The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, an alliance of leading US housing organizations convened by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, today released a blueprint for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s 2025–2027 Duty to Serve plans. 

As the mortgage business moves increasingly from federally regulated banks to other lenders, Fannie and Freddie play an even bigger role in determining access to affordable housing finance.  The UMMC helps to demystify the complicated “secondary mortgage market” and organize the affordable housing community to work more efficiently with Fannie and Freddie. 

Every three years, the two Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) are required to create plans outlining how they will comply with Duty to Serve, a federal regulation that requires the enterprises to prioritize and improve affordable housing finance opportunities in three historically neglected markets: manufactured housing, rural housing, and affordable housing preservation. 

The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition’s recommendations, “Blueprint 2024,” urges the Enterprises to increase certain loan purchases in DTS markets, develop new, accessible loan products and programs, and evaluate new partnership opportunities. By centering affordable housing experts’ perspectives and synthesizing the most critical action steps, the coalition hopes to expand and enhance the Enterprises’ performance in underserved markets. The coalition will track the plans’ progress and publish a scorecard evaluating the success of the GSEs in adhering to the blueprint and implementing their plans.   

“Duty to Serve is one of the most important affordable housing regulations this country has,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition’s new blueprint equips Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the guidance they need to comply with this federal regulation and expand housing finance opportunities in unprecedented, potentially revolutionary ways.” 

The Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition consists of 32 leading US affordable housing organizations seeking to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable to their founding purpose: to bring housing finance opportunities to American families not traditionally served by the private market. Its members include: 

• Center for Community Progress 
• Ceres 
• Cdcb 
• Enterprise Community Partners 
• Fahe 
• Grounded Solutions Network 
• Homeownership Alliance 
• Housing Assistance Council 
• Housing Partnership Network 
• Institute for Market Transformation 
• Leading Age 
• Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation 
• National Consumer Law Center 
• National Council of State Housing Agencies 
• National Community Stabilization Trust 
• National Housing Conference 
• National Housing Trust 
• Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago 
• NeighborWorks America 
• New Hampshire Community Loan Fund 
• Next Step 
• Novogradac 
• Oklahoma Native Assets Coalition 
• Opportunity Finance Network 
• Prosperity Now 
• RMI 
• ROC USA 
• Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future 
• The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) 
• Unidos US 
• Urban Strategies 

To learn more about the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, visit its webpage here.

Kristina McGeehan is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: A neighborhood of manufactured houses, one of the Duty to Serve markets. Credit: motorider via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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.

Oji Alexander is the CEO of People’s Housing+, a New Orleans nonprofit that aims to close the racial wealth gap by developing affordable homeownership opportunities, providing long-term financial stewardship services, and ensuring perpetual affordability through its community land trust and shared ownership arrangements. Alexander participated in the Center for Community Investment’s 2022–2023 Fulcrum Fellowship, a one-year, intensive program for field-level community leaders. In this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, he explained how the fellowship shifted his perspective on affordable housing, and how People’s Housing+ is working to create generational wealth for New Orleans families.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your organization, and how did your Fulcrum Fellowship help you build upon that work?

OJI ALEXANDER: People’s Housing+ is the result of a strategic merger between three New Orleans-based affordable housing organizations. My organization was called Home by Hand—we were historically a single-family affordable homeownership developer. Tulane Canal Neighborhood Development Corporation was also a single-family affordable housing developer for homeownership, but their unique wrinkle was in-house financial fitness work and homebuyer training. And the third organization was the Crescent City Community Land Trust, one of the city’s two community land trusts. Three small organizations, two of them Black-led, with similar missions; we partnered pretty often, and it was the same old story of competing for the same limited resources. So we built a larger scale, Black-led organization that’s able to provide a greater breadth of services to our community.

Our mission is African American wealth creation, shrinking the racial wealth gap. We do that through affordable real estate development, as we know homeownership is a reliable driver of wealth creation, and by providing stewardship services. So not only are we building the units, identifying the families, identifying the resources, getting those families into the homes, but really the important work, and what distinguishes us from some of our peers, is that first five to seven years that folks are in their homes, making sure that they understand the asset they have just acquired, how to keep and maintain that asset, and how to grow that asset, with the goal of being able to transfer that asset. We’re also providing resources for folks in our network who have been in their homes for 10 to 15 years, which is a completely different set of services.
 

I’d always thought of housing as a transactional process—it was always about building more units, numbers, more and more and more. Before Fulcrum, my goal would have been to be the biggest, most productive affordable housing organization for our size—we have developed more single-family housing, I think, than any organization in South Louisiana, other than Habitat for Humanity. What Fulcrum helped me realize is that our organization alone is not the answer, and it’s really helped me think about systems-level change and what we can do—what is our part in the broader affordable housing ecosystem and community development ecosystem? It has completely changed my approach to our work.

Fulcrum also helped me pull myself out of the weeds. I was always proud to know not just the big picture but how a house gets built, start to finish—the nuts and bolts—and Fulcrum helped me take that balcony view and start looking at the broader ecosystem, really incorporating the capital absorption framework and figuring out where we fit within the pipeline of deals.
 

JG: What are you working on now, and what do you have planned next?

OA: The ‘Plus’ in our name is that we’re also working toward some shared ownership and community ownership projects, where we have partnered with folks who own land but have not had the resources to get the land back into commerce. We had Hurricane Katrina, and we have a lot of families who are still trying to recover from a storm back in 2005—who have blighted property, who are deemed unbankable by traditional lending institutions. So we partner with organizations, lend our balance sheet and our access to resources, to help them get properties back in commerce, in situations where we can incorporate affordable housing as well. We’ve got quite a mountain to climb.

We are also working on our first small, multi-family rental, mixed-use project. It’s the historic restoration of a blighted firehouse that was built in the early 1900s in a neighborhood called Central City, a historically African American neighborhood that is really starting to see the effects of gentrification and displacement. The firehouse will have seven permanently affordable rental apartments upstairs, and a 65-seat early childhood development center downstairs, which is the first cohabitation of affordable housing and early childhood education in the city.
 

What we’re looking to start working on is more community ownership, shared ownership, shared equity. We’re always looking to provide benefits not just to the direct recipients of our products, but to folks who are already living in the neighborhoods that we’re working in. There are a number of different shared ownership models nationwide, but we’re involved with the Community Investment Trust, which was started in Portland and spun off by Mercy Corps, and is a way for residents of a particular neighborhood to safely invest in commercial real estate. The potential is for them to realize the upside of real estate development in their neighborhood—again, without being direct recipients of some of the new housing that’s going in—but making sure that we’re giving people the opportunity to invest and capitalize on neighborhoods transitioning, as opposed to being displaced by that transition.

JG: Can you talk about the twin challenges of developing not just affordable housing but also climate-resilient housing, in a city that’s particularly vulnerable to climate change?

OA: Because of Hurricane Katrina, we’re in a unique position: we’re talking about rebuilding a city. And conventional wisdom has been, if we’re going to rebuild the city, we’ve got to build a resilient city. We have always approached it from a practical standpoint. For us, it was always about the families, always about the end user—how can we build a resilient home that’s going to have low operating costs. The goal is predictability: You want to have predictability in your payments, whether they be rental payments or mortgage payments, and you want to have predictability in your utility bills. So we’re building with insulation, efficient HVAC systems. We want to make sure that the end user has a building they can afford to maintain. With some of the mitigation features that we build into the houses, people are realizing discounts on their insurance rates.

It’s also predictability that when a storm comes, and you have the opportunity to evacuate, your house is still going to be there when you get home. And this is where stewardship comes in. If you do come home after a storm, and your home does sustain some damage, we’re there to help you navigate the transactions with your insurance company and FEMA and things like that. 

We’re a city that sits below sea level, and the way our city deals with water is we try to pump it out faster than it rains. So we’re building green infrastructure and stormwater management into our homes at no cost to our homeowners. Stormwater management is an area where you’re not going to see a lower water bill; it’s really a community benefit. And low- and moderate-income folks generally don’t have expendable income to provide community benefits. So we want to make sure that we’re providing that at no cost.
 

JG. What do you wish more people knew about affordable housing?

OA: Overwhelmingly, people come to us thinking that there was no way that they could have possibly purchased a home. In addition to what we know about the racial wealth gap from an asset standpoint—those disparities are understood and well known—I think there’s also a gap in the wealth of knowledge that comes along with generational wealth. And a lot of our folks who don’t come from generational wealth just don’t have the understanding of what owning an asset can do for a family.

So if there was something I wish the broader community knew, especially the African American community, who has historically—purposefully, through racist housing practices and policies—been denied access to homeownership, it’s that there’s a pretty simple recipe. And with a little bit of support, in a reasonable timeframe, most folks who have steady work, steady income, can achieve homeownership if they follow that path. Homeownership is not unattainable for folks who do not come from generational wealth.

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

OA: What keeps me up at night is really the fact that we have to fight so hard for what should be a basic right, which is shelter. The fact that an organization like ours has to exist. What gives me hope, though, is the compound nature of wealth—the impact that one individual home can have on a family from a generational standpoint. There were folks who were raising kids when we first started working with them. Now those kids are graduating or in college and in certain cases actually inheriting these homes. So we’re actually starting to see the transfer process. You plant the seed, you water it and give it resources, and then you just watch it grow.

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

OA: It’s not related to housing, but it really is related to the work that we did at Fulcrum. The best book I’ve read lately was called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. A lot of the work that we did in the Fulcrum Fellowship, in addition to the redevelopment framework and leadership training, was on self-care—as nonprofit leaders, we often take self-care for granted, we kill ourselves in these jobs. And the power of what breath can do, the physiological impact that breathing and the way you breathe has on you, is really amazing.

Related Articles

Fellows in Focus: Rethinking Stormwater Management in the West

Fellows in Focus: Designing a New Approach to Property Tax Appraisals

Fellows in Focus: Mapping Our Most Resilient Landscapes

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

Lead image: Oji Alexander, CEO of People’s Housing+ and a former Fulcrum Fellow, in front of two People’s Housing+ homes. Credit: Courtesy photo.

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning. 

Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.

To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.

The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.

There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.

You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown

As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.

The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.

Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP

Climate Displacement on the Rise

In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.

In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.

Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.

Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP

Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities

Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.

Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.

Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.

Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back

Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.

Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah

Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth

The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.

De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.

However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado

Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends

Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.

Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

It’s Time to Welcome the Robots

Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.

In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.

With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis

Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.

The coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 30 miles north of Boston, has about 6,000 homes built over the course of five centuries. There are the typical cul-de-sac Colonials, the new townhouses, and both modest and massive waterfront properties. But Ipswich is also awash in historic homes—including roughly five dozen “First Period” houses built before 1725, more than any other community in the United States. Lately, the town’s antique houses have been popular with homebuyers, fetching the kinds of multimillion-dollar sales prices usually associated with new construction.

Ipswich Chief Assessor Mary-Louise Ireland isn’t sure whether it’s a temporary blip or the start of a trend. But she does know one thing: it’s making her team’s task of assigning fair and accurate property tax values to every home in town a bit more challenging.

After all, one of the biggest difficulties for a local tax assessor isn’t just making accurate property valuations—it’s doing so consistently, across all price points, home styles, and neighborhoods. If a $1 million Colonial is assessed at $950,000, for example—or 95 percent of its market value—then a $100,000 condo in the same district should be assessed at $95,000. When that ratio is consistent across a community’s price tiers, the valuations have what’s called vertical equity.

That’s tricky enough to achieve in a homogenous postwar suburb. But when 300-year-old saltboxes share the streets with new luxury townhomes, and storied houses get converted to character-rich condos, making equitable assessments across such a sundry assortment of housing styles gets even more challenging. “We’re three people,” says Ireland, “and we do all of the field work on our own.”

Now, Ireland’s small department is using an innovative—and free—new online tool from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to evaluate and interpret the vertical equity of their assessments. “We don’t have a lot of money for extra tools,” she says. “So having this has been fabulous.”  

Evaluating the Valuations

Getting assessments right across the board is crucial to a fair and equitable property tax. But accurately assessing very low- and high-priced properties is notoriously difficult, partly because there are fewer market sales in those brackets. And in recent years, researchers analyzing national data sets have found headline-worthy evidence that lower-priced homes are being over-assessed—and therefore overtaxed—relative to higher-priced properties nearby.

“If assessments are equitable, then low-, medium-, and high-priced properties are all assessed at the same level relative to the market,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy fellow Ron Rakow. “But even though it’s a fairly simple concept, vertical equity is really tricky to measure.” 

The International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) has two vertical equity standards in place to guide assessors, says Rakow—former commissioner of the City of Boston Assessing Department—but even those measures are imperfect. The price related differential is a simple ratio most assessors use, but Rakow says it can be imprecise; the coefficient of price related bias is a little more robust, but also more complex—it requires a type of analysis that many small departments don’t have the resources or expertise to conduct. 

“Because of the difficulty of measuring vertical equity, there’s no single best, definitive measure,” Rakow says. “So rather than just looking at one indicator, it’s better to look at several indicators to paint a more complete picture.”

Needless to say, that’s no simple undertaking. So the Lincoln Institute partnered with the nonprofit Center for Appraisal Research and Technology (CART) to develop a new online tool to help assessors measure and understand the vertical equity in their own valuations.

The browser-based vertical equity app, which is free to use, instantly analyzes property data that any local assessor already has on hand, evaluating it against six different measures of vertical equity and providing a detailed report. “We wanted to give assessors a tool where they can not only get these measures calculated out, but also get some assistance in interpreting them,” Rakow says.

The new tool, launched in September, simply requires users to upload a data set of assessment records, which are anonymized to protect the privacy of property owners. The tool then runs a calculation based on two main ingredients: time-adjusted sale prices and assessed values.

From there, assessors can see different illustrated measurements of vertical equity in their data set, with customized graphs and explanations, and can download a full PDF of the results.

“If you can upload an attachment to an email, you can now do these complex statistical quality control studies—you don’t have to have a PhD, you don’t even have to have programming experience,” says CART founder and research scientist Paul Bidanset. “There are a lot of different ways to do it that would have been more complicated—but we thought if we could meet people exactly where they were, we would be helping the most people.” (Read our profile of Bidanset, a former C. Lowell Harriss fellow at the Lincoln Institute.)

Ireland says she’s thrilled to have access to such a powerful tool. “It was super simple—I have everything in Excel spreadsheets anyway, and you only needed two columns,” she says. “I can use this really beautiful report to go before the Select Board and say, ‘OK, here’s the data to support what we’ve done.’”

The professional look of the report was impressive, Ireland says—and not something her department of three could have put together on their own with their limited budget. And the illustrated graphs aren’t just useful for communicating vertical equity data to non-assessors. Paired with contextual explanations of what each measurement means and how it’s calculated, they helped Ireland wrap her head around some of the more complex and novel metrics. “I’ve taken all the classes, and we’ve talked about [these measurements], but for some reason it really hit home for me seeing it all put together this way,” she says. 

Six Sides to Every Story

The tool provides results based on six approaches. The first looks at the commonly used assessment-to-sale ratio, which simply divides assessed values by their sale prices; the tool then sorts and charts those results into price deciles.

“We basically split all the sales into 10 bins—lowest-priced properties in the first bin and highest-priced properties in the tenth bin—and then we compare that ratio and see if it changes,” Rakow explains. “If we have proportional assessments, the ratio should be the same in each of those bins. But what we commonly see is that the assessment ratios tend to be a little bit higher for the low-priced properties than they are for high-priced properties.”

The coefficient of dispersion analysis plots out how far each property’s ratio is from the median. While that’s more commonly used as a measure of horizontal equity, Rakow says, it still reflects the overall quality of the assessments. “Generally speaking, if you have problems with vertical equity, you’re also probably going to have a pretty high coefficient of dispersion,” he says. 

The tool also calculates the price related differential, one of two standards the IAAO uses to measure vertical equity (a PRD between 0.98 and 1.03 indicates vertical equity, according to IAAO guidance); the coefficient of price related bias, which can help users understand patterns in assessment-to-sales ratios at higher price points; and Spearman’s rank-order correlation, which compares rankings of assessments and sales from lowest to highest.

Finally, the tool includes Gini coefficients, which have long been used to measure inequality in economics. It’s only fairly recently that the assessment profession has begun to apply the Gini ranking technique to analyze vertical equity. “We’re really excited about these,” Rakow says. The Gini ranking not only offers an overall indicator of equity in the assessments, “but it also can point to where in the price distribution you’re actually having problems,” Rakow says. “It’s great to know whether or not the assessment distribution is equitable or not, but it’s even more important, if it isn’t, to know where to start looking and where you may have some issues.”

While any one of these six measurements in isolation might provide an imperfect analysis of vertical equity, Rakow says, they offer a more complete picture when taken altogether. And the app can also help an assessor look more closely at specific data. “If you suspect that the issue may be in certain neighborhoods, or within certain housing styles, you could basically cull your sales file and just feed those types of properties into the app and see whether or not that is in fact the case, and how severe the problem is,” Rakow explains.

Ultimately, the developers of the tool hope that it will make it easier for assessors not just to understand vertical inequity, but to take steps to address it. In future iterations, Rakow would like to add diagnostic elements. One feature currently in development is a geographically weighted tool to highlight areas with the most significant divergences between market values and assessments. “So then you can zoom in and see what’s going on there,” he says. “Maybe there’s a certain style of house in that neighborhood that you’re not capturing right in the model, or maybe it’s very large homes that tend to be in that particular location versus the rest of the community.” 

This kind of data could also help assessors make the case for their municipalities to consider targeted tax relief policies, such as a homestead exemption, that can help make assessments more equitable.

Like any good technology, the tool will never truly be finished, Bidanset says: “It’ll always be changing and evolving as the industry evolves, and as we get more feedback, and as the industry comes up with new metrics and better statistics.”

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

Lead image: Houses in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Credit: Leigh Mantoni-Stewart.

What comes to mind upon hearing Scranton, Pennsylvania? For some, it’s the location of the fictional company Dunder Mifflin, from the TV comedy series “The Office.” Others may know it as President Biden’s hometown. Hard-core urbanists will note that it’s also where Jane Jacobs grew up, before moving to New York City to do battle with Robert Moses.

Ultimately, though, much of what Scranton is about these days is what legacy cities are confronting across the US and indeed all over the world: its postindustrial future, now that the manufacturing industries of yesteryear are long gone.

In the case of Scranton, a railroad crossroads in northeast Pennsylvania, its industrial riches were built on mining and processing coal, as well as iron and steel and textiles, and a heyday of some of the nation’s first electric lights and electrified streetcars, which earned it the moniker the “Electric City.” Though some defense-related manufacturing remains, the city is facing a new frontier. Essentially, Scranton must reinvent itself as a metropolis that was built, beginning more than a century ago, for purposes that no longer exist.

Into this moment comes Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, a transplant from Oregon with an MBA and a stint in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, to help try to forge a way forward. The 43-year-old mother of two was sworn in January 2020 after the previous chief executive resigned and pleaded guilty to corruption charges. She won reelection to a full term in November 2021, and is the first woman to hold the office.

“The Scranton story now is one, I think, of resilience and creativity,” Cognetti said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. The establishment of the coal and textile industries “really set the tone for the type of entrepreneurship that we are still known for and that we’re looking to have more of in Scranton.”

Earlier generations recognized that local economy needed to be diversified, she said, so the city wasn’t tied to an anchor industry that would inevitably diminish. As a result, the city has “lots of educational institutions, we have hospitals, we have healthcare, we have services. We also still have 11 percent of our jobs that are based in manufacturing. . . . There’s a lot of different family-owned, smaller businesses. That’s really important for our economy.”

The efforts at reinvention are readily seen in projects such as Boomerang Park, site of a former gas plant, and in the transformation of the Scranton Lace Factory, which once employed thousands of people churning out curtains, tablecloths, parachutes, and camouflage netting before closing in 2002. The abandoned campus of red-brick factory buildings is now being turned into a mixed-use project with offices, homes, retail spaces, and event venues.

Those kinds of adaptive reuse projects are “unique and really catching people’s attention, so folks want to be there,” Cognetti said. “That’s something that I think we can replicate.”

She has been bullish on Scranton since she went there nearly 20 years ago and ordered a sandwich at a restaurant run by her future husband. She had grown up in Beaverton, Oregon, and graduated from the University of Oregon Clark Honors College with a BA in English literature; she ended up in Pennsylvania working for political campaigns including Barack Obama’s first run for President. She became a senior advisor to the Under Secretary for International Affairs at the US Treasury Department, was an investment advisor in New York City, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School as well.

Before becoming mayor, Cognetti advised the Pennsylvania Auditor General on oversight of public school districts and care for older adults, and served on the Scranton School Board.

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

This interview will be available online and in print in Land Lines magazine, as the latest installment in the Mayor’s Desk series. The first 20 Q&As with mayors from around the world have been compiled in a new book, with an introduction by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Further Reading

Now the mayor of Scranton, PA, Paige Gebhardt Cognetti’s passion for equity inspired by her time in CHC (University of Oregon Clark Honors College)

Scranton Elects First Female Mayor by Overwhelming Margin (Penn Live)

America’s Legacy Cities: Building an Equitable Renaissance (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

Remaking Local Economies (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

How Small and Midsize Legacy Cities Can Pursue Equitable, Comprehensive “Greening” (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

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: Paige Cognetti. Credit: Courtesy photo.

More than 30 reporters, editors, podcasters, and Substack writers attended the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s 2023 Journalists Forum, engaging in two days of conversations about the problem of housing affordability and the impact of current policy interventions.

The 2023 Journalists Forum: Innovations in Affordability was held November 17–18 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University (JCHS) and TD Bank. The annual convening bridges the media and academic inquiry, allowing journalists to hear new ideas and network with each other.

Researchers, scholars, practitioners, and appointed and elected officials shared perspectives on recent policies aimed at increasing the supply of housing. The group considered statewide zoning mandates that require cities and towns to allow more multifamily development; tax policies that can help manage runaway land prices and real estate speculation (with Detroit’s efforts to establish a land value tax serving as a case study); local strategies to outmaneuver institutional investors; and calibrating the home financing system to help close a stubborn racial wealth gap.

Local Strategies, a Nationwide Crisis

Arthur Jemison, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, kicked off the proceedings by describing Boston’s “all of the above” efforts to address affordable housing, a major issue for the entire region.

On the supply side, Jemison said, the city is looking to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as of right in the city’s Mattapan neighborhood to start, coupled with low- or zero-interest financing programs for residents, and to upzone transit-oriented neighborhoods citywide through a “Squares and Streets” initiative.

The city is also pursuing “a very deep tax incentive” for property owners who convert vacant office buildings to residences, Jemison said. Global architecture firm Gensler surveyed downtown Boston, “and they found about 60 great candidates for office-to-residential conversion,” he said. “We think that maybe 10 percent, maybe 15 percent of those buildings could be and will likely be converted with this incentive.”

Daniel McCue, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, then set the stage for the next two days of discussions by detailing worrying trends in home prices and rents, pulled from the JCHS’s annual State of the Nation’s Housing assessment. Home construction hasn’t kept pace with demand since the Great Recession, McCue explained, but low interest rates kept monthly mortgage payments somewhat affordable even as home prices climbed amid the scarcity.

That dynamic, though, has changed.

“Over the past two and a half years, we’ve seen prices go up 40 percent nationwide,” he said. “That’s combined with a rise in interest rates that has really ratcheted up mortgage costs,” adding $1,200 a month to the average homebuyer’s mortgage payment. “That’s the carpet getting pulled out from under you if you’re a millennial, maybe even a Gen Z-er.”

Zoning Reform

As more states from California to Connecticut pursue statewide zoning reform in an effort to boost housing production, density, and affordability—prompting backlash from local governments seeking to retain control over land use—the issue of upzoning mandates and the impact of increased density was deftly taken up by a panel including Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute; Jenny Schuetz, senior fellow at Brookings Metro; Patrick Condon, professor of urban design at the University of British Columbia; and David Garcia, director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

Moderator and urban policy writer Diana Lind asked Grogan to start by explaining why some states are looking to override local zoning rules. Housing is often a regional problem, Grogan said, “but most of the tools that we’re given to address that problem are at a local level.” In a sense, she noted, that geographic mismatch creates more of a politics problem than a policy one.  

“We’ve created this system of perverse incentives—particularly for the more affluent, higher opportunity places—where current residents, even if they acknowledge the need for more affordable housing and more housing supply more broadly at a regional level, it’s really in their best interest to keep the gates up,” she added. “If housing supply is low, property values remain high. . . . It’s great for them, it’s terrible for the region.” 

As a result, Grogan said, there are now quite a few states either passing or actively discussing statewide zoning policies that generally aim to do one of three things. “First, they try to boost overall housing supply. Second, they try to increase the amount of inexpensive and below-market-rate housing. Third, they try to build housing in strategic places, like near transit.”

Unfortunately, explained Schuetz—who recently coauthored a Lincoln Institute Policy Download on implementing state housing reforms—it will take a while before anyone can measure the impact of such interventions, and even longer for new housing to materialize.

Developers need to wait for their municipality to write and pass new state-compliant zoning rules before they can apply for permits, she explained, and some communities—like those in Massachusetts that have pushed back on the state’s MBTA Communities Act—put up a fight. “It’s not unusual for it to take three to five years from the state law passing until you actually have local zoning that’s compliant,” Schuetz said.

“We would like to think, ‘Oh, the state now legalized a bunch of new housing, you can build apartments near transit stations, so how many apartments are getting built?’ And of course the answer is, well, so far, none—because we don’t actually have local zoning in place,” she said. “It’s going to take a couple of years before we start seeing even the early stages, like developers requesting permits for these apartments.”

That said, while some communities may push back or even sue the state in response, many others acknowledge the problem and are willing to comply. And state policies can give cover to local officials who want to upzone but fear political blowback.

“​​A forward-looking mayor or city council can go to their voters and say, ‘Hey, the state is telling us we have to allow apartments, we have to allow duplexes. We know that we have an affordability problem, that many of the kids who grew up here can’t move back to the community because it’s so expensive, so we’re going to take this opportunity and lean into the idea and figure out on our terms what works for us to comply with the state mandate,’” Schuetz said. 

Condon, who has studied housing affordability in Vancouver for decades, raised a contrarian point: There are lots of good reasons for zoning reform and increasing density, he said, but affordability is not one of them.

“We have doubled the number of people per square kilometer in the city since 1970; there is no other center city that I’ve been able to find in North America that’s come even remotely close to the addition of new supply,” Condon said. “If adding supply was going to reduce prices, Vancouver should have the cheapest housing in North America. It now has the most expensive housing in North America.” 

And so the question, Condon continued, is why the additional supply didn’t help affordability. “The answer seems to be that land prices absorbed all the benefit of that new supply,” he said. “Because the capacity of those parcels was increased in terms of the financial return, it’s reflected in this tremendous rise in land value.”

Condon pointed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as one community taking the right approach: Its 100 percent Affordable Housing Overlay allows extra density in exchange for assured, permanent affordability. “The wrong thing is just to increase allowable density and think that that’s going to solve the problem,” he said. “The right thing is to figure out ways to capture that new land value increase in the context of rebuilding these neighborhoods.”

Municipalities should insist on affordability “to discipline the land market, which is out of control,” Condon concluded. “A lot of the initiatives that we’re talking about today do the opposite—they unleash the land market. It’s a fundamentally different philosophy of how to solve the problem.”

The impacts of increased housing supply can be subtle. Grogan pointed to Minneapolis, where Pew Research has been tracking rents since the city legalized triplexes on all residential lots and did away with parking requirements. While rents increased 31 percent nationwide between 2017 and 2023, they were up just one percent in Minneapolis. “It’s very, very, very early in their experiment of increasing density, but they are finding that their rent prices are not increasing as steeply as other places in the country,” she said.

As the conversation turned to California, where some 200 new statewide housing policies have emerged since 2016—including preempting local zoning to allow ADUs by right on nearly all residential lots— more evidence was available to analyze. The Terner Center at UC Berkeley has been tracking the passage of California’s zoning interventions and housing laws, Garcia said, and the results have been mixed.  

Legalizing ADUs has been a success, for example, but has proven no match for the larger problem. “ADUs now make up almost 20 percent of new homes permitted in California,” Garcia said, “which seems like a good thing, but also is a little bit scary, because it means the rest of the market is not working.”  

Other policies out of Sacramento now require communities to prove they’re planning for significant new housing, and make it more difficult to skirt that obligation. Changes to the state’s density bonus law, meanwhile, allow developers to build higher in exchange for more affordable units, and a bill called Senate 35 allows affordable housing developers to bypass local approval and the “infamous” California Environmental Quality Act.

“Is it working? My very simple answer to that question is not yet, but maybe,” Garcia said. California used to build 200,000 housing units per year, he said. “More recently, even with all of these state-level changes, California hovers at around 100,000 units per year,” he said. “Last year we had 120,000 units. That’s an increase, that’s good—but it’s still lagging well behind the 180,000 units California needs to be building per year.”

Tax Policy

Cities and towns are also considering the effects of their tax systems on housing affordability. A panel including Jay Rising, chief financial officer for Detroit; Nick Allen, a researcher based at MIT; Joan Youngman, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute; and former Boston assessor Ron Rakow examined Detroit’s proposal for a land value tax to lower residential taxes and encourage development.

About 17 percent of Detroit’s 138 square miles lies vacant, said Rising, and owners of unproductive land pay very little property taxes. “This is incentivized speculation,” he said. Taxing land more than buildings will also lower the property tax burden for many homeowners who have stayed in Detroit and seek to raise their families there. The city, which needs permission from the Michigan state legislature to implement the land tax, is trying to “protect public revenues and public services by making it fairly revenue-neutral. That’s how we got to where we are today.”

Detroiters “are paying the highest property tax rates in the nation, particularly on the housing investments that they own,” said Allen, coauthor of a Lincoln Institute study on the feasibility of splitting the tax rates for land and buildings. “A land value tax, in some ways, is just a neutral tax. Some economists have called it the least bad tax. It taxes an asset that doesn’t move, that when you tax it, it doesn’t chase that asset away. It raises revenue to fund the types of services that cities are providing.”

The theory is that landowners will build housing or make other improvements rather than pay taxes on vacant land. Many are holding on to the land expecting to sell at a higher price, but that speculation is based on an unearned windfall. “If you have a piece of bare land in the middle of Manhattan, you have wealth, but not because of anything you did. It’s because society has grown and there’s demand around you,” said Youngman, author of A Good Tax.

A well-functioning property tax based on market value is also critical to greater equity, the panelists agreed, with many jurisdictions designing property tax relief programs and homestead exemptions to lessen the tax burden in targeted circumstances.

“In terms of tax equity, it’s really important to . . . have a good and solid assessment system where assessments are kept up to date and with targeted exemption programs to make sure that we’re only giving relief where needed, and ensuring that we’re having adequate revenues for our communities,” said Rakow, who analyzed Boston property taxes to test for regressivity.

Policies that are less effective include some urban agriculture exemptions and broad-based tax caps like Proposition 13 in California, the panelists agreed. “The dirty little secret with assessment caps is that far more people pay more in taxes than they would if there were no cap at all,” said Rakow.

Institutional Investors

In one of the liveliest discussions at the workshop, the issue of institutional investors—large companies that are buying, flipping, or charging high rents for properties in weak real estate markets and elsewhere—was subject to a thorough examination.

Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, appearing on video, touted the use of a Port of Cincinnati bond issue to outbid institutional investors for control of nearly 200 properties across several neighborhoods.

“We have an aging built environment, aging buildings and aging single-family homes. That reality, combined with the fact that we’re an affordable city in the national context, has made us a key target for predatory institutional investors,” Pureval said. “Like other cities, we’ve seen a trend of bad-acting out-of-town corporations coming in to buy up huge swaths of single family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, and then jacking up the rents overnight. This practice contributes to pricing legacy communities out of their neighborhoods. It hurts the well-being of the tenants who are being neglected and it has a negative impact on our entire housing market.

“[We] jumped at the chance to get these houses back into the hands of local homeowners,” he said. “Local governments are inherently limited in terms of both resources and our ability to move markets, but I believe that this program has been a strong piece of evidence for the value there is in thinking outside of the box and in leaning in and testing innovative ideas.”

The success in Cincinnati was the result of a thoughtful organization of public finance structures that can be replicated in other communities to preserve affordable housing, said Robert J. (RJ) McGrail, who leads the Accelerating Community Investment initiative at the Lincoln Institute.

The extent of property ownership by institutional investors, covered by many news outlets as a key facet of the housing affordability crisis, can be documented using increasingly sophisticated mapping and data technology, said Jeff Allenby, director of innovation at the Center for Geospatial Solutions.

“What we can do with this information . . . is begin to look at a lot of different pieces and really dig into things like transaction history, layer on other information from the city [including building code violations] . . . to begin to tackle what I call data fusion,” Allenby said. CGS has developed an approach that uses this data to map property transactions, in some cases revealing swaths of institutional ownership in a single neighborhood.

David Howard, CEO of the National Rental Home Council, a DC-based nonprofit trade association that represents the single-family rental home industry, countered that property ownership by institutional investors is a small fraction on a national basis, though he acknowledged it is more concentrated in certain metro areas. While there are some bad actors, he said, outside investors are simply meeting market demand—fueled by a slowdown in construction of starter homes.

“It’s becoming harder and harder to purchase single-family homes. They’re harder to finance. They’re more expensive. There are significant inventory challenges. There’s excess demand for single-family rentals,” he said.

Home Financing

On the second day of the conference, Dan D’Oca of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design explored how innovative design can promote affordability, summarizing a recent report published by the GSD and the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The presentation was followed by another lively discussion about home financing. After the Community Reinvestment Act and the financial crisis of 2008, a reset has been in the works, with new programs and policies intended to help both individuals and neighborhoods access capital and to help close the racial homeownership gap. But there is disagreement on how much can be accomplished with policy tweaks versus a more radical reassessment of the $12 trillion mortgage market.

NPR reporter Chris Arnold opened the discussion by noting that if zoning reform and other measures increase housing supply—“as the ice floe breaks up,” as he put it—clearly evident barriers remain for financing homeownership, particularly for low-income families and communities of color.

Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, applauded incremental changes that could make it easier for more people to enjoy wealth-building through homeownership, including down payment assistance, making the application process easier, improving the credit score and appraisal process, and making it possible to get financing for ADUs, manufactured homes, and property purchases through community land trusts.

Majurial (MJ) Watkins, community mortgage sales manager at TD Bank, cited the use of special purpose credit programs to expand access to home finance—though there is concern such outreach could trigger a legal challenge on the basis of reverse discrimination.

Jim Gray, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, which is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, noted that about 70 percent of all mortgages end up with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. “The way we change the system is primarily through Fannie and Freddie because they control such a big part of the market,” he said. “If you want to get a system that now recognizes your rent credit in your credit score, well, when you get Fannie and Freddie to do it, that’s when the system changes. That’s why we at the Lincoln Institute feel like it’s so important and we hope that you all will pay more attention to what Fannie and Freddie are doing and how they’re continuing to evolve our mortgage market.”

Also important, he said, are the Duty to Serve rules that govern the GSEs and, as a result, shape the lending criteria used by non-bank lenders, an increasingly prevalent category of mortgage providers that are not subject to provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act.

Will incremental measures be sufficient? Not really, said Chrystal Kornegay, director of MassHousing, an independent, quasi-public agency created in 1966 and charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts.

“The current housing finance system is a total creation of the government. When you think about all of the injustices and inequities in that system, it is a total creation of the government. It was all done with intention,” she said. “When we ask questions around why there are homeownership gaps, should you buy a house now, the question is really much more about what can the government do to create a system that’s equal for everybody. They created this system that’s unequal; they can also create a different system.”

Kornegay described the MassDreams program, which was supported with American Rescue Plan Act funds and designed to expand homeownership opportunities for people in communities disproportionately affected by COVID by providing down payment and closing cost grants. By providing funds directly to buyers, she said, “all of a sudden, we had 64 percent of people who bought houses were people of color. Seventy-five percent were at 100 percent of area median income and below. It just goes to show what the power of money can do for people who make good decisions.

“What if we, the government, all of us, decided that we wanted to have . . . a whole system for people of color to actually buy houses?” Kornegay said. “We could do that. We know how to do that . . . [but] it’s not going to happen if we don’t make the federal government make it happen.”

Herbert emphasized the important role that housing owned by nonprofits and the public sector can play in expanding homeownership. “We’ve got 11 million renters paying more than half their income on housing, and we think that we’re going to fix zoning and make a little innovation in financing and solve this? No,” said Herbert. “We’ve got to get enough housing for those 11 million people to be able to afford housing, and it’s got to be outside the private market. Because most of that increase in price is land prices. If we get that out of the market, and you have good housing that’s well-financed, over time, we can actually start to have housing for those 11 million people.”

He also noted that the terms “public housing” and “social housing” don’t fully capture the concept of mixed-income, permanently affordable developments. “We need to have this conversation. We need to have a name for it that doesn’t make people think it’s socialist or Swedish,” he said.

A final session reviewed some of the approaches the Lincoln Institute is currently taking to help address the housing affordability crisis in the United States, followed by the traditional concluding roundtable, facilitated by Paige Carlson-Heim from the TD Charitable Foundation and TD Bank’s Shelley Silva, who earlier in her career ran the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

The journalists shared their perspectives on the challenges of being on the housing beat, given the complexities of the different elements of the story, from the dire needs of an aging population to increasingly visible homelessness, to the potential of new forms of government-enabled social housing.

Stories flowing from the Journalists Forum continue to appear, including a dispatch by Josh Stephens in the California Planning & Development Report, “Does Density Lead to Affordability?,” based on the first session on zoning reform; and an editorial encouraging a proposal for legalizing basement apartments in New York City by Mayor Eric Adams in Crain’s New York Business.

“The mayor is in good company,” the editorial states. “As discussed at a recent Lincoln Institute of Land Policy conference on innovations in affordable housing, municipalities across the nation are considering ADUs, which can include apartments fashioned out of garages and other structures, as solutions to housing shortages. One speaker pointed out that the high cost of constructing an ADU, which some local analysts say could run about $400,000, and the fact that federal programs such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae don’t help with financing, were major hindrances to getting them into the legal housing stock, with only about 772,000 created across the country since 2015.”

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

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: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy President George W. McCarthy welcomes participants at the start of the 2023 Journalists Forum. Credit: Dakin Henderson.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy launched the second round of the Accelerating Community Investment initiative’s Community of Practice (ACI CoP) in November, kicking off with a convening in Sante Fe, New Mexico. ACI improves the practice of public finance by creating opportunities for public development, housing, and infrastructure finance agencies to engage in skill building and peer learning with philanthropies, mission-aligned investors, and the broader capital markets, with the goal of increasing investment and its impact on communities across the nation. 

Through this initiative, the Lincoln Institute connects participants in local community investment ecosystems to each other and their peers elsewhere—helping to form partnerships that create new, community-led investments in underserved places and people. The ACI CoP, first launched in 2021 with approximately 40 agencies and institutions from 14 states, has expanded to 100 participants now representing 18 states across the country. 

“My team’s participation in the Lincoln Institute’s ACI CoP over the past three years has been transformational,” said Laura N. Brunner, president and CEO of the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority. “It is difficult to say whether the education or the relationship building has been more impactful, because both far exceeded our expectations. The technical content contributes to our ability to move from ‘good to great,’ and the friendships and perspectives of fellow members allow us to benchmark ourselves against others and enjoy the comfort of safe spaces to learn.” 

ACI seeks to increase the availability of capital in the right places, at the right times, and for the right purposes. The initiative includes field research, a national CoP focused on peer learning and skill development, and technical assistance and support for participants to develop and deploy impactful mission-aligned investment opportunities. These opportunities create a more fertile environment for investment in community and economic development, housing, and more, for the benefit of residents and communities.  

“Our work in ACI, focusing on deepening the skills of public finance practitioners and creating connections with values-aligned impact capital holders, is helping to drive new investments that improve the quality of life in underserved communities across the country,” said Robert J. “R.J.” McGrail, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute and initiative director for ACI. “These public finance leaders not only have the capacity to tap large pools of capital and leverage public funding, but they can also help impact-minded and values-aligned investors channel new capital to communities where it will create deeper impact.” 

“Over the last few years in the Accelerating Community Investment initiative, we’ve seen the benefits of bringing together new civic coalitions to tackle local problems,” said George W. McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute. “Whether we’re trying to meet the challenge of supplying adequate affordable shelter to residents, preparing to support a low- or no-carbon fleet, or adapting our cities to endure the climate crisis, we need unprecedented multisectoral cooperation to deploy unprecedented volumes of financial and human resources. When the public, private, and civic sectors bring their respective knowledge, discipline, and creativity together, the results can be magical.”   

More information about ACI and a complete list of CoP participants can be found on the Lincoln Institute’s website. 

Kristina McGeehan is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.