Three Michigan mayors—Sheldon Neeley of Flint, Christopher Taylor of Ann Arbor, and David LaGrand of Grand Rapids—appeared at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Detroit in April, on a panel moderated by Anthony Flint, author of Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.

Their conversation, which followed similar mayors’ panel sessions at APA’s national conferences in Denver and Minneapolis, highlighted the challenges municipal leaders face on issues including housing affordability, the property tax, and an evolving relationship with the federal government. These highlights from the discussion have been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Flint: What is it like to run a city at this current time, in this political environment, and what impact has the role of the federal government had, especially as it has changed?

Mayor Sheldon Neeley: One of the things I find is that it’s the intersection of crises. It’s like any intersection, you have … to make sure you don’t run into catastrophic accidents. My engagement has been on the financial crisis, water crisis, civil unrest, and also a global pandemic. I call it prayer, planning, partnership … we looked for our partners to be able to get through that. We needed all parts of government to play a part to serve the various residents across the state of Michigan. Also, I have a great relationship with the state government as a former legislator, and also have one of the greatest state legislators in the state, [who] happens to be my wife.

Mayor Christopher Taylor: With the current climate, we have a combination of certainties and uncertainties as we grapple at the global level. We know that if we are trying to protect our community members, we need to be welcoming…. That’s going to be complicated, at best, frustrated, at worst, by the administration. We also know that some of our primary quality-of-life initiatives with respect to housing and climate action are at odds with the federal policy and with the process of the administration. We have been doing a lot of work on climate action. [The federal policies], at the very best, complicate and slow down the exciting work that we’re doing.… On housing, crucially, with all those cuts in HUD, those are going to hit our residents.

Mayor David LaGrand: The level of chaos that’s been injected at the federal level has been really problematic, because a lot of people want me to come and do something about Donald Trump. I can’t change his mind on tariffs. I can’t change his mind on a lot of things. We’re the closest people to [yell at], so we get a lot of frustration. Maybe we’re about to revert to city-state models rather than a federal one. The federal government’s been around for a couple hundred years. Cities have been around for 9,000 years. They’re very durable. They have lots of structural advantages, and there are reasons why the cities are going to be fine.

Then the question is, [do] we just forget about the federal government and the state government? The long-term question is, post–Great Society, if we made this deal … to put most of our money up to the federal level and it was going to come back in the form of grants and programming … if that bargain has been falsified, then why am I sending my federal taxes off to the federal government anymore?

If we want to do housing, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. We have to figure out what the resources are. If we want to do environmental work, we have to figure out what’s city level. We just have to be honest and break out of [the approach of saying] gee, there’s a grant somewhere we should apply for.

AF: The next question is about local action. I’m going to ask three questions, one for each of you. I’ll start with Mayor Taylor. Can you tell us about the clean energy public utility you’ve started in Ann Arbor and how that fits in with your local climate action plans?

Mayor Christopher Taylor: We have, in our liberal town, no surprise, we’ve had a climate action plan for quite some time. We were able to, through some work at the county level, find a million dollars a year starting in about 2017, which enabled us to staff up our Office of Sustainability and Innovation. In the state of Michigan, we have a franchise with a regulated provider. That franchise for electric is perpetual. That means if we wanted to run our own utility, seizing [its] assets and utilizing them, not only would we have to pay for capital, we’d also have to pay for the profit interest going forward perpetually.

We decided to start the Sustainable Energy Utility, [which] overlays the existing utility. It is an opt-in utility. It enables residents who wish to sign up to get from the city, from the public utility, 100 percent renewable, reliable, sustainable, resilient, and just-at-market, if not a little bit below, energy. We are getting this underway. We have hired some staff. We’re allocating some budget. We’re going to try to hit 100 homes this year. We’re going to try to hit 1,000 homes next year. We’re going to work … on batteries and solar panels, and we’re focusing on one of our lowest-income areas in the city. The residents are signing up for it. It’s something that gives us a lot of drive, a lot of excitement. It’s something I think that lots of jurisdictions could take a look at.

AF: Mayor Neeley, I know that the … water crisis was traumatic and this is in the rearview mirror, but we’d like an update on how the resolution is going. Importantly, this is ultimately about infrastructure and investment in the city. What can you tell other cities about your experience?

Mayor Neeley: When people find out that I’m the mayor of Flint, Michigan, they ask, how’s the water? I reply, the water’s fine. We’re doing very well. We’ve invested more than $20 million into our infrastructure repair programs [plus $100 million in federal matching funds] … to get us to this point. All of you have been watching over the last decade or so. I want to thank you for your prayers and your wishes. We’re still providing water for the poor families inside the city of Flint, while we’re trying to build … trust. It’s a confidence thing that we have to build back.

AF: I want to turn now to affordability and start with you, Mayor LaGrand. You’ve got your own special circumstances in terms of your local economy, which I’d like you to talk about, but what have you found in terms of the strategies for promoting affordable housing? I’m going to follow up with each of you about your particular strategy, and that is something we’re interested in, which is promoting the use of government-owned land for housing.

Mayor LaGrand: First of all, I’ve just got to acknowledge that I think jealousy is an under-respected emotion. I am jealous of the work that Ann Arbor is doing on the electric utility work, [which] we’re watching very carefully. It’s incredibly exciting.

One of the things that I think in the policy space is really important [is] to ground things in economics. The law of supply and demand is a law. You can try ignoring it if you want. Try ignoring gravity and see how well that works for you. Demand is going to give you price pressures. It really boils down to two things. One is the regulatory environment, and the other is how you actually make it. Again, just to geek out for you guys a little bit, one of the weird things about housing is if you look at industries in general, think about a computer, they get more and more efficient, dramatically so, right? We see that all the time. For housing, the construction industry still involves a guy or a woman coming out to a site with a hammer and knocking a bunch of pieces of wood together like it’s 1940. The housing industry hasn’t moved forward very much technologically.

Sheldon and I were deskmates in [the state legislature] in Lansing. There was a good idea of taxing vacant land that Mayor Duggan proposed for Detroit . Those of us with bad developers squatting on land—that’s a problem. I wrote a bill so that cities could have land banks and not just counties. Then when I became mayor, now we have a land bank in Grand Rapids. That’s a way for you to do public investment, and it’s exciting. That gets to your public ownership of land question.

The other thing is [ADUs, or accessory dwelling units]. Let’s say I have 50,000 garages in Grand Rapids. Those garages are all potential one-bedroom or studio apartments, but only if the regulatory environment makes that possible and makes it work. I’ve got bills in Lansing that will drop the cost of construction of an [accessory dwelling unit] about 20 grand a unit because of regulatory things in the state building code. You’ve got to get it fixed at the state level. Then at the city level, you’ve got zoning questions. Is it even allowed? Do you have prebuilt models? How easy is it to get through your zoning department? How easy is it to get financing?

If we increase supply enough, prices will moderate. We saw it happen in Minneapolis. We saw it happen in Boston last year. We see it happen in Austin. The law of supply and demand is a law.

AF: We’re going to have to move into a little bit more lightning-round mode, but I want to ask you about affordability and specifically this idea of making use of government-owned land.

Mayor Taylor: Just a couple of weeks ago [we] passed our comprehensive land use plan, which envisions substantially more housing throughout the city, much more in the downtown, substantially more on transit corridors, and more in established neighborhoods, duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, wherever we can.

There isn’t much vacant land in Ann Arbor. We do have a couple of parking lots downtown that we’re utilizing in different ways. One, we are looking to sell on the open market. We’re going to sell to the highest bidder for as much housing as we can get, [plus] a grocery store on the first floor.

Next, we have a … parking structure that has been a conversation in the city for a number of years. We are transferring the air rights to that parking structure to the next-door library. The library is going to build an awesome library on top …. They’re going to work on having affordable housing, workforce housing, artist housing. Across the street, we’ve got another surface parking lot owned by the City of Ann Arbor. We are going to break ground this season on about 300 units of new permanent housing there. We’re working on it.

AF: Mayor Neeley, have you seen efforts to redevelop underutilized land in the city of Flint?

Mayor Sheldon Neeley: The good news is that if Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor don’t have a home for you … we have land, and we have industrial space, and also residential space. What we’re doing, we’re taking a lot of structures down, and we’re redeveloping that land. It’s affordable. The Real Estate Association says the land value has increased over the last decade by about 332 percent, but it’s still very affordable. Flint, right now, for the first time in 20 years, is actually growing in population, so people are realizing that it’s a good investment to come back there and even start your business.

AF: All around the country, there’s this new property tax revolt just at the time when local governments are counting on that revenue. Just interested in your reflections on that revolt, and then also where you stand on the land value tax.

Mayor David LaGrand: If you want to geek out, the land value tax is called Georgian economics. It’s a great idea. It’s good for everybody incrementally, so I’d like it in general.

Property tax in Michigan is badly broken, but let me tell you middle-class people: It’s broken in your favor. That’s really the conversation we have to have when we [discuss] property tax. It’s money for the local government. It’s revenue. It’s not an inalienable way to tax if you want to do the stuff [that] government does. The question [is] who pays the most.

Mayor Taylor: With respect to property tax, we’ve identified some of the challenges. If you stay in your home, your property taxes tick up with inflation. If you move, they leap up to the assessed value. That is great if you’re in your home. It’s hard if you’re a senior and want to downsize. The way our property tax system operates keeps people in their homes longer when they want to stay there.

Second, and this is a little bit of a particularity with respect to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, a fairly important economic engine in the city, doesn’t pay any taxes. We do have an opportunity to have a city income tax. The way that it’s structured in Michigan, however, in the city of Ann Arbor, would mean that the imposition of an income tax would, on the one hand, be capped at 1 percent for residents, 10 percent for nonresidents, and crucially, would involve an approximately 13 percent property tax cut for people in the city of Ann Arbor.

Mayor Neeley: How many of you guys are thoroughly confused by this whole tax question right now? Let me help you simplify it. Taxation is a necessary thing in order to provide services for residents inside any particular community. Let me give you an example from the city of Flint. We have more than 290 churches, about 23 vacant school buildings [that have] been vacant for more than a decade. We have two major hospitals. We have three university campuses. All our nonprofit entities are not paying property taxes. We talk about a PILOT payment [payments in lieu of taxes]. We need to make sure everybody is able to get their share [of public services when] just one-third of the communities are paying for all the services that they need.

We use a combination of different revenue streams to be able to have a support base. I do operational audits to see how we can provide more services for less without cutting or raising the price. These are dialogues and conversations that we need to have.

We can get industry back in and using land space for redevelopment, housing, or other businesses. If we have hospitals, we need to be able to have a PILOT payment because if they need help with the fire department, police department, those are tax dollars of the residents that are providing that level of service. All these things have to come together .… We need to take a really good look … around the table and be able to have these really engaged conversations. Truth has never been afraid of an audience, and so we need  to be able to speak the truth, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, white, Black, rich, or poor. We need to have that.

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: Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand speaks during a session at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Detroit in April. Seated next to him (partially obscured) is Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor, with Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley and Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy completing the panel. Credit: American Planning Association.

Mindy O’Neall, 44, was elected the 53rd mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2025, flipping the seat from Republican to Democrat for the first time in a decade and becoming the fourth female municipal chief executive in the city’s history.

The Iowa native drove a stick-shift pickup truck to Alaska to look for adventure 23 years ago—landing first in Anchorage, where she worked as an aide in the state legislature, and then in Fairbanks, home to roughly 30,000 people including the Fort Wainwright military base. She worked at the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation and the Interior Gas Utility, served as a labor business representative, and founded Blue Canoe Media, a boutique communications and consulting firm.

At the University of Alaska Fairbanks, O’Neall earned a master’s in communication, researching governance and climate impacts in rural Alaska. Prior to her election as mayor, she served on the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and was executive director of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, and also serves on boards of the Alaska State Homebuilders Association and Alaska Municipal League. She campaigned on the issues of downtown revitalization, affordable housing, and public safety. She lives in downtown Fairbanks with her dog, Tito, who she pointed out is the true official dog of Alaska, the mutt.

This interview is also available as a Land Matters podcast.

Anthony Flint: For the uninitiated, what kind of place is Fairbanks? And why did you want to be mayor?

Mindy O’Neall: I would say we’re the land of extremes. We are extremely cold in the winter. Some people may be surprised to learn that we can get up to 90 to 100 degrees in the summer. We have exotic animals, grizzly bears and polar bears, and we have extreme industry, like mining and gas and oil development. At the heart of it is the people … who have grit and determination and oftentimes this mindset of abundance … [and a] mindset of scarcity as well. We’re at the end of the line. We have three to four days of food security at any given time.

I’ve been in Alaska for over 23 years. I’m originally from Iowa, and I came up here just like a lot of other folks, looking for adventure. If you’ve ever been to the Midwest, they say, why would you ever want to leave the heartland? And I said, don’t worry, I’ll be back in a year. I just want to go check it out. And, after a year, it was painfully obvious that there was so much more to discover to Alaska that I just had to stay.

One of the things that’s interesting about Alaska is we have seven boroughs, that are kind of like counties in the lower 48. And then we have cities within those boroughs, and so Fairbanks has a borough that has a governing body, which is the assembly, and a mayor, and then within the borough, there are two cities…. We always like to joke that for a place that’s so against government and overregulation, we have a lot of government.

I started my public service during COVID…. We had a mayor that was on paper doing a fine job. But he was very discriminatory to the Alaska Native population here, and after some comments and blow-ups on social media … I just believe that public service is a privilege, and somebody who is in office has to have the respect of every population that is within their community … [a] key piece of public service is showing your community respect, even if you don’t understand them, even if you don’t agree with them. I think that we have lost that on a lot of levels of government these days.

I do think that one of the benefits of being in this position is being a female. This is the first time Fairbanks has had a female mayor in about two decades, and I’m the fourth one since 1903 … a young female in my 40s, leading this community and being a role model for girls in our community to see that there’s somebody like them … in an environment that is sometimes very hostile and sometimes very male-driven.

AF: Everybody’s wrestling with affordability these days, and one big part of that is housing. What are the policies that can help, in your region, whether homebuying or renting?

MO: We suffer from a housing stock that’s from the ’70s. Alaska really got its last big boom during the oil pipeline of the ’70s, and what happened was there was such an explosion of [people] coming up to the state that they built things the way that they knew how to build things, which was without a lot of insulation, built out of whatever that they had. So we suffer from very inefficient housing.

[We need to focus on] building generational wealth outside of homeownership. Building homes and housing has been the game or the business of large, wealthy developers. And in our community, we just can’t really afford that. We don’t have enough folks for a large developer to make money here.… How can we lower the amount of investment [that is necessary for housing]?

AF: The Lincoln Institute has been helping municipalities identify government-owned land that can be used for affordable housing. Do you see opportunities in that approach?

MO: Absolutely, I do. A few facts for you here. Sixty percent of our land in Alaska is federal, and 25 percent is owned by the state of Alaska. 10 percent is owned by Native corporations, and one percent is private. So we have a lot of government land that’s available. Now, about 80 million of those acres are managed for conservation. But that’s still quite a bit of land left for us to use.

We have a parking structure that has been mothballed for probably five years. The university that used it ended up not needing it, and so they literally welded the doors shut, and this building has been sitting there, kind of deteriorating ever since. There was some funding that became available … for land acquisition. We’ve put out an RFP for a developer to then build two or three stories on top of that parking garage, therefore activating the space, using the garage for parking, covered parking, which is very important in Fairbanks, but also getting units into the downtown core. So, that’s one example, and there’s a few others that we have, but I’m really eager to see how that plays out.

AF: What are the unique challenges of living with climate change in Alaska, and what, at the state and local level, can be done about it?

MO: They often call the Arctic the canary in the coal mine, because we start to see the issues of climate change far beyond and far before the lower 48 or other parts of the world. Something’s been happening in our environment for quite some time. We have more wind in Fairbanks, which means that we have more risk for summer fires. In the winter, we’ve had more snow than usual, and it’s also been colder than usual, which means that our ground will not thaw quickly—meaning that when the temperature gets hot in the air, it’s all going to melt into water, but there’s going to be nowhere for it to go because the ground hasn’t thawed yet. And so now we miss out on that water, and we get lots of floods. And then we don’t have moisture in the ground, and so it’s more susceptible to wildfires in the summer.

I don’t think there’s really much we can do about this now. It’s happening. We’re in a cycle of climatic disruption. But we can plan for it. We can plan for extreme events—what we’re going to do when the power goes out and it’s negative 30 degrees.

The other thing is, with planning comes money, and Alaska is a place where we do not collect sales taxes on a statewide basis. Some municipalities do, we do not, as the municipality of Fairbanks. And income taxes. So we pay property taxes, and that’s all we pay. As we address these more and more dramatic events, it’s costing us more and more to repair the roads, costing more and more to protect the utilities that are above and below ground. We’re seeing less and less investment from the federal government for events like that. So as Alaskans, it’s time for us to really think hard about how we want to protect … our assets that we have. And what level of commitment comes from our own pocketbooks.

AF: Leading into that, how have you navigated being a mayor at a time when the federal government is reducing funding, and withdrawing from being a partner on so many issues?

MO: We continue to ask our public employees to do more with less. At the same time, the public expects services to be modern. So, that means we have to invest in technology.

It’s a tough spot. I have all of these ideas and plans for being mayor, and then you come into the office.… The way we want to provide services and make things more efficient … with less and less funding, from the state and from the federal government, we’re going to have to look at ways that we contribute to ourselves. And that comes back to the values that we hold as a community.

It’s tough. It’s definitely something I’m working on—how we do more with less, how we explain the value of good governance, [and] putting our own skin in the game.

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: The Midnight Sun Festival in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska. Credit: Jacob Boomsma via iStock/Getty Images.

Like most places these days, the United Kingdom needs more housing. But that housing won’t come at nature’s expense—at least not in England, where since 2024, any new construction project must be accompanied by a 10 percent net gain in biodiversity, ideally on the same site.

Whether that entails restoring wetlands or reforesting farmland, the improvements are intended to leave the immediate natural environment better off than it was before the development. But where that proves impossible, the goal of a “net” gain allows developers to engage in off-site conservation efforts or, as a last resort, to purchase biodiversity credits to fund habitat restoration and preservation elsewhere.

Prioritizing biodiversity has direct benefits for humans and other species, from ensuring clean air to protecting habitats. It also helps build climate resilience, whether in the form of trees that provide shade in overheated urban areas or soil that absorbs and stores carbon. The question for many communities is how to pay for such nature-based solutions—and one answer lies in the value of the land itself.

Passed in 2021, England’s Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) rule is a form of land value capture, a strategy that allows communities to recover and reinvest some of the increases in land value that arise from development due to public investment or government actions, such as zoning changes. Researchers at the University of Liverpool are looking at the connection between land value capture and climate adaptation, and investigating how the BNG rule is affecting local fiscal strategies.

UK municipalities already had a few value capture tools available to them, from locally negotiated planning obligations to the Community Infrastructure Levy. Such revenues can fund investments in education, transportation, parks, or other public goods, but “the majority of land value capture in England is used for affordable housing,” says Richard Dunning, professor of land economy and housing at the University of Liverpool.

That left Dunning and his colleague, fellow University of Liverpool professor Alex Lord, curious about the impacts of the Biodiversity Net Gain rule—both its measured contributions to biodiversity and its impact on other value capture programs. The UK’s other main value capture tools are mostly used at the local level on a case-by-case basis, Dunning says. As a national policy, BNG has essentially moved the environment to the front of the queue, ahead of other land value capture opportunities that fund, say, affordable housing.

“[If] the first thing a developer needs to do is to ensure that they leave the environment in measurably better condition than when they started, that is effectively the first request you have made of them,” Lord explains. Whether that could “crowd out other forms of investment” is one of the questions the professors aim to answer by focusing on three unique case studies with support from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

“It could be the case that putting biodiversity first in the queue actually makes the development worth more, so that there’s actually more [value] available to go into some other things,” Lord explains. For instance, many studies of statistically identical houses with or without nearby trees have found a price inflation effect for the homes set on leafy streets, he says. “So it’s entirely conceivable that the value of the development as a whole is enhanced as a result of there being on-site biodiversity.”

One of the three case studies Lord and Dunning will examine is London Dock in Wapping, a mixed-use development creating more than 2,000 homes and 7.5 acres of public green space on a 15-acre brownfield site in Central London. The developer’s investor brochure appears to position the on-site nature enhancements not as a bureaucratic requirement, but as a premium selling point, calling attention to its living roofs and 171 trees planted, as well as to its targeted 437 percent increase in biodiversity.

The three case studies will span a range of contexts, from those high-value former industrial docks in Central London, to a college expansion project in the historic, premium-priced university town of Cambridge, to the adaptive repurposing of a disused glassworks in Birmingham. In addition to examining how promised biodiversity increases are measured and monitored, Lord and Dunning want to understand how developers are responding to BNG in different settings; for example, is there a greater incentive to pursue off-site biodiversity credits for projects in high-value locations, where any loss of livable square footage takes a bigger bite out of profits?

While England’s BNG program—which was introduced to Parliament through the 2021 Environment Act—has sparked interest around the world, “we’re only a couple of years into the policy, so the evidence base for it is limited at the moment,” Dunning says. “So that’s the kind of exemplary nature of the case study approach these are first snapshots of what’s going on.”

Lord and Dunning’s project was among eight chosen for support through a recent request for proposals studying the use of land value capture to support climate adaptation and disaster risk management. Such case studies can help practitioners and policymakers implement effective LVC tools to support climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction, ultimately resulting in more climate-resilient, fiscally healthy communities, says Patrick Welch, associate director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute.

“Our research over the past few years has documented the real potential for land value capture to help fill the multi-trillion-dollar urban climate adaptation gap,” Welch says. “However, we lack well-documented examples of these instruments being used in practice, which are essential to improve our understanding of the full, practical potential for land value capture to advance climate goals and reduce the impacts of sea level rise, flooding, extreme heat, and other climate impacts.”

The seven other proposals selected for support will document case studies on four continents and span a range of climate risk adaptation strategies—from flood mitigation, to wildfire recovery and prevention, to issues of water scarcity and extreme heat. The research topics include:

• Bogotá, Colombia’s use of a betterment levy to finance an ecological cycling corridor along the Córdoba Canal. In the past, funds generated through this land value capture tool were mostly used to pay for road expansion and vehicular infrastructure, but in this case the levy helped support an intervention that integrates flood-risk mitigation, environmental restoration, and active mobility.
• A year after the Eaton Fire destroyed thousands of homes as well as critical water and utility infrastructure in Altadena, California, Los Angeles County is turning to a land-based financing instrument to help pay for disaster recovery, through the Altadena Wildfire Recovery Infrastructure Financing District.
• Planned relocation from at-risk coastal areas is a much-discussed but fraught climate adaptation strategy; Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) programs, implemented in a handful of coastal Florida counties, may offer a promising, market-based approach to the challenge. By allowing development rights to be shifted from vulnerable areas to safer locations, TDRs can reduce risk exposure while compensating landowners without relying entirely on public buyouts.
• As many places face increased water scarcity but lack the financing needed to adapt to such conditions, Luján de Cuyo, a fast-growing midsized city in Argentina’s semi-arid wine region, may offer lessons for similar communities. The municipality has assembled six coordinated land value capture tools—betterment contributions, differential rent charges, idle land surcharges, sale of building rights, strategic tax exemptions, and transfer of development rights—to generate dedicated revenue streams for water efficiency infrastructure, aquifer recharge protection, and compact development.
• After repeated stormwater disasters hit Foshan, China, in the 2010s, the Nanhai District developed the Climate-Linked Development Right Cycling (CDRC) This land-based financing tool designates formal flood retention zones, reallocates development rights from high-risk to low-risk areas, and captures land value increments generated through adjusted floor area ratios (FAR) in safer areas, which are earmarked exclusively for urban flood adaptation infrastructure.
• In Melbourne, Australia, some 1,200 acres of industrial land is being rezoned and transformed into a high-density, mixed-use development at Fishermans Bend—but the site is highly vulnerable to flooding, and the entire region is projected to face water security pressures. Since most of the land is privately owned, a Development Contributions Plan, required as a condition of planning approval, is financing climate resilience infrastructure, from flood mitigation and drainage upgrades to water management systems.
• The innovative, market-based Stormwater Retention Credit program in Washington, DC, which has been in operation for over a decade, requires developers to strictly manage density-related stormwater runoff, but allows them to satisfy some obligations by purchasing credits from unrelated Green Stormwater Infrastructure projects, channeling private capital into financing climate resilience across the city.

These selected case studies will be published on the Lincoln Institute website in 2027; in the meantime, learn more about land value capture and climate adaptation—and learn more about Lincoln Institute RFPs, fellowships, and research opportunities.

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

Lead image: Redevelopment projects in South London’s Elephant & Castle neighborhood have added thousands of homes in tandem with new green spaces. Credit: Ogulcan Aksoy via Getty Images.

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

What can an 18th-century orphanage tell us about housing affordability today? Quite a lot, says Thies Lindenthal, professor of real estate finance at the University of Cambridge.

In Europe, many institutions, like orphanages and hospitals, historically held large portfolios of market-rate rental properties to help fund their primary operations, Lindenthal says, and some kept detailed financial records that span several centuries. That’s allowed Lindenthal and his colleagues to trace the long-term evolution of urban housing affordability by analyzing nearly half a million rent observations and other data from seven major European cities during a period of more than 500 years.

Their findings, detailed in a recent working paper, may sound surprising: In inflation-adjusted terms, real urban rents have increased only about 0.17 percent a year, on average, over the last half a millennium. “If you compare what you’re paying for a 50-square-meter place in London now to what you’d have paid, I don’t know, 100 years ago, it is not more expensive,” Lindenthal says. However, modern Europeans do pay higher rents in total—consuming more and better living space than people in centuries past.

In 2019, Lindenthal was awarded a David C. Lincoln Fellowship, which supports scholars and practitioners conducting new research on land value taxation and its applications.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Lindenthal elaborates on his centuries-spanning real estate research, reflects on what artificial intelligence might mean for academic researchers, and reveals the actual reasons so many people tend to like historical housing (hint: it’s not really about the architecture).

JON GOREY: What is the general focus of your work?

THIES LINDENTHAL: I’m working on real estate finance topics, and mostly I’m looking into the risk-return profile of real estate as an investment. So at the asset level, what are the returns that people have achieved, what are the returns they believe they achieve, what are the returns they should achieve? And then trying to measure properly what kind of risks they are exposed to and what kind of risk-adjusted returns that they actually got in the end.

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

TL: I’m now in week four of my experiment to do my job with [Anthropic’s AI tool] Claude. It is quite a ride. I’ve always been interested in using big data, or biggish data, and machine learning to answer the types of questions that we work on in our field. But I think we’re now in the next step, where the machines can actually help us not just do individual tasks, but also tie them together—anything from data management to building up empirical pipelines to running tasks to interpreting tasks to doing quality control to a degree, and then, in the end, even producing reports or presentations based on that.

And that is quite a change. I mean, for academics, the stuff that we’re good at—not everything, but a lot of these things—Claude is extremely good at. So we have to really think about what it is that we can add to the mix.

JG: You’ve tracked certain real estate data across hundreds of years. Can you talk about how you’re able to do that—what kind of records exist from 400 years ago?—and what these very long-term historical property trends can tell us?

TL: We go back to the archives and find rents, and find prices, and sometimes you can find costs for portfolios from institutional investors across Western Europe. So we have good data from the Netherlands, from Belgium, from France, and somewhat okay data from England. These are records from what you’d call institutional investors—hospitals, orphanages—people who use real estate to generate income to then spend that money on running a hospital or something like that. They’re reliant on these very large portfolios of properties across a number of cities—Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London. And from these records, we can see how real estate, as an investment, is linked to other investment classes—for instance, how it’s linked to government bonds—and we can see how rents and prices are in equilibrium over the long run.

One thing that I find so important about these long-run data is that we can observe cities that are relatively free, so there’s very little interference from any type of regulation. You can see that in the long run, if rents and prices can adjust in a free, supply-and-demand kind of way, they don’t go through the roof, they are just nicely coming back to fundamentals.

And the other thing that’s interesting is that, if you actually start to try out policies that aim to improve affordability, for instance, or try to increase the quality of the housing stock, then that can actually work. So we’ve seen free markets, where stuff is not going through the roof. But then also we see the 1930s, 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in Europe, where you see a lot of different things being tried out in these cities, and houses get cheaper, houses get better, people live in better places.

Affordability, depending on how you look at it, might get worse, because people pay more—but also they live in much better quarters.… If you’re tracking affordability across the centuries, you’ll see that the price per square foot of space in a city has not become more expensive; on the contrary, it has become a lot cheaper.

But we don’t live in the same way as people lived 100 years ago—and luckily so. We have running water, we have more space, it’s better, it’s bigger, it’s healthier. A lot of progress has been made there. We are demanding a lot more housing services. Stuff got cheaper, but we consume a lot more of it. So overall, we pay more, but the fact that stuff has become expensive is also just reflecting the fact that stuff has gotten better.

JG: What’s one thing you wish more people understood about real estate finance?

TL: The number one insight is that the returns you get for real estate investments are realistic returns that represent the risk. You’re not getting something that is exceptionally good, that is better than other investments, no—but also nothing that is worse. This idea that you have to get into real estate as an investment, because it will make you rich? No. That’s simply not true. Some people are lucky, and some people are not lucky, but on average, you get a fair return.

JG: Have you encountered anything surprising or counterintuitive in your research?

TL: Maybe eight years back, there was this concept in the UK that the best way to create more supply of housing, to overcome the NIMBYism and the deadlock of supply not coming through, would be to just build in historical styles—to just say, you know what, we won’t build this modern stuff anymore, no more glass, no more steel, we’re going to build cozy, Victorian-style terrace houses. And if we do that, we build more beautifully, and everything will fall into place. And that was a bit of wishful thinking.

We did a study here, looking at the transaction prices that we see in the market, trying to account for the fact that the [older] buildings are in nicer locations and have bigger gardens and more greenery around them, and are better quality in terms of materials and so on. And that’s why they achieve higher prices. And the interesting thing was that, in a solid and data-driven way, accounting for these quality differences, we saw no premium at all for old architecture—not for your own property, but also no premium because your neighbors have a certain architecture.

So yes, green space matters. Yes, the quality of the materials matters. But if a house looks ’60s or ’80s or 1860s, that was not a big driver. I’m a bit of an architecture snob, I think good architecture matters. But it is more complicated than just saying, it has to look Victorian style or something. There’s still value in architecture, but I think that a good chunk of the home buyers don’t care.

What really surprised me is a different experiment that we ran, where we showed 2,000 pictures of houses from around the world to people in an app, and they could like or dislike each house. It was a bit like Tinder for houses: They could swipe left, or swipe right. We took the responses to these images and trained machine learning models to capture the aesthetic preferences of people. I was expecting to see some form of cluster [based on demographics or geography], buildings that everybody dislikes, or buildings that everybody likes, and we found surprisingly few of those. That was something I found really, really surprising. People like greenery, so that was across the board. People like space, people dislike density, and so on. So there’s stuff that showed up across the board, but it was not so much about the properties themselves, it was more about the setting in which these properties were located.

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

TL: One of the books that I really enjoyed was Careless People [A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams], that is a really good book.

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

TL: Well, it’s not very creative, but the AI revolution keeps me awake, and gives me hope. I think it’ll fundamentally change what we do, how we live; it will change society.

The problem is, you have the same people who are described in Careless People at Facebook, I presume that the same kind of people are running Open AI, and that is not good news. It’s the same kind of unchecked power. I mean, if you realize the power that is coming out of the big AI companies, and then read Careless People, that will keep you awake at night.

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

Lead image: Thies Lindenthal, professor of real estate finance at the University of Cambridge. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Poco después de comenzar su mandato en 2022, el alcalde de Atlanta, Andre Dickens, hizo el tipo de promesa que los votantes no suelen olvidar: se comprometió a abrir paso a 20.000 nuevas viviendas dentro de los límites de la ciudad para 2030, en el contexto de un rápido aumento de los alquileres y los precios de las viviendas.

Con la presión encima, una de las primeras medidas que tomó Dickens fue formar un grupo de trabajo en materia de vivienda para investigar parcelas y propiedades pertenecientes la ciudad. El alcalde lo consideró la ruta más rápida para poner manos a la obra, con el beneficio adicional de que sería más barato construir en estas parcelas, ya que el suelo, que casi siempre es el elemento más caro del proceso de construcción, ya estaba incluido.

El equipo del alcalde también estableció un centro de ayuda para la vivienda, simplificó los permisos, puso a disposición de los emprendedores inmobiliarios diferentes tipos de financiamiento y creó un programa de prevención de desalojos para ayudar a detener la ola de falta de hogares. Sin embargo, los más de 50 sitios y 217 hectáreas que se identificaron, que van desde escuelas cerradas hasta tierras y propiedades de MARTA, el sistema de transporte público de la ciudad, permitieron que la ciudad aprovechara la ventaja especial que proporciona la propiedad pública. “Los esfuerzos de desarrollo de capacidades están dando sus frutos en la forma de un vehículo sofisticado y colaborativo para desarrollar viviendas para familias de ingresos mixtos, ancladas en la comunidad, en suelo de propiedad pública”, comentó Dickens.

La estrategia de Atlanta es parte de un movimiento nacional para hacer un mejor uso del suelo propiedad del gobierno. Y la cantidad de suelo que se incluye (terrenos infrautilizados, como baldíos, lotes de estacionamiento abandonadas o edificios fuera de servicio, propiedad de entidades que van desde distritos escolares hasta autoridades de vivienda) no es insignificante. Según el Centro de Soluciones Geoespaciales (CGS, por su sigla en inglés), en todo el país, sería factible construir en más de 93.077 hectáreas de suelo de propiedad municipal con acceso al transporte público. Eso es más que la superficie total de la ciudad de Nueva York.

El análisis de tierras locales, estatales y federales del CGS encontró un total de 111.694 hectáreas de suelo de propiedad gubernamental donde podría construirse en áreas urbanas con acceso al transporte público e infraestructura existente. Este suelo podría albergar casi 7 millones de viviendas nuevas a una densidad modesta, según el CGS, que forma parte del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. Un destacado comentarista de asuntos urbanos calificó el potencial de estas tierras como una solución “escondida a plena vista”.

Para alentar a las comunidades de los EUA a identificar suelo de propiedad pública que podría utilizarse para mejoras de vivienda o medioambiente, el Instituto Lincoln lanzó una iniciativa llamada Community Land for Community Benefits (“Suelo de la comunidad para beneficio de la comunidad”).  “Las tierras públicas desempeñan un rol clave a la hora de abordar la capacidad de pago de la vivienda, pero los gobiernos locales necesitan apoyo para permitir la transformación”, indicó George W. McCarthy, presidente y director ejecutivo del Instituto Lincoln. “La campaña Community Land ayudará a los responsables de formular políticas y a sus socios a identificar y aprovechar el suelo de propiedad pública”.

Se calcula que se deben construir entre seis y ocho millones de viviendas nuevas para superar las restricciones en la oferta que contribuyen al aumento de los costos habitacionales, según análisis de fuentes como Freddie Mac, Zillow, Goldman Sachs y McKinsey. La ventaja de desarrollar o redesarrollar suelo de propiedad pública es que el gobierno puede dictar los términos de uso y garantizar que cualquier vivienda que se construya sea permanentemente asequible. Alquilar el suelo o entregarlo a un desarrollador sin fines de lucro también puede tener el efecto de mantener bajos los costos generales. “La capacidad de pago del suelo es el mayor obstáculo para la vivienda asequible”, explica McCarthy. “Si un emprendedor inmobiliario tiene que comprar tierras a precio de mercado, eso elimina, de forma casi automática, la posibilidad de construir viviendas asequibles. El costo del suelo será demasiado alto para que esto funcione”.

A medida que los gobiernos hacen un inventario de los terrenos de propiedad pública, surge una serie de otras opciones para la construcción de nuevas viviendas, en suelo con distintos regímenes de tenencia y propiedad: terrenos comerciales con mal rendimiento, como un centro comercial en quiebra; estacionamientos privados infrautilizados; terrenos que son propiedad de empresas ferroviarias de carga o de pasajeros; corrales de ganado; y terrenos que son propiedad de comunidades tribales o instituciones religiosas, que, por diversas razones, buscan vender sus activos inmobiliarios en la actualidad. (Obtenga más información sobre el movimiento para construir viviendas en tierras de propiedad religiosa).

A menudo, las instituciones cívicas como universidades, hospitales y fundaciones comunitarias también son propietarias de grandes extensiones de tierra y, además, tienen una misión orientada a la comunidad. Un esfuerzo coordinado para mapear estas hectáreas, a través de jurisdicciones e instituciones cívicas concurrentes, puede orientar las iniciativas destinadas a abordar la asequibilidad de la vivienda y la resiliencia ante el cambio climático, mientras revela oportunidades potenciales para obtener parcelas más grandes y contiguas a partir de parcelas fragmentadas.

A continuación, se incluye un desglose de la tierra de propiedad gubernamental con acceso a transporte público por categoría (federal, estatal y local), que comienza con suelo bajo el control de los municipios, que es, con amplia diferencia, el segmento más grande de la propiedad pública.

LOCAL: más de 95.000 hectáreas

Varias ciudades, grandes y pequeñas, se unen a Atlanta para valuar sus activos inmobiliarios, determinar cómo podrían usarse y avanzar con los proyectos. En el sector de Morgan Park, en Chicago, 11 baldíos de propiedad de la ciudad se están reurbanizando para viviendas, como parte de la Iniciativa de viviendas intermedias faltantes de la ciudad. Una base de datos de baldíos de propiedad de la ciudad revela que hay 7.000 más.

De manera similar, en Detroit, donde la alcaldesa Mary Sheffield firmó una orden ejecutiva para destinar todos los ingresos por la venta de propiedades comerciales de la ciudad al fondo fiduciario de desarrollo y preservación de viviendas asequibles, se está examinando el estado de 100.000 parcelas vacías, la mayoría de las cuales son propiedad de la ciudad, según la organización sin fines de lucro Detroit Future City. El suelo vacante es candidato, como mínimo, para mejoras naturales como jardines comunitarios, si no se usa para vivienda, comentan desde la organización.

Sin embargo, los terrenos baldíos representan los espacios más inmediatos en el ejercicio de identificar suelo municipal adecuado. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, la alcaldesa de Burlington, Vermont, lanzó un plan para usar parques, estacionamientos y otras parcelas públicas mal aprovechadas para la construcción de viviendas. Entre los sitios del proyecto, se incluye una zona comercial de tres cuadras deteriorada en el centro de la ciudad, con un auditorio en desuso; y un extenso estacionamiento de propiedad de la ciudad, adyacente a una incubadora de empresas emergentes de tecnología que ahora ocupa una fábrica que solía usarse para fabricar hornos y otros equipos de cocina.

Cuando el suelo se percibe como un activo de la comunidad, pueden surgir tensiones y conflictos, incluso si la propiedad está olvidada hace mucho tiempo o las condiciones se han deteriorado. Como las tierras de propiedad pública pueden ser un imán para conflictos de intereses, en especial si involucran cualquier tipo de espacio recreativo o abierto, la ciudad adaptó el proceso de adquisición, comentó Charles Dillard, director de Planificación de Burlington. “Queremos darle la vuelta al proceso de solicitud de propuestas”, agregó, para obtener primero la opinión de la comunidad e identificar un esquema de desarrollo y diseño que se ajuste a ello.

“No suele haber consenso sobre qué se debe construir, si es que se debe construir algo”, indicó Dillard, y señaló que, en general, los conflictos surgen en torno a “cuestiones de capacidad de pago y beneficio público: qué se está construyendo y para quién… Entonces, en última instancia, se trata de democratizar el desarrollo y reafirmar la función del sector público como líder en la creación de la perspectiva de la vivienda y la ciudad en evolución”.

En Atlanta, los funcionarios de la ciudad construyen una narrativa que resalta el contexto más amplio del suelo de propiedad de la ciudad: cómo todo desarrollo de vivienda se adapta, en última instancia, a un barrio bien articulado. Según la oficina del alcalde, el enfoque es “enmarcar la producción de viviendas en una estrategia holística de revitalización del barrio. Cuando hablamos de nuevas viviendas, también hablamos de tiendas de comestibles, parques, senderos, guarderías, escuelas [y] retención de residentes históricos”. El objetivo idealista es garantizar que todos los residentes de Atlanta “tengan un lugar donde vivir, pero que todos tengan la capacidad de pago para vivir en un barrio completo, saludable y próspero”.

Sin embargo, la ciudad también tiene en cuenta la producción de resultados rápidos. Las tierras municipales se han convertido en el lugar perfecto para la iniciativa de vivienda rápida del alcalde, al entregar construcciones modulares y construidas en fábrica. Un estacionamiento a nivel del suelo para vehículos de la ciudad mal aprovechado se transformó en The Melody, 40 unidades de vivienda de apoyo permanente junto a la estación Garnett de MARTA. A fines del año pasado, la ciudad celebró la apertura de Waterworks Village, 100 unidades de viviendas de apoyo construidas en tres pisos de viviendas modulares en suelo transferido del Departamento de Gestión de Cuencas de la Ciudad.

Otra ventaja de la mayor cantidad de suelo bajo control municipal es que permite a las ciudades y pueblos elegir, a medida que evalúan parcelas cuyo desarrollo implicaría diversos grados de dificultad. El análisis del Centro de Soluciones Geoespaciales puede ser de particular utilidad para calcular las concesiones que se deben hacer, ya que las investigaciones exhaustivas muestran diferentes niveles de complejidad al disponer de propiedades gubernamentales. Un taller de obras públicas desmantelado podría estar en un sitio con menos vecinos que se opongan a la reurbanización, pero podría requerir un alto nivel de remediación medioambiental.

“Estamos realizando un estudio diligente de cada parcela de propiedad de la ciudad para determinar no solo las que están más al alcance, sino también las propiedades más complejas que, en última instancia, pueden aportar de manera más significativas a la creación de viviendas, el desarrollo comunitario y la transformación catalítica”, indicó Dillard, el planificador de la ciudad de Burlington.

Los condados también se unen a la iniciativa. La “Guía para desarrollar viviendas en suelo propiedad del condado” de Smart Growth America tiene como objetivo ayudar a los gobiernos de los condados, que suelen tener menos capacidad, a identificar parcelas adecuadas, evaluar las limitaciones de zonificación y modelar la viabilidad financiera y la estructura de propiedad. El condado de San Mateo, justo al sur de San Francisco, recientemente arrendó una parcela por USD 1 al año para que un desarrollador de viviendas asequibles pudiera construir 160 unidades de viviendas asequibles para adultos mayores.

ESTATAL: más de 13.300 hectáreas

Los estados están adoptando un rol de coordinación al ayudar a las ciudades y pueblos a identificar el suelo de su propiedad. Pero los estados también son propietarios de tierras extensas, y los legisladores reclaman una imagen más nítida de dónde podría radicar la promesa de nuevas viviendas. Prácticamente todos los estados tienen, desde hace mucho tiempo, un proceso para disponer de la propiedad estatal, ya sea un depósito de armas obsoleto o un hospital psiquiátrico cerrado, pero ese ejercicio es notoriamente prolongado y se desarrolla caso por caso. Dada la urgencia de la crisis habitacional, los responsables de elaborar políticas de hoy buscan una perspectiva general más estratégica y plazos más rápidos.

Esta primavera, el gobernador de Colorado, Jared Polis, firmó la Ley de Facilitación de Oportunidades de Vivienda (HOME, por su sigla en inglés), que les permite a los distritos escolares, universidades, autoridades de vivienda, distritos de transporte público y organizaciones sin fines de lucro calificadas construir viviendas en propiedades de un máximo de dos hectáreas, al margen de las reglas de zonificación locales. La iniciativa sigue a una medida de 2019 que exige que cada agencia e institución estatal de educación superior presente una lista de todo el suelo no desarrollado que sea propiedad de la agencia o institución o esté bajo su control, y que podría desarrollarse para viviendas asequibles para hogares de ingresos bajos y moderados, bajo regímenes de venta o alquiler. El Departamento de Asuntos Locales (DOLA, por su sigla en inglés) del estado se ha asociado con el Centro de Soluciones Geoespaciales para realizar un inventario de todas las tierras identificadas por las agencias e instituciones, detectar superposiciones y asignar la propiedad con precisión. El objetivo es permitir una mejor coordinación en el futuro.

Un esfuerzo similar en Vermont dio 140 propiedades, que van desde 0,2 a 202 hectáreas, en diversos lugares. El gobernador de California, Gavin Newsom, lanzó el Programa de Sitios Sobrantes para identificar propiedades estatales mal aprovechadas y acelerar el proceso de desarrollo de sitios adecuados para la vivienda. Los constructores tienen acceso a un nuevo portal web que brinda una explicación clara de cuáles son las oportunidades. Los funcionarios dicen que las propiedades que están en el inventario, que van desde tierras cercanas a un hospital estatal hasta parcelas vacías que pertenecen a la agencia estatal de transporte, Caltrans, podrían ser sitios apropiados para la creación de 2.000 viviendas nuevas.

Según un plan anunciado por el gobernador de Maryland, Wes Moore, unas 54 hectáreas de suelo de propiedad estatal cerca de las estaciones de transporte público se activarán con potencialmente 5.000 hogares. En Massachusetts, la gobernadora Maura Healey estableció el programa de Tierras Estatales para Viviendas, que ya identificó 182 hectáreas de tierras de propiedad estatal e incluye un mapa interactivo para crear una imagen más clara de las ubicaciones aptas y su contexto.

Las campañas para transformar suelo de propiedad estatal se encuentran, de manera constante, con los mismos obstáculos que los municipios. Los funcionarios de Massachusetts creían que tenían una propuesta infalible para desarrollar 180 departamentos en un estacionamiento infrautilizado de dos hectáreas en el campus de MassBay Community College en el suburbio de Wellesley, al oeste de Boston. Pero los residentes se opusieron al plan y expresaron inquietudes sobre las consecuencias en las 16 hectáreas adyacentes de suelo de conservación, a pesar de que el estado expresó con claridad su intención de construir solo en el estacionamiento y no en el bosque. Es probable que la reurbanización se suspenda si se presenta la demanda que se anunció.

FEDERAL: más de 2.100 hectáreas

La idea de construir viviendas en tierras de propiedad del gobierno federal es una de las pocas políticas de la gestión de Biden que se mantuvieron hasta la presidencia de Trump.

El Grupo de Trabajo Conjunto sobre Suelo Federal para la Vivienda, una asociación del Departamento del Interior y el Departamento de Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano, tiene como objetivo identificar suelo federal que podría ser adecuado para la construcción residencial y agilizar el proceso de transferencia para que el desarrollo ocurra más rápido.

El gobierno federal controla la asombrosa cantidad de 263 millones de hectáreas de tierras públicas, pero la mayor parte de esa superficie son parques nacionales, reservas y áreas silvestres que no serían aptas para el desarrollo de viviendas. Los candidatos más probables para la reurbanización serían edificios federales y tierras en entornos más urbanos: se calcula que 8.000 propiedades están vacías, abandonadas, obsoletas o infrautilizadas, según el Congreso. La Administración de Servicios Generales enumera, de manera rutinaria, las propiedades que ya no se usan, ya sea un juzgado cerrado o un espacio para oficinas administrativas de agencias federales que ya no se necesita.

Un precedente para la reutilización de la propiedad federal es el desmantelamiento de bases militares, muchas de las cuales se convirtieron en viviendas y desarrollos de uso mixto. Unas 350 instalaciones, desde astilleros hasta instalaciones de formación y cuarteles, pasaron a estar disponibles en el proceso de realineación y cierre de bases, que se lleva a cabo desde hace casi 40 años. Solo en Massachusetts, dos bases militares importantes se están convirtiendo en desarrollos residenciales: Fort Devens y la estación aeronaval South Weymouth, que prometen casi 300 y 6.000 hogares, respectivamente.

Sin embargo, ha surgido un acalorado debate sobre la diferencia entre identificar parcelas específicas sobre suelo federal, aptas para viviendas asequibles y simplemente poner a disposición tierras públicas para un desarrollo sin sentido. Las propuestas recientes del senador Mike Lee (R-Utah) y otros para vender miles de hectáreas de lo que hoy es espacio abierto en Utah, Nevada, Arizona y otros estados del oeste suscitaron la preocupación de que podrían surgir loteos de alto costo en áreas protegidas, y esto dañaría hábitats clave y drenaría suministros de agua muy limitados mientras poco se hace para abordar la crisis de capacidad de pago. Esas preocupaciones se plantearon en el contexto del impulso de la gestión para poner a disposición más suelo federal para la extracción de recursos.

Si bien el debate sobre el suelo federal continúa, la verdadera oportunidad yace con los gobiernos estatales y locales, que poseen la mayor parte de los bienes raíces públicos privilegiados en todo el país. Por cada hectárea de suelo federal urbanizable, los gobiernos estatales y locales controlan más de 21 hectáreas. Los líderes estatales y locales ya están comenzando a actuar, pero necesitan datos y pruebas para garantizar que se urbanicen las parcelas de terreno adecuadas, a la velocidad y escala correctas, en los lugares correctos, teniendo en cuenta las limitaciones de suelo y agua que afectan tanto a la habitabilidad como a la conservación.

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: Líderes de la ciudad de Atlanta identificaron a 104 Trinity Avenue, que se encuentra enfrente del ayuntamiento, como un sitio de desarrollo residencial. Un edificio de ingresos mixtos de 10 pisos y 218 unidades se está construyendo en este suelo, que había sido arrendado por 99 años con un requisito de asequibilidad. Crédito: Google Earth.