percent African American, and a part of Southeast St. Louis, which is about 60 to 65 percent African American. Both of those areas have high levels of poverty, high levels of vacancy, and also high levels of crime. So we are making intentional investments in those areas, bringing back business and industry, building new homes. There are places where a mortgage hasn’t been generated in a neighborhood for 10 or 15 years . . . we’re trying to rebuild a market in order to build  more new market-rate and affordable homes.

The Monarch at MLK was an old electrical plant that sat vacant for decades. We are turning that into a world-class workforce development hub, co-located with companies that will be producing their products on site. Our Office of Violence Prevention will go there, and our Workforce Development Agency . . . our Economic Empowerment Center will also go there, which is going to help entrepreneurs either start or grow their businesses, as well as our Land Reutilization Authority, our land bank. They have a lot of equipment that they use to maintain our vacant lots; we have about 7,000 vacant lots that we are currently maintaining.

We’re co-locating essential services in the community so people don’t always have to come downtown to City Hall. We hope that this facility is going to be a hub of activity, and we also own 15 acres around it, so we’re going to build up around it as well, with a daycare center and housing and other amenities.

AF: For all the physical planning and placemaking that is part of the mayor’s job, what are the key elements of addressing violent crime, which understandably is on the minds of so many residents?

TJ: The year before I came into office, which was a pandemic year, we had 263 homicides. As of the end of 2023, that number is down to 158. That’s a 40 percent decrease. Crime is also decreasing in other categories. . . . It’s because of several things that we put in place. It’s not just one thing. We started by opening a new Office of Violence Prevention, where we work with community organizations because people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

We provide grants and technical assistance to community organizations on the ground who are doing this violence prevention work, employing trusted messengers, taking care of mental health, substance abuse. We also started a cops-and-clinicians program where we pair an officer with a mental health professional to be deployed to certain calls. We’re trying to deploy the right professional to the right call. That program alone has saved us thousands of man hours and millions of dollars because we’ve diverted people from emergency rooms, we’ve diverted people from jail and entering the criminal justice system. . . . Also for the first time in our city’s history, I hired a police chief from outside of the city. He’s been in several cities, Wilmington, Delaware, Chicago, and started his career in New York. He applies business practices to policing . . . and deploys our resources—which are finite—based on what the data is telling us. In his first full year being police chief, homicides were reduced 20 percent. We’re not quite where we want to be, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction with all of these pieces working together.

AF: I want to turn to infrastructure, which plays a role in the overall vibe of the city. Have you seen any difference in the results of the infrastructure plan from two years ago, which included some small but important things like sidewalk repair, lighting, and trimming weeds?

TJ: Yes. I sit as the chair of our local metropolitan planning organization, the East-West Gateway [Council] of Governments. Most of our infrastructure dollars flow through there for our various transportation projects. But we also, as a city, set aside almost $50 million to repave our major thoroughfares. And we currently have about $300 million in projects going on, whether it’s repaving our major thoroughfares or our side streets. Great Rivers Greenway is building the Brickline Greenway—think of Atlanta or Denver, where they have those greenways that are bike and ped paths. We will be expanding ours to connect our major parks. So in about five years, you’ll be able to ride your bike from the Arch all the way to Forest Park, and then to a park on the south side called Tower Grove Park, to a park on the north side called Fairground Park. It’ll all be connected through a series of bike and ped pathways.

We’re hoping to also start construction on expanding transit, taking advantage of the money that’s available through the Department of Transportation, expanding our light rail. Then we’re also going to apply for funding to redo our airport. So in about five to seven years, St. Louis is going to have a new airport, a new transit line, new bike and ped pathways, and a whole host of infrastructure projects will be almost finished or at completion.

AF: How can a city like St. Louis contribute to the effort to combat climate change while at the same time, needing to build resilience to manage extreme heat, for example?

TJ: Today, as we are recording this interview, it’s about 100 degrees outside, which is normal for August in St. Louis, but it’s not normal for those who have respiratory problems. We also received a multimillion-dollar grant from the federal government to plant more trees to make sure certain neighborhoods are not heat islands. Just with the disinvestment that happened in certain portions of our community, there weren’t trees replanted. We’re going to be planting more trees, hopefully cooling down the city as we do that. We’re also part of the Bloomberg Sustainable Cities Initiative, where we will be employing about three to four people for the next three to four years to identify other sustainability projects and how those intersect with economic justice.

AF: A lot of the mayors that we’ve interviewed have talked a little bit about the stress and heavy weight of the job. I’d like to ask you, on a personal level, how do you manage all of these challenges day to day?

TJ: The answer I usually give is that I rely on three things: Jesus, my Peloton, and bourbon, and not always in that order. But I think I have a fourth weight that’s on my shoulders, which is I’m a single mom of the most adorable and probably the tallest 17-year-old you’ll ever see. He is about 6′ 8″, and he’s a junior in high school. So I also have to juggle that in addition to being mayor. I would say I do it all by the grace of God. I feel like this is the work that God called me to do, and because of that, it doesn’t feel like work. I really enjoy and love what I do. I love being able to see in real time the changes that we’re making—either brick and mortar or the lives that we’re changing. So that is the job satisfaction that helps me rest every night.

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

Lead image: St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones takes a selfie at City Hall with local middle school and high school students. Credit: St. Louis Mayor’s Office via Facebook.

CAMBRIDGE, MA—The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has released a new Policy Focus Report, Preserving Affordable Homeownership: Municipal Partnerships with Community Land Trusts, by John Emmeus Davis and Kristin King-Ries.

Drawing on insights from 115 community land trusts (CLTs) that were interviewed or surveyed by the International Center for Community Land Trusts, the report explores how CLTs are partnering with public officials to help address the housing affordability crisis. In this innovative model, individuals buy homes on land that is leased from a local CLT and agree to limit the resale price, reducing the upfront cost of homeownership and keeping those homes affordable for one income-qualified household after another.

“There has been a seismic shift in public policy over the last two decades, especially among cities and counties,” said Davis, a city planner who has spent much of his 40-year career providing technical assistance to CLTs and documenting their history and performance. “Public resources invested in helping to expand homeownership were once routinely allowed to leak away when assisted homes resold. Today, a growing number of public officials are prudently committed to preserving those subsidies—and the hard-won affordability of the homes themselves—for many years. Municipalities are partnering with CLTs because they have proven their effectiveness in making that happen. CLTs remain in the picture long after a home is purchased, ensuring that affordability lasts, homes are maintained, and newly minted homeowners succeed. These multi-faceted duties of stewardship are what CLTs do best.”

Preserving Affordable Homeownership builds on the Lincoln Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Report The City-CLT Partnership, coauthored by Davis and Rick Jacobus. In addition, a multimedia case study published by the Lincoln Institute in 2023, Still the One: Affordable Housing Initiatives in Burlington Vermont’s Old North End, features Davis and several colleagues from the Champlain Housing Trust, the largest CLT in the United States.

“The survey of CLTs conducted by the International Center for this report revealed that city and county government partnerships with CLTs have grown in number, variety, and sophistication since the 2008 Policy Focus Report, and a number of state governments are now supporting CLTs as well,” said King-Ries, an attorney whose practice focuses on creating and stewarding homeownership opportunities for people priced out of the traditional real estate market. “This updated report offers insights and tips on what is possible when governments and CLTs work together toward the shared goal of creating permanently affordable homeownership. The report also examines unintended consequences of governmental policies and conditions that make it difficult for CLTs to produce and to preserve affordably priced homes—and offers recommendations for how government officials can work more productively with CLTs.”

Preserving Affordable Homeownership reveals significant trends in the landscape of CLTs and municipal-CLT partnerships, from Los Angeles to Lawrence, Kansas. Among the key findings: more municipalities are starting CLTs, including Tampa, Florida, which set aside part of a $10 million bond for that purpose, and Indianapolis, Indiana, which appropriated $1.5 million to start a citywide CLT.

More cities are also incorporating lasting affordability into housing subsidies and regulations, and many are considering how to more fairly assess and tax the lands and homes in CLT portfolios. State governments are increasingly providing legislative and financial support for CLTs, from Connecticut to Texas.

In addition to identifying trends, the report provides recommendations for successful public-CLT partnerships. “This is a groundbreaking and insightful report,” says Sheila R. Foster, a professor of climate and law at Columbia University and cofounder and director of LabGov, an applied research laboratory focused on urban challenges. “It will make a tremendous difference to practitioners, cities, and policymakers as CLTs are experiencing historic growth and expansion in an increasingly unaffordable housing market.”

About the Authors

John Emmeus Davis is a city planner who has spent much of his 40-year career providing technical assistance to CLTs and documenting their history and performance. He coauthored the Lincoln Institute’s 2008 Policy Focus Report The City-CLT Partnership. He previously served as housing director in Burlington, Vermont, and was dean of the National CLT Academy. He is a partner at Burlington Associates in Community Development LLC, a national consulting cooperative. Davis is a founding board member of the International Center for CLTs and editor in chief of the center’s imprint, Terra Nostra Press.

Kristin King-Ries is an attorney whose practice focuses on creating and stewarding permanently affordable homes and farms for people priced out of the traditional real estate market. She represents CLTs and other nonprofits and serves as a consultant to the Agrarian Trust and the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. She is currently organizing a CLT legal collaborative on behalf of the International Center for CLTs. She served as general counsel for Trust Montana from 2017 to 2021.

Lead image: Rebecca Buford, executive director of Tenants to Homeowners, a community land trust (CLT) in Lawrence, Kansas. The CLT has developed permanently affordable housing with support from the city, an example of the growing universe of municipal-CLT partnerships across the country. Credit: Taylor Mah/City of Lawrence.

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

Ryan M. Gallagher is an urban economist. But his latest research is increasingly concerned with areas outside the city—because in modern America, that’s where so much of the action has taken place. “Central cities are interesting, don’t get me wrong. But they already tend to be the focus of a lot of research,” says Gallagher, an associate professor of economics at Northeastern Illinois University. “And if you look at postwar America, most of the growth was in suburbia.”

Gallagher, who earned his PhD in economics from the University of Illinois Chicago, was awarded a David C. Lincoln Fellowship in 2015. The program supports scholars and practitioners conducting new research on land value taxation and its applications.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Gallagher shares what he’s learned about the evolution of suburban zoning, explains why urban economics is more relevant to people’s lives than they tend to realize, and ponders whether urban housing markets in Northern Ireland are still impacted by the legacy of decades of conflict.

JON GOREY: You’re an applied microeconomist—can you explain how that differs from macroeconomics?

RYAN GALLAGHER: This is what I tell my students: Microeconomics deals with the economic implications of individual behaviors, or the incentives that drive individual economic behaviors. Whereas macroeconomics deals more with economic aggregates—inflation, recession, economic growth, the unemployment rate. I’m an urban economist, so we deal with how we allocate scarce collective resources across space, and what the implications of that might be. Some of the work that I’ve done in the past is on the impact of house size or zoning regulations on the fiscal viability of properties from a local public finance perspective—and that all kind of falls within the realm of microeconomics, because you’re talking about the incentives that local home builders face, and what the implications are for local public decision-makers. That’s all microeconomics, because we’re talking about how folks behave in response to environmental changes.

JG: What was the focus of your Lincoln Institute fellowship?

RG: I had been doing a little bit of research, with colleagues at Howard University and the University of Illinois Chicago, looking into the role that households without children play in redistributing resources within a public education system funded by property taxes. And we showed reasonably that education property taxes can be quite redistributive away from folks who don’t have children and towards folks who do have children within a local school district. . . . And that got me thinking about home size. Because historically, going back to the ’70s and the Tiebout model, there’s this belief, at least in economics, that small homes were kind of a fiscal burden on municipalities, based on the logic that they have less value and generate less tax revenue. And what I was trying to investigate was that, wait, folks in small homes probably have fewer kids, or they’re just smaller households in general. So I started looking at the value per person that a property generates. And my preliminary evidence suggested that small homes and apartments, as an aggregate group, actually had a higher per capita value, which suggested that the logic was actually flipped—that smaller dwellings, on average, were a fiscal boon to these property tax–funded systems, that maybe we’ve been approaching this problem all wrong.

The Lincoln Institute fellowship supported two published papers, one on small homes in general, and then I transitioned to looking at the implications of zoning laws. Do communities that are overly restrictive with their lot sizes—meaning they require large lot sizes, and as a consequence they prevent small homes and apartments—find themselves at a fiscal disadvantage, are they shooting themselves in the foot? A lot of folks that live in apartments and small dwellings are single people, or couples without kids, or elderly folks. They’re putting a lot of property tax money into the system and not drawing a lot out.

So I investigated zoning laws in Massachusetts . . . looking across space to see whether there was a big jump across boundaries in property tax value per person as zoning laws became more or less restrictive. And I showed in the second paper that within a municipality in Massachusetts, as you cross a zoning boundary from an area that’s more to less restrictive, you would see a higher property tax base on a per capita basis in the less restrictive area.

JG: What have you been working on lately, and what are you interested in working on next?

RG: Something that’s really missing from the literature, both for planners and for economists alike, is a detailed, digitized historical archive of the evolution of land use zoning over time within suburbia. So for Cook County—that’s where Chicago is, it’s the second-largest county population-wise in the country, and we have an immense number of municipalities—I started to digitize the history of each suburb’s zoning ordinance over time, starting in 1940.

It’s been a massive undertaking, and I was able to digitize most of the evolution of the suburban zoning environment for Cook County from 1940 to 1950 to 1960. Then I teamed up with Allison Shertzer, who’s now at the Philadelphia Fed, and Tate Twinam, who’s at William and Mary, and we’re now pushing this digitization project into 1970. We’re looking at how zoning laws impacted urban form within suburbia, and the built environment in particular—what would things have looked like if there hadn’t been zoning? And this is really, really tricky, because the role that real estate developers play is oftentimes overlooked.

We’re focusing on the evolution of minimum lot sizes. But the lot size is put in place when the land is platted, not when the home is built. This is really important, because zoning laws might very well just follow the preexisting built environment, and that makes a lot of sense. I mean, if I’m a city planner or a city councilor, and I’m thinking about passing a zoning ordinance, I’m going to say, ‘Okay, well, we should probably follow what’s already there.’ So in that case, it’s not really zoning that’s having the impact on the built environment, it’s the opposite: It’s the built environment that preexisted zoning that’s really impacting zoning and future building projects.

I’ve got some other projects that are looking at municipal formation and annexation. I’m tracking the value of a parcel of land every year from 1946 to 1969 across suburban Cook County for multiple parcels, and I’m looking at how the value responds to being annexed by a local municipality. It’s all very preliminary, but I’m finding that when land is incorporated into a taxing body, that has a huge impact on the land’s value.

I’ve got another paper that I’m working on with someone from the University of Illinois, on the role of newly incorporated suburbs, and what role they play in the fiscal fabric of a metropolitan area. . . .

What we’re finding—this is very preliminary—is that the newer suburbs tend to tax far, far less than the older suburbs do, and they provide, as a consequence, fewer services . . . and in that respect, they provide an option for folks that are looking for that type of a lifestyle. If you go to a lot of these suburbs, they don’t have sidewalks . . . it’s a low-cost, low-service environment. Maybe they have a library, maybe they don’t. I think the role of these newer incorporated towns and cities, especially on the urban fringe, is underexplored and worth investigating.

JG: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found in your research?

RG: One thing that surprised me is how busy our inner-ring suburbs have been, and how strategic they’ve been, at building out their borders. . . . It’s not big tracts of land, it’s more a question of, ‘Should we annex this lot versus that lot?’ So I was fascinated by how much nuance there was and how much intricate detail and surveying work is involved behind the scenes in urban growth. I’ve really gained an appreciation for all the local public servants who are in charge of maintaining all this.

When we look at urban growth, the role that private, profit-motivated real estate developers play in growing the metropolitan area and determining its built environment has also surprised me. Sifting through all these plats, you really see how each subdivider had their own vision. If you drive through some suburban neighborhood or community that has sprawled, if you really pay attention, you can see where one subdivision stopped and where a different subdivider picked up, because the homes are maybe a little bit smaller, a little bit bigger . . . there are these invisible boundaries that most of us probably don’t pay attention to. You’ll see huge class differences across these boundaries. These aren’t zoning boundaries, these aren’t political boundaries. But you can see the change in the demographic, how that impacted the urban landscape, spatially speaking, and that’s fascinating.

JG: What do you wish more people knew about urban economics?

RG: Zoning, in particular, has been very topical for the last decade, and urban economists have been interviewed a bit more in the press in response to that. As well as the pandemic, and the move to Zoom, where people were like, ‘Are cities just going to disappear?’ These are the two areas where I’ve seen urban economics really make it into the popular press in my lifetime. But we do so much more. I think the research and work being done by urban economists—and local public finance folks are included in that category—is really important to how a lot of us live.

Macroeconomists are always being interviewed about interest rates and money supply and recessions and depressions, and that’s all important stuff, of course. But I think what we do as urban economists—and I get that a lot of it’s kind of high-minded, academic ivory tower stuff—the questions that we’re asking, and the problems that we’re trying to help solve, probably have a more direct impact on the lives of the average urban resident, on their quality of life. I think if people paid more attention to what we’re doing and the problems that we’re trying to investigate, they would find that this is a very, very fruitful and impactful area of research.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

Two books I’ve read recently that were quite good are Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike, and We Don’t Know Ourselves. Both are about Irish history. I’m not sure how comfortable everyone would be reading the first book, but I enjoyed it. Anyone who studies the conflict in Northern Ireland would find it very interesting, but I recognize that the subject matter is controversial.

To tie this back to urban economics, I’m really interested in what impact, if any, the physical barriers in cities like Belfast and Derry have had on urban economy and growth. They don’t fight the way they used to, of course, but there’s still discomfort. And so the question is, you’ve got a growing Catholic population on one side, you’ve got a relatively stagnant, give or take, more Protestant population on the other side of these barriers, and if they’re unwilling to live amongst one another, what does that do to housing price pressures? If there’s available housing on the Protestant side for this growing Catholic population, but they’re unwilling to live there, does that put more pressure on housing prices on the Catholic side?

Now, these are just ideas, it’s been hard to get data on stuff like this. But I’m a Gallagher, my mom’s and my dad’s families both came from the north, so it’s kind of a passion project. I think it’d be really interesting if someone could show what the implications are for these relatively firm neighborhood boundaries.

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

Lead image: Urban economist Ryan Gallagher. Credit: Courtesy photo.