What Will Make Home Buyers Consider Climate Risk? What Happens Once They Do?
By Jon Gorey, November 17, 2023
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Realtor Gabriella Beale stopped for lunch at a cafe in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, this summer, on her way to show her buyers a home in nearby Larchmont, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and early 20th-century houses. Then a late August downpour dumped more than two inches of rain on the city, forcing Beale to cancel the showing—because she could no longer get to the house. She watched helplessly from the cafe as flash flooding filled the road outside.
“I couldn’t even get to my car because part of the road essentially became a river,” Beale said. This wasn’t a hurricane, or even a tropical storm—just a rainy Monday in this low-lying city of 238,000. Situated between the Elizabeth River and Chesapeake Bay, Norfolk is experiencing the fastest relative sea-level rise on the East Coast—more than two inches just since 2012—so there isn’t much room for extra water. Parts of the city flood even without rainfall during king tides, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that the city’s dozen or so annual “sunny-day flooding” incidents could double as soon as 2030.
The encroaching water hasn’t gone unnoticed, Beale said: more buyers ask about flooding than in years past, even in neighborhoods outside the 100-year floodplain. She dutifully counsels all her clients on flood risk, discussing insurance costs, personal safety, and the potential drop in future resale value. Some buyers want nothing to do with a floodplain house, but others don’t mind the risk—or can’t afford to be picky. Beale acknowledges that she can’t make decisions for them. “People have different ideas of what level of flood risk they’re comfortable with, and it’s not really up to me to say, ‘This is a bad house.’”
Flooding in the Larchmont neighborhood of Norfolk, Virginia. Credit: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant via Flickr.
By the time the stormwater finally subsided on that rainy Monday, Beale’s car was toast; she wasn’t sure it could be repaired. “I can tell that story, and some buyers still want to live in that neighborhood,” she said. Indeed, her buyers rescheduled their showing for the very next day.
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BEALE’S CLIENTS are hardly alone in their pursuit of risky real estate. Even as climate change delivers more intense and more frequent storms, wildfires, and heat waves, home buyers across the United States continue to move into areas at greater risk of climate impacts like flooding, wildfire, drought, and extreme heat—in fact, they’re doing so at a faster pace.
That the climate is changing, and not for the better, is hard to miss. The US experienced a record 23 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in just the first nine months of 2023; the previous annual record of 22 was not even three years old, set in 2020. The number of buildings destroyed by wildfire in California each year has spiked 335 percent since 2009, according to First Street Foundation, a research nonprofit seeking to make climate risk data more accessible. Nationwide, we’re now losing an average of more than 17,000 structures a year to wildfire, a number that is forecast to top 33,700 by 2053—meaning we can soon expect to lose the equivalent of Daytona Beach, Florida, or Asheville, North Carolina, to fire every single year.
Yet home buyers still don’t seem to factor in climate risk when they make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. We keep building and buying homes in the fire-prone “wildland-urban interface” where town meets wilderness, and moving closer to the water, not away from it.
The most flood-prone counties in the US had 384,000 more people move in than out in 2021 and 2022, according to a Redfin analysis, roughly double the net increase of the prior two years. That includes Lee County, Florida, which gained 60,000 net new residents in two years even as Hurricane Ian destroyed nearly 10,000 homes in 2022.
Counties facing the greatest wildfire risk, meanwhile, netted 426,000 new residents in that time. And those most threatened by heat collectively gained 629,000 net residents—including Maricopa County, Arizona, where 76,000 newcomers sweltered in temperatures that topped 110º Fahrenheit for 31 straight days last summer and left hundreds dead.
And yet, the housing market in Maricopa County has been almost as hot as the sidewalks that gave residents third-degree burns in July: median home prices rose a staggering 64 percent in four years, from $290,000 in June 2019 to $475,000 in 2023, as more residents moved in. Prices in Florida’s Lee County rose 70 percent in that time, compared to 40 percent nationwide. Accounting for likely long-term flood damage—to say nothing of drought or wildfire risk—a study published in Nature Climate Change estimated that the residential real estate market in the US is collectively overvalued by as much as $237 billion.
New construction in Maricopa County, Arizona, which has seen record heat, drought, and growth. Credit: halbergman via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
The disconnect is largely driven by short-term affordability concerns, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “People are leaving places like San Francisco because their rent is too high, and then they’re moving to places like Tampa or Las Vegas because they can actually afford to buy a home there,” Fairweather said. “But what they’re not thinking about is how their housing expenses might change in the future, how the value of their home might change in the future, and also how the livability of those places might change in the future.”
Where the planet is sending us flashing red “stop” signals, home buyers and developers seem to see green lights. Why? And what will it take to get them to heed the stop signs?
Tell Me About It
One reason a driver might recklessly blow past a stop sign, putting themselves and others in danger, is if the sign itself isn’t visible—if it’s concealed by overgrown foliage, for example.
Sometimes warnings of flood or fire risk aren’t immediately obvious to home buyers, either.
“One thing that we’ve learned is that information is just so critical,” said Patrick Welch, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “Even though there is so much information out there about climate risks, it’s not necessarily that accessible—people don’t know about it.”
In 23 states, for example, home sellers aren’t typically required to disclose a home’s flood history to potential buyers, including in vulnerable coastal states like Florida, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Only two states, California and Oregon, require some disclosure of wildfire risk. And often such notices are confusing or reach buyers too late for them to act on the information—after the home inspection, for example, or buried in a stack of forms signed at the closing.
California requires some disclosure of wildfire risk, but it doesn’t apply to every property, and often comes late in the homebuying process. Credit: f00sion via E+/Getty Images.
Getting clear, accurate risk assessments into home buyers’ hands can help them make more climate-informed decisions about where they choose to live, Welch said.
“Disclosure of risks is very uneven across states,” agreed Margaret Walls, senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. In fact, disclosure rules can even vary within a state, which is how Walls and her colleagues were able to isolate the impact of disclosing fire risk on home values in California in a new working paper.
California requires home sellers located in a moderate, high, or very-high Fire Hazard Severity Zone to disclose that fire risk to buyers—but only if the home falls within a state responsibility zone, meaning the state manages wildfire prevention and response. In areas where the local jurisdiction is responsible, sellers aren’t required to disclose moderate or high fire risk.
That allowed Walls to compare homes that share the same level of fire risk—as well as school districts, walkability, and other location-based amenities—but have different disclosure requirements. By comparing years of sales data for neighboring homes on either side of the disclosure divide, the researchers were able to show that homes with a disclosed fire risk sold for an average of 4.3 percent less than similar nearby properties with undisclosed risk.
In other words, buyers who were made aware of the risks seemed to adjust their behaviors in a rational way—exactly what you’d hope to see in a well-functioning market. “We can’t expect markets to work and prices to reflect something unless we have all the information,” Walls said.
The effect of risk disclosure on sale prices seems to be strengthening as fire seasons intensify. The eight largest wildfires in California history have all occurred since 2017, burning more than 4 million acres, and 2020 was the state’s worst fire year on record. “We found a stronger effect in the more recent years,” Walls adds. “It’s getting more salient to people after these bad fire years.”
Past research has found that strict flood disclosure rules yield a similar price penalty of about 4 percent. In the absence of flood disclosures, though, home buyers can still get some idea of a home’s flood risk from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA’s flood maps aren’t perfect—they’re based on historical flooding, for one thing, not future climate models—but they’re freely available. Anyone can access them online, though Beale says most home buyers don’t think to do so until she recommends it. And even then, it’s hard to get a price quote for flood insurance without applying for coverage. In fact, because lenders require borrowers to purchase flood insurance on homes located within a FEMA high-risk floodplain, loan officers are often the ones breaking the bad news about flood risk and insurance premiums—typically very late in the process.
“Usually at that point, the buyers can’t get out of the contract,” Beale said. The average annual flood insurance premium nationwide was $888 in 2022, “so that’s not a huge impact if you’re spreading it out over 12 months,” she notes. But rates can vary dramatically by property, even cresting five figures. “If it comes back at $10,000, and you can still technically afford the house according to the lender … you can’t walk away.”
Major real estate sites Redfin and Realtor.com have started incorporating First Street’s climate risk data on their property listings—right alongside other typical home buyer concerns, such as school districts and taxes. And getting that information to a home buyer early in the process makes a real difference, according to a new working paper Fairweather coauthored.
Redfin and Realtor.com have started incorporating climate risk data from First Street Foundation into their property listings. Credit: Redfin.
Redfin started publishing flood risk data sitewide in February 2021. But before that, in late 2020, the brokerage leveraged a soft launch of the new feature to conduct a three-month experiment among 17.5 million users. Half of them saw detailed flood risk data and “Flood Factor” scores on the homes they searched, while the other half did not. That randomized flood risk information “had a significant and meaningful impact on users’ search behavior,” and influenced every stage of the home buying process, from initial search to making offers to the final purchase. Over time, buyers who encountered high Flood Factor scores on their initial home searches gradually adjusted their searches toward—and were later more likely to bid on—less flood-prone homes than were users who didn’t see flood risk information.
“Increasing information to home buyers, especially at the moment they’re buying a home, would help them make a different decision when it comes to taking on climate risk,” said Fairweather.
A Reckoning in the Insurance Market
One way markets traditionally communicate risk is through insurance rates; higher premiums quite clearly reflect a greater likelihood of losses. But right now, the home and flood insurance markets are struggling to adapt to a range of issues, with the costs of climate change-fueled disasters, reconstruction, and fraudulent claims all on the rise.
For decades, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has underpriced coverage, indirectly subsidizing homeowners in flood-prone areas by making it less expensive to live there than it should be. This is evident through simple math: The NFIP is $20 billion in debt, as premiums have failed to keep up with the actual cost of damages incurred.
FEMA took a step toward correcting that imbalance by implementing Risk Rating 2.0 in late 2021, a new methodology that better aligns premiums with an individual property’s flood risk. However, Congress capped NFIP rate increases at 18 percent a year to ease the impact on existing policyholders. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that median flood insurance premiums would still need to almost double, from $689 to $1,288, for the program to be actuarially sound, and that roughly one in 10 properties insured by the NFIP will eventually require at least a 300 percent rate hike. In Naples, Florida, for example, the average annual flood insurance premium among 1,568 policyholders was $2,228 in 2022; FEMA calculated the risk-based cost of those policies should average almost four times as much: $8,067 per year.
In Naples, Florida, the average annual flood insurance premium among 1,568 policyholders was $2,228. FEMA calculations suggest the risk-based cost of those policies should be nearly four times higher. Credit: Andrii Mischykcha via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Meanwhile, private insurers (whose homeowner policies generally don’t cover flood damage) are increasingly finding it difficult or impossible to provide coverage at fair but profitable rates as windstorms and wildfires grow more destructive, and as reconstruction gets more expensive.
State Farm announced in May that it would no longer write new homeowner policies in California, where it is the largest insurer, citing “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure” and historically high construction costs. Soon after, Allstate announced that it would do the same, making permanent a pause on new policies instituted in 2022. More than a dozen insurance companies have pulled out of Florida and Louisiana in the past two years, leaving homeowners scrambling for coverage.
Insurance companies could theoretically just raise their rates enough to offset increased costs. But insurance is something of a necessity—lenders won’t approve a mortgage without it, and four in five home buyers rely on a home loan to finance their purchases. So, to protect consumers, big insurance premium hikes often must be approved by state regulators. And in California, insurers can only use past losses, not future risk estimates, to justify rate increases. That makes it hard for insurers to price their coverage accurately or profitably as risk intensifies.
As Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, told KQED, the price of home insurance in California no longer matches the risk. “Our insurance system kind of pretends that climate change doesn’t exist, and that’s not workable anymore,” he said.
The price signals that private insurers ordinarily provide through premium adjustments are crucial to a functioning real estate market, “because that is ultimately how decisions get made,” University of Pennsylvania economist Benjamin Keys told Penn Today. “When there are incentives for the choices that homebuilders make, that homeowners make, that’s going to reshape where we live and where we build. When we don’t get that price signal, that distorts our perceptions of risk.”
A report by First Street Foundation asserts that millions of US homes face more climate risk than their insurance rates would indicate, creating a “climate insurance bubble” in the market. “You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns,” First Street Head of Climate Implications Jeremy Porter told Grist. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.” In that respect, it makes some sense for home insurers like State Farm and Allstate to stop writing new policies in the most high-risk areas—doing so could help dissuade developers from building in places most likely to burn.
According to a recent report from the First Street Foundation, millions of homes in the United States face more climate risk than their insurance rates indicate, creating a “climate insurance bubble.” Credit: First Street Foundation.
But millions of people already live in high-risk areas. And when those homeowners can’t get insurance on the private market, they must turn to state-run plans that offer less coverage at higher prices. These public options are meant to offer policies of last resort, but their role is growing; in Florida, the public Citizens Property Insurance Corporation is now the state’s largest insurer, according to the First Street report, with 1.3 million policyholders. The number of homeowners on California’s state-run FAIR Plan more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, to nearly 273,000.
“I worry that a larger state role in insurance markets will bring political pressure to keep premiums low without reflecting the growing climate risks,” Keys said. “It’s challenging for a state-backed plan to raise rates aggressively on homeowners in that state. There’s real political tension.” State-run plans also transfer financial risk to taxpayers: Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation expects to turn a profit in 2023, but lost more than $2 billion in 2022. That’s one reason Florida is phasing in a new law over the next four years requiring all Citizens policyholders to obtain flood insurance as well.
In September, California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara announced emergency steps aimed at stabilizing the state’s wobbly home insurance market by the end of 2024. Under these new rules, insurers will be permitted to consider climate change and future catastrophe risk when setting premiums. However, they’ll also be required to cover a percentage of high-risk homes, to start transitioning homeowners off the FAIR Plan and back into the private market. That could well be enough to draw insurance companies back, Keys says: “When an insurer leaves a state, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to write insurance policies. It means that they don’t want to write insurance policies under the current regulatory environment and with the current limits on premiums. They want to make a profit.”
As insurance rates rise to account for increased climate risk, one way to ease the impact on homeowners (without artificially suppressing premiums) is for insurers to offer discounts when property owners invest in preventative risk-reduction measures—such as raising a home’s mechanical systems above the base flood elevation, or clearing fire-fueling vegetation from around a house. A new California initiative called “Safer From Wildfires,” introduced in late 2022, requires insurers to recognize and reward fire resiliency measures by offering discounts to homeowners who create five-foot ember-resistant zones around their homes, for example, or who invest in upgraded roofs, windows, or vents.
“By incentivizing policyholders to implement wildfire-resistant measures, insurance companies can create a win-win situation,” the First Street report notes. That could create a positive cycle, reducing the frequency and severity of wildfire losses—and the resulting financial burden on both insurers and communities—while potentially preserving home values.
Change the Lending Landscape
As the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that back most mortgages in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wield tremendous influence over the real estate market—and could also help home buyers heed climate risk.
The GSEs already require borrowers purchasing a high-flood-risk home to secure flood insurance as a condition of their mortgage. But they could, in theory, take more aggressive steps to dissuade risky home purchases, such as requiring a bigger down payment on high-risk properties, charging higher interest rates on such loans, or factoring climate risk into valuations. Fannie Mae has started enlisting climate analytics companies like First Street to figure out how and whether it can fairly incorporate climate risk into its underwriting and lending guidelines.
It’s a delicate exercise, however. Adjusting valuation or lending criteria to make it more difficult or more expensive to get a mortgage in flood-prone areas would very likely devalue the affected homes. And it’s not just expensive beach houses. Due to historical discrimination and redlining practices, low-income households and people of color are disproportionately represented in the most flood-prone areas. These are some of the very communities Fannie and Freddie have been trying to better support through their “Duty to Serve” mandate.
A Redfin analysis of 38 US metro areas found that people in formerly redlined neighborhoods–areas categorized as undesirable on discriminatory federal lending maps in the 1930s–face higher flood risk and related financial and safety concerns than those in other neighborhoods. Credit: Redfin.
“It’s really a double-edged sword,” said Ellie White, senior associate on the buildings team at RMI. Like the Lincoln Institute, RMI is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC), which seeks to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable for bringing housing finance opportunities to families not traditionally served by the private market.
“A main roadblock of incorporating climate risk information into the valuation of a property revolves around this challenge of ensuring that we’re not devaluing properties in already high-risk, low-income, historically disadvantaged communities,” White said. “So I think the GSEs are very cautious, and rightfully so, about what it would mean if we had wide-scale incorporation of those physical risks into the valuation of property.”
The stakes are uniquely high in the US, where homeownership has long been a primary engine of wealth creation. “If not done correctly, this could really completely wipe out families’ generational wealth, and it would disproportionately impact low-income communities,” Welch said. “It’s a really complicated, tricky issue.” Local governments that rely heavily on property taxes could also see major shifts in their tax base if climate risk were fully reflected in home values. While municipalities can typically offset potential revenue loss by adjusting tax rates when property values decline, large shifts in the distribution of tax burdens can create political challenges.
But the GSEs could do other things, like using risk research and data to guide policy, and helping homeowners in high-risk areas pay for resiliency upgrades like elevating structures. “The GSEs can take more action on the community engagement front, to support educational programs and raise awareness of these risks and resilience solutions among home buyers,” White said.
Raising a house above flood level on Long Island, New York. Lenders could influence the market by dissuading the purchase of vulnerable properties and helping existing homeowners pay for resilience upgrades. Credit: John Penney via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.
In a letter to Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Sandra Thompson in August, the UMMC made a wide range of policy recommendations. Among them: requiring the disclosure of both climate risk and energy performance on existing homes backed with GSE mortgages, and requiring new homes backed by GSE loans to meet more energy-efficient building codes. The latter would reduce long-term ownership costs for home buyers, while also reducing financial risk to the GSEs.
Zoning for the Future
Figuring out how to protect, insure, or move residents of existing neighborhoods that face increased climate risk is a thorny problem without many satisfactory solutions. But at the very least, experts say, we should stop creating more at-risk residents, and focus new development in climate-resilient places.
“New construction has been increasingly going in places with high climate risks, particularly when it comes to wildfire risk and drought risk,” Fairweather said. “And it’s exurban sprawl that is to blame. Because of single-family zoning, people build more and more into places that aren’t naturally equipped for climate change—they’re building into the forests in inland California, they’re building into the deserts, which don’t have access to water.”
Taking a gamble on new home construction in Nevada. Credit: 4Kodiak via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Communities should instead be trying to shift development away from high-climate-risk areas, and encouraging more density and affordable housing in safer areas, says Michael Rodriguez, research director at Smart Growth America. “Climate-informed zoning can easily overlay with a lot of other priorities that a city has,” he said, such as transit-oriented development.
Right now, land markets clearly aren’t sending the right signals about climate risk, Welch said, but planners and elected officials could help correct that at a local level. “Updating zoning codes and land use regulations to reflect climate risks, whether it’s wildfire or flooding, are relatively simple ways that local governments can start to move the needle on this,” he said.
Back in Norfolk, Virginia, city leaders have taken the lead on climate-informed zoning. Over the past decade, Norfolk has adopted a pair of new land use plans: the short-term PlaNorfolk2030, and the long-term Vision 2100, along with accompanying zoning overlays.
The long-range plan divides the city into four color-coded sections. Red zones, which include the naval base and the downtown district where Beale watched stormwater surge through the streets, are densely developed and economically important, but very vulnerable to flooding; the plan calls for investments in flood protection and mitigation in these areas. Yellow zones indicate flood-prone residential and historic areas, where a resilience overlay will discourage new development but support existing residents’ adaptation efforts. Low-risk green zones are where the city wants to invest in denser, transit-rich neighborhoods. And purple zones, which also have a lower flood risk, are slated for infrastructure investments and lower-density development aimed at preserving housing affordability.
Leaders in Norfolk, Virginia, have developed land use maps that indicate areas where the city intends to invest in flood mitigation and resilience (red and yellow) and areas where new infrastructure and housing development will be encouraged (green and purple). Credit: PlaNorfolk2030.
Such a climate policy can influence land use and real estate decisions in a couple of ways, Rodriguez said. “It might work through literal policy incentives and disincentives, in a tangible sense, like money or regulations,” he said. “But then there’s also the signaling aspect. The city government has now put out a map, and that map in itself can send a signal that can have market impacts.”
Some people worried that, by officially declaring some places risky and others preferable for development, Norfolk’s plan could spook home buyers and investors and sink home values in the high-risk areas. But Rodriguez and his colleagues compared years of sales and permit data before and after the Vision 2100 plan was released, and, as they describe in a new working paper commissioned by the Lincoln Institute, there was no statistical impact on home prices.
That could be the result of the unusually strong pandemic real estate market during the years studied, the authors wrote, or a general lack of climate concern among area home buyers at the time. But it may offer some assurance to hesitant communities: Enacting climate-informed zoning to guide future development doesn’t necessarily have to wreak havoc on existing home values, at least in the short term.
“It’s a long-term solution—it’s not going to change the development patterns or reduce the risk today or tomorrow,” Welch said. “But it’s going to slowly incentivize and push development into less risky areas. And I think one of the takeaways from that study was that you can do this and not immediately crash the local housing market or cause a panic.”
Norfolk’s experience also showed that an inclusive process can ease perceptions of malicious remapping. “You’re drawing lines on the map, and you’re saying, ‘Build here, don’t build there,’” Rodriguez said. “That feels weird, and it feels a little bit like redlining in a historical context of planning. And that feels doubly weird when we know that a lot of the places facing the most climate risk tend to be poor, and tend to have more people of color. . . . There has to be a lot of community input and communication as to what it means to have climate-informed zoning to try and mitigate some of those concerns.”
In that sense, while Norfolk’s policy lacks “teeth” and the city has yet to implement follow-up measures such as density bonuses or the transfer of development rights (which would allow landowners in vulnerable zones to sell their development rights to builders in a low-risk zone), the city has already taken a huge step. “They were one of one of the few communities out there that did anything like this,” Rodriguez said.
States and municipalities have other levers they can pull, too—some more drastic than others.
In water-stressed Arizona, for example—where the Colorado River is overdrawn, and depleted underground aquifers are projected to eventually run dry at current usage levels—state officials recently announced a moratorium on new residential construction that relies on groundwater in the Phoenix metro area.
Even without placing an outright ban on new construction in high-risk areas, communities can, through zoning and other regulations, effectively stymie risky new development by refusing to fund or permit new streets, water service, and other key infrastructure in high-risk settings. The federal government uses a similar approach to protect sensitive coastal ecosystems through the Coastal Barrier Resources Act. The CBRA doesn’t explicitly outlaw development in those areas, but dissuades it by withholding federal support for things like infrastructure, flood insurance, and disaster relief. That disincentive has proven remarkably effective, research commissioned by the Lincoln Institute has shown, reducing development by 85 percent.
It’s worth noting that Norfolk didn’t outright ban new construction in high-flood-risk areas, either. But it did set stricter building codes in those zones, which can help the city’s built environment adapt to climate risk by accomplishing two things at once. “To the extent that you do build there, at least you’re going to build something that’s more resilient,” Rodriguez said. Meanwhile, higher design standards can add cost and complexity to construction in vulnerable areas, creating a disincentive to build there, and encouraging developers to locate projects on safer sites instead.
Local governments can also charge higher taxes or impact fees to discourage building or buying in high-risk areas—for example, raising water and sewage rates in water-stressed areas, or funding wildfire prevention efforts with a higher tax on fire-prone properties. “Higher fees in risky areas serve two purposes,” write Brookings Institute researchers Julia Gill and Jenny Schuetz. “They encourage price-sensitive households to choose safer locations, and they also provide local governments with more revenue to upgrade the climate resilience of infrastructure.”
All of these policies could help point home buyers toward making better, more rational decisions. But where we choose to live sometimes defies reason.
Flooding in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2021. Credit: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant via Flickr.
Beale, the Norfolk realtor who counsels all her buyers about flood risk, understands why some of them still choose a high-risk home. For some, it’s straightforward economics. “If a buyer can only afford $150,000, and they want a detached house, Norfolk’s going to be it—and it’s maybe in a flood risk area,” Beale said.
But for others, it’s a deep-seated desire that isn’t so easily erased by rising insurance rates or flood disclosure forms. “These are beautiful neighborhoods” of century-old Colonials and tree-lined sidewalks, she said. “It’s not all about money. It’s this perceived dream of homeownership—this ideal of, ‘What do you want your life to be?’”
Unfortunately, the one thing that does seem to break through and change home buyer behavior is witnessing a weather disaster. Beale says many buyers still shy away from particular streets because they remember driving past flood-ravaged houses there after a bad storm.
After all, no one’s ideal dream of homeownership involves fleeing a fire or wading through floodwater. Fairweather expects attitudes to shift as risk increasingly becomes reality for more people. “I think experience will be a teacher,” she said, “as there are more hurricanes and more fire events. I think more homeowners will start to worry about it when they see it in real life.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Tidal flooding in Norfolk, Virginia. Credit: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant via Flickr.
Events
Lincoln Institute at COP28
November 30, 2023 - December 12, 2023
Offered in English
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Land and water policy is at the heart of climate policy and essential to climate-resilient development. Lincoln Institute staff are participating in the UN’s 28th annual Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from November 30 to December 12, to support inclusive and equitable land and water policy responses to the climate crisis.
Lincoln Institute at the Multilevel Action and Urbanization Pavilion
This year, the Lincoln Institute is a Pavilion partner at the Multilevel Action and Urbanization Pavilion, coconvened by ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability and UN-Habitat. The Pavilion serves as the global hub for discourse on challenges and solutions to the interconnected issues of climate change and urbanization. Here the Lincoln Institute will focus on the intersection of equitable climate action, land use, urbanization, nature-based solutions, and finance in two sessions on the Global Event Stage and streamed live on YouTube:
Local Solutions in Land: Multilevel Collaboration for Inclusive Climate Resilience
December 6 at 10:00 a.m. (GMT+4)
This event will highlight the critical role land and land policy can play in the development of inclusive, resilient communities and how collaboration and networks are essential to scaling up action. Anacláudia Rossbach, director of the Latin America and the Caribbean program at the Lincoln Institute, will moderate. Panelists include:
Patrick Welch, policy analyst, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (moderator)
Lauren McLean, mayor of Boise, Idaho
Inamara Mélo, general coordinator of adaptation, national secretariat for climate change, Brazilian Ministry of Environment and Climate Change
Margaret Mengo, director of program operations in Africa, Habitat for Humanity International
Laura Arévalos, community liaison and professor, Villa 20, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Juan Carlos Cárdenas, mayor of Bucaramanga, Colombia
Toward Win-Win Outcomes for Climate and Community
December 9 at 1:00 p.m. (GMT+4)
This event will focus on how communities—from agricultural to highly urbanized—are taking action to reduce and adapt to climate change while balancing their responses with social and economic considerations. Panelists include:
Amy Cotter, director of climate strategies, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
John Farner, executive director, Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy
Deepthy Kanneri Balagangadharan, regional director Middle East, Green Business Certification, Inc.
Henk Ovink, senior fellow, World Resources Institute, and commissioner, Global Commission on the Economics of Water
Perla Lozano, manager, Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Center for the Future of Cities
Gabriel Liu, joint secretary at the Brazilian Presidency for Environment, Climate and Agriculture
Hosted by the Lincoln Institute
USG-Civil Society Gathering on Built Environment Day
December 6 at 5:00 pm (GMT +4)
Hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, this meet-and-greet reception brings together representatives from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and US civil society organizations attending COP28 to discuss the critical intersections of climate, housing, transport, and the built environment in a relaxed environment.
US Government staff and members of US civil society organizations are invited to RVSP here.
Featuring the Lincoln Institute
Lincoln Institute staff will be featured in several other discussions at COP28, including:
Building Partnerships to Deliver Transformative Climate Action in Cities
December 1
Hosted by The King’s Foundation and Community Jameel, this impact-driven roundtable acknowledges the Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation and leverages insights from Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and The Prince’s Foundation’s University of Oxford-partnered research to build partnerships, raise awareness and explore evidence-based solutions towards climate action in cities.
Achieving Climate Targets in the Transport Sector: Can Renewables Pave the Way?
December 5 at 11:30 a.m. (GMT +4)
Co-developed by Asociación Sustenar, the International Union of Railways, the International Union of Public Transport, and REN21, this panel will discuss how renewables and transports can tackle global climate goals together.
Land Use in the Era of Climate Mobility: The Possibilities, Challenges, and Risks of Artificial Intelligence
December 6 at 9:00 a.m. (GMT +4)
Organized by the Global Centre for Climate Mobility and Claudia Dobles (LCAU/MIT), this panel will discuss the challenges and opportunities of introducing AI into land use planning in climate vulnerable countries and communities and its potential for helping to address climate mobility pressures in rural and urban areas.
Details
Date
November 30, 2023 - December 12, 2023
Language
English
Keywords
Adaptation, Climate Mitigation, Resilience, Water
Feed the Farm, Not the Algae
By Jon Gorey, November 1, 2023
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Natural ecosystems offer some powerful solutions to our climate crisis. And nature holds answers to other environmental challenges as well—like figuring out how to feed a growing human population without contributing to climate change, pollution, and toxic algal blooms.
The invention of synthetic fertilizer allowed farmers to double their yields per acre in the past century, supporting some four billion additional humans. But its use and production can have serious ecological impacts. Along with methane from livestock and the carbon released by soil disturbance, fertilizer is a primary reason why agriculture accounts for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. But new funding models in the Midwest are providing an incentive to farmers to swap status quo techniques for more sustainable practices.
The high-temperature production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is by itself responsible for 1.4 percent of global carbon emissions. After that fertilizer is applied to crops, it can release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 245 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And excess nitrogen also finds its way into waterways, polluting drinking supplies and wildlife habitat and, in the American Midwest and Plains, flowing down the Mississippi River to create a vast, headline-making “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, where it feeds toxic algal blooms that suck the oxygen out of the water.
“That is the principal cause of these dead zones and toxic algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The Mississippi River collects fertilizer runoff from Montana all the way to Pittsburgh, and sends it down in one big spout that flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and it becomes this concentrated soup of nitrogen and phosphorus.”
However, some fairly simple practices can reduce how much fertilizer farmers need, and how much ends up polluting watersheds. First and foremost, says Matthew Helmers, director of the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University, is resisting the tendency to over-fertilize. About a third of farmers apply more nitrogen than necessary, sometimes in an effort to maximize yields or hedge against risk.
“If we can reduce the rate, and not reduce yields for the crop,” he says, that cuts nitrogen loss as well as costs for the farmer. Iowa State and other universities developed a calculator to help Midwestern farmers determine the best amount of nitrogen to use depending on their goals. And simply fertilizing in the spring instead of in the fall can also reduce nitrogen runoff by an average of 6 percent.
Beyond better fertilizer management, regenerative farming—a more holistic and sustainable approach to agriculture that can help restore degraded soil, enhance biodiversity, and protect water and other resources—can also help reduce nitrogen runoff.
One of the most basic regenerative farming practices is planting cover crops in between growing seasons. “That’s where we try to have something green out there during the period when we’re not growing our cash crop,” Helmers says, “covering the soil surface and taking up nutrients that might otherwise be susceptible to loss.”
A perennial cover crop such as rye or oat stabilizes the soil, but also converts excess water-soluble nitrate into plant matter, “so there’s less nitrate that could be leached away in the next rainfall event,” Helmers explains. Rarely employed just 30 years ago, the use of cover crops nearly doubled in Iowa between 2017 to 2021, to an estimated 2.8 million acres.
Other in-field practices include a diverse crop rotation—alternating corn or soybean seasons with forage crops, for example—or growing an energy crop such as switchgrass, which can be used to produce renewable natural gas. (That may sound like gas-powered greenwashing, but it’s a real technology.) Low- or no-till farming, meanwhile, which reduces soil disturbance and leaves most of the plant residue on the surface after harvest, can cut nitrous oxide emissions and help soil retain more carbon and nutrients. No-till farming is now employed on 41 percent of Iowa farmland, or 9.5 million acres.
No-till farming minimizes soil disturbance, helping soil retain more carbon and nutrtients. Credit: Jason Johnson, USDA Resources Conservation Service.
The edge of a farm offers one more chance to halt nitrogen loss as water drains off the cropland and into nearby waterways. “We have a whole suite of practices to treat that water before we deliver it to a stream, and they’re kind of utilizing Mother Nature to promote denitrification,” Helmers says, referring to the natural process that converts nitrate into dinitrogen, the inert, stable gas that makes up most of Earth’s atmosphere.
In one configuration, underground drainage systems can be diverted so they release water perpendicular to a stream instead of directly into it, forcing it to flow slowly across a 30-foot vegetated buffer. If the soil in that buffer zone doesn’t contain enough organic matter to promote denitrification, then installing a bioreactor—which sounds high-tech, but is simply a trench full of wood chips—can help do the job. These simple methods can reduce nitrate loss by 42 percent or more.
“We could also route that drainage water to a wetland—that might be a riverine wetland next to the stream, or an oxbow wetland, or one that we restore,” Helmers says. In addition to providing ecological benefits to the landscape, “those can be very effective for promoting denitrification.”
Despite the impact of nitrates on both local drinking water and the Gulf’s marine environment, these practices remain voluntary in Iowa and in most other states. But there are federal and local cost-share programs designed to encourage their adoption, some more robust than others.
Iowa’s Polk County, for example, offers both financial and logistical assistance for installing edge-of-field buffers, making it easier and more economical for farmers who might otherwise be put off by the hassle or cost. And since water treatment plants are finding that it’s more efficient to pay farmers to reduce fertilizer runoff at the source than to build additional treatment facilities, new funding models have emerged that encourage more farmers to introduce conservation measures to their land.
The multistate Soil and Water Outcomes Fund, for example, pays farmers to create vegetative buffers, plant cover crops, or employ other regenerative agriculture techniques chosen by the farmer. Later in the year, an independent scientific team measures and verifies the reduction in nitrogen or increase in stored soil carbon. The fund then sells a mix of environmental credits to various public and private entities seeking to meet required or voluntary sustainability goals. Water quality credits, for example, allow water treatment facilities subject to strict nutrient reduction standards to fund pollution mitigation at the source instead of paying for expensive new equipment. Carbon offsets, meanwhile, are tied to the amount of additional carbon stored in the soil.
Importantly, given the growing and valid criticism aimed at carbon offset schemes, those credits are tied to actual outcomes, “after they have been produced and verified,” says Eric Letsinger, CEO of Quantified Ventures, whose AgOutcomes subsidiary jointly manages the fund with the Iowa Soybean Association. The outcomes-based model is “a demonstrably more cost-effective means of achieving environmental improvements than existing ‘pay for practices’ approaches,” he adds, in a paper prepared for the Environmental Defense Fund.
“Basically the sewage treatment plant pays into a fund, and the fund will contract with soybean farmers to manage their land in a different way, so as to reduce the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that reaches the streams,” Levitt explains. “That’s a natural climate solution that is applicable to the entire Mississippi River Valley, and will clean up the water more efficiently than building engineered filters into the streams of Guttenberg, Iowa, or Des Moines.”
In 2021 and 2022, the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund expanded from Iowa into eight more states, and paid farmers an average of $31 per acre to implement new conservation measures on over 241,000 acres of cropland. Those practices prevented 3.4 million pounds of nitrogen and 206,000 pounds of phosphorus from reaching waterways, and sequestered over 465 million pounds of carbon.
Still, there’s a lot more ground to cover—literally—including millions of acres in Iowa alone. Cultural barriers remain, with some longtime farmers wary of deviating from a proven formula.
“We need to get over that hump of changing what’s the norm,” Helmers says, perhaps hinting at the most powerful untapped nature-based solution of all: human nature. “We still need to create a sense of urgency—that we have a problem, and we need to do something about it.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: This map illustrates how runoff from farms (green areas) and cities (red areas) drains into the Mississippi River, delivering nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico and fueling the annual hypoxic zone. Credit: NOAA.
Land Matters Podcast: Water in the West
Jim Holway Reflects on Decades of Problem-Solving
By Anthony Flint, October 31, 2023
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Water in the West—one of the most enduring and confounding stories of human settlement anywhere around the world.
Jim Holway, who retired as director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy this summer, has spent more than 40 years helping to solve the puzzle of ensuring sustainable water resources in this increasingly arid region. In the latest Land Matters podcast, he describes the challenges ahead, and the kind of leadership—and serious, good-faith negotiation—it will take to establish a more secure water future.
With some places having their water restricted, and big reservoirs like Lake Mead drawing down to historically low levels, it has become increasingly clear that water from the Colorado River—distributed to nine states in the US and Mexico through a series of agreements and amendments hammered out since the 1920s—is no longer enough to meet the demands of a fast-growing population.
How did the region get to this point? “I’d say it was a combination of optimism, beginning with allocating more water [than would be available], and then it was just ignoring science for political reasons,” said Holway. “If I want to get my water project approved, it’s going to be a lot easier if I can convince people there’s enough water left for their project too. Even once we should have known better, we acted like we didn’t know better.”
The water allocations now have a structural deficit, Holway said, that is clear throughout the year-to-year ups and downs of drought and sufficient snowpack. Climate change is intensifying everything.
“We designed a hydrologic system for a physical reality that is changing on us, and the change in the level of heat is driving the system. More evaporation and more demand for agriculture, more demand in urban use—that heat is actually a more significant factor than precipitation. Whereas there is a lot of uncertainty about what the future precipitation changes will be in the Southwest, it’s very clear that it’s going to be hotter.”
While politicians debate climate science, Holway says, water and land managers know they have no choice but to prepare for the uncertain future that climate change will bring: “Droughts that cause inadequate supplies for historic uses, floods that exceed the infrastructure we’ve built to handle flooding, wildfires of much greater intensity and size, urban areas that are getting increasingly hot and leading to crisis situations in the middle of the summer—this is the reality of our future, and we need to adapt to deal with it.”
Building the capacity of local communities to integrate land use planning and the management of water resources has been the calling card of the Babbitt Center under Holway’s tenure, including using scenario planning techniques to map out future supply and demand conditions. Importantly, agriculture—which uses approximately three-quarters of Colorado River water—has increasingly been at the table, Holway said.
When asked to look to the future, Holway said, “It’s important for anyone doing this kind of work to find some way to sustain themselves. I suspect the thing that makes me most optimistic is when I look at the 20- and 30-year-olds getting involved . . . it seems that they really have an understanding of the challenges they’re inheriting.”
One of those challenges is developing the capacity to work together as a civilization to address water shortages in a more serious and straightforward manner, he said.
“When societies fail, it may look like it’s because of a flood, a drought, disease, or warfare. However, societies have survived those challenges before. Why do they not survive the next one? Typically, what we find is they have lost the ability to govern themselves.
“To me, that is where my main pessimism comes from. It isn’t our water challenge. It’s, will we come together? Will we make the necessary decisions we need to govern ourselves? That is our biggest challenge, and it’s what we’re doing particularly badly at the moment.”
Water, Holway said, “perhaps will help us rediscover our ability to come together and make collaborative decisions. There are very few things that humans see as critical to their survival [more than] a good water supply. That’s pretty clear and pretty compelling. Let’s hope it’s part of our path forward.”
Jim Holway served as director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy from its founding in 2017 until late 2023. He was elected to the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, directed the Western Lands and Communities program with the Sonoran Institute, and served as a professor of practice in sustainability at Arizona State University and assistant director at the Arizona Department of Water Resources. He has degrees from Cornell University and the University of North Carolina, and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners.
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: Jim Holway, founding director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Credit: Courtesy image.
“Mayor’s Desk” Book Highlights Crucial Work of Local Government Leaders
By Kristina McGeehan, November 7, 2023
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During an era defined by racial reckonings, the COVID pandemic, rapid technological advances, and the unyielding climate emergency, mayors around the world have been thrust into once unimaginable situations. In Mayor’s Desk, an inspiring collection written by Anthony Flint and published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 20 innovative leaders from five continents share their struggles and successes, along with strategies for making cities more equitable, sustainable, and healthy places to live and work. From Berkeley to Bogotá, Mayor’s Desk proves that progress is possible, even—or maybe especially—in turbulent times, and that local governments are the drivers of global change.
Since 2018, Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Flint has conducted interviews with mayors of large and small cities in the United States, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America about their groundbreaking approaches to our most pressing urban challenges. Mayor’s Desk interviews appear regularly in the Lincoln Institute’s Land Lines magazine and Land Matters podcast.
In these forthright conversations, local leaders describe how they are using land policy to improve the quality of life for the people who live in their communities. From building a new bike lane to weaning an entire city off fossil fuels, from piloting new sources of revenue to stopping speculators in their tracks, the strategies and solutions in this collection can be of value far beyond their local contexts. The conversations also reveal how the personalities, backgrounds, and values of these mayors shape their leadership styles, whether they are making modest incremental improvements or bold transformations.
A journalistic time capsule of innovative leadership and tangible change, this book can serve as an inspiration and valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand and influence the evolution of their cities.
“For mayors, activists, urban planners, students, and citizens of every kind, these pages offer a sample of some of the bold ideas that have been emerging from cities over the past decade,” writes Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and former mayor of New York City, in the book’s foreword. “The mayors on these pages have differing political viewpoints and party memberships, and that underscores one of the book’s messages: Just as good ideas transcend national borders, they transcend political ideology, too.”
About the Author
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, contributing editor to Land Lines, and host of the Land Matters podcast. He is a correspondent for Bloomberg CityLab and the Boston Globe, where he writes about architecture and urban design, and has been a journalist for over 30 years. He is the author of Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow (New Harvest); Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House); and This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (Johns Hopkins University Press), as well as coeditor of Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes (Lincoln Institute).
Lead image: Mayor Aki-Sawyerr, center, helps celebrate the installation of marketplace shades in Freetown. Credit: Office of Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr.
Desafíos con las redes
Cómo las batallas de uso del suelo dificultan la transición hacia la energía limpian
Un consenso emergente sobre cómo combatir el cambio climático es cada vez más evidente: electrificar todo, y producir dicha energía con fuentes renovables, como la energía eólica, solar e hidroeléctrica. La eliminación de los combustibles fósiles de la producción de electricidad puede realizarse sin exabruptos, ya que las instalaciones de energía limpia se han vuelto más rentables rápidamente. Las energías renovables representan el 20 por ciento de la producción de energía de los Estados Unidos y siguen creciendo de forma paulatina.
Pero existe una tarea de uso del suelo colosal y desafiante que es necesaria para concretar la transición hacia la energía limpia: no solo el emplazamiento de paneles solares y parques eólicos, sino también la construcción y mejora de líneas de transmisión, subestaciones y tuberías a lo largo de miles de hectáreas de suelo.
Investigadores de la Universidad Princeton calcularon que, si la capacidad de fabricación de las turbinas y los fotovoltaicos sigue aumentando como lo hizo hasta el momento durante los últimos años, se necesitarán hasta 640.000 kilómetros cuadrados en los Estados Unidos para aprovechar la energía eólica sola (Larson et al., 2020). Esto implica mucha infraestructura de energía renovable visible en las cumbres, en barrios suburbanos y en lo que puede considerarse patios de las viviendas de las personas.
A falta de una autoridad o un control federal, se están librando batallas de manera individual en cada estado sobre el emplazamiento de instalaciones eólicas y solares, y la oposición a modernizaciones y expansiones clave de la red que permitirán que la energía limpia se convierta en tendencia. En muchos casos, las instalaciones de energía renovable han recibido autorización para empezar a funcionar por medio del proceso de permisos, pero permanecen en el limbo porque no pueden conectarse a la anticuada red actual.
Líneas eléctricas en California. Crédito: pgiam vía E+/Getty Images.
Una combinación alocada de regulaciones de uso del suelo, incluidos los estatutos que restringen los campos de energía solar y los parques eólicos, amplificó las voces de oposición de los vecinos y grupos organizados, entre los que se encuentran algunas organizaciones medioambientales, lo que según muchos defensores climáticos es una profunda ironía de los tiempos.
Además, conflictos en torno al uso del suelo están obstaculizando otro componente crítico de la transición hacia la energía limpia: la minería de metales como el litio para hacer baterías recargables de gran capacidad, para los vehículos eléctricos y el almacenamiento de energía de las fuentes renovables cuando el sol no brilla o el viento no sopla.
Quienes apuntan a neutralizar las emisiones de carbono para mediados de siglo esperaban una ola alta de energía renovable que transformaría la forma en que todas las personas obtienen energía. Por el contrario, existen pulseadas y cuellos de botella a nivel local y estatal, ya que la ejecución de esta extraordinaria transición se empantana, literalmente, en la tierra.
“Estaría de acuerdo con que las cosas no están yendo bien ahora mismo; sin embargo, sugeriría que además tenemos muchas más oportunidades que en años previos, es decir que hay más historias de proyectos bloqueados debido a que son más las propuestas de proyectos”, dijo Banas Mills, gerenta de proyectos sénior en Graham Sustainability Institute y profesora en la Escuela de Medioambiente y Sostenibilidad de la Universidad de Michigan.
A medida que crece la frustración en lo que muchos ven como un mal pase de pelota en un momento clave en la lucha contra el cambio climático, Mills, que viene haciendo un seguimiento de las batallas sobre la energía renovable en todos los Estados Unidos y corredactó un artículo científico sobre el tema (Bessette y Mills, 2021), dice que se necesita un análisis más matizado sobre todos los lugares, ahora que las instalaciones están aumentando considerablemente. Los proyectos eólicos en lugares con más personas y mayores atractivos paisajísticos tienen más probabilidad de ser objetados; los vecinos, además, son más propensos a resistirse a los grandes paneles solares en las tierras agrícolas, que muchos defensores de la energía limpia pensaron que serían más fáciles de vender.
“Las fuentes renovables presentan una de las oportunidades económicas más grandes que las comunidades rurales hayan visto en décadas”, dijo. “Pero todas las oportunidades implican concesiones. Hay muchas comunidades que se niegan a la propuesta porque, en muchos lugares, se están dando cuenta de que las ventajas, los beneficios económicos, no superan las desventajas. Los cambios pueden requerir que se proyecten características, como el tamaño, la ubicación dentro de la comunidad y la distribución de los beneficios económicos . . . para lograr que las comunidades acepten”.
No fue siempre así. En el pasado, casi no se ejerció el poder de veto a nivel local, ya que la industrialización avanzó y la infraestructura crítica se consideró necesaria, tanto canales, vías de tren y líneas de telégrafos en el siglo IX como el sistema de avenidas conectadas en la década de 1950.
Un denominador común para la infraestructura es el uso intensivo del suelo, que se necesita para completar redes y distribuir beneficios a lo largo de grandes extensiones. Esto fue especialmente cierto en el desarrollo de la red eléctrica. Las centrales eléctricas se construían donde fuera necesario, incluso cerca de una mina de carbón o en un río. Luego, un sistema descentralizado pero altamente conectado de subestaciones, transformadores, y líneas de distribución y transmisión llevaba la energía hasta los usuarios finales, hogares y negocios. El flujo de la energía va de un punto a otro y en el momento, ya que no se almacenan grandes cantidades de electricidad; la energía se usa a medida que se produce, y vice versa.
A pesar de que la construcción, la organización y la regulación de la red comenzaron en un marco fragmentario regional, en cada estado por separado, el gobierno federal estableció un control mediante la Ley Federal de Energía de 1920, que el Congreso aprobó para coordinar el desarrollo de proyectos hidroeléctricos como la represa Hoover. Importantes agencias nuevas como Tennessee Valley Authority, creadas en 1933, ayudaron a elaborar un sentido de intención y propósito. Llevar electricidad a las áreas rurales fue parte de una movilización nacional en el desarrollo económico durante la Gran Depresión (y, además deliberadamente, una fuente de trabajo). Entre otras agencias federales, la que se conoce como la Comisión Federal Reguladora de Energía (FERC, por su sigla en inglés) tomó la iniciativa de administrar la producción de energía y la red, a pesar de que, por lo general, la supervisión de los servicios públicos y los precios que se cobran por estos en particular, sigue siendo una responsabilidad del estado.
Construcción de líneas eléctricas en Cashion, un pueblo del condado de Maricopa en Arizona, en 1934. Crédito: Biblioteca Estatal de Arizona, Archivos y Registros Públicos, División de Archivos e Historia, Phoenix, #98-3250.
En términos de los logros extraordinarios de la red eléctrica, el resultado final de la planificación y la coordinación es el paisaje familiar actual: 256.000 kilómetros de líneas de energía de alto voltaje colgadas sobre soportes de metal de hasta 60 metros de alto, despojadas de bosques y maleza a sus pies, que van y vienen por los campos, suministrando la electricidad generada por 7.300 centrales eléctricas a unos 150 millones de clientes en los Estados Unidos, según la Administración de Información Energética de los Estados Unidos. La red eléctrica de América del Norte, tres redes, técnicamente llamadas Eastern, Western y Texas Interconnect, se completa con miles de millones de líneas de electricidad de bajo voltaje y transformadores de distribución (EIA 2016).
Hasta la fecha, la mayor parte de la electricidad se produce utilizando las fuentes convencionales como el gas natural, el petróleo, el carbón y la energía nuclear. Pero, ahora, al menos un 20 por ciento de la energía del país se produce por medio de infraestructura de energía renovable (eólica, solar, hidroeléctrica, biomasa, geotérmica), y tal proporción está creciendo, a medida que las centrales eléctricas alimentadas a carbón, por ejemplo, se están eliminando de forma gradual. Durante la última década, se desmantelaron 290 centrales alimentadas a carbón en los Estados Unidos, lo que dejó un saldo de 224 en funcionamiento.
La administración de Biden prometió eliminar los combustibles fósiles como una forma de generación de energía en los Estados Unidos para el 2035, y estableció el objetivo de un 80 por ciento de electricidad libre de carbono para el 2030. La energía eólica, solar e hidroeléctrica ha sido el segmento del sector de la energía con el crecimiento más acelerado, y recibirá un impulso de US$ 370.000 millones de financiamiento en virtud de la Ley de Reducción de la Inflación (Inflation Reduction Act). Los proyectos eólicos y solares, que siguen mejorando de forma constante su tecnología y eficacia, están listos para comenzar.
Pero allí yace el desafío actual de uso del suelo, no solo en el emplazamiento de las instalaciones de energía renovables, sino también en las modernizaciones importantísimas de la red para transportar y distribuir toda esa energía limpia. En ambos frentes, el desarrollo de energía renovable se estancó en los últimos años.
La red eléctrica de EE. UU. comprende tres secciones: las interconexiones del Este, Oeste y Texas (ERCOT). Los círculos representan las 66 autoridades equilibradoras del sistema, que garantizan el equilibrio entre la oferta y la demanda. Crédito: Administración de Información Energética de EE. UU.
La oposición a los parques eólicos marinos, en particular, al proyecto Cape Wind frente al cabo Cod, fue quizás el primer y más infame ejemplo de propietarios adinerados que rechazaron la infraestructura de energía limpia porque afirmaban que les arruinaría la vista. Pero los parques eólicos en tierra, ya sea en la cima de las cumbres o sobre suelos agrícolas, han despertado una oposición feroz, incluso en áreas remotas.
En Carolina del Norte, supervisores del condado de Shasta rechazaron la propuesta por parte de Connect Wind/Fountain Wind de 48 turbinas en suelo rural después de oír preocupaciones sobre los impactos en el hábitat silvestre, las tierras indígenas e incluso la posibilidad de que las turbinas interfirieran con los intentos de apagar los incendios forestales desde el aire. Inmediatamente después de que se prohibieran por completo grandes proyectos eólicos, se aprobó un decreto. La Comisión de Energía de California está permitiendo que los desarrolladores tengan una segunda oportunidad en virtud de una disposición del Proyecto de Ley 205 (Assembly Bill 205), que puede invalidar el poder de veto para los proyectos de energía limpia.
En Iowa, un juez ordenó que los desarrolladores desmantelaran tres turbinas de 140 metros en tierras agrícolas después de que los propietarios de las tierras se quejaran del ruido que estas hacían. Los oponentes victoriosos, que argumentaron con éxito que la junta de zonificación no debería haber emitido los permisos, esperan que su batalla “empodere a otros propietarios rurales y pequeños pueblos a enfrentarse a la energía eólica”, según Des Moines Register (Eller 2018).
Otra preocupación típica es el peligro que presentan las turbinas eólicas para las aves, a pesar de que los pesticidas, las construcciones y los gatos domésticos matan en muchas oportunidades más aves que las paletas de rotación lenta, y los investigadores de energía limpia, que utilizan inteligencia artificial, han ideado formas de mantener a las aves lejos.
A las instalaciones solares no les fue mucho mejor. Si bien en los Estados Unidos hay más de 2.500 parques solares finalizados y en funcionamiento, en Indiana, Ohio, Virginia y otras partes se están bloqueando proyectos de energía solar. A menudo, los vecinos se escandalizan cuando ven lo enormes y visibles que son los paneles solares, sumado el uso intenso que hacen del suelo, que describen de un modo alarmante, por ejemplo, en una batalla sobre una propuesta del Medio Oeste, los compararon con llenar miles de canchas de fútbol con paneles de color azul intenso y brillante.
Instalación solar en el oeste de Massachusetts. Crédito: Jerry Monkman/EcoPhotography.
En un estudio que realizaron investigadores de Michigan en 2021 observaron que, a pesar de que se reconocen fácil los beneficios como el desarrollo económico, los pagos de impuestos y las compensaciones para los propietarios de tierras y las comunidades, “los proyectos se han enfrentado a una resistencia creciente . . . [debido a] la estética, el ruido y los impactos negativos para la cultura, los valores rurales y tribales, y la soberanía energética de la comunidad, junto con . . . el riesgo de la vida silvestre, las tierras agrícolas productivas, la biodiversidad y la salud de las personas” (Crawford, Bessette y Mills, 2022). Otros riesgos percibidos incluyeron la disminución de los valores de las propiedades inmuebles y las viviendas, el aumento de las tasas de electricidad, el impacto sobre el turismo y la toxicidad de los materiales utilizados en la construcción y la ejecución, según describe el estudio.
Un equipo del MIT estudió 53 proyectos de energías renovables de los Estados Unidos que se pausaron, retrasaron o cancelaron entre 2008 y 2021 en 28 estados debido a la oposición local. Los investigadores identificaron siete factores de conflicto en común: impacto medioambiental, viabilidad financiera, calidad de la participación pública, derechos tribales, preocupaciones sobre la salud y la seguridad, y preocupaciones relacionadas con los valores de las tierras y las propiedades inmuebles (Susskind et al., 2022).
“Encontramos pruebas abrumadoras que sugieren que los reguladores locales, estatales y federales deben repensar el diseño y la ejecución de los procesos de emplazamiento de la infraestructura”, concluyen los investigadores. “En los Estados Unidos, no se logrará una transición rápida y justa a una energía renovable si los gestores de políticas y los desarrolladores de energía no se anticipan y responden de forma proactiva a todo el surtido de fuentes de oposición local”.
Pulseadas de gran repercusión mediática tienen el efecto de ahuyentar a los socios preocupados por la mala publicidad. En Queensland, Australia, la compañía tecnológica Appe se retiró de un acuerdo de comprar energía de un parque eólico propuesto con 80 turbinas en una extensión de 800 hectáreas, un proyecto que el Fondo Mundial para la Naturaleza (WWF, por su sigla en inglés) había criticado por amenazar a koalas, ualabíes y azores rojos. Un vocero del WWF aplaudió la decisión y dijo que demuestra “liderazgo y compromiso con las energías renovables que son buenas para el clima y la naturaleza”.
La oposición a las líneas de transmisión que se necesitan para controlar la energía limpia nueva ha sido quizás lo más estresante de todo, y deja en un limbo a las instalaciones que ya se construyeron o autorizaron, un escenario insostenible para las empresas y los inversionistas de tecnologías verdes.
Una batalla legal de cuatro años sobre una línea de transmisión de 232 kilómetros que transportaría energía hidroeléctrica desde Quebec a Massachusetts ha sido representativa de la pelea despiadada sobre el uso del suelo. Los grupos de conservación dijeron que las tuberías amenazaban las áreas naturales en Maine, donde la mayor parte de la línea se construiría, lo que incitó a una votación en contra del proyecto a nivel nacional, a pesar de que ya se lo había autorizado. Recientemente, un juez dictaminó que la construcción podía reanudarse.
Los defensores se quejaron de que la oposición había sido financiada y motivada por un servicio público de gas natural rival para bloquear la competencia. Joseph Curtatone, presidente del Consejo de Energía Limpia del Noreste, dijo que esperaba que la decisión de la corte “ponga fin a los intentos egoístas de sabotear este proyecto financiados por empresas”. Construir el proyecto como se planificó, dijo, eliminaría más de tres millones de toneladas métricas de carbono por año y proporcionaría US$ 200 millones en modernizaciones urgentemente necesarias para la red eléctrica.
“Es un trabajo esencial en nuestro esfuerzo por electrificar todo a fin de evitar los peores efectos del cambio climático Si no se moderniza la red, no podemos distribuir electricidad para calentar las bombas y los vehículos eléctricos. Estos son los tipos de zancadas que tenemos que dar después de décadas de progreso mínimo en materia de acción climática”, dijo. “Si estamos luchando con uñas y dientes por eliminar tres millones de toneladas de CO² con energía de bajo costo, nunca vamos a alcanzar la neutralidad de carbono”.
En el libro Superpower (Superpoder), la autora Russell Gold hizo una crónica del intento, finalmente en vano, por parte del empresario de Houston Michael Skelly de obtener la aprobación de una línea de transmisión para conectar los parques eólicos en Oklahoma con la red de Tennessee, que se volvió emblemática por la oposición de la comunidad acompañada de los políticos (Gold 2020). Pero se sigue repitiendo el mismo problema. Pasaron 18 años hasta que las autoridades federales aprobaron una transmisión de 1.178 kilómetros para transportar energía limpia desde el propuesto parque eólico TransWest de 700 turbinas en unas tierras de haciendas en Wyoming hasta viviendas y negocios en California. El proyecto interestatal requirió múltiples aprobaciones en virtud de la Ley Nacional de Protección Medioambiental (National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA), con una examinación detallada de los impactos sobre la flora y la fauna, incluido el urogallo de las artemisas.
Turbinas eólicas en el estado de Washington. Crédito: Ryan J Lane vía E+/Getty Images.
Las objeciones a la infraestructura verde han evocado batallas pasadas sobre las especies en peligro, sitios sagrados y otras tierras de valor cultural. El proyecto Greenlink West, una línea de transmisión de 760 kilómetros a lo largo de Nevada, está siendo blanco de críticas porque puede afectar los fósiles de colmillos de mamut lanudo.
La ironía no pasa desapercibida para muchos de que leyes medioambientales aprobadas en la década de 1970 para combatir la contaminación desenfrenada ahora se están utilizando para luchar contra proyectos de energía renovable que frenarán el cambio climático. La litigación medioambiental está amenazando una gama amplia de iniciativas beneficiosas para el medioambiente en el país, desde la vivienda densa hasta bicisendas y tarifas por congestión.
“Soy ambientalista, lo que significa que tengo experiencia en decir no. Es lo que hacemos”, escribió Bill McKibben en su ensayo para Mother Jones titulado “Yes in Our Backyards” (Sí en nuestros patios) (McKibben 2023). Las décadas de activismo de McKibben incluyen luchas exitosas contra las tuberías de combustibles fósiles de Keystone XL. “Pero ahora estamos en un momento bisagra, en el que resolver nuestros mayores problemas, medioambientales pero también sociales, implica que debemos decir sí a algunas cosas . . . Una forma puede ser retroceder un poco y pensar en un plazo apenas más largo”.
Sin ningún sentido de un gran plan o razonamiento, y ambientalistas divididos (un bando que dice que siempre deben considerarse los impactos sobre el medioambiente, y otro que dice que no habrá ningún hábitat silvestre en funcionamiento o especies prosperando si no se detiene el cambio climático), los proyectos de energía renovable se están viendo cada vez más como lo que el profesor de Harvard Alan Altshuler llamó en inglés LULU: “usos del suelo localmente indeseados”, como cárceles o vertederos
Recientemente, surgieron diversas soluciones para superar este punto muerto, entre ellas la legislación que se introdujo este mismo año.
Se necesitan por lo menos tres pasos para implementar infraestructura de energía limpia de forma eficaz y adecuada, dice Patrick Welch, analista del grupo de estrategias climáticas del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo: reforma de los permisos a nivel federal, cambios en la regulación local, y más planificación estratégica y creativa.
“En muchas instancias, existen problemas genuinos con relación a los emplazamientos propuestos para proyectos de energía hidroeléctrica, eólica y solar, ya sea asociados a temas de escorrentía de aguas pluviales, otros impactos sobre ecosistemas importantes o apropiaciones de tierras nuevas en suelos de comunidades indígenas”, dijo Welch. “Debemos ser más estratégicos y creativos. Cosas como la coubicación de paneles solares en espacios de estacionamiento y terrazas o derechos de paso interestatales, en lugar de despojar bosques, son soluciones buenas”.
La iniciativa Derechos Renovables del Lugar (Site Renewables Right) de The Nature Conservancy, que identifica lugares apropiados para la energía solar y eólica en el centro de los Estados Unidos al trazar un mapa de los factores, incluido el impacto medioambiental y la producción agrícola, es un buen ejemplo de cómo intentar encontrar soluciones factibles, añadió Welch. Otro es el estudio del condado de Baltimore sobre el emplazamiento de los paneles solares, que identificó alrededor de 14.000 hectáreas de lugares potenciales óptimos para la energía solar en terrazas, espacios de estacionamiento y suelo degradado (Minnemeyer y Wiggans, 2020).
Instalador de paneles solares en Lowell, Massachusetts. Crédito: Jerry Monkman/EcoPhotography.
Pero, incluso con emplazamientos más adecuados, expresó Welch, las regulaciones de permisos de uso del suelo locales pueden entorpecer el paso. “Ambos bandos han sabido por décadas que NEPA y la telaraña de permisos asociada son responsables de los retrasos innecesarios y extensos. Hoy en día, la crisis climática suma una urgencia nueva a ese debate. Las regulaciones locales también deben permitir el emplazamiento adecuado de infraestructura de energía renovable”.
A muchos, la coordinación federal, que rememora el establecimiento más intencional de infraestructura en la primera mitad del siglo XX, les pareció un primer paso obvio. Esta primavera, el senador de los Estados Unidos Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) y el representante de los Estados Unidos Mike Quigley (D-IL) introdujeron la Ley de Optimización de la Transmisión Interestatal de Electricidad (SITE Act), que establecería una autoridad nueva de emplazamiento federal en la Comisión Federal Reguladora de Energía (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) para facilitar el proceso de construcción de líneas de transmisión de alto voltaje y largo alcance.
“Si no construimos más líneas de transmisión de largo alcance, gran parte de la energía limpia de bajo costo que recibimos en línea simplemente no podrá llegar a los hogares y las empresas que la necesitan”, afirmó la Casa Blanca cuando se presentó la ley. El objetivo es mejorar la confiabilidad, modernizar la infraestructura de la red decrépita del país, y reducir las emisiones, a la vez que se establece un “equilibrio responsable entre las necesidades y las preferencias locales”, dijo.
Existe acción a escala nacional y regional. Después de las críticas de que las autoridades reguladoras estatales dieron muchas vueltas en torno a la energía limpia, el gobernador de Massachusetts, Maura Healey nombró a comisionados expertos en clima para el Departamento de Servicios Públicos del estado, y estableció dos comisiones nuevas, una para revisar el emplazamiento y los permisos de la energía limpia, y otra para coordinar los desarrollos eólicos trasnacionales.
En el estado de Washington, hace poco, el gobernador Jay Inslee firmó un proyecto de ley que exige la planificación a largo plazo por parte de los servicios públicos y autoriza que los proyectos de transmisión más grandes puedan avanzar en el proceso de emplazamiento optimizado del país. Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), que gestiona la energía hidroeléctrica de 31 represas federales en el noroeste, propuso algunas mejoras al sistema, que, de concretarse, ayudarán a aumentar la capacidad de transmisión.
El mercado de electricidad se estructura de forma diferente en el noroeste del Pacífico que en California y otros estados, lo que dificulta mucho más la planificación y coordinación, dijo Emily Moore, directora del programa para el Clima y la Energía del Sightline Institute. Washington y Oregón tienen planes de acción climática asertivos para cambiar a la energía limpia, pero incluso si todos los servicios públicos concuerdan en hacer el cambio mañana, la red no podría soportar la carga, dijo, así que cientos de proyectos de energía solar y eólica están languideciendo.
“En un mundo ideal, tendríamos en claro qué cantidad de transmisión adicional se necesita . . . y dónde iría, así que podríamos empezar a construirla antes de que sea demasiado tarde”, dijo. “Pero la planificación, al menos en nuestra región, es ampliamente reactiva, no proactiva. Cambiar eso aquí demandará nuevos niveles de coordinación entre BPA, los servicios públicos individuales, los reguladores y los gestores de políticas”.
Cuando los proyectos de energía renovable o las líneas de transmisión se presentan por primera vez al público, los desarrolladores deberían practicar una mayor participación de las partes interesadas, dijo Josh Hohn, director de la empresa de diseño urbano Stantec. Hohn incita a los coordinadores de proyectos a ayudar a las personas a visualizar lo que realmente se propone “antes de dar rienda suelta a la imaginación”.
Fomentar el consenso sobre la infraestructura para la energía limpia es particularmente desafiante, en parte, porque los problemas de uso del suelo son muy locales, pero se vinculan al problema mundial del cambio climático, lo que exige conceptualizar prioridades, a veces, de formas que van en contra de la intuición. Por ejemplo, parece atroz que se eliminen árboles para hacer espacio para los paneles solares. Pero, según un ecologista de bosques, hacerlo, en realidad, reduce más las emisiones de carbono después de un período que dejar los árboles en el lugar (Canham 2021).
La tecnología también está avanzando a pasos agigantados, la dimensión de uso del suelo de la energía limpia podría volverse menos onerosa. Las excavaciones geotérmicas implican menos suelo, a pesar de su semejanza con las torres de perforación que han manchado el paisaje desde principios del siglo pasado. Las baterías están mejorando, lo que permite que la energía limpia se almacene. Y existe la noción del megaproyecto de energía solar, que consolida todos los paneles solares en uno o dos lugares apartados, como un rincón del desierto del Sahara. Si hacemos un cálculo, una sola parcela de 69.000 kilómetros, 1,2 por ciento del desierto del Sahara, cubierta con paneles solares podrían dar electricidad a todo el mundo (Moalem 2016).
En un nivel más conceptual, McKibben, que fundó la organización Third Act para reclutar a boomers ancianos preocupados por el cambio climático, pidió un cambio en la forma de pensar a la hora de analizar la infraestructura para la energía limpia. En lugar de verla como algo feo, sugiere, podríamos apreciar cómo está ayudando al planeta a dejar los combustibles fósiles y los grandes beneficios económicos que tiene a la vez. “Es otro tipo de belleza”, dijo en una entrevista, a pesar de que reconoció que las personas están acostumbradas a juzgar los paisajes por medio de indicadores más convencionales.
Aún queda por ver si tal reconceptualización puede suceder. Pero es evidente que la relación de las personas con el suelo se convirtió en un elemento clave de la transición hacia la energía limpia. Ante todo, este es un momento propicio para una política de suelo a consciencia, con el futuro del planeta que pende de un hilo, dijo Patrick Welch del Instituto Lincoln.
“Dada la escala y la urgencia necesaria para este despliegue masivo de infraestructura nueva, existe un riesgo significativo de lo que hacemos de modo que conduzca a consecuencias serias no intencionadas”, expresó Welch. “Así que debemos ser conscientes y estratégicos, pero no al punto de la inacción”.
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: Manifestantes marchan en contra de una línea de transmisión que atravesará Maine para transportar energía hidráulica desde Quebec hasta Massachusetts. Crédito: AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty
Referencias
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Crawford, Jessica, Douglas L. Bessette y Sarah B. Mills. 2022. “Rallying the Anti-Crowd: Organized Opposition, Democratic Deficit, and a Potential Social Gap in Large-Scale Solar Energy”. Energy Research & Social Science. Vol. 90. Agosto. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629622001013.
EIA (US Energy Information Administration). 2016. “U.S. Electric System Is Made Up of Interconnections and Balancing Authorities”. Today in Energy. 20 de julio. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152.
Larson, Eric, Chris Greig, Jesse Jenkins, Erin Mayfield, Andrew Pascale, Chuan Zhang, Joshua Drossman, Robert Williams, Steve Pacala y Robert Socolow. 2020. “Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts”. Interim report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. 15 de diciembre. https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf331/fil….
Riofrancos, Thea, Alissa Kendall, Kristi K. Dayemo, Matthew Haugen, Kira McDonald, Batul Hassan y Margaret Slattery. 2023. “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining”. University of California-Davis Climate and Community Project. https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining.
Susskind, Lawrence, Jungwoo Chun, Alexander Gant, Chelsea Hodgkins, Jessica Cohen y Sarah Lohmar. 2022. “Sources of Opposition to Renewable Energy Projects in the United States”. Energy Policy. Vol. 165. Junio. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001471.
Mayor’s Desk
Vivienda y esperanza en Cincinnati
Por Anthony Flint, July 31, 2023
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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.
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.
Una de las casi 200 casas compradas por el Puerto de Cincinnati como parte de un esfuerzo por preservar la asequibilidad y brindar oportunidades de propiedad de vivienda a los residentes locales. Crédito: Autoridad de Desarrollo del Puerto de Cincinnati.
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.
Leaders in Cincinnati are striving to balance growth and affordability. Credit: StanRohrer via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
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.
El alcalde Pureval, a la derecha, habla en una celebración de Findlay Market, el mercado público en funcionamiento continuo más antiguo de Ohio. Crédito: Cortesía de Aftab Pureval.
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.
Tranvías en Fountain Square de Cincinnati durante la Primera Guerra Mundial. Crédito: Metro Bus vía Flickr CC BY 2.0.
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 Flintes miembro sénior del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo, conduce el ciclo de pódcasts Land Matters y es editor colaborador de Land Lines.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy invites proposals for original research on land policies and urban development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our objective is to understand how land policies are overcoming—or can overcome—systemic challenges to sustainable development in the region, including housing affordability and informality, spatial segregation, fiscal autonomy, and climate change. We need to think holistically to produce structural changes to address these challenges, so we are seeking to shed light on current policy debates across the region on key research areas of interest to the Lincoln Institute. These areas include the implementation of land-based financing instruments for infrastructure finance and fiscal stability, approaches to informal settlements’ upgrading and regularization, policies to reduce housing deficits, and enabling nature-based solutions for climate action.
Application guidelines and proposal submissions are also available in Spanish and Portuguese.
Details
Submission Deadline
January 15, 2024 at 11:59 PM
Keywords
Adaptation, Climate Mitigation, Housing, Inequality, Informal Land Markets, Infrastructure, Land Market Regulation, Land Use, Land Use Planning, Land Value, Municipal Fiscal Health, Planning, Property Taxation, Public Finance, Public Policy, Urban Development, Urban Upgrading and Regularization, Value Capture, Water
Requests for Proposals
Research on Municipal Fiscal Health and Land Policies
The submission deadline has been extended from January 29 to February 5, 2024.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy invites proposals for original research that can be applied to address the challenge of promoting the fiscal health of municipal governments in a range of contexts and institutional settings across the world. We are particularly interested in research that explores the ways sound urban planning, land-based taxation, and economic development combine with disciplined financial management to promote prosperous, sustainable, equitable, and fiscally healthy communities.
Research proposed should examine some of the most pressing questions that local officials around the world are confronting in the fiscal policy arena, with an emphasis on the implications for local land policy and planning decisions.
Details
Submission Deadline
February 5, 2024 at 11:59 PM
Keywords
Development, Economic Development, Housing, Infrastructure, Land Use Planning, Land Value, Land Value Taxation, Land-Based Tax, Local Government, Municipal Fiscal Health, Property Taxation, Public Finance, Public Policy, Urban Development, Value Capture, Value-Based Taxes, Zoning