Randall Woodfin, Birmingham’s “millennial mayor” and rising star in Alabama politics, has launched an urban mechanic’s agenda for revitalizing that post-industrial city: restoring basic infrastructure on a block-by-block basis, setting up a command center so federal funds are spent wisely, and providing guaranteed income for single mothers. 

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really supercharge infrastructure upgrades and investments we need to make in our city,” Woodfin said, referring to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, which are bringing unparalleled amounts of funding to state and local governments. “This type of money probably hasn’t been on the ground since the New Deal.” 
 
Woodfin talked about neighborhood revitalization, housing, climate change and other topics in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. An edited version of the Q&A will appear in print and online as the Mayor’s Desk feature in the next issue of Land Lines magazine. 
 
When he was elected in 2017, Woodfin was the youngest mayor of Birmingham in over a century. Now 40 and nearly a year into his second term, he’s made revitalization of the city’s 99 neighborhoods a top priority, along with enhancing education, fostering a climate of economic opportunity, and leveraging public-private partnerships. 
 
In a city battered by population and manufacturing loss — including iron and steel industries that once thrived there — Woodfin looked to education and youth as keys to a better future. He set up Birmingham Promise, which provides apprenticeships and college tuition assistance to local high school graduates. He also established Pardons for Progress, a mayoral pardon of 15,000 misdemeanor marijuana possession charges dating back to 1990, that had been a barrier to employment. 

Woodfin is a graduate of Morehouse College and Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law. He was an assistant city attorney for eight years before running for mayor, and served as president of the Birmingham Board of Education as well. 
 
Too many Birmingham residents have been living in areas where they are constantly reminded of decline, Woodfin said — stepping out of their house and seeing a dilapidated house next door and a broken streetlight out front. Playground and park equipment is out of order, and many live in food deserts. The answer, he said, is to “triple down” on efforts to create new housing and other infrastructure and eradicate blight, to address “snaggletooth” blocks where “you have a house, empty lot, house, empty lot, empty lot.” 

Chipping away at concentrated poverty through physical improvements improves quality of life for thousands, and will help the entire city rebound, Woodfin says.  

More near-term, Woodfin said he embraced the concept of guaranteed income because as a practical matter, a few hundred dollars a month could help single mothers fend off “the monotony of concentrated poverty.” 
 
“I think we all would agree, no one can live off $375 a month,” he said. But if households had that additional money, “does that help keep food on the table? Does it help keep your utilities paid? Does it help keep clothing on your children’s back and shoes on their feet? Does it help you get from point A to B to keep your job to provide for your child? 

“This is why I believe this guaranteed income pilot program will be helpful. We only have 120 slots, so it’s not necessarily the largest amount of people, but I can tell you over 7,000 households applied for this,” he said. “The need is there.” 

The Lincoln Institute’s Legacy Cities Initiative is developing a community of practice for the equitable regeneration of post-industrial cities, like Birmingham, that have been hit hard by manufacturing and population loss. Strategies to maintain good municipal fiscal health for these and all cities include one that Woodfin is making a priority: keeping better track of intergovernmental transfers, such as the billions in federal funding that is currently on the way. 

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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

Photograph courtesy of Anthony Flint. 

Further reading: 

Everything you need to know about Birmingham’s millennial mayor 

Seven Strategies for Equitable Development in Smaller Legacy Cities 

How Smarter State Policy Can Revitalize America’s Cities 

The Empty House Next Door: Understanding and Reducing Vacancy and Hypervacancy in the United States 

Last fall, water levels in Utah’s Great Salt Lake reached historic lows. Severe drought fueled by climate change and increased demands on upstream water systems have shrunk the lake to nearly half of the 1,700 square miles it covers in an average year, making it “a puddle of its former self.” Scientists warn that the lake could disappear entirely in the not-too-distant future. 

The losses at the Great Salt Lake represent just one aspect of a looming water crisis in Utah. The entire state is suffering from drought, with statewide reservoir storage capacity at 50 percent. Lake Powell, a reservoir that plays a critical role in the Colorado River Basin’s complex water storage and delivery system, is at just over 26 percent capacity. “It’s not just the Great Salt Lake,” said Utah Governor Spencer Cox at a press conference in November. “It’s the Colorado River Basin, it’s all our lakes and streams and [water] storage capacity . . . . This is an all-hands-on-deck issue.” 
 
During the past few years, policy makers in Utah—one of the most arid U.S. states and one of the fastest-growing—have begun to address this crisis with strategies designed to promote water conservation while supporting population growth. As part of that effort, the state appropriated funds for a project led by the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and Western Resource Advocates that will help communities better coordinate land and water planning and create more sustainable futures. 

“As one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, how we grow and develop today will set our water use for decades to come,” said Candice Hasenyager, director of the state Division of Water Resources (DWR). “The Division of Water Resources has been a strong proponent of water conservation for decades. The next logical step toward adapting to climate change by adopting waterwise practices is integrating water considerations into the planning process.” 

More Demand, Less Water 

Projections suggest that the number of households in Utah could double by 2060, from 1.1 million to 2.2 million. As the realities of supporting a swelling population with a dwindling water supply began to hit home, the state released a water strategy in 2017, followed by regional water conservation goals in 2019. These plans aim for a statewide reduction in per capita water use of about 16 percent by 2030 and 26 percent by 2065.  

The state legislature has taken action to support these goals, creating a multi-year water banking pilot project, enacting a state water policy, and, in 2021, appropriating $270,000 for the water and land use planning integration project. (These legislative acts are significant accomplishments in a state where water-related legislation is frequently contentious.) In addition, a bill passed by the state legislature in early 2022 will require water use and preservation elements to be included in municipal and county comprehensive plans, a step the Babbitt Center recommends in the U.S. West and beyond. 

The recent water shortages, especially in highly visible locations like the Great Salt Lake, “have caught people’s attention in a way that’s making them realize solutions are needed now,” said Marcelle Shoop, director of the Saline Lakes Program for the National Audubon Society. Shoop, who served on a statewide steering committee charged with ensuring adequate water supplies for Great Salt Lake, says improving the integration of land and water planning was a key recommendation that came out of that process. “When you make land use decisions, you’re making a water use decision,” she said. “And you’re locking it in for a very long time.” 

To help spread that message, DWR embarked on the land and water integration project in 2021, with initial funding from the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council. The primary output of the first phase of that work was the development of a Utah-specific framework for community action—refined with input from 12 local governments, water providers, and community organizations—that illustrates how communities can better integrate water and land use planning. The framework recommends four stages of work: form a core water and land use planning team per community; assess local conditions; identify points of impact; and take action. As part of Phase One, the Babbitt Center and Western Resource Advocates also shared a stakeholder checklist and community self-assessment tool that can provide tangible guidance for communities.  

Interviews with community stakeholders were enlightening, said John Berggren, policy analyst at Western Resource Advocates. “Only one community said they could continue to grow with existing supplies without many constraints in the coming decades,” he said. “Some communities anticipate most of their growth will be in redevelopment or infill, while others are preparing for new development, but there was widespread concern about having enough water for current and future demands—and this is compounded by climate change.” 

Growing Water Smart 

The 2021 appropriation makes it possible for the Babbitt Center, Western Resource Advocates, and Utah State University’s Center for Water-Efficient Landscaping to embark on a second phase of the project, working directly with communities via the Growing Water Smart program.  

Growing Water Smart, which originated as a joint program of the Sonoran Institute and Lincoln Institute, brings small groups of community stakeholders together for several days to learn, collaborate, and create plans applicable to their local residents and needs. Participants gain a better understanding of the connections among land use, water supply and demand, and climate change, and they also build professional relationships—with each other and with peers throughout their regions. Launched in 2017, the program is also operating in Arizona, California, and Colorado, and discussions are underway with partners in Mexico about adapting it for communities there. 

“The heart of Growing Water Smart is getting land use planners and water managers from the same communities together to talk to each other, sometimes for the very first time,” says Faith Sternlieb, who oversees the program and its expansion for the Babbitt Center and helps facilitate community workshops. “Once they start sharing resources, data, and information, they see how valuable and important collaboration and cooperation are.” 

After each workshop, the project team follows up with participants for up to 12 months to help participant groups implement the strategies developed in the workshop, which often take the form of a one-year action plan. The team typically provides additional resources and technical assistance opportunities specific to each participant community’s needs as well. 

Sternlieb expects this phase of the project to include at least two workshops that could include as many as 12 communities (six community teams per workshop). She is hopeful that the Growing Water Smart team will be able to continue to build partnerships and raise funds to hold a third workshop in the state: “That will help ground the program and allow us to draw important lessons learned, recommendations, and case studies that will be helpful for communities across Utah.” 

Hasenyager of DWR said she hopes the upcoming Growing Water Smart workshops will serve as examples for other Utah communities, contribute to more widespread understanding and implementation of integrating land use and water planning, and help build relationships between water planners and land use planners at the local level. 

“At the conclusion of the workshops, the Division will continue to pursue opportunities to assist Utah communities to integrate water considerations into their planning processes,” Hasenyager said. Ultimately, she added, “we want to make better decisions on how we grow and use water in the state.” 

Image: Residential development in Utah. Credit: RichLegg/E+ via Getty Images.

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

During the first session of the virtual Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP) conference in early February, participants were asked to name the biggest disruptors they are experiencing in their work. Their typed answers flooded onto the presenter’s screen, creating a shifting, multi-colored cloud of words. As the most common answers grew larger and moved to the center, it became clear that three would dominate the conversation: funding, COVID, and climate change. 

Over the course of the next two days, the conference—which drew more than 165 registrants from 11 countries and 27 U.S. states—addressed all three of these issues, with a focus on planning for climate change and building climate resilience. “The impacts of climate change on a day-to-day basis are hard to ignore,” said Ayano Healy of Cascadia Partners, during a presentation on participatory planning in California’s San Joaquin County. “There’s a lot of momentum both at the social level and at the political level for getting organized around climate resilience and taking action.” 

Scenario planning can be a helpful tool for communities confronting the local impacts of climate change. A practice with roots in the military, scenario planning guides planners, community members, and other stakeholders through considerations of various futures and how to effectively respond to and plan for them. Practitioners and researchers at the conference described how communities are using this approach, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 

In a session focused on greenhouse gas scenario planning tools, Mauricio Leon of the Metropolitan Council—the regional planning agency of Minnesota’s Twin Cities region—described working with a team of researchers to help local governments create paths to net-zero emissions. “It’s great to create a portfolio of strategies to meet net-zero emissions, but [we have to] acknowledge that there are things that we don’t know,” Leon said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.” He cited the pandemic and its effects on urban demographic projections as an example of how plans can go awry.  

Tim Reardon of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Massachusetts described a similar tool his organization has developed to help communities in the Boston region benchmark greenhouse gases. “Being able to provide information that is reflective of [specific communities] reduces a barrier to a conversation about the big moves that have to happen” to reduce emissions at the local level, Reardon said. One goal of the tool, he said, is to help communities feel more engaged in the planning process. 

The notion of scenario planning as a form of community conversation, rather than a technical exercise, came up throughout the conference. “When scenario planning is really done well, it can serve as a kind of platform for social learning where different jurisdictions and stakeholders can talk about different values, not just debate technical issues,” said Ryan Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in city and regional planning at Cornell University who is studying regional efforts to prepare for climate impacts in the Great Lakes region. “It allows multiple jurisdictions that have different interests to be able to preserve those within the scope of a collaborative process.”  

Thomas was one of several researchers supported by the Consortium for Scenario Planning who provided updates on projects related to climate adaptation and growth scenarios in legacy cities. That work includes an exploration of how scenario planning can be used in rural communities, the development of a tool that uses scenarios to explore the impacts of land use and water policy, and the creation of an exploratory scenario planning how-to guide that legacy cities can use to prepare for a potential influx of new residents migrating from more climate-vulnerable places. 

As the breadth of this research indicates, scenario planning can be applied in many contexts, says Heather Sauceda Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. Hannon says both the practice and the CSP conference are gaining momentum. 

“This was the fifth year of the conference, and we had the most people we’ve ever had, with attendance at sessions ranging from 30 people to 90 people,” said Hannon. “It’s great to see new people entering this field and wanting to learn more, and the conference is designed to give them the chance to share ideas, learn from one another, and make connections they can follow up on.”  

To learn more about the Consortium for Scenario Planning, visit https://www.lincolninst.edu/research-data/data-toolkits/consortium-scenario-planning.

Image: Disruptors named by participants in the Consortium for Scenario Planning conference. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

As the climate crisis grows ever more urgent, land conservationists are taking meaningful action to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and protect natural systems from the unavoidable impacts of a warming planet, according to a new report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

From the Great Plains of the United States to the high-altitude wetlands of Ecuador, land trusts and conservancies are developing and implementing creative, nature-based strategies to address climate change. In the report From the Ground Up: How Land Trusts and Conservancies are Providing Solutions to Climate Change, Lincoln Institute experts James N. Levitt and Chandni Navalkha document these initiatives through a dozen case examples that demonstrate how conservation organizations can help mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

“Such organizations are working in more than 100 nations on six continents,” write Levitt, director of the Lincoln Institute’s International Land Conservation Network, and Navalkha, the Lincoln Institute’s associate director of sustainably managed land and water resources. “They represent millions of engaged citizens working from Finland to Chile to pass our natural heritage on to future generations.” 

The report explores how land trusts and conservancies have addressed climate change in five distinct areas, with examples of successful initiatives in each:  

• Land Protection, Restoration, and Management
• Water Supply, Stormwater Management, and Buffering Against Sea-Level Rise  
• Biodiversity Conservation 
• Carbon Sequestration 
• Energy Production 

Among the cases, the report documents how The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is using sophisticated geospatial technology to identify sites  in the United States where wind turbines will not pose a threat to birds or other wildlife. The initiative, Site Wind Right, draws on more than 100 sources to map wind resources, wildlife habitat, infrastructure, and other relevant data. It identifies more than 90 million acres as suitable for wind turbines—enough land to generate wind power equal to the country’s entire electricity supply from all sources in 2018. 

Meanwhile, the South American capital city of Quito, Ecuador, has confronted threats to its water supply—made worse by climate change—through an ambitious land conservation program. The municipality worked with the local water provider and others to enhance water quality and supply downstream by conserving and better managing land upstream, in the high-altitude wetlands known as the Andean páramo, which surround the city. Through partnerships with international organizations, including TNC, the program has been replicated in at least seven other Latin American cities, generating more than USD $200 million for conservation efforts from 500 public and private partners. 

Drawing on these cases and 10 others, Levitt and Navalkha synthesize lessons learned and make five recommendations for those who seek to confront climate change through land conservation: Empower civic sector initiatives that are creative and ambitious in scope and scale; invest in initiatives with clear strategies and measurable impact; aim for broad collaborations; share advanced science, technologies, and financing techniques; and think long term. 

“In the evolving struggle to rein in and cope with climate change globally, all sectors must join forces to find solutions that are sustainable, replicable, and reliable,” the authors conclude. 

Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: Flint Hills Credit: Brad Mangas

The leading technology companies should be doing more to address climate change, says Silicon Valley chronicler Kara Swisher, host of the Sway podcast at the New York Times. Inventions await in manufacturing, materials, batteries, agriculture, land use monitoring, and carbon sequestration, she says. 
 
“A lot of these answers are going to be in how we build things, how we make things, how we consume things, how things are distributed—and tech really does play a part in it,” Swisher says in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. 

Technology has long been intertwined with the way people live, since well before the notion of the smart city and the Internet of Things. Traffic lights were transformative technology a century ago; today traffic and transit management is using Artificial Intelligence, there are apps for finding a parking space or getting a pothole filled, and 3D printing and other methodologies are part of building construction. 
 
Now expectations are even higher for addressing the biggest challenge facing humankind: the climate crisis. Swisher predicted in a New York Times column at the end of 2019 that there were abundant, lucrative opportunities for tech entrepreneurs in green solutions. Their contribution might be vital as national governments struggle to come together on a global program to reduce emissions. 
 
“These are issues that are not going to solely be fixed by tech, but there’s a lot of technology that’s going to go into … how to build the right seawall and make it work, to less consumption to carbon capture to space travel, all kinds of things are all within the bailiwick of the tech industry,” Swisher said. 

One promising area among many is the task of monitoring global land use changes, fires, land clearing, severe weather, drought, and floods. Expect these platforms to get even more sophisticated as a kind of global dashboard, using artificial intelligence to map and understand all the climate data. 

“Our whole world is monitored,” Swisher says. “I think we can use it to help us really understand what’s happening versus anecdotal stuff that often happens when we make policy decisions.” 

Perils abound, including, for example, insufficiently vetted ideas involving shooting supposedly curative matter into the atmosphere—a geoengineering scheme depicted in the sci-fi novel Termination Shock, which Swisher recommends. 
 
The blurring of technology fixes that are truly good for the planet with those that simply make money was also underscored by the quirky tech entrepreneur featured in the film Don’t Look Up. “I thought it was perfect … this idea [of] that benign goodness that really masks malevolence and greed,” Swisher says. “I think the whole point of that character was that there are people on this planet that are more powerful than governments.” 
 
Climate change—and land’s role in both reducing emissions and adapting to new realities—is a core focus for the Lincoln Institute, which is also engaged in the role of technology in cities and in the stewardship of the earth. The Center for Geospatial Solutions has been developing precisely the kind of land use monitoring and mapping tools that Swisher talks about. 
 
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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

Image: Kara Swisher Credit: vox

Further Reading 
 
City Tech: Mapping a More Efficient Approach to Land Use | Land Lines 
 
President’s Message: 2030 is Coming Soon, Let’s Get To Work | Land Lines 
 
Let’s Make the Future What it Used to Be | The Boston Globe