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.

Realtor Gabriella Beale stopped for lunch at a cafe in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, this summer, on her way to show her buyers a home in nearby Larchmont, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and early 20th-century houses. Then a late August downpour dumped more than two inches of rain on the city, forcing Beale to cancel the showing—because she could no longer get to the house. She watched helplessly from the cafe as flash flooding filled the road outside.

“I couldn’t even get to my car because part of the road essentially became a river,” Beale said. This wasn’t a hurricane, or even a tropical storm—just a rainy Monday in this low-lying city of 238,000. Situated between the Elizabeth River and Chesapeake Bay, Norfolk is experiencing the fastest relative sea-level rise on the East Coast—more than two inches just since 2012—so there isn’t much room for extra water. Parts of the city flood even without rainfall during king tides, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that the city’s dozen or so annual “sunny-day flooding” incidents could double as soon as 2030.

The encroaching water hasn’t gone unnoticed, Beale said: more buyers ask about flooding than in years past, even in neighborhoods outside the 100-year floodplain. She dutifully counsels all her clients on flood risk, discussing insurance costs, personal safety, and the potential drop in future resale value. Some buyers want nothing to do with a floodplain house, but others don’t mind the risk—or can’t afford to be picky. Beale acknowledges that she can’t make decisions for them. “People have different ideas of what level of flood risk they’re comfortable with, and it’s not really up to me to say, ‘This is a bad house.’”

By the time the stormwater finally subsided on that rainy Monday, Beale’s car was toast; she wasn’t sure it could be repaired. “I can tell that story, and some buyers still want to live in that neighborhood,” she said. Indeed, her buyers rescheduled their showing for the very next day.

* * *

BEALE’S CLIENTS are hardly alone in their pursuit of risky real estate. Even as climate change delivers more intense and more frequent storms, wildfires, and heat waves, home buyers across the United States continue to move into areas at greater risk of climate impacts like flooding, wildfire, drought, and extreme heat—in fact, they’re doing so at a faster pace.

That the climate is changing, and not for the better, is hard to miss. The US experienced a record 23 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in just the first nine months of 2023; the previous annual record of 22 was not even three years old, set in 2020. The number of buildings destroyed by wildfire in California each year has spiked 335 percent since 2009, according to First Street Foundation, a research nonprofit seeking to make climate risk data more accessible. Nationwide, we’re now losing an average of more than 17,000 structures a year to wildfire, a number that is forecast to top 33,700 by 2053—meaning we can soon expect to lose the equivalent of Daytona Beach, Florida, or Asheville, North Carolina, to fire every single year.

Yet home buyers still don’t seem to factor in climate risk when they make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. We keep building and buying homes in the fire-prone “wildland-urban interface” where town meets wilderness, and moving closer to the water, not away from it.

The most flood-prone counties in the US had 384,000 more people move in than out in 2021 and 2022, according to a Redfin analysis, roughly double the net increase of the prior two years. That includes Lee County, Florida, which gained 60,000 net new residents in two years even as Hurricane Ian destroyed nearly 10,000 homes in 2022.

Counties facing the greatest wildfire risk, meanwhile, netted 426,000 new residents in that time. And those most threatened by heat collectively gained 629,000 net residents—including Maricopa County, Arizona, where 76,000 newcomers sweltered in temperatures that topped 110º Fahrenheit for 31 straight days last summer and left hundreds dead.

And yet, the housing market in Maricopa County has been almost as hot as the sidewalks that gave residents third-degree burns in July: median home prices rose a staggering 64 percent in four years, from $290,000 in June 2019 to $475,000 in 2023, as more residents moved in. Prices in Florida’s Lee County rose 70 percent in that time, compared to 40 percent nationwide. Accounting for likely long-term flood damage—to say nothing of drought or wildfire risk—a study published in Nature Climate Change estimated that the residential real estate market in the US is collectively overvalued by as much as $237 billion.

The disconnect is largely driven by short-term affordability concerns, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “People are leaving places like San Francisco because their rent is too high, and then they’re moving to places like Tampa or Las Vegas because they can actually afford to buy a home there,” Fairweather said. “But what they’re not thinking about is how their housing expenses might change in the future, how the value of their home might change in the future, and also how the livability of those places might change in the future.”

Where the planet is sending us flashing red “stop” signals, home buyers and developers seem to see green lights. Why? And what will it take to get them to heed the stop signs?

Tell Me About It

One reason a driver might recklessly blow past a stop sign, putting themselves and others in danger, is if the sign itself isn’t visible—if it’s concealed by overgrown foliage, for example.

Sometimes warnings of flood or fire risk aren’t immediately obvious to home buyers, either.

“One thing that we’ve learned is that information is just so critical,” said Patrick Welch, policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “Even though there is so much information out there about climate risks, it’s not necessarily that accessible—people don’t know about it.”

In 23 states, for example, home sellers aren’t typically required to disclose a home’s flood history to potential buyers, including in vulnerable coastal states like Florida, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Only two states, California and Oregon, require some disclosure of wildfire risk. And often such notices are confusing or reach buyers too late for them to act on the information—after the home inspection, for example, or buried in a stack of forms signed at the closing.

Getting clear, accurate risk assessments into home buyers’ hands can help them make more climate-informed decisions about where they choose to live, Welch said.

“Disclosure of risks is very uneven across states,” agreed Margaret Walls, senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. In fact, disclosure rules can even vary within a state, which is how Walls and her colleagues were able to isolate the impact of disclosing fire risk on home values in California in a new working paper. 

California requires home sellers located in a moderate, high, or very-high Fire Hazard Severity Zone to disclose that fire risk to buyers—but only if the home falls within a state responsibility zone, meaning the state manages wildfire prevention and response. In areas where the local jurisdiction is responsible, sellers aren’t required to disclose moderate or high fire risk.

That allowed Walls to compare homes that share the same level of fire risk—as well as school districts, walkability, and other location-based amenities—but have different disclosure requirements. By comparing years of sales data for neighboring homes on either side of the disclosure divide, the researchers were able to show that homes with a disclosed fire risk sold for an average of 4.3 percent less than similar nearby properties with undisclosed risk.

In other words, buyers who were made aware of the risks seemed to adjust their behaviors in a rational way—exactly what you’d hope to see in a well-functioning market. “We can’t expect markets to work and prices to reflect something unless we have all the information,” Walls said.

The effect of risk disclosure on sale prices seems to be strengthening as fire seasons intensify. The eight largest wildfires in California history have all occurred since 2017, burning more than 4 million acres, and 2020 was the state’s worst fire year on record. “We found a stronger effect in the more recent years,” Walls adds. “It’s getting more salient to people after these bad fire years.”

Past research has found that strict flood disclosure rules yield a similar price penalty of about 4 percent. In the absence of flood disclosures, though, home buyers can still get some idea of a home’s flood risk from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA’s flood maps aren’t perfect—they’re based on historical flooding, for one thing, not future climate models—but they’re freely available. Anyone can access them online, though Beale says most home buyers don’t think to do so until she recommends it. And even then, it’s hard to get a price quote for flood insurance without applying for coverage. In fact, because lenders require borrowers to purchase flood insurance on homes located within a FEMA high-risk floodplain, loan officers are often the ones breaking the bad news about flood risk and insurance premiums—typically very late in the process.

“Usually at that point, the buyers can’t get out of the contract,” Beale said. The average annual flood insurance premium nationwide was $888 in 2022, “so that’s not a huge impact if you’re spreading it out over 12 months,” she notes. But rates can vary dramatically by property, even cresting five figures. “If it comes back at $10,000, and you can still technically afford the house according to the lender … you can’t walk away.”

Major real estate sites Redfin and Realtor.com have started incorporating First Street’s climate risk data on their property listings—right alongside other typical home buyer concerns, such as school districts and taxes. And getting that information to a home buyer early in the process makes a real difference, according to a new working paper Fairweather coauthored.

Redfin started publishing flood risk data sitewide in February 2021. But before that, in late 2020, the brokerage leveraged a soft launch of the new feature to conduct a three-month experiment among 17.5 million users. Half of them saw detailed flood risk data and “Flood Factor” scores on the homes they searched, while the other half did not. That randomized flood risk information “had a significant and meaningful impact on users’ search behavior,” and influenced every stage of the home buying process, from initial search to making offers to the final purchase. Over time, buyers who encountered high Flood Factor scores on their initial home searches gradually adjusted their searches toward—and were later more likely to bid on—less flood-prone homes than were users who didn’t see flood risk information.

“Increasing information to home buyers, especially at the moment they’re buying a home, would help them make a different decision when it comes to taking on climate risk,” said Fairweather. 

A Reckoning in the Insurance Market

One way markets traditionally communicate risk is through insurance rates; higher premiums quite clearly reflect a greater likelihood of losses. But right now, the home and flood insurance markets are struggling to adapt to a range of issues, with the costs of climate change-fueled disasters, reconstruction, and fraudulent claims all on the rise.

For decades, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has underpriced coverage, indirectly subsidizing homeowners in flood-prone areas by making it less expensive to live there than it should be. This is evident through simple math: The NFIP is $20 billion in debt, as premiums have failed to keep up with the actual cost of damages incurred.

FEMA took a step toward correcting that imbalance by implementing Risk Rating 2.0 in late 2021, a new methodology that better aligns premiums with an individual property’s flood risk. However, Congress capped NFIP rate increases at 18 percent a year to ease the impact on existing policyholders. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that median flood insurance premiums would still need to almost double, from $689 to $1,288, for the program to be actuarially sound, and that roughly one in 10 properties insured by the NFIP will eventually require at least a 300 percent rate hike. In Naples, Florida, for example, the average annual flood insurance premium among 1,568 policyholders was $2,228 in 2022; FEMA calculated the risk-based cost of those policies should average almost four times as much: $8,067 per year.

Meanwhile, private insurers (whose homeowner policies generally don’t cover flood damage) are increasingly finding it difficult or impossible to provide coverage at fair but profitable rates as windstorms and wildfires grow more destructive, and as reconstruction gets more expensive.

State Farm announced in May that it would no longer write new homeowner policies in California, where it is the largest insurer, citing “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure” and historically high construction costs. Soon after, Allstate announced that it would do the same, making permanent a pause on new policies instituted in 2022. More than a dozen insurance companies have pulled out of Florida and Louisiana in the past two years, leaving homeowners scrambling for coverage.

Insurance companies could theoretically just raise their rates enough to offset increased costs. But insurance is something of a necessity—lenders won’t approve a mortgage without it, and four in five home buyers rely on a home loan to finance their purchases. So, to protect consumers, big insurance premium hikes often must be approved by state regulators. And in California, insurers can only use past losses, not future risk estimates, to justify rate increases. That makes it hard for insurers to price their coverage accurately or profitably as risk intensifies. 

As Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford, told KQED, the price of home insurance in California no longer matches the risk. “Our insurance system kind of pretends that climate change doesn’t exist, and that’s not workable anymore,” he said.

The price signals that private insurers ordinarily provide through premium adjustments are crucial to a functioning real estate market, “because that is ultimately how decisions get made,” University of Pennsylvania economist Benjamin Keys told Penn Today. “When there are incentives for the choices that homebuilders make, that homeowners make, that’s going to reshape where we live and where we build. When we don’t get that price signal, that distorts our perceptions of risk.”

A report by First Street Foundation asserts that millions of US homes face more climate risk than their insurance rates would indicate, creating a “climate insurance bubble” in the market. “You don’t want someone to live in a place that always burns,” First Street Head of Climate Implications Jeremy Porter told Grist. “We’re subsidizing people to live in harm’s way.” In that respect, it makes some sense for home insurers like State Farm and Allstate to stop writing new policies in the most high-risk areas—doing so could help dissuade developers from building in places most likely to burn.

But millions of people already live in high-risk areas. And when those homeowners can’t get insurance on the private market, they must turn to state-run plans that offer less coverage at higher prices. These public options are meant to offer policies of last resort, but their role is growing; in Florida, the public Citizens Property Insurance Corporation is now the state’s largest insurer, according to the First Street report, with 1.3 million policyholders. The number of homeowners on California’s state-run FAIR Plan more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, to nearly 273,000.

“I worry that a larger state role in insurance markets will bring political pressure to keep premiums low without reflecting the growing climate risks,” Keys said. “It’s challenging for a state-backed plan to raise rates aggressively on homeowners in that state. There’s real political tension.” State-run plans also transfer financial risk to taxpayers: Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation expects to turn a profit in 2023, but lost more than $2 billion in 2022. That’s one reason Florida is phasing in a new law over the next four years requiring all Citizens policyholders to obtain flood insurance as well.

In September, California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara announced emergency steps aimed at stabilizing the state’s wobbly home insurance market by the end of 2024. Under these new rules, insurers will be permitted to consider climate change and future catastrophe risk when setting premiums. However, they’ll also be required to cover a percentage of high-risk homes, to start transitioning homeowners off the FAIR Plan and back into the private market. That could well be enough to draw insurance companies back, Keys says: “When an insurer leaves a state, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to write insurance policies. It means that they don’t want to write insurance policies under the current regulatory environment and with the current limits on premiums. They want to make a profit.”

As insurance rates rise to account for increased climate risk, one way to ease the impact on homeowners (without artificially suppressing premiums) is for insurers to offer discounts when property owners invest in preventative risk-reduction measures—such as raising a home’s mechanical systems above the base flood elevation, or clearing fire-fueling vegetation from around a house. A new California initiative called “Safer From Wildfires,” introduced in late 2022, requires insurers to recognize and reward fire resiliency measures by offering discounts to homeowners who create five-foot ember-resistant zones around their homes, for example, or who invest in upgraded roofs, windows, or vents.

“By incentivizing policyholders to implement wildfire-resistant measures, insurance companies can create a win-win situation,” the First Street report notes. That could create a positive cycle, reducing the frequency and severity of wildfire losses—and the resulting financial burden on both insurers and communities—while potentially preserving home values.

Change the Lending Landscape

As the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that back most mortgages in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wield tremendous influence over the real estate market—and could also help home buyers heed climate risk.

The GSEs already require borrowers purchasing a high-flood-risk home to secure flood insurance as a condition of their mortgage. But they could, in theory, take more aggressive steps to dissuade risky home purchases, such as requiring a bigger down payment on high-risk properties, charging higher interest rates on such loans, or factoring climate risk into valuations. Fannie Mae has started enlisting climate analytics companies like First Street to figure out how and whether it can fairly incorporate climate risk into its underwriting and lending guidelines. 

It’s a delicate exercise, however. Adjusting valuation or lending criteria to make it more difficult or more expensive to get a mortgage in flood-prone areas would very likely devalue the affected homes. And it’s not just expensive beach houses. Due to historical discrimination and redlining practices, low-income households and people of color are disproportionately represented in the most flood-prone areas. These are some of the very communities Fannie and Freddie have been trying to better support through their “Duty to Serve” mandate. 

“It’s really a double-edged sword,” said Ellie White, senior associate on the buildings team at RMI. Like the Lincoln Institute, RMI is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC), which seeks to hold Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accountable for bringing housing finance opportunities to families not traditionally served by the private market.

“A main roadblock of incorporating climate risk information into the valuation of a property revolves around this challenge of ensuring that we’re not devaluing properties in already high-risk, low-income, historically disadvantaged communities,” White said. “So I think the GSEs are very cautious, and rightfully so, about what it would mean if we had wide-scale incorporation of those physical risks into the valuation of property.”

The stakes are uniquely high in the US, where homeownership has long been a primary engine of wealth creation. “If not done correctly, this could really completely wipe out families’ generational wealth, and it would disproportionately impact low-income communities,” Welch said. “It’s a really complicated, tricky issue.” Local governments that rely heavily on property taxes could also see major shifts in their tax base if climate risk were fully reflected in home values. While municipalities can typically offset potential revenue loss by adjusting tax rates when property values decline, large shifts in the distribution of tax burdens can create political challenges.

But the GSEs could do other things, like using risk research and data to guide policy, and helping homeowners in high-risk areas pay for resiliency upgrades like elevating structures. “The GSEs can take more action on the community engagement front, to support educational programs and raise awareness of these risks and resilience solutions among home buyers,” White said.

In a letter to Federal Housing Finance Authority Director Sandra Thompson in August, the UMMC made a wide range of policy recommendations. Among them: requiring the disclosure of both climate risk and energy performance on existing homes backed with GSE mortgages, and requiring new homes backed by GSE loans to meet more energy-efficient building codes. The latter would reduce long-term ownership costs for home buyers, while also reducing financial risk to the GSEs.

Zoning for the Future

Figuring out how to protect, insure, or move residents of existing neighborhoods that face increased climate risk is a thorny problem without many satisfactory solutions. But at the very least, experts say, we should stop creating more at-risk residents, and focus new development in climate-resilient places. 

“New construction has been increasingly going in places with high climate risks, particularly when it comes to wildfire risk and drought risk,” Fairweather said. “And it’s exurban sprawl that is to blame. Because of single-family zoning, people build more and more into places that aren’t naturally equipped for climate change—they’re building into the forests in inland California, they’re building into the deserts, which don’t have access to water.”

Communities should instead be trying to shift development away from high-climate-risk areas, and encouraging more density and affordable housing in safer areas, says Michael Rodriguez, research director at Smart Growth America. “Climate-informed zoning can easily overlay with a lot of other priorities that a city has,” he said, such as transit-oriented development.

Right now, land markets clearly aren’t sending the right signals about climate risk, Welch said, but planners and elected officials could help correct that at a local level. “Updating zoning codes and land use regulations to reflect climate risks, whether it’s wildfire or flooding, are relatively simple ways that local governments can start to move the needle on this,” he said.   

Back in Norfolk, Virginia, city leaders have taken the lead on climate-informed zoning. Over the past decade, Norfolk has adopted a pair of new land use plans: the short-term PlaNorfolk2030, and the long-term Vision 2100, along with accompanying zoning overlays.

The long-range plan divides the city into four color-coded sections. Red zones, which include the naval base and the downtown district where Beale watched stormwater surge through the streets, are densely developed and economically important, but very vulnerable to flooding; the plan calls for investments in flood protection and mitigation in these areas. Yellow zones indicate flood-prone residential and historic areas, where a resilience overlay will discourage new development but support existing residents’ adaptation efforts. Low-risk green zones are where the city wants to invest in denser, transit-rich neighborhoods. And purple zones, which also have a lower flood risk, are slated for infrastructure investments and lower-density development aimed at preserving housing affordability. 

Such a climate policy can influence land use and real estate decisions in a couple of ways, Rodriguez said. “It might work through literal policy incentives and disincentives, in a tangible sense, like money or regulations,” he said. “But then there’s also the signaling aspect. The city government has now put out a map, and that map in itself can send a signal that can have market impacts.”

Some people worried that, by officially declaring some places risky and others preferable for development, Norfolk’s plan could spook home buyers and investors and sink home values in the high-risk areas. But Rodriguez and his colleagues compared years of sales and permit data before and after the Vision 2100 plan was released, and, as they describe in a new working paper commissioned by the Lincoln Institute, there was no statistical impact on home prices.

That could be the result of the unusually strong pandemic real estate market during the years studied, the authors wrote, or a general lack of climate concern among area home buyers at the time. But it may offer some assurance to hesitant communities: Enacting climate-informed zoning to guide future development doesn’t necessarily have to wreak havoc on existing home values, at least in the short term.

“It’s a long-term solution—it’s not going to change the development patterns or reduce the risk today or tomorrow,” Welch said. “But it’s going to slowly incentivize and push development into less risky areas. And I think one of the takeaways from that study was that you can do this and not immediately crash the local housing market or cause a panic.”

Norfolk’s experience also showed that an inclusive process can ease perceptions of malicious remapping. “You’re drawing lines on the map, and you’re saying, ‘Build here, don’t build there,’” Rodriguez said. “That feels weird, and it feels a little bit like redlining in a historical context of planning. And that feels doubly weird when we know that a lot of the places facing the most climate risk tend to be poor, and tend to have more people of color. . . . There has to be a lot of community input and communication as to what it means to have climate-informed zoning to try and mitigate some of those concerns.”

In that sense, while Norfolk’s policy lacks “teeth” and the city has yet to implement follow-up measures such as density bonuses or the transfer of development rights (which would allow landowners in vulnerable zones to sell their development rights to builders in a low-risk zone), the city has already taken a huge step. “They were one of one of the few communities out there that did anything like this,” Rodriguez said.

States and municipalities have other levers they can pull, too—some more drastic than others.

In water-stressed Arizona, for example—where the Colorado River is overdrawn, and depleted underground aquifers are projected to eventually run dry at current usage levels—state officials recently announced a moratorium on new residential construction that relies on groundwater in the Phoenix metro area. 

Even without placing an outright ban on new construction in high-risk areas, communities can, through zoning and other regulations, effectively stymie risky new development by refusing to fund or permit new streets, water service, and other key infrastructure in high-risk settings. The federal government uses a similar approach to protect sensitive coastal ecosystems through the Coastal Barrier Resources Act. The CBRA doesn’t explicitly outlaw development in those areas, but dissuades it by withholding federal support for things like infrastructure, flood insurance, and disaster relief. That disincentive has proven remarkably effective, research commissioned by the Lincoln Institute has shown, reducing development by 85 percent.

It’s worth noting that Norfolk didn’t outright ban new construction in high-flood-risk areas, either. But it did set stricter building codes in those zones, which can help the city’s built environment adapt to climate risk by accomplishing two things at once. “To the extent that you do build there, at least you’re going to build something that’s more resilient,” Rodriguez said. Meanwhile, higher design standards can add cost and complexity to construction in vulnerable areas, creating a disincentive to build there, and encouraging developers to locate projects on safer sites instead.

Local governments can also charge higher taxes or impact fees to discourage building or buying in high-risk areas—for example, raising water and sewage rates in water-stressed areas, or funding wildfire prevention efforts with a higher tax on fire-prone properties. “Higher fees in risky areas serve two purposes,” write Brookings Institute researchers Julia Gill and Jenny Schuetz. “They encourage price-sensitive households to choose safer locations, and they also provide local governments with more revenue to upgrade the climate resilience of infrastructure.”

All of these policies could help point home buyers toward making better, more rational decisions. But where we choose to live sometimes defies reason.

Beale, the Norfolk realtor who counsels all her buyers about flood risk, understands why some of them still choose a high-risk home. For some, it’s straightforward economics. “If a buyer can only afford $150,000, and they want a detached house, Norfolk’s going to be it—and it’s maybe in a flood risk area,” Beale said.

But for others, it’s a deep-seated desire that isn’t so easily erased by rising insurance rates or flood disclosure forms. “These are beautiful neighborhoods” of century-old Colonials and tree-lined sidewalks, she said. “It’s not all about money. It’s this perceived dream of homeownership—this ideal of, ‘What do you want your life to be?’”

Unfortunately, the one thing that does seem to break through and change home buyer behavior is witnessing a weather disaster. Beale says many buyers still shy away from particular streets because they remember driving past flood-ravaged houses there after a bad storm.

After all, no one’s ideal dream of homeownership involves fleeing a fire or wading through floodwater. Fairweather expects attitudes to shift as risk increasingly becomes reality for more people. “I think experience will be a teacher,” she said, “as there are more hurricanes and more fire events. I think more homeowners will start to worry about it when they see it in real life.”

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

Lead image: Tidal flooding in Norfolk, Virginia. Credit: Aileen Devlin/Virginia Sea Grant via Flickr.

Tiene tanto sentido, al menos en los papeles: un último cambio de las normativas en el lugar de trabajo ha dejado a muchos edificios de oficinas del centro mitad vacíos durante gran parte de la semana, así como a las tiendas de delicatessen, kioscos y cafeterías que por mucho tiempo dependieron de los dólares de los trabajadores que llegaban a diario. A medida que las vacantes aumentan, los valores de los inmuebles comerciales disminuyen, lo que podría afectar las rentas por tributos inmobiliarios. Mientras tanto, en los barrios más residenciales, fuera de aquellos adormecidos distritos del centro, una grave escasez de viviendas disparó los precios por encima de niveles sostenibles para compradores de propiedades e inquilinos por igual.

Entonces, ¿por qué no transformar algunas de esas oficinas vacías en las tan necesarias viviendas, y traer más personas (y consumo) al centro, a la vez que se propician beneficios en cuanto al clima y la sostenibilidad gracias a la reutilización de edificios y la generación de densidad urbana?

Esa es la pregunta que se están planteando en las ciudades en todo el mundo, a medida que los calendarios de trabajo remoto e híbrido pasan de ser una excepción a ser una regla para una parte considerable de la mano de obra. Pero, si bien la reutilización adaptativa de las oficinas como residencias parece ser una solución prometedora, la realidad es más complicada.

Según un análisis de Gallup de junio de 2022, más de la mitad de los trabajadores estadounidenses, unos 70 millones de personas, pueden realizar sus trabajos de forma remota, y un mero seis por ciento quiere volver a trabajar en una oficina a tiempo completo algún día (la mayoría dice que, si el empleador lo exigiera, buscaría otro empleo). Gallup predice que más de la mitad del personal con capacidad de trabajar remoto trabajará en un esquema híbrido en el futuro, y un 22 por ciento trabajará siempre fuera del establecimiento en los próximos años (Wigert y Agrawal, 2022).

A medida que los acuerdos de trabajo remoto e híbrido no solo se aceptan sino que también se esperan, las empresas están consolidando la cantidad de espacio de oficina que alquilan mientras intentan hacer que trasladarse hasta el lugar de trabajo valga el esfuerzo para el personal. A menudo eso se traduce en alquilar menos metros cuadrados en un edificio más costoso con terminaciones nuevas y de calidad superior, e instalaciones de última generación, lo que, en el ámbito de los bienes raíces comerciales, se conoce como espacio de clase A.  

Esto obliga a las oficinas menos atractivas de clase B o clase C, que representan la mayoría de los espacios de trabajo construido, a tener que luchar para encontrar y mantener inquilinos. En todo el país, la tasa de vacantes de las oficinas superó el 17 por ciento en el cuarto trimestre de 2022, frente a un 12,1 por ciento a fines de 2019, según la empresa de bienes raíces comerciales, CBRE.

Esta tendencia no muestra señales de atenuarse, y a algunas ciudades les está yendo peor que a otras. CBRE calculó que, a finales de 2022, la tasa de vacantes comerciales en San Francisco será del 27,3 por ciento (antes de la pandemia era tan solo del 4,8 por ciento). Phoenix finalizó el año con casi el 24 por ciento de sus oficinas desalquiladas, frente a un 14,4 por ciento a finales de 2019 (CBRE 2023).

Y los distritos comerciales del centro, en particular, están tambaleando. Este ya es el tercer trimestre consecutivo que las oficinas del centro presentan niveles de vacantes superiores (17,6 por ciento) a los de las áreas urbanas (17,2 por ciento), lo que invirtió la tendencia histórica. A fines de 2019, la tasa de vacantes para los edificios de oficinas céntricos fue del 10,2 por ciento.

En la región de Upper Downtown de Denver, la tasa de vacantes de oficinas ya estaba aumentando antes de la pandemia y, para mediados de 2022, había alcanzado un 21 por ciento, explica Laura E. Aldrete, directora ejecutiva de Planificación y Desarrollo Comunitario. Pero los dirigentes de la ciudad están eligiendo ver esta situación como una oportunidad. “Hay una crisis de viviendas asequibles integrada a eso”, dice Aldrete. “Entonces, ¿cómo podemos crear una variable positiva de dos negativas?”.

Diversificar

Avanzada la pandemia, Aldrete notó algo mientras caminaba por la ciudad de Querétaro, México: en momentos en los que muchos centros estadounidenses aún parecían misteriosamente vacíos debido al cierres prolongados de oficinas, la ciudad de Querétaro estaba viva. En México, también habían cerrado muchos lugares de trabajo, pero el centro de la ciudad estaba lleno de personas, incluidas familias con niños pequeños. “Es una ciudad de la década de 1500 que tiene una serie de plazas públicas, con calles peatonales y residencias, oficinas y [tiendas] minoristas, y estaba prosperando”, relata Aldrete.

Vio un patrón similar emergente en secciones del centro de Denver. El distrito comercial central de la ciudad, Upper Downtown, es una vuelta hacia la era de la renovación urbana (edificios de oficinas de hormigón, calles de sentido único, espacios de estacionamiento) y aún tiene que despertar del sueño inducido por la COVID. Pero Lower Downtown (o “LoDo”), un barrio histórico con usos múltiples cuyos depósitos alguna vez vacíos se convirtieron en loft y restaurantes en las décadas de 1980 y 1990, permaneció bastante activo durante la pandemia. Lo mismo ocurrió con el barrio de Union Station, que experimentó su propio renacimiento de uso mixto en la década pasada, con la renovación, de gran repercusión mediática, de la estación de tren que puso una mayor foco en los parques y las viviendas de ingresos mixtos. “Hoy en día, en comparación con Upper Downtown, aquellos dos barrios céntricos siguen prosperando”, comenta Aldrete.  

Incluso antes de la pandemia, Aldrete pudo ver que el ambiente de oficina “de nueve a cinco” de Upper Downtown había perdido la vitalidad que buscaban los empleados del siglo XXI. “Históricamente, todos los bancos y las empresas de gas y petróleo se han peleado por tener una dirección en la 17th Street”, dice Aldrete, un tramo de Upper Downtown llamado “La Wall Street de las Rocosas”. Pero cuando BP estaba buscando una sede regional siete años atrás, la empresa ignoró la 17th Street y prefirió una ubicación cerca de Union Station. La COVID atacó, “y se hizo muy evidente que no teníamos un barrio [en Upper Downtown] . . . no había nadie”, dice. La pregunta que surgió es la siguiente: “¿Cómo podemos pensar en transformar nuestro distrito comercial central en un distrito barrial central?”.

Denver está elaborando un programa piloto en el que invitará a cinco propietarios de inmuebles a trabajar con la ciudad para convertir sus edificios de oficinas infrautilizados en residencias. Aldrete alentó a los propietarios del edificio histórico Petroleum, que está ocupado a medias, entre otros, a participar, debido a que ya tenían planes de transformar la torre de oficinas en más de 100 departamentos. Espera que unos pocos proyectos piloto puedan abrir camino a otros en el futuro. 

“En el mercado inmobiliario, los primeros son los que asumen el mayor riesgo”, explica Aldrete. “Una de las funciones que el gobierno municipal puede desempeñar es trabajar con el sector privado . . . ¿Cómo nos presentamos como buenos socios para acompañarlos en el proceso?”.  

El barrio ya tiene espacios de entretenimiento y quizás el mejor acceso al transporte público de la ciudad, incluidos colectivos y el metro ligero, comenta Aldrete, pero carece de otros servicios esenciales que atraerían a residentes por tiempo completo, “el corazón de toda comunidad”. Así que, al mismo tiempo, Denver está trabajando con socios de la comunidad para encontrar otras formas de crear un centro “que sea un barrio completo”, desde estrategias para atraer más establecimientos para el cuidado de las infancias y aumentar la cubierta de árboles afuera de las transformaciones residenciales, hasta la activación de espacios de venta minorista en planta baja a través de programas como PopUp Denver, que brinda a los empresarios locales vidrieras sin costo de alquiler por tres meses.  

Sostener el centro

La reutilización adaptativa presenta desafíos logísticos, pero también posibilidades, como el potencial de revivir los centros en dificultades y sostenerlos de una forma nueva, explica Amy Cotter, directora de estrategias climáticas en el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. “Mucho se ha escrito sobre la evolución del espacio de oficinas como una sentencia de muerte para los centros de nuestras ciudades”, comenta Cotter, explanificadora que se centra en las políticas urbanas y la resiliencia climática. Pero convertir el exceso de espacio de trabajo en viviendas ofrece el panorama de una población que mantiene la ciudad activa y económicamente saludable las 24 horas de todos los días de la semana, “diferente de cuando teníamos distritos comerciales centrales con una población durante el horario de oficina y habitantes de los suburbios que venían a trabajar”, añade. 

Las rutinas urbanas de las últimas décadas se volvieron predecibles e insostenibles, señala Cotter: “Durante el día, están los trabajadores de oficina que estacionan y comen en restaurantes, y luego, por la noche, hay propietarios de condominios y habitantes de departamentos que estacionan y salen a comer a restaurantes”, comenta. “Bien, ¿qué pasaría si no existiese ese recambio? ¿Qué pasaría si fuera siempre la misma población, no solo que trabaja, vive, come y se recrea en el mismo espacio, sino también que evita viajar todos esos kilómetros en auto, y, quizás, hasta evita tener un auto?”.  

Suena un poco utópico, admite Cotter, pero no es impracticable. Después de todo, la reutilización adaptativa no es nada nuevo. Como consecuencia de la caída de la fabricación nacional a fines del siglo XX, las industrias y fábricas textiles vacantes en el Noroeste y en el Medio Oeste se redestinaron a estudios de arte y loft residenciales muy demandados. La merma en la asistencia a las iglesias dio origen a condominios reformados con techos de catedrales reales. Y, según un estudio publicado en enero por el Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force (Equipo de Trabajo de Reutilización Adaptativa de Oficinas) de la ciudad de Nueva York (ciudad de Nueva York, 2023), en Bajo Manhattan, las iniciativas de revitalización que comenzaron a mediados de los noventa y se aceleraron después del 11 de septiembre dieron lugar a alrededor de seis millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina que se transformó en unas 17.000 viviendas.  

Readaptar una estructura, en lugar de demolerla y reconstruirla, evita que llegue más carbono a la atmósfera y más desecho de construcción a los vertederos. Según la Agencia de Protección Ambiental, en 2018, en los Estados Unidos se generaron 600 millones de toneladas de desecho de construcción y demolición, más del doble de nuestro desecho sólido municipal, y un 90 por ciento de este vino de la demolición de edificios existentes (US EPA 2022). Mientras tanto, los materiales de construcción convencionales emiten cantidades excesivas de carbono; la producción de acero y hormigón, por separado, representan al menos un ocho por ciento de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero. 

Este es el motivo por el que la reutilización adaptativa “casi siempre ofrece ahorros medioambientales en comparación con la demolición y la construcción nueva”, según el Laboratorio de Políticas e Investigación del Fideicomiso Nacional para la Preservación Histórica, que advierte que los edificios más nuevos necesitan entre 20 y 30 años de operaciones de alto rendimiento para, finalmente, compensar el impacto climático inicial de su construcción (Frey, Dunn y Cochran, 2011). Mantener intactos los cimientos y la estructura de los edificios a la vez que se le hace un lavado de cara a la fachada y se modernizan la calefacción, refrigeración, aislamiento y otros sistemas tiene el beneficio añadido de mejorar de forma radical la eficiencia energética del funcionamiento del edificio, lo que reduce el consumo de energía en hasta un 40 por ciento.   

Además, puede ser económico. Si bien las transformaciones de oficinas pueden complicarse, Robert Fuller, director y jefe de estudio de la sede de Nueva York de la firma de arquitectura mundial Gensler, explica que “en comparación con demoler y construir de cero, por lo general, implican un menor costo por unidad que una construcción nueva”. CBRE calcula que el costo de acondicionar un edificio de oficinas para transformarlas en departamentos en Alexandria, Virginia, sería de US$ 213 por pie cuadrado, en comparación con US$ 275 por pie cuadrado si se construyera de cero. Además, el proceso puede acelerarse: algunos desarrolladores le contaron a Urban Land Institute que la reutilización puede ahorrar de seis a 12 meses de tiempo de construcción (Kramer, Eyre y Maloney, 2023).  

La apatía de mediados de siglo

Lo que hace que el movimiento actual de reutilización sea más desafiante que la transformación de fábricas e iglesias es el tipo de edificios de oficinas que hay que transformar. Gran parte del espacio comercial vacante hoy en día se encuentra en torres de las décadas de 1960, 1970 y 1980, cuadradas y sin ningún tipo de glamour.

“Aún no se las considera realmente edificios históricos”, señala Fuller. Además de sistemas envejecidos, estos monolitos de mitad de siglo suelen tener plantas extensas de una cuadra de profundidad, que hacen que el corazón del edificio se encuentre elevado, a más de 10 o 15 metros de la ventana más cercana (que no puede utilizarse), así como fachadas monótonas y poco acogedoras.

Muchos edificios de Bajo Manhattan que se reformaron tras la catástrofe del 11 de septiembre eran construcciones previas a la guerra con placas de piso pequeñas y aperturas para ventanas con marcos tradicionales, comenta Fuller. “No quiero decir que hayan sido transformaciones sencillas, pero tenían mucho sentido. Algunos de estos edificios de las décadas de 1960 y 1970 . . . definitivamente presentan desafíos”.

De todos modos, los arquitectos pueden resolverlos, en general, se trata de una cuestión de viabilidad financiera. Por ejemplo, Fuller dice: “Si el edificio tiene una placa de suelo lo suficientemente amplia, en realidad, se puede crear un tragaluz en el centro”, y así se atrae la luz diurna hacia el corazón del edificio.

Ese espacio también puede reutilizarse de otras formas. Cuando, hace unos años, Gensler estaba transformando las oficinas de la Franklin Tower de Filadelfia en departamentos, la empresa decidió apilar los servicios nuevos del edificio, como el estudio de ciclismo Peloton, el centro fitnes y el teatro, en el centro del edificio a lo largo de diferentes pisos, y así le dio uso a un espacio que, de lo contrario, estaría ocioso, en el núcleo del edificio. “En lugar de hacer un servicio por piso, algo que suele ser muy común en los edificios residenciales”, explica Fuller, “puedes imaginarte esta columna vertical de servicios que atraviesa todo el edificio hasta arriba”.  

Otro desafío al adaptar los edificios de oficinas más viejos es modernizar el muro cortina, la fachada externa no estructural. El fin de esto no es solo modernizar la estética y mejorar la eficiencia energética, sino también instalar ventanas que funcionen, que suelen faltar en la mayoría de los edificios de oficinas y que la mayoría de las ciudades exigen en las unidades residenciales.

A pesar de presentar estos obstáculos, los edificios de oficinas corrientes aún pueden ofrecer un buen cimiento para viviendas atractivas, así como ubicaciones codiciadas y características estructurales lujosas como los techos altos. Una altura de 3,5 metros de techo a techo no se considera un estándar de clase A para el espacio de oficina moderno, dice Fuller, “pero es muy generoso para un edificio residencial”.

Para ayudar a las ciudades a identificar candidatos potenciales para la reutilización, Gensler desarrolló un sistema de puntuación de propiedad que otorga puntos según la ubicación del edificio, la configuración, el servicio de ascensores y otros factores. “Es una forma de analizar rápido una franja amplia de edificios e identificar a los mejores competidores”, comenta Fuller, porque no todas las torres de oficinas vacantes son aptas para proyectos de transformación razonables.  

Por ejemplo, solo 10 de los 84 edificios que Gensler evaluó en el distrito financiero de Boston alcanzaron el puntaje necesario para merecer que se los considere como objetivos de reutilización (Carlock 2022). Puede que esta no parezca una gran cifra. Pero, incluso si la mayoría de las torres de oficinas de mitad de siglo no califican para la reutilización residencial, convertir tan solo algunas puede generar cientos o, incluso, miles de viviendas nuevas en las ciudades carentes de ellas. “Dados los millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina infrautilizados, incluso un pequeño porcentaje podría ser realmente significativo en lo que respecta a la vivienda”, afirma Fuller.  

Esta es una de las razones por las cuales el Office Adaptive Reuse Task Force de la ciudad de Nueva York está recomendando 11 cambios de políticas que permitirían y fomentarían la conversión de más edificios de oficinas en más barrios (ciudad de Nueva York, 2023). “Queremos garantizar que los edificios de oficinas obsoletos puedan transformarse para darles un uso más demandado, como las viviendas que los neoyorquinos necesitan desesperadamente”, escribe el director de planificación, Dan Garodnick. Algunas de las recomendaciones del equipo de trabajo, posteriores a un estudio de cinco meses, son: flexibilizar las reglas para permitir la transformación de la mayoría de los edificios de oficinas construidos antes de 1991 y ofrecer incentivos de impuestos a la propiedad para apoyar la creación de viviendas asequibles e instalaciones para el cuidado de las infancias en edificios restaurados.   

Y en Washington, DC, donde unos seis millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina permanecen vacantes, y el alcalde Muriel Bowser prometió llevar unos 15.000 residentes nuevos al centro en los próximos cinco años, la ciudad ofrecerá 20 años de exención fiscal a los desarrolladores que transformen edificios de oficina en residencias, siempre que un 15 por ciento de las viviendas se declaren asequibles para quienes ganen el 60 por ciento o menos del ingreso medio de la zona. 

Convertir Calgary

Para mejor o para peor, Calgary, Alberta, le lleva ventaja a muchas ciudades que recién están empezando a explorar las transformaciones de oficinas. Calgary, una ciudad de 1,3 millones, ha tenido sus auges y caídas como capital corporativa de la industria de gas y petróleo de Canadá. Pero la baja de los precios del petróleo crudo en 2014 arrastró con ella al mercado de bienes inmobiliarios comerciales. Los edificios de oficinas del centro de Calgary perdieron alrededor de US$ 16.000 millones de su valor inmobiliario desde 2015, lo que generó una pérdida de recaudación tributaria que afecta a toda la ciudad.   

“Las conversaciones en torno a nuestro problema de vacantes de oficinas comenzó cerca de 2015”, relata Natalie Marchut, gerenta de programa del equipo de estrategia del centro de Calgary. “Las vacantes de oficinas habían empezado a escalar, no veíamos ninguna reabsorción y la situación se tornó alarmante”. Para el momento de los cierres por la COVID en 2020, no quedaban muchos trabajadores de oficina en el centro para enviar a sus hogares. 

Así que los funcionarios de la ciudad trabajaron junto a desarrolladores, empresarios y otros socios para idear un plan. Con alrededor de un tercio del espacio de oficina del centro que permanecía vacante (unos 4 millones de metros cuadrados), la ciudad estableció un objetivo de eliminar dos millones de metros cuadrados de existencias de oficinas en los próximos diez años, idealmente a través de conversiones residenciales.

Pero, como diría Isaac Newton, un objeto en reposo tiende a permanecer en reposo, a menos que se vea afectado por una fuerza externa. A pesar de que convertir un edificio de oficinas ocupado por la mitad en viviendas, por lo general, cuesta menos que demolerlo y reconstruirlo de cero, muchos propietarios de bienes inmobiliarios no tienen la capacidad o el deseo de asumir proyectos de esta magnitud y, en cambio, sucumben a la inercia y permiten que los edificios permanezcan inactivos. “Algo importante que notamos fue que la mayoría de los propietarios de edificios no estaban tomando la iniciativa de reconvertir esas torres de oficinas vacantes por sí mismos”, dice Marchut.  

Así que Calgary decidió ofrecer incentivos financieros para impulsar el proceso. El ayuntamiento de la ciudad aprobó una financiación municipal inicial de US$ 100 millones en 2021, y otra de US$ 53 millones a fines de 2022, para apoyar proyectos de reutilización adaptativa en el centro, lo que permitió reembolsar a los desarrolladores US$ 75 por pie cuadrado de espacio de oficina convertido.   

Incluso con esa tasa generosa, que se calculó para cubrir cerca de un tercio del costo estimado de US$ 225 por pie cuadrado de tales transformaciones al principio del programa, a algunos desarrolladores les resultó difícil hacer que los números cerraran, explica Marchut, dado el aumento en las tasas de interés y la inflación. Pero las dos primeras rondas del programa reunieron muchas más propuestas de proyectos que los fondos disponibles. Los primeros diez proyectos aprobados le restarán más de 300.000 metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina al mercado comercial del centro para convertirlos en unas 1.200 viviendas nuevas.

Una preocupación que solía surgir en los primeros debates es que se suelen imponer tarifas más altas para los bienes inmobiliarios comerciales que para los residenciales. “Este fue un aspecto importante que tuvimos que descifrar, pero, además, hacerle entender a nuestro consejo: al convertirlos en inmuebles residenciales, se les impone una tarifa menor, por lo que no vamos a obtener lo que podríamos recibir si fueran espacios comerciales totalmente ocupados”, explica Marchut. “Sí. Pero no vamos a ver la absorción de 4 millones de metros cuadrados de espacio de oficina. Nunca llegaremos allí”.

En este momento, la situación es tan alarmante, que algunos edificios del centro se valúan únicamente por el valor del suelo, añade. “Por supuesto que se necesitan bienes inmobiliarios comerciales en el centro, y por supuesto que siempre pagarán más a la ciudad en forma de recaudación tributaria, pero no si están todos vacíos”, comenta Marchut. Pero, al eliminar el exceso de existencias se debería reducir la tasa de vacantes, lo que ayuda a estabilizar e, incluso, restaurar el valor del espacio de oficinas restante.

Para acelerar las transformaciones y atraer todas las solicitudes posibles, la ciudad simplificó el programa, de manera intencional, y no incluyó requisitos específicos para la vivienda asequible, por ejemplo. Marchut dice que dejó que la ciudad priorice los proyectos que mejor se alineen con sus objetivos de equidad, clima y planificación.

“Cada proyecto que llega en línea por medio de este programa está haciendo más que solo convertir las oficinas en residencias”, dice Marchut. “Hemos recibido algunos que van a hacer viviendas asequibles . . . tenemos otros que están haciendo mejoras en el espacio público, y esto es opcional. No lo exigimos, pero los postulantes se sientan a la mesa con propuestas verdaderamente sólidas, porque saben que el programa es muy competitivo, así que hacen su mejor apuesta”.

El primer proyecto de conversión del programa, The Cornerstone de Peoplefirst Developments, con planes de terminarse a fines de este año, está creando 112 unidades destinadas a familias, 40 por ciento de las cuales tendrán un precio asequible, explica Marchut. “También están construyendo unidades de tres dormitorios, que escasean en el centro”, señala. Otro proyecto, Palliser One de Aspen, con 176 unidades, planifica incluir un parque público y una pista de patinaje en planta baja.  

La ciudad también está invirtiendo US$ 163 millones en proyectos para el espacio público y de placemaking (creación de espacios), como la renovación de calles peatonales clave y la extensión de RiverWalk hasta West End. “Lo otro que estamos realmente considerando es cómo obtener más espacio para parques”, dice Marchut. “El centro, y en especial West End, carece de espacios públicos abiertos, y si estamos considerando traer a nuevos residentes, familias e infancias, y todo lo que eso conlleva, necesitarán un lugar donde salir y jugar”.  

Una opción que permanece en la mesa para crear más parques en el centro mientras se reduce la saturación de espacio comercial es la demolición de edificios de oficinas vacantes que no pueden convertirse en algo más útil (una próxima etapa del programa también subsidiará otros tipos de transformaciones de oficinas, como locales de arte y de venta minorista). “Estamos explorando el incentivo de la demolición para bienes inmobiliarios muy específicos”, dice Marchut. “Existen edificios de clase C construidos en la década de 1970 que están llenos de amianto, y a su vez, quizás no pueden realmente modernizarse para cumplir con el código de edificación, simplemente llegaron al final de su vida útil”.   

Calgary no enfrenta el tipo de crisis de viviendas que enfrentan ciudades más grandes como Toronto o Vancouver, pero aún se espera que, para 2046, Alberta reciba dos millones de residentes nuevos, en su mayoría población urbana. “Con tales cifras”, dice Marchut, “necesitamos construir más viviendas asequibles, y necesitamos construir más viviendas en el centro . . . y estos proyectos de transformación brindarán tasas de alquiler inferiores a las de las construcciones nuevas”. Esto es algo que ayudará a los habitantes de Calgary actuales y futuros. “Veremos un producto terminado muy pronto”, comenta Marchut. “No veo la hora de finalmente ver que uno abre su puertas y recibe a residentes nuevos”. 

No es (solo) una cuestión de dinero

Más allá de los incentivos financieros, Calgary está dando otros pasos para fomentar las transformaciones. La mayoría de los bienes inmobiliarios del centro, por ejemplo, están exentos de requisitos que permiten el cambio de uso. “Esto ahorra, en promedio, seis meses”, señala Marchut, y elimina el riesgo de que los proyectos queden empantanados o bloqueados por completo. 

Como los desarrolladores necesitan invertir una cantidad enorme de tiempo y dinero en un proyecto incluso antes de proponérselo a la ciudad, el solo hecho de mostrar un apoyo general para las transformaciones implica un impulso importante para la confianza, dijo Marchut. “Obviamente, no se puede garantizar la aprobación hasta que el plan esté definido ante tus ojos y pueda contrastarse con las reglas. Pero una respuesta teórica del estilo: ‘Sí, la ciudad apoya lo que intentas lograr en este lugar’, sirve mucho para reconfortar a los desarrolladores”.

De regreso en Denver, Aldrete no tiene incentivos en dólares para promover la inversión, así que espera que un proceso de aprobación y revisión “más minucioso”, dirigido por un coordinador interno dedicado a las transformaciones de oficinas, reduzca radicalmente el tiempo que les lleva a los desarrolladores hacer avanzar el proyecto. “Básicamente, acortas entre dos y tres meses de cada ciclo de revisión que pueda reducirse, para que salgan a la calle y se empiecen a construir. Esto representa mucho dinero para los desarrolladores”, comenta. “Así es como estamos intentando persuadirlos”.

Fuller dice que, aunque algunas ciudades se adhieren a la reutilización, otras se están quedando atrás. “Este es el momento para cambiar algunas políticas legislativas y de zonificación que podrían ayudar a catalizar este tipo de conversión”, dice, mientras enfatiza que la calidad y la seguridad no deberían sacrificarse. “Hemos llegado a entender que, en realidad, tener una combinación de usos en el mismo lugar es sano para las ciudades, en cuanto a la generación de actividad las 24 horas de todos los días de la semana, y a la vigilancia en las calles y todas esas cosas que sabemos que son buenas. Así que soy optimista respecto a los beneficios que esto conllevará”.

Cotter también es optimista en cuando a que este fuerte incremento de interés pospandémico en las transformaciones de oficinas creará una tendencia duradera. “Se está realizando todo tipo de reutilización adaptativa, lo que les dará a los arquitectos, las empresas de construcción y los funcionarios de códigos de la ciudad experiencia sobre cómo puede hacerse, y sentará las bases para que pueda hacerse con mayor facilidad”, dice Cotter. “¿Y no nos beneficiaríamos todos si nuestros edificios, una vez construidos, pudieran evolucionar con nosotros?””  

Jon Gorey es redactor de personal en el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo.

Imagen principal: Un área común transformada de la Franklin Tower de Filadelfia. Crédito: Robert Deitchler, cortesía de Gensler.

Referencias

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