Matthew McKinney was named director of the Public Policy Research Institute at the University of Montana in 2003, after serving for 10 years as the founding director of the Montana Consensus Council. He is also a senior lecturer at the University of Montana’s School of Law, a partner with the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, and a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute. Matt was a research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in 2000 and 2002, and a visiting fellow of the Lincoln Institute in 2000. During the past 18 years, he has designed and facilitated more than 50 multiparty public processes, helping leaders and citizens address issues related to federal land management, land use planning, growth management, water policy, fish and wildlife, and public health and human services. He has published numerous journal articles and is coauthor of The Western Confluence: Governing Natural Resources (Island Press, June 2004).

Land Lines: You have a strong background in facilitation and consensus building. How do you apply that to land use planning?

Matt McKinney: I come to planning largely from a process perspective. Land use issues typically involve multiple parties, and the challenge of planning is to integrate diverse, often conflicting, interests. In my current work with the Public Policy Research Institute I operate on the assumption that one of the most effective ways to develop and implement strategies to sustain livable communities and healthy landscapes is to create opportunities for stakeholders to come together with the best available information to address issues of common concern. In short, the planning process is most effective when it is inclusive, informed and deliberative:

• Inclusive participation means that a concerted effort is made to engage all viewpoints and interests, and participants’ input and advice will be considered by the decision makers and will influence the outcome.
• An informed process offers an equal opportunity to share views and information, fostering mutual learning, common understanding and consideration of a variety of options.
• A deliberative dialogue occurs when people listen to each other, consider the rationale or reason for competing viewpoints (the interests that underlie the positions), and seek solutions that integrate as many interests as possible.

This principled approach has been shown through experience to produce decisions that are broadly supported by the public, and it eases implementation because the key stakeholders have already played their part in shaping the proposed action or plan. Compared to lobbying, litigation and other ways of shaping public policy, it can save time and money. Last—and important for planners—this approach offers an effective way to integrate social and political values within the scientific, technical and legal framework of land use planning. It’s a more cooperative and constructive way for planners and public interests to work together.

LL: Can you give some examples of how these principles work in the real world?

MM: In the northern Rocky Mountains, many communities with limited staff, money and other resources are struggling with double-digit growth, strains on local infrastructure and cultural clashes between newcomers and those with traditional western values. But westerners are infamous for resisting government intrusion—a predictable backlash in a region where the federal government holds sway over more than half of the land base. As a result planners often face a steep climb just to gain the public’s ear on land use issues.

These situations are ripe for inclusive, informed and deliberative approaches, and there are many examples across the West. In Helena, Montana, we helped a broad-based citizens group—including open space advocates, neighborhood leaders, realtors and developers—negotiate new procedures for subdivision reviews. Developers wanted to streamline the subdivision application process, and residents of established neighborhoods wanted to ensure that safeguards remained in place to preserve the small-town feel and curb sprawl. In another case, residents of Jefferson County, Montana, started talking about zoning after a cement plant near an elementary school proposed burning hazardous waste as fuel. The “z” word caused some resistance from local business and industry, notably the cement plant and a nearby mining operation, but we brought in a facilitator who helped a working group of local residents, industry representatives, private property rights advocates and county officials develop a zoning plan.

In both cases, negotiations took the form of deliberative dialogue that lasted about a year. Both groups used joint fact-finding to gather information that was credible to all parties at the table. Then they crafted proposals and submitted them to formal decision-making arenas—city council and county commission, respectively. After careful review, both the new subdivision protocols and the zoning plan were adopted essentially unopposed.

LL: What role do planners play in such processes?

MM: We frequently recommend using an impartial, third-party facilitator to help build trust and more effective working relationships among the stakeholders. A facilitator can also keep the group on task and focused on a common goal. In some cases planners can play this role themselves, but more often they act as conveners or sponsors of a multiparty process, or as vested stakeholders and hands-on participants. Either way, planners can participate more effectively if they have a working knowledge of the principles and strategies of collaborative problem solving.

LL: How can planners obtain this kind of training?

MM: Since 1999 the Lincoln Institute and the Consensus Building Institute have cosponsored a two-day introductory course, Mediating Land Use Disputes, for planning practitioners and others interested in land use decisions. It presents practical insights into negotiating and mediating conflicts over land use and community development. Using interactive exercises, games and simulations, participants receive hands-on experience with collaborative problem solving and public participation. They learn how to dovetail these concepts with existing processes for designing and adopting land use plans and evaluating development proposals. In addition, we are reaching out to 100 planners across 10 western states to enroll in the Planning Fundamentals course offered online through LEO, the Lincoln Education Online program.

LL: What other planning-related programs do you teach?

MM: Again with the Lincoln Institute, I have been involved in a relatively new and much-needed program for state planning directors in 13 western states, modeled on a similar program in the Northeast. These seminars provide a forum for leaders within state government to compare their experiences, learn from each others’ successes and failures, and build a common base of practical knowledge that will serve them in their individual efforts and in the region generally. The intent is not to promote any particular approach to planning and growth, but to explore a range of strategies to respond to growth and land use challenges in the West. The level of interest goes well beyond the planning officials themselves, as evidenced by the list of cosponsors: the Council of State Governments-WEST (an association of state legislators), the Western Governors Association, the Western Municipal Conference and Western Planners Resources.

LL: Is regionalism in the West a new emphasis in your work?

MM: Land use issues often transcend political and jurisdictional boundaries. Coping with sprawl, water and air quality, economic development and the effects of globalization demands practical, local solutions that also work within the bigger picture. Research indicates that many land use issues are most efficiently addressed at a regional scale. Instead of stopping at the county line or the border between federal and private land, planners are now thinking in terms of the “problemshed” or the “natural territory” of the problem.

More and more regional initiatives are being designed to address transboundary matters. Some augment existing government institutions, but most are more ad hoc and rely on the principles of collaboration to engage people with diverse interests and viewpoints. When we inventoried such initiatives throughout the West, we were as surprised as anyone by the sheer number and variety of ongoing regional efforts. They range from ad hoc, community-based groups like the Applegate Partnership in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon, which seeks to promote and sustain the ecological health of land within its watershed, to substantial government entities with regulatory authority like the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (McKinney, Fitch and Harmon 2002).

LL: How do you transfer this work to other regions?

MM: Recently I have worked with the Lincoln Institute to conduct clinics on regional collaboration for several interstate efforts in the New Jersey-New York area, including a watershed management plan for the Delaware River Basin Commission.

Another project is a collaborative effort among local, state and federal agencies in the New York-New Jersey Highlands, the 1.5-million-acre region between the Delaware and lower Connecticut rivers. State and federal land managers are assessing changes in land cover and use, identifying significant natural areas for protection, and developing strategies to protect the 12-county region’s open space and natural resources.

In addition, we have designed a two-day course titled Regional Collaboration: Learning to Think and Act Like a Region. It provides a conceptual framework and practical skills to train planners, local elected officials, small business owners, advocates and educators to initiate, design, coordinate and sustain regional initiatives. With the involvement of several national and regional organizations, the Institute cosponsored the first course in spring 2003 in Salt Lake City and offered it again in March 2004 at Lincoln House in Cambridge.

Reference

McKinney, Matthew, Craig Fitch, and Will Harmon. 2002. Regionalism in the West: An inventory and assessment. Public Land and Resources Law Review 23:101–191.

The inventory is also available online at www.crmw.org/Assets/misc/regionalinventory.asp and www.crmw.org/Assets/misc/regarticle.htm

Related Articles

Carbonell, Armando, and Lisa Cloutier. 2003. Planning for growth in western cities. Land Lines 15(3):8–11.

McKinney, Matthew. 2003. Linking growth and land use to water supply. Land Lines 15(2):4–6.

McKinney, Matthew, and Will Harmon. 2002. Land use planning and growth management in the American West. Land Lines 14(1):1–4.

The Mississippi River watershed has, since the administration of Thomas Jefferson, played a central role in American life. This centrality has been both literal, in a geographic sense, and figurative, in the sense that the mighty river runs through America’s agricultural and cultural heartland.

One of the nation’s greatest conservationists, Aldo Leopold, grew up along the banks of the Mississippi, in Burlington, Iowa. After gaining a forestry degree at Yale University and serving in the U.S. Forest Service in the desert Southwest, Leopold returned to the upper Midwest to teach and write his most enduring prose at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Leopold and his family also devoted themselves to the restoration of a farm and forest landscape that included a ramshackle home, affectionately known as “the Shack,” on the sandy soils adjacent to the Wisconsin River, a tributary of the Mississippi.

In his work at both the university and the Shack, Leopold gained a first-hand view of the enormous challenges Americans face in attempting to conserve the nation’s soil, water, wildlife, and landscape. As the instigator of the first “wilderness” designation of a federally owned landscape in the Gila National Forest in Arizona, and as a founder of the Wilderness Society, Leopold was a prominent proponent of conservation on public lands. Still, he understood that unless private lands were also conserved for the long term, the conservation community would not be able to effectively protect America’s natural heritage. He wrote presciently for The Journal of Forestry in 1934:

Let me be clear that I do not challenge the purchase of public lands for conservation. For the first time in history we are buying on a scale commensurate with the size of the problem. I do challenge the assumption that bigger buying is a substitute for private conservation practice … . Bigger buying, I fear, is serving as an escape-mechanism—it masks our failure to solve the harder problem. The geographic cards are stacked against its ultimate success. In the long run, it is exactly as effective as buying half an umbrella … . The thing to be prevented is destructive private land use of any and all kinds. The thing to be encouraged is the use of private land in such a way as to combine the public and private interest to the greatest degree possible … . This paper forecasts that conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest. It asserts the new premise that if he fails to do so, his neighbors must ultimately pay the bill. It pleads that our jurists and economists anticipate the need for workable vehicles to carry that reward. (Leopold 1991)

More than seven decades after Leopold penned those words, American jurists, economists, policy makers, public natural resource agency administrators, nonprofit conservation leaders, and concerned citizens are still working on his challenge. In October 2005 the Lincoln Institute convened more than 30 conservation leaders to consider the most effective ways to design and use such “workable vehicles.” The Johnson Foundation cohosted the conference at its Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin.

From that base the participants visited several sites in the Upper Mississippi watershed in south-central Wisconsin that showcase impressive public-private conservation efforts. Brent Haglund and Alex Echols of the Sand County Foundation led the group to an expansive site on the Portage River managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where participants learned how cooperative public-private land management practices effectively enhanced wildlife habitat and helped restore native ecosystem functions. At the nearby Baraboo River we saw a public-private effort that had restored the river to health through the removal of several aged dams.

For historical perspective, the group visited the site of Leopold’s Shack, where we read from his posthumously published volume, A Sand County Almanac. Leopold (1949) lyrically describes the critical role of private stewardship in maintaining the long-term value of the region’s ecosystems. The participants also visited the campus of the International Crane Foundation (ICF), where we stood face-to-face with several of the world’s rarest birds and learned of cofounder George Archibald’s nonprofit efforts to restore their populations.

Over the next two days at Wingspread, the group discussed ways to enhance a broad array of conservation incentives in an economically efficient, measurably effective, and reasonably equitable manner. The participants focused on three types of incentive programs of interest to the conservation community in the early twenty-first century: tax incentives, market-based incentives, and fiscal (or budgetary) incentives.

Tax Incentives

Jean Hocker, president emeritus of the Land Trust Alliance (LTA), explained how the federal tax incentives associated with the donation of conservation easements, codified in the 1970s and 1980s, have become a key driver of growth in the U.S. land trust movement. Jeff Pidot, chief of the Natural Resources section of the Maine Attorney General’s office, and a 2004–2005 visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute, followed Hocker with a critique of easement policy and practice, explaining how the use of conservation easements has resulted in a variety of unintended consequences. He argued that reform of easement law and regulation at the state and national levels would both reduce misuse of the tool and improve its effectiveness in achieving conservation purposes (Pidot 2005).

Responding to Pidot’s critique, the participants, led by Mark Ackelson of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, considered a number of potential reforms, paying special attention to opportunities for strong voluntary standards, improved training and accreditation programs, stronger enforcement of existing regulations, and revision of appraisal standards. Several of these reforms have since been implemented, including LTA’s establishment of a voluntary accreditation program.

In response to persistent advocacy by the conservation community, the U.S. Congress in August 2006 approved an expansion of conservation easement tax benefits. In the opinion of James Connaughton, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the new provisions provide “substantial new incentives to landowners who want to commit their land to open space while keeping our nation’s working farms and ranches working” (The Chattanoogan 2006).

Market-based Incentives

Adam Davis, a California-based expert on ecosystem services, explained how private interests, in the context of public cap-and-trade regulatory structures, were becoming increasingly active in providing public and private goods, by employing new ecosystem service trading mechanisms for land and biodiversity conservation (Davis 2005). He noted that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regulations for the mitigation of adverse impacts to wetlands were evolving to require all mitigators to meet measurable, relatively efficient performance standards. Such developments, he reported, would allow commercial wetlands banking firms to compete effectively and efficiently, improving the per-unit cost and quality of mitigation banking initiatives over time.

Davis’s remarks were expanded upon by several speakers, including Fred Danforth, who offered a case study of his own entrepreneurial experience in ecosystem service provision on a ranch in Montana’s Blackfoot River valley; George Kelly of Environmental Bank & Exchange (EBX) and Wiley Barbour of Environmental Resources Trust, who offered insights on the importance of clear norms and standards in ecosystem service markets; and Leonard Shabman, resident scholar at Resources for the Future and a widely respected economist, who has published several papers on the future of mitigation banking.

Recent events offer considerable hope that some of the legal and regulatory reforms discussed at the session will be implemented in the near future. Specifically, in the spring of 2006 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published new draft regulations that appear to address many of the concerns raised about wetlands mitigation. As reported by Ecosystem Marketplace (2006), “central to the proposed new regulations is the requirement that all forms of mitigation meet the same environmental standards already required of mitigation banks … . The proposed regulations will raise accountability levels for projects funded by in-lieu fee payments and will implement a more timely approval process for mitigation banks.”

Fiscal Incentives

The third type of incentive is generally funded through governmental budgets. Ralph Grossi of the American Farmland Trust; Craig Cox of the Soil and Water Conservation Society; Roger Claassen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Jeff Zinn of the Congressional Research Service offered a variety of perspectives on the complex negotiations associated with reauthorization of the Farm Bill, which offers opportunities to expand and change federal farm programs in 2007.

Whether or not the next Farm Bill provides for growth or shifts in incentive programs, achieving measurable impacts will depend on skillful program implementation. Jeff Vonk, director of Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources, offered detailed insight into the challenges of using a conservation budget to address agricultural water quality problems. He argued persuasively that even if conservation budgets increase over time, they will not achieve their intended effect without careful resource allocation analysis and follow-through.

Howard Learner, director of the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, offered a detailed case of how a federally funded agricultural renewable energy program benefited from focused legislative design and follow-through on implementation. Andrew Bowman of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation added the idea that, if implemented in a well-coordinated fashion, the State Wildlife Action Plans submitted to the federal government by the 50 states offered another important opportunity to make progress in wildlife and habitat conservation.

Help for the Mississippi River Watershed

Recent progress in strengthening U.S. tax and market-based incentives for land and biodiversity conservation, combined with potentially significant fiscal incentives, could provide an historic opportunity to realize ambitious conservation objectives in the next decade. There are many thorny conservation challenges that might be addressed with such incentives.

One of most urgent is associated with the Mississippi River watershed where Aldo Leopold spent much of his life. Stretching from Montana to Pennsylvania to Louisiana, the watershed picks up an enormous load of phosphorus and nitrogen from farms, parking lots, and lawns. These chemicals and other pollutants are carried by the great river into the Gulf of Mexico, where they are instrumental in creating hypoxia—an ecological condition characterized by a shortage of available oxygen. It can be caused by surplus amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen that feed huge, oxygen-consuming algal blooms on the ocean’s surface. As the blooms grow rapidly, deeper ocean waters may become relatively depleted of oxygen, sometimes resulting in the death of massive numbers of fish.

A combination of innovative tax, market-based, and fiscal incentives could make a significant impact in improving the ecological character of the watershed and reducing hypoxia in the Gulf. For example, incentives targeted to encourage stream bank restoration, the establishment and stewardship of buffer strips, the implementation of crop rotation schemes that reduce fertilizer runoff, and the reduction of impervious surfaces near watercourses could, after sufficient trial and error, prove to be efficient, measurably effective, and reasonably equitable across geographic and socioeconomic lines. If implemented across the Mississippi watershed, such tools would benefit marine and bird populations, as well as the Gulf fishing industry and local economies. Aldo Leopold would likely applaud news of such an effort’s success, seeing private landowners rewarded to conserve the public interest.

James N. Levitt is director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, and a research fellow at the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

References

The Chattanoogan. 2006. Conservation incentives pass Senate: Waiting on President’s signature, August 7. http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_90539.asp.

Davis, Adam. 2005. Mainstreaming environmental markets. In From Walden to Wall Street: Frontiers of conservation finance, James N. Levitt, ed., 155–171. Washington, DC: Island Press in association with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Ecosystem Marketplace. 2006. Ecosystem Marketplace Commentary: Draft mitigation regulations signal growing private sector role in conservation, Press Release, March 27. http://www.ewire.com/display.cfm/Wire_ID/3033.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County almanac. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1991. Conservation economics. In The river of the Mother of God and other essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan Flader and J. Baird Caldecott, eds., 193–202. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Pidot, Jeff. 2005. Reinventing conservation easements: A critical examination and ideas for reform. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

The rapid and intense urbanization in Latin America over the last 50 years is often contrasted in the literature with an inadequate urban planning system as a way to explain many resulting social problems: high land prices and property speculation, rampant informality, extreme sociospatial segregation, inadequate urban infrastructure and services, environmental degradation, and the like. The literature is largely silent, however, on the role played by national legal systems, which have both contributed to this situation and reacted against it. The pivotal role of the legal order cannot be underestimated.

Conservation Leadership Dialogue

On March 1, 2011, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy hosted its tenth annual Conservation Leadership Dialogue with a focus on The Future of Large Landscape Conservation in America. The session was organized by James N. Levitt, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute, with support from Armando Carbonell, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form. Held in the Members of Congress Room of the Library of Congress, across the street from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, the meeting took place on the 100th anniversary, to the day, of President William Howard Taft’s signing of the landmark legislation that allowed for creation of national forests in the eastern part of the country. The Weeks Act of 1911, named for Congressman (later Senator) John Wingate Weeks of Massachusetts, changed the nature of cooperative conservation involving citizens active in the public, private, nonprofit, academic, and research sectors in the United States.

In the tradition of previous conservation dialogues, a cross-sectoral, geographically diverse group of conservationists convened to seek a path forward—in concert with the Obama administration’s recently released report on America’s Great Outdoors (Council on Environmental Quality 2011), as well as myriad initiatives at the state and local level. Their goals were to advance collaboration on a large landscape scale among landowners, land managers, and citizens from the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors. They also sought to understand and expand on the example set by large landscape initiatives that are achieving measurable, durable conservation outcomes that will provide benefits for generations to come.

Just as we can now appreciate the revival of the White Mountains of New Hampshire from their barren, moonscape-like conditions around 1900 to their majestic, verdant stature today, twenty-second century Americans ought to be able to appreciate how our foresight in working across property, jurisdictional, and even national boundaries has become a key element in the nation’s multigenerational effort to preserve essential sources of clean water, sustainably produced forest products, and expansive recreational opportunities.

Speakers’ Comments

The conference speakers emphasized the importance of sustained cooperation across many organizations and sectors to achieve lasting results. Proudly recounting how some two million acres of Maine forestland has been conserved over the past dozen years, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, reported that “we have done this by building a partnership among government at all levels, the forest products industry, environmental, forestry and recreation groups, and landowners. Through this partnership, we have been able to maintain or increase productivity for wood and harvest levels, supporting a diverse and robust forest products industry that employs tens of thousands of workers who produce paper, other wood products, and renewable energy. At the same time, we have been able to protect biodiversity, old growth and late succession forest, and public access to recreation, and also increase opportunities for tourism” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 72).

Representatives Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, each stressed the importance of perseverance in such efforts. Welch remarked on the value of sustaining land conservation budgets during the current round of budget negotiations. He reminded the audience that in 1864 President Abraham Lincoln took his attention off a monumental crisis—the Civil War—in order to sign a bill deeding the area of Yosemite to the state of California for public use and recreation. If Lincoln could create Yosemite in the midst of the Civil War, Welch asserted, we can do our part in a time of tight budgets and economic volatility.

Holt focused his remarks on achieving a longstanding promise to fully fund the federal and stateside portions of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), as well as a number of other legislative initiatives such as the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act. Holt was emphatic in urging the conservation community to respond to the need for urgent action for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations. He reminded the audience of the admonition of President Lyndon Johnson, signer of the original LWCF legislation and the Wilderness Act in 1964: “If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,” said Johnson, “we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it” (Henry and Armstrong 2004, 123).

It was evident from the discussions that leaders from every sector stand ready to help implement the cooperative conservation aspirations of Collins, Welch, and Holt. Bob Bendick, director of U.S. government relations at The Nature Conservancy, stated that “the overall objective of AGO [America’s Great Outdoors] should be to create and sustain a national network of large areas of restored and conserved land, water, and coastlines around which Americans can build productive and healthy lives” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 74). Accordingly, Bendick shared with the assembled group his personal dream that someday his young granddaughters might, as adults, look out from the arch at the gateway to Yellowstone National Park and note that “all across America, 400 million people have been able to arrange themselves and their activities across this remarkable country in a way that reconciles their lives with the power, grace, beauty and productivity of the land and water that ultimately sustain us all” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 75).

Will Shafroth, acting assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks of the U.S. Department of Interior, and Harris Sherman, undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shared their frank assessments of the current situation. Shafroth described the hard work and extensive comments that helped shape the America’s Great Outdoors report. While this work serves as a good foundation for the effort ahead, Shafroth noted that it takes considerable creativity and proactive thinking to sustain conservation momentum in these times of sharp budgetary constraints.

Sherman added that the whole idea of landscape-scale conservation implies that we need to move from performing random acts of conservation to more comprehensive and collaborative large-scale initiatives that engage many agencies and ownership types. Of particular importance, he noted, will be the outcome of the debate on the 2012 Farm Bill, because its conservation provisions will be critically important to the success of large-scale conservation efforts.

The enthusiasm for large landscape conservation on the part of speakers from large public and nonprofit organizations was strongly reinforced by Jim Stone, a private landowner and ranch operator in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley. Stone helped to start the Blackfoot Challenge, a grassroots organization that has yielded impressive, measurable results over the last three decades using a landscape-scale approach.

Stone’s colleague Jamie Williams of The Nature Conservancy explained that the Blackfoot Challenge has achieved remarkable success over the years because it has taken the time to engage so many landowners and partners in consensus-based approaches to conservation. Initial small successes were critical to building the foundation of trust that led to larger successes later (Williams 2011). In the area of stream restoration alone, the Blackfoot Challenge has helped to engage more than 200 landowners in some 680 projects involving 42 streams and 600 stream-miles that have contributed directly to an 800 percent increase in fish populations in the 1.5 million acre valley. Stone is emphatic in saying that, with the right people in the right places, what has been done in the Blackfoot region could be done across the nation.

Complementing the program was a panel of researchers and academic officials representing universities, colleges, and research institutions that are helping to catalyze large landscape initiatives. Matthew McKinney of the University of Montana moderated a dialogue with David Foster of Harvard Forest and Harvard University, Perry Brown of the University of Montana, and Karl Flessa of the University of Arizona. They explored how institutions, within their own walls and beyond, can use their analytic and convening capacities to advance initiatives with extensive impacts.

Perry Brown pointed out that those universities that will play a role in real-world conservation initiatives will not be insular, but rather will cherish their relationships with nonacademic partners such as Indian tribes, state and federal government agencies, and large national and small local nonprofits. David Foster reinforced that idea by describing the Harvard Forest’s outreach efforts to develop and disseminate its recent report on Wildlands and Woodlands New England (Foster et al. 2009).

Large Landscape Cases

There are many exemplary cases of on-the-ground progress in large landscape conservation across the country from Maine to Montana and from Southern Arizona to Northern Florida. One of the longest operating and most important cases is in the ACE Basin in South Carolina’s celebrated Lowcountry. The ACE Basin, comprised of some 350,000 acres that drain into the Ashepoo, Combahee, and South Edisto Rivers between Charleston and Beaufort, is one of the largest undeveloped estuaries along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard (figure 1).

In the late 1980s, a group of public, private, and nonprofit organizations banded together to form a partnership that would protect the remarkable scenic, wildlife, and water resources in the region. Among members of the ACE Basin Partnership are federal agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; state agencies including the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources; national nonprofits including The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited; local nonprofits including the Coastal Conservation League and the Lowcountry Open Land Trust; philanthropic organizations and individuals including the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and private interests such as MeadWestvaco Corporation.

Partnership members have conserved more than 134,000 acres, covering a contiguous core in the heart of the ACE Basin that stitches together easements on private land, a National Wildlife Refuge, South Carolina Wildlife Management Areas, and a Charleston County natural and historical interpretive center, among other properties.

As a large landscape initiative, the ACE Basin truly stands out from other efforts. Mark Robertson, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in South Carolina, has noted that the effort “set a standard of how to get conservation done on a large scale using collaboration between private landowners, conservation groups and government agencies.” Asked about the significance of the progress in the ACE Basin to date, Dana Beach, director of the Coastal Conservation League, is emphatic: “It’s real importance is that it has given many people for the first time hope that a place of great importance is not inevitably going to be developed” (Holleman 2008).

Next Steps

The leadership dialogue concluded with general agreement that there is a great deal of work to be done, as well as an historic opportunity to expand on initial progress in the field of large landscape conservation. The discussion of next steps was organized to focus on four types of initiatives.

Policy Dialogues

There is a need for ongoing policy dialogue, both among conservationists in the public, private, nonprofit and academic sectors and between the conservation community and local, state and federal decision makers, regarding the very timely opportunities to realize landscape-scale conservation initiatives across the nation. The dialogue should celebrate existing success stories about both cultural and nature-oriented properties (both being highly valued by the public), consider ongoing regional conservation efforts, and envision new ones.

In the political sphere, these dialogues should connect with conservation caucuses at multiple layers of government (local, county, state, federal, and international). In nonprofit and academic contexts, the dialogue should reach across disciplines and institutional boundaries. Such intersectoral, interdisciplinary discussions are most likely to come up with creative solutions and novel ideas. While the dialogues may be able to take advantage of the socially neutral nature of universities as conveners, they nevertheless need to be responsive to the practical, on-the-ground issues of vital concern to field practitioners and landowners.

Research

Another immediate need is to build on existing maps and inventories (e.g., the Regional Plan Association’s Northeast Landscape Partnership database) to offer a more comprehensive picture of existing public, private, and nonprofit initiatives. A more comprehensive overview of nationwide efforts should be of particular use to groups and networks working to advance the practice of large landscape conservation, including the Large Landscape Practitioners Network, a program of the Lincoln Institute, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs).

Such research efforts should be more regionally relevant and cost-effective if they involve cooperation among a wide assemblage of public and private organizations. They might also serve to augment environmental education initiatives that already are spread thin.

Additional research is also needed to measure the impacts, performance over time, and conservation outcomes of landscape-scale initiatives, and to identify the key factors of success for initiatives that are able to show significant measureable results. Of particular importance is research that is able to identify where, when, and how certain efforts are able to yield measurably improved ecosystem services, such as improved water quality, increased wildlife populations, and enhanced sustainable production of forest products.

Networking

A number of large landscape networks have been created recently or are now emerging, including the Large Landscape Practitioners Network and the LCCs mentioned above. As they evolve, the networks are likely to nest within one another at larger and larger geographic scales, but they will also need to focus on sharing knowledge and building capacity at the local level to yield lasting results. Notwithstanding the need to be grounded in local realities, the networks have an opportunity to reach out to international partners with lessons to share. Within their own territories, large landscape conservation networks need to be linked to diverse constituencies, including philanthropists interested in landscape-scale conservation, university faculty and students, a range of public agencies, and, most importantly, property owners and land managers.

Demonstration and Implementation

Given what are expected to be very tight constraints on new conservation programs at the federal, state, and local levels over the next few years, participants focused much of their attention on the creative use of existing budgets for landscape-scale conservation purposes. One noted the significant role that is already being played by the Department of Defense to conserve (and limit development on) lands adjacent to active military reservations. Such programs are now being used effectively to protect habitats and working lands from development and to limit landscape fragmentation. They also may be used in the future to address water supply protection issues. Another participant noted the potential significance of state and federal transportation budgets that could be used to mitigate the disruptive impact of new roads and highways.

Particularly enthusiastic support came from several participants for public-private-nonprofit partnerships that have a proven track record for protecting and enhancing locally valued natural and cultural resources to form the backbone for a regional green infrastructure. Examples include Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Chattahoochee/Apalachicola basin in Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida; the Crown of the Continent in Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia; and the New Jersey Highlands.

Additional opportunities for funding large landscape conservation initiatives include state incentives for private land protection that can be used to match selected federal programs (e.g., the matching monies required by funds provided by the North American Wetlands Conservation Act); community forest programs that are now gaining momentum around the nation; selected opportunities for foundation Program-Related Investments (PRIs); and emerging ecosystem service markets assisted by federal policy and public-private partnerships, including mitigation banking and statewide markets for carbon credits, such as those in California.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding evident federal budget constraints, myriad opportunities are available to pursue conservation projects that are expansive in scale, extensive in scope, able to achieve measureable conservation outcomes, and enduring. The conference participants themselves offered clear evidence that the concept of large landscape conservation has spread to initiatives across the continent. These individuals and their colleagues at home and abroad are now and will continue to be at the forefront of initiatives that protect nature in the context of human values at a scale commensurate with the conservation challenges they face.

About the Author

James N. Levitt is a fellow in the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University.

References:

Council on Environmental Quality. 2011. America’s great outdoors: A promise to future generations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. http://americasgreatoutdoors.gov/report

Foster, D., D. Kittredge, B. Donahue, K. Fallon Lambert, M. Hunter, L. Irland, B. Hall, D. Orwig, A. Ellison, E. Colburn, A. D’Amato, and C. Cogbill. 2009. Wildlands and woodlands: A vision for New England. Harvard Forest Paper 32. Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest.

Henry, Mark, and Leslie Armstrong. 2004. Mapping the future of America’s national parks: Stewardship through geographic information systems. Redlands, CA: ESRI.

Holleman, Joey. 2008. Ace Basin: Protected forever. The State, Local/Metro Section, November 10. http://www.thestate.com/2008/11/10/584599/ace-basin-protected-forever.html#ixzz1W3yQd7KP

Levitt, James N., and Charles N. Chester. 2011. The future of large landscape conservation in America. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/1916_The-Future-of-Large-Landscape-Conservation-in-America

Williams, Jamie. 2011. Scaling up conservation for large landscapes. Land Lines 23(3): 8–13. https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1923_1246_LLA_071103.pdf.

Related Resources

Levitt, James N., ed. 2005. From Walden to Wall Street:Frontiers of conservation finance. Washington, DC: Island Press and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

———. 2010. Conservation Capital in the Americas: Exemplary Conservation Finance Initiatives. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in collaboration with Island Press, the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

McKinney Matthew J., and Shawn Johnson. 2009. Working across boundaries: People, nature, and regions. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

McKinney, Matthew J., Lynn Scarlett, and Daniel Kemmis. 2010. Large landscape conservation: A strategic framework for policy and action. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Land trusts across the United States differ vastly in terms of age, size of protected acreage, mission, strategy, budget, and context. Audrey Rust, an acknowledged conservation leader and the 2012 Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is in a unique position to parse the differences between two strikingly distinct yet successful preservation efforts in the American West. She served as president and CEO of the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) in Palo Alto, California, for 24 years until July 2011, and she is now a board member of the American Prairie Reserve (APR) in Bozeman, Montana.

APR is one of the nation’s most ambitious new conservation efforts, aiming to assemble 3.5 million acres and create the largest wildlife complex in the lower 48 states—in Montana, the nation’s fourth largest state with the seventh smallest population (just one million as of 2012). By contrast, POST encompasses only 2 percent of APR’s projected acreage, yet is considered remarkably successful for amassing 70,000 acres of very expensive open space, farms, and parkland in a densely settled region, from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, with more than seven million inhabitants.

Despite their dissimilar profiles, these organizations share a surprising number of similarities. In this Q&A with the Lincoln Institute, Rust compares POST’s and APR’s particular histories and characteristics, based on her first-hand experience with each organization, and offers some universal lessons for all involved in the difficult and challenging work of preserving open space.

Lincoln institute: How did the Peninsula Open Space Trust begin and what is its mission?

Audrey Rust: POST is a 35-year-old, traditional land trust in a dense metropolitan region, which has grown significantly since POST was founded in 1977. It began as a private conservation partner for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, a public, tax-supported agency on the San Francisco Peninsula (figure 1). Working on the urban fringe, POST would raise private funds on behalf of the District and take on an occasional land donation project. To this day, all the territory it protects lies within a major metropolitan area.

Given POST’s densely populated location, it was essential from the beginning to immediately include opportunities for low-intensity public recreation and provide exposure to the biodiversity of the peninsula, where within a 12-mile transect one can pass through at least nine distinct ecosystems. POST works to assure a system of interconnected open lands in corridors along the San Francisco Bay, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the Pacific Coast. No specific number of total acres is contemplated, unless a particular campaign is underway, but giving people a place to experience nature is a driving force.

Lincoln institute: How do the genesis and mission of the American Prairie Reserve compare?

Audrey Rust: Since it was founded in 2002, APR has amassed 274,000 acres but seeks to permanently protect some 3.5 million contiguous acres of short-grass prairie as a wildlife reserve in northeastern Montana—one of only four places on earth where such a conservation effort is possible (figure 2). The idea originated from research done by a group of nonprofit conservation organizations working in the northern Rockies, with science assistance from the World Wildlife Fund at the start.

APR is reintroducing plains bison that are free of cattle gene introgression and intends to develop a sustainable herd of 10,000 animals while restoring other native species including prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, and burrowing owls. APR acquired a lot of land quickly, but it will take decades to reintroduce wildlife and foster significant growth of species populations.

Federal lands form a large part of the wildlife habitat APR is assembling. The Reserve lands are adjacent on the south to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and on the west to the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, which figures prominently in our nation’s history as part of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Lincoln institute: What are the key challenges for POST and APR?

Audrey Rust: Funding any conservation work is always the biggest challenge. The first hurdle is identifying potential donors and getting their attention. To do that, you need a clearly articulated vision and the ability to make the project relevant to the potential donor. Validation of the mission from a third respected party is key. You also need some means for the donor to experience the relevant work and feel appropriately included, in addition to a well-developed relationship that results in an appropriate request for support made at the right time.

Lincoln institute: What are the particular funding challenges at POST?

Audrey Rust: In the San Francisco Bay Area, millions of people see and appreciate how proximity to nature enhances their quality of life, but most do not know the role POST plays in assuring this; or, if they do know, they don’t necessarily feel moved to support POST’s work financially. Competition for philanthropic dollars within the small geographic area of Silicon Valley is intense. All the major conservation organizations, plus Stanford University’s powerful fundraising machine, operate in the area.

Fundraising takes a traditional course at POST. There is a well-developed annual giving program that moves many donors to the upper capital gift levels. Many of them are willing to lend their networks to the effort, and because of the successes of the organization and the existing donor list, people feel comfortable and supported by their community when making a gift. POST’s model has also depended on finding and creating public funds and then selling land or easements to a public entity, at or below the price paid by POST, allowing the organization to return donor funds to be used again and again.

POST also faces the challenge of success. Often leadership-level donors are ready to move on to new ideas and new environmental issues, seeing that their personal impact is not as visible as it would be in starting their own new organization. Some donors feel they have done their part, and now it’s someone else’s turn. New top leadership-level donors are as difficult as ever to attract.

Lincoln institute: How do APR’s mission and goals affect its fundraising strategy?

Audrey Rust: APR faces what is often called a “pipeline” problem. As a relatively new organization—and one where the potential donor population is both scattered and at a great distance from the Reserve—finding the right people has required many false starts and unproductive gatherings. It has been difficult to expose potential donors to the project in ways that can build a philanthropic relationship. Although board members are willing, only a few have networks that have proven productive for APR. It’s difficult and expensive to assess the real interest of a potential donor, estimate his or her likely gift level, and develop an ongoing relationship with a person who is geographically removed. As yet, status is not associated with being a supporter, and the enormity of the campaign goal ($300 million to $500 million) dwarfs even million-dollar gifts. Any practical campaign would need to attract a gift of $80 million to $100 million at the top of the fundraising pyramid.

Building a productive leadership-level prospect list is only worthwhile if meetings and relationships can happen. Geography creates difficulties when there are not enough people in one area, and efforts can’t be leveraged. Time is a key element in building the needed relationships.

Because of its rare size and scope, however, APR may have singular appeal to extremely wealthy individuals who, like the Rockefellers decades ago, could create this Reserve with their philanthropy alone. This is the unfulfilled dream of every executive director. Chances are slim, but history shows it is possible. APR’s model has never looked to public funding as a way to leverage private dollars, since the leased public lands are in some measure doing just that.

Another key funding challenge for APR is the scale of the project. Impact comes in increments of 50,000 or 100,000 acres in a landscape where conservation biologists have determined that a mixed-grass prairie would need to be approximately 5,000 square miles (roughly 3.2 million acres) to be a healthy, functioning ecosystem that supports the full complement of native prairie biodiversity.

Lincoln institute: How has the leadership at both organizations handled the funding challenges?

Audrey Rust: At both APR and POST, the first president/executive director, who also served as a board member, had a solid business background but no experience fundraising or running a nonprofit organization. The second board chair of both organizations was a successful venture capitalist and was viewed as a founder. All these leaders were charismatic and well-connected. Last but not least, both founding executive directors had to contribute or lend substantial funds to the organization to keep it afloat.

APR’s founding President Sean Gerrity is still at the helm after ten years, and his passion for conservation is undiminished. The time needed for extensive travel and meeting the financial needs of the organization was more than a full-time job, however, and none of the development professionals he hired could relieve his load. On the premise that potential donors want to meet someone with a title, two years ago Gerrity made a major change in how the organization functions by hiring two managing directors who are able to carry a significant fundraising and content load. The strategy requires regular telephone or in-person meetings to stay aligned on all aspects of the organization, but it’s working. Organizing around the managing director model has allowed APR staff to travel more and develop better donor relationships. Current personnel have been in place for fewer than two years, but they are making progress.

Lincoln institute: How did you weather the fundraising challenge at POST?

Audrey Rust: When POST hired me to replace Founding Executive Director Robert Augsburger in 1986, my first mission was to raise $2 million in a few months in order to exercise an option on a key coastal ranch, POST’s first truly independent project.

I understood the local donor community and had a good deal of experience in fundraising and nonprofit management. I was completely absorbed by the work and the need to meet our financial obligations. Although travel usually wasn’t necessary to raise funds, the proximity of potential donors meant that every weekend, every farmer’s market, every local event was an opportunity to connect. We undertook one major project after another, doing good conservation work and building momentum, but I was exhausted.

To solve this problem, I also found really good staff people. My approach, however, was traditional: Get enough money in the bank to hire adequate staff and ensure one of them was a young lawyer with potential to take on additional responsibilities and leadership. I would continue doing large-gift fundraising as well as oversee key land acquisition strategy and negotiation, and others would take over more of the day-to-day work and administration. The ability to grow the staff and delegate some of the work was a major step forward for me and the organization.

Lincoln institute: What has been POST’s basic approach to land acquisition and how has that affected its financial strategy?

Audrey Rust: Both POST and APR want to connect existing public lands through acquisition of adjacent, privately held property, and both have treated local conservation entities as key allies in the task of preserving biodiversity, providing public access, and creating a larger vision of a protected landscape. Their different basic land conservation strategies, however, lead to very different funding patterns and long-term financial impacts.

POST plans to transfer all the land it protects, and most of it will go into public ownership as federal, state, and county parks or to one of the regional open space districts for its management and permanent protection. Agricultural land, protected by strict conservation easements, is sold to local farmers. POST retains the easements along with an easement endowment fund to assure their monitoring and compliance.

The first project POST undertook in the late 1970s resulted in the gift and subsequent sale (at half the appraised value) of a highly visible property adjacent to the town where a high percentage of potential donors lived. The funds resulting from this sale allowed POST to save some additional lands. However, the organization progressed slowly for nearly a decade, with no real financially sustainable land protection strategy in place.

In 1986, driven by an opportunity to purchase a 1,200-acre coastal ranch, POST optioned the property, which required owner-financing, significant fundraising, and later statewide political action. Success led to the creation of a working capital fund that allowed POST to repeat a similar strategy several times, focusing on prominent and ambitious conservation projects. Gaining a reputation for delivering on its promises, POST transitioned to raising funds in a capital campaign for a much larger inventory of property. Having working capital freed POST to focus on what needed to be done, rather than what could be done.

Lincoln institute: What were the key accomplishments and shortfalls of POST’s strategy?

Audrey Rust: POST was able to build working capital and show donors a leveraged return. Success built on success, and today POST operates with a working capital account of more than $125 million. Protected land was never at any risk of being lost due to financial issues. The type of public funds used, coupled with private gifts, provide further assurances.

Each accomplishment has given POST the confidence to move to another level in direct protection, restoration, and collaboration. Sustainable forestry, affirmative easements on farmland, conservation grazing, and exotic species removal are all now a part of its conservation arsenal.

On the other hand, a broad vision of what the future could hold was never well articulated, as POST essentially worked in an incremental fashion. Stirring the imagination of leadership-level entrepreneurial donors, the primary wealth in the Valley, became more difficult as time went on. It was also difficult for the organization to embrace the restoration and management of land being held for later transfer.

As public funds have begun to dry up, public agencies are less likely to take on the obligation of additional land ownership. POST experiences both the expense of holding the property indefinitely and the inability to sell the land to return capital to its account.

Lincoln institute: What has been APR’s basic approach?

Audrey Rust: APR faces a different situation in Montana, where the privately held ranches are far larger than any parcel in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and their owners control additional vast tracks of federally owned leased land. APR intends to hold these private fee lands and leases in perpetuity. Privately raised endowment funds will be required to ensure the management of these lands.

APR wanted to show from the beginning that it could make real progress on its large conservation vision, despite the lack of funds. APR moved quickly to acquire land and the accompanying leases using owner financing. The leadership of the organization felt putting a stake in the ground was the only way to begin to attract the money it would need to acquire the property that would make up the Reserve. Without sufficient fundraising experience or a developed prospect list, the struggle was enormous. Until recently, only minimal funds were held in reserve, making it extremely stressful to meet financial obligations, especially for debt.

Lincoln institute: What are APR’s key accomplishments and ongoing challenges?

Audrey Rust: Persistence and good work are now paying off. Critical advances include the opportunity to acquire fees and associated leases on a 150,000-acre ranch and in 2012 a very important gift from one of the organization’s largest supporters. APR also began building a high-end “safari camp” to open in 2013 that will allow them to bring leadership-level donors to the prairie, build relationships, and deepen their connection to the land.

The organization has a track record, demonstrating its ability to get things done, and can begin management practices to foreshadow future activity. Reintroducing genetically pure bison is a charismatic example. Extraordinary opportunities for acquiring key pieces of land can now be pursued. Without significant working reserves, however, APR staff and leadership are under great stress to meet their financial obligations. This creates a climate of looking for quick delivery on donations rather than developing the kind of leadership gifts the organization needs most for the long haul. As yet, plans are incomplete for assuring the permanent private protection of the acquired lands. Land that carries owner financing or is especially well priced may be purchased, even though its priority for acquisition may not be high. Raising the necessary endowment funds for the ongoing stewardship of the land has been slow.

Lincoln institute: In conclusion, what are key commonalities between these two very different organizations?

Audrey Rust: POST and APR are at different stages in their organizational growth, and their futures are based on their most obvious differences and track records. However, it is possible to identify similar key elements leading to success:

• capable leaders who are committed for the long haul;
• strategy that fits the size of the vision;
• developing funding sources that take years to come to fruition; and
• partnerships with public agencies to leverage the conservation work.

Both organizations continue to face significant challenges in funding their goals. POST has successfully transitioned to new leadership and is pursuing ever larger and more complex conservation initiatives. Its success has dominated the organization for so long that it is difficult for new philanthropists to find something to “invent” and support. It is a very well-run organization, which leaves little room for the new Silicon Valley elite to provide their trademark “we can do it better” involvement. POST needs to do more to identify and attract those very few top-of-the-pyramid donors. This challenge is especially difficult because government participation has virtually ended, and POST’s three largest donors are no longer making grants, in the $20 million to $50 million range, to this type of conservation. Further, it is difficult to point to an endgame, and, without it, the organization will lose urgency and gift support.

APR is new and exciting. The organization has sought a creative partnership with National Geographic, which produced an hour-long video called The American Serengeti, elevating APR’s mission and bringing with it the national prominence APR needs to raise large gifts in the national arena. It is during this time that key leadership donors must become involved. In all nonprofit organizations, funding pyramids are becoming more and more vertical. Campaigns such as this one often depend upon one or two donors to make gifts equal to half or even two-thirds of the total goal. Without these donors, staff members are worn out by raising money, and the cost of fundraising rises rapidly.

I am convinced that the size, scope, and ability to measure the vision held by an organization are key determinants of success. Donors and the public in general are elevated by the idea that we can change our world. Clearly articulating and promoting that vision is instrumental. POST needs to work on its messaging to better articulate its current vision. APR needs to find more venues to effectively communicate its vision and develop a critical mass of supporters.

Conservation leader Audrey Rust, the 2012 Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute, will lecture on “The Peninsula and the Prairie: Regional and Large Landscape Conservation,” at Lincoln House on May 1, 2013, at noon (lunch is free).

Más que cualquier otra variable, el cambio en los valores del suelo a través del tiempo y del espacio brinda una perspectiva importante sobre la evolución de la estructura espacial de una ciudad. Mientras que la venta normal de una propiedad refleja el valor combinado del suelo y los edificios, el valor del suelo solo representa el valor real de una ubicación y sugiere expectativas sobre su futuro. Incluso si una parcela soporta la carga de un edificio anticuado, el precio del suelo refleja el valor actual descontado del flujo de retorno a la inversión que se podría obtener con un uso más intenso y óptimo de la parcela. El aumento rápido del precio del suelo en un área de la ciudad es una indicación clara de que la gente espera una alta demanda en el barrio durante un período de tiempo, lo cual es señal de oportunidades de inversión para los emprendedores inmobiliarios. Los cambios en el valor del suelo también pueden advertir a funcionarios municipales que es necesario efectuar cambios de zonificación e inversiones de infraestructura en una determinada área.

El valor del suelo es también un componente importante en el método de valuación de propiedades por costo, que es uno de los tres métodos utilizados comúnmente (junto con la comparación de ventas y el nivel de ingreso). El método de costo tiene tres componentes principales: (1) el costo de edificar la infraestructura existente como si fuera nueva en el momento de la tasación; (2) la depreciación del edificio a su condición actual; y (3) el precio de la parcela de suelo. Si se suma (1) a (3) y se resta (2), en general se obtiene una buena estimación del valor total de la propiedad. En las transacciones estándar de propiedades, sin embargo, no se pueden separar fácilmente el valor del suelo del valor de las estructuras. Las ventas de suelo vacante, que pueden indicar con mayor claridad el valor de un sitio, son relativamente raras en áreas urbanas grandes y edificadas, y por lo tanto hay pocos estudios existentes de ventas de suelo vacante (ver Ahlfeldt y Wendland 2011; Atack y Margo 1998; Colwell y Munneke 1997; Cunningham 2006). A veces se pueden usar las demoliciones para medir los valores del suelo, ya que cuando el edificio existente se demuele inmediatamente después de una venta, el suelo representa el valor total de la propiedad (McMillen 2006; Dye y McMillen 2007). No obstante, las demoliciones se tienden a concentrar en ciertos barrios de alto valor, y puede ser difícil obtener datos sobre demoliciones.

De todas las ciudades de los EE.UU., Chicago tiene la fortuna de contar con una fuente de datos, el Libro azul de valores del suelo de Chicago (Land Values Blue Book of Chicago) de Olcott, que reporta las estimaciones de los valores del suelo por cada manzana de la ciudad y por manzanas de muchos suburbios del condado de Cook durante la mayor parte del siglo XX. Olcott proporciona datos críticos para el procedimiento de tasación por costo. Después de determinar el costo y depreciación del edificio, el valor total de una propiedad se puede estimar multiplicando el tamaño de la parcela por el valor del suelo proporcionado en la serie del Libro azul. Este artículo se basa en un muestreo de datos de los volúmenes de Olcott (recuadro 1). Incluye una serie de mapas que proporcionan una imagen clara de la evolución espacial de Chicago durante el siglo XX, similar en espíritu al libro clásico Cien años de valores del suelo en Chicago (One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago) (Hoyt 1933).

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Recuadro 1: Fuentes de datos para los valores del suelo en Chicago

El Libro azul de valores del suelo de Chicago (Land Values Blue Book of Chicago) cubre la ciudad y gran parte del condado suburbano de Cook con una serie de 300 mapas, cada uno impreso en una página del libro. A la ciudad propiamente dicha se le dedican 160 mapas individuales con un impresionante nivel de detalle. La mayoría de lotes que dan a la calle tienen un valor que representa el precio por pie cuadrado para un lote estándar de 125 pies de profundidad. También se indica el uso dado al suelo. Los lotes grandes y la mayoría de los suelos industriales tienen precios cotizados por acre (0,4 hectárea), u ocasionalmente por pie cuadrado (0,98 m2, para una profundidad de lote sin especificar. Los datos representan los valores del suelo para cuadrículas de 1/8 x 1/8 de milla (alrededor de 200 x 200 metros), que siguen de cerca la disposición de las calles de Chicago y por lo tanto se asemejan a manzanas urbanas. El conjunto de datos de cada año incluye 43.324 observaciones para toda la ciudad.

El Lincoln Institute of Land Policy ha proporcionado financiamiento para digitalizar los datos contenidos en el Libro azul de Olcott para una serie de años que cubre gran parte del siglo XX: 1913, 1926, 1932, 1939, 1949, 1961, 1965, 1971, 1981 y 1990. Se presenta una descripción más minuciosa del procedimiento en Ahlfeldt et al. (2011). La digitalización de mapas consiste en incorporarlos a un entorno SIG. Se calculan los valores promedio del suelo para cuadrados de 1/8 x 1/8 de milla (alrededor de 200 x 200 metros) superpuestos sobre los mapas. El conjunto completo de datos tiene más de 600.000 puntos para cada uno de los 10 años.

El libro de Olcott se dejó de publicar a comienzos de la década de 1990, y el último año de datos digitalizados es 1990. Para suplementar los registros de Olcott en años recientes, los autores obtuvieron datos de todas las ventas de suelo vacante en la ciudad entre 1980 y 2011. Se geocodificaron exitosamente más de 16.000 ventas, las cuales demuestran el enorme aumento en los precios del suelo durante el período anterior al colapso del mercado inmobiliario al final de 2006. Estos conjuntos combinados de datos brindan una oportunidad única para analizar el cambio de estructura espacial de una ciudad completa durante un período de tiempo prolongado.

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Variación espacial en los valores del suelo

A pesar de su terreno plano, Chicago nunca fue una ciudad verdaderamente monocéntrica. El lago Michigan ha sido siempre una atracción, dado su valor panorámico, su efecto de moderación climática y la serie de parques que lo bordean. El río Chicago también ha tenido una influencia significativa sobre la ubicación de comercios y residencias. El desarrollo al norte del Distrito Comercial Central (Central Business District, o CBD) se demoró porque los puentes sobre el brazo principal del río se tenían que abrir con tanta frecuencia para dejar pasar el tráfico fluvial que el viaje a la zona comercial del Loop (bucle del tren elevado) era impredecible y largo. Los brazos norte y sur del río atrajeron tanto compañías industriales como desarrollos residenciales de bajo precio para los obreros, al tiempo que repelían las viviendas de alto precio diseñadas para los trabajadores del CBD. La ubicación de las calles principales, carreteras y líneas ferroviarias también tuvo un efecto significativo sobre los patrones de desarrollo. Por tanto, existen muchas razones para esperar una variación en la tasa de cambio en los valores del suelo a través de la ciudad.

Los mapas de la figura 1 (página 20) muestran esta variación espacial en los valores del suelo en Chicago a lo largo del tiempo. En 1913, los valores del suelo eran mayores en la gran zona que rodeaba el CBD y también eran bastante altos a lo largo del lago y algunas de las avenidas principales y bulevares que irradiaban de la zona céntrica. En 1939, este patrón era generalmente similar, junto con el crecimiento del lado norte en relación al lado sur de la ciudad. Los valores del suelo eran muy altos a lo largo de la ribera norte del lago, extendiéndose bien hacia adentro en la zona norte. El área del borde de la ciudad al oeste del CBD (el barrio de Austin) también tenía valores del suelo relativamente altos en 1939.

Para 1965, el patrón de valores del suelo había cambiado notablemente. Los valores del suelo muy altos estaban confinados a un área relativamente pequeña del CBD. El área de valor alto del barrio occidental de Austin era mucho más pequeña en 1965 que en 1939, y casi todas las áreas que anteriormente tenían un valor alto habían disminuido de tamaño.

Hacia 1990, sin embargo, la situación había cambiado drásticamente. El área con valores muy altos se extendía mucho más al norte y hacia adentro que antes. Las áreas del lado sur tenían valores del suelo relativamente altos en 1990, particularmente en la parte sur del Loop (cerca del CBD) y Hyde Park (a lo largo del lago Michigan, al sur del CBD).

Después de 1990, el patrón de revitalización continua de la ciudad se basa en un análisis de las ventas actuales de suelo vacante. La expansión del área de alto valor hacia el norte y el oeste del CBD es notable, y el lado sur cercano también gozó de un resurgimiento durante este tiempo.

La figura 2 (página 21) muestra cómo la reciente recesión afectó el crecimiento de los valores del suelo en Chicago cuando se lo expresa en función de la distancia del CBD. Las gráficas muestran el cambio en el valor promedio (logarítmico) del suelo a lo largo del tiempo para circunferencias con centroides a 2, 5, y 10 millas (3,2, 8 y 16 kilómetros) del CBD. En 1913, los valores promedio del suelo eran mucho menores a 10 millas (16 km) del CBD que en los anillos más cercanos al mismo. En la década de 1960, en contraste, había poca diferencia en los valores del suelo a estas distancias. Desde entonces, los valores promedio crecieron mucho más en el anillo a 2 millas (3,2 km) que en ubicaciones más distantes. Durante la Gran Recesión, los valores del suelo disminuyeron rápidamente en el anillo de 2 (3,2 km) millas, menos rápidamente en el anillo de 5 millas (8 km), y no disminuyeron en absoluto en el anillo de 10 millas (16 km). Por lo tanto, las áreas que tuvieron las mayores tasas de apreciación durante el período de crecimiento extendido también tuvieron las mayores tasas de depreciación durante la recesión.

La figura 3 ofrece una perspectiva distinta de la variación espacial de los valores del suelo a lo largo del tiempo. Los tres paneles muestran superficies promediadas de valores del suelo en 1913, 1990 y 2005. Las superficies de 1913 y 1990 se estimaron con los datos de Olcott, mientras que las estimaciones de 2005 se basan en ventas de suelo vacante. En cada uno de los tres años, los valores del suelo son mucho más altos en el CBD que en cualquier otro lado. En 1913, hay una gran cantidad de picos locales de valores del suelo en las intersecciones de las calles principales. Estas zonas eran distritos comerciales relativamente pequeños que atendían a los residentes locales antes de que el uso del automóvil se hiciera habitual. En 1990, el pico de valor del suelo en el CBD está acompañado por una meseta mucho más baja justo al norte, a lo largo de la ribera del lago. En 2005, esta meseta se había ampliado a un área grande que se extiende muy hacia el norte y hacia adentro de la ribera del lago. La región de altos valores del suelo también se ha extendido al sur a lo largo del lago, con un aumento local mucho más al sur en Hyde Park.

Persistencia de patrones espaciales

Los valores históricos del suelo son interesantes no sólo porque revelan cómo un área urbana ha cambiado con el tiempo, sino también porque el pasado sigue ejerciendo una influencia sustancial sobre el presente. Las ciudades no se reconstruyen a partir de cero en cada período. Los edificios están en pie mucho tiempo antes de ser demolidos, y los sitios que eran atractivos en el pasado tienden a ser deseables por mucho tiempo. Una de las características únicas del conjunto de datos de Olcott es que nos permite comparar valores del suelo de 100 años atrás con valores y usos del suelo en la actualidad.

La figura 4 (página 24) muestra la fecha promedio de construcción de los cuadrados de 1/8 x 1/8 de milla (alrededor de 200 x 200 metros). Se puede observar la reciente recentralización de Chicago en la forma de “rosquillas” de las edades de los edificios en torno al CBD. Los edificios más nuevos están cerca del CBD, mientras que los más viejos están en el siguiente anillo externo. Los edificios en la región más distante son los que tienen mayor probabilidad de haber sido construidos entre 1940 y 1970.

La figura 5 (página 24) resume esta relación comparando la media de la fecha de construcción con la distancia al CBD. Los edificios más viejos están en un anillo a solo 5 millas (8 km) del CBD.

Una buena medida de la densidad estructural es la relación entre el área edificada y el tamaño del lote. La teoría económica predice que las densidades estructurales serán altas en lugares donde los valores del suelo son altos. Las estructuras duran un tiempo largo. ¿Qué tan bien pueden los valores pasados predecir la densidad estructural actual? La figura 6 (página 24) compara la densidad estructural de los edificios en los padrones de tasación del condado de Cook en 2003 con los valores del suelo en 1913 y 1990. Este conjunto de datos incluye el área construida de cada estructura residencial pequeña (seis unidades o menos) en Chicago.

La altura de las barras indica las densidades estructurales: Las barras altas tienen relaciones relativamente altas de área construida por tamaño del lote. El color de las barras indica los valores del suelo: Las barras rojas tienen valores relativamente altos del suelo. Por lo tanto, deberíamos esperar una gran cantidad de barras rojas altas y barras verdes bajas. En general, los dos paneles indican una correlación positiva entre densidad estructural y valores del suelo. La correlación es particularmente evidente en el lado norte y en la ribera del lago. La correlación con 1990 es menos clara en los lados sur y oeste. Hay varias elevaciones en la superficie de densidad que no tienen una contraparte de valores altos del suelo. Una explicación de estos resultados, que coinciden con la reorientación de áreas de precios altos hacia el lado norte, es que las densidades relativamente altas en estas áreas son manifestaciones de un pasado en el que estas manzanas eran relativamente más valiosas y había un mayor incentivo para usar el suelo de manera más intensiva. El panel de 1913 de la figura 6 sugiere que los valores del suelo tienen en realidad mayor correlación con las densidades de edificios en 2003 que los valores de 1990. La causa de esta aparente anomalía se debe a que la densidad de edificios es un reflejo de las condiciones económicas en el momento de su construcción, y la mayoría de los edificios en esa parte de la ciudad fueron construidos hace mucho tiempo. El pasado sigue ejerciendo una influencia importante sobre el presente.

Conclusión

Los datos de Olcott proporcionan una imagen clara de los cambios en la estructura espacial de Chicago durante la mayor parte del siglo XX. Chicago, que nunca fue una ciudad monocéntrica, comenzó el siglo con valores del suelo muy altos en el CBD, a lo largo del lago y junto a las avenidas y bulevares principales que irradiaban del centro. Los valores también fueron altos en áreas de comercios minoristas ubicadas en las intersecciones de las calles principales. Para 1939, el lado norte de Chicago ya había comenzado a mostrar su hegemonía económica. Después, en la década de 1960, la ciudad sufrió un largo período de decadencia en el cual el CBD era la única concentración importante de valores altos del suelo. Desde entonces, la ciudad ha experimentado un resurgimiento notable. Los valores altos del suelo ya se extienden a casi todo el lado norte, y han repuntado en partes del lado sur. Nuestro análisis también muestra el importante papel del pasado en la estructura espacial actual de la ciudad. Una consecuencia de esta persistencia es que los valores del suelo de hace un siglo predicen mejor la densidad del inventario de viviendas actual que los valores presentes.

Agradecimientos

Los autores agradecen al Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelos su generoso financiamiento y su apoyo. Asimismo agradecen al Centro de Estudios Metropolitanos de TU-Berlin por alojar al equipo de investigadores durante el proyecto. Quieren dar las gracias a Kristoffer Moeller and Sevrin Weights por su importante contribución en el diseño y coordinación de la recopilación del conjunto de datos. Philip Boos, Aline Delatte, Nuria-Maria Hoyer Sepulvedra, Devika Kakkar, Rene Kreichauf, Maike Rackwitz, Lea Siebert, Stefan Tornack y Tzvetelina Tzvetkova brindaron una ayuda inestimable en investigación.

Sobre los autores

Gabriel M. Ahlveldt es profesor asociado de la Escuela de Economía y Ciencias Políticas de Londres (LSE) en el Departamento de Geografía y Medio Ambiente, y del Centro de Investigaciones Económicas Espaciales (SERC).

Daniel P. McMillen es profesor del Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana-Champaign.

Recursos

Ahlfeldt, Gabriel M., Kristoffer Moeller, Sevrin Waights y Nicolai Wendland. 2011. “One Hundred Years of Land Value: Data Documentation.” Centre for Metropolitan Studies, TU Berlin.

Ahlfeldt, Gabriel M. y Nicolai Wendland. 2011. “Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility: The Impact of the Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Berlin 1890–1936.” Regional Science and Urban Economics 41: 77–88.

Atack, J.y R. A. Margo. 1998. “Location, Location, Location! The Price Gradient for Vacant Urban Land: New York, 1835 to 1900.” Journal of Real Estate Finance & Economics 16(2) 151–172.

Colwell, Peter F. y Henry J. Munneke. 1997. “The Structure of Urban Land Prices.” Journal of Urban Economics 41: 321–336.

Cunningham, Christopher R. 2006. “House Price Uncertainty, Timing of Development, and Vacant Land Prices: Evidence for Real Options in Seattle.” Journal of Urban Economics 59: 1–31.

Dye, Richard F.y Daniel P. McMillen. 2007. “Teardowns and Land Values in the Chicago Metropolitan Area.” Journal of Urban Economics 61: 45–64.

Hoyt, Homer. 1933. One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McMillen, Daniel P. 2006. “Teardowns: Costs, Benefits, and Public Policy.” Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 18(3): 2–7.

As interest in urban living grows, the cost of residential real estate in many hot markets is skyrocketing. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS 2015), in 2014 rental vacancy rates hit their lowest point in two decades; rents rose in 91 out of 93 metropolitan areas studied; and the consumer price index for contract rents climbed at double the rate of inflation—and 10 percent or more at the top end, in Denver, San Jose, Honolulu, and San Francisco. Despite some interruption from the mortgage crisis, asking prices for homes for sale have continued to rise as well, often beyond the reach of potential home buyers (Olick 2014); in Washington, DC, the median home value nearly tripled from 2000 to 2013 (Oh et al. 2015). As housing activists look for effective tools to prevent displacement of lower-income families from gentrifying neighborhoods and create inclusive communities, many are turning to community land trusts (box 1) as a way to help build the nation’s stock of permanently affordable housing.

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Box 1: The CLT Model

Under the CLT model, a community-controlled organization retains ownership of a plot of land and sells or rents the housing on that land to lower-income households. In exchange for below-market prices, purchasers agree to resale restrictions that keep the homes affordable to subsequent buyers while also allowing owners to build some equity. The CLT also prepares home buyers to purchase property, supports them through financial challenges, and manages resales and rental units.

CLTs thus bring sustainable home ownership within the reach of more families, supporting residents who want to commit to their neighborhoods for the long term. In gentrifying areas, they provide an effective way for lower-income families to retain a stake in the neighborhood because they take a single initial subsidy (which could come from a variety of sources, often public programs such as the HOME Investment Partnerships Program or Community Development Block Grants) and attach it to the building, keeping the units affordable over time without new influxes of public money. In weak housing markets, they are beneficial as well (Shelterforce 2012), providing the financial stewardship that ensures fewer foreclosures, better upkeep, and stable occupancy. In 2009, at the height of the foreclosure crisis, Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) loans were 8.2 times more likely to be in the foreclosure process than CLT loans, despite the fact that CLT loans were uniformly made to low-income households (Thaden, Rosenberg 2010), and MBA loans included all income brackets. Of the very few CLT homes that did complete foreclosure, none were lost from the CLT’s portfolio.

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Much like community development corporations (CDCs), many CLTs grew from grassroots neighborhood organizations. Traditional community organizing (distinct from broader “resident outreach”) creates a base of residents who are empowered to determine for themselves what they need and mobilize to get it; as a united front, these individuals are better able to counter-balance corporate or governmental opponents and other forms of institutional power. Strategic collaboration and strength in numbers are essential to the successful formation of a CLT. But the skills required to organize politically around local concerns are very different from the skills required to manage real estate. While both sets of skills are required to implement and sustain a CLT, growing these core competencies under the same roof might hamper the neighborhood-based organization’s ability to pursue or achieve its core founding mission.

How have community organizations that created CLTs navigated the challenge of building two seemingly incompatible skill sets? We examined the experience of five established CLTs in locations across the country to see how they addressed this challenge and how their focus evolved as a result. From Boston to Los Angeles, community organizers faced a range of conditions, from high-vacancy neighborhoods with almost no housing market to booming areas where displacement was the top concern. Yet all five organizations had remarkably similar reasons for starting a community land trust: each CLT director spoke of wanting community control of land to prevent residents from either losing a home or being unable to afford one. Even those CLTs that began in weak housing markets were located near downtowns, university districts, or other popular areas, and recognized the potential for displacement as conditions in the neighborhoods improved. All agreed that a clear community vision is essential to the success of a CLT, but some groups take direct responsibility for creating and implementing that vision, while others are devoted to housing work on behalf of a parent organization charged with shepherding the larger vision. Approaches to organizing and housing development varied as well, but all agreed that these two activities can be a difficult mix.

Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston, MA

The oldest organization in our study, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), formed in a cold market in the 1980s to fight illegal dumping on broad swaths of vacant land left behind by a wave of arson. The city was proposing a master plan for the area without seeking input from residents, and community members responded by organizing DSNI to assert the community’s right to direct decisions about land use within its boundaries. They won that right and through DSNI decided that a CLT was the best tool to help the organization implement the community’s vision. “A lot of times, groups want to jump into creating a CLT thinking it will magically solve a neighborhood’s problems,” says Harry Smith, director of DSNI’s CLT, Dudley Neighbors Inc. (DNI). “But first we say: ‘Have you written down a vision of development in your community, and can you say how a CLT fits into that?’”

Founded in 1984, DNI is an independent organization, but it maintains close ties to its parent organization. The two groups share staff, and DSNI appoints a majority of the CLT’s board. The CLT is responsible only for providing affordable housing and community control of land, freeing DSNI to make organizing and community planning its main priority. Neither DSNI nor DNI carry out development directly, but instead partner with local affordable housing developers.

Because of its long history and established relationships, DSNI engages in less confrontational organizing than it did in its earliest days. But it doesn’t shy away from it if necessary. In fact, Smith reports that maintaining a CLT can be a unique political strength. When DSNI organizes around the fate of a particular parcel of land, “Having a land trust gives us an extra level of impact,” he says.

Sawmill Community Land Trust, Albuquerque, NM

Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sawmill CLT was born in 1996 when, after a decade of community organizing, low-income residents banded together to fight a nearby factory that polluted their air and threatened their health. They wanted to assert control over future use of the space. After leaders attended a conference to learn more about CLTs, they held a series of community meetings on the topic. Though some residents aired concerns about the lack of land ownership in the CLT model, a community elder reminded them that they didn’t truly have ownership of their property in any case, either because they were renting or were ill-equipped to control what happened on their land. Former executive director Wade Patterson says, “The fact that the work was specifically geared toward controlling housing costs assuaged concerns about gentrification and displacement. The fact that we got a house instead of another factory was something we couldn’t argue with.”

Sawmill CLT was created as a standalone organization dedicated to housing development, stewardship, and property management. It’s one of the largest CLTs in the country, with 34 acres, which includes rental, ownership, and senior housing. Recently, it won an RFP issued by the city of Albuquerque to revitalize an old motel in a new neighborhood in the city, and the CLT is figuring out how to enter the community respectfully from outside.

Albuquerque’s Sawmill-area neighborhood associations, including the Sawmill Advisory Council, which launched the CLT, focus on “community building” through cultural events, says Patterson. The CLT supports neighborhood organizing by offering meeting space in one of its buildings and other support. Patterson says, “Our goal isn’t to lead but to be behind them.”

San Francisco Community Land Trust, San Francisco, CA

SFCLT was launched in 2003, at a time when the city was already one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, and low-income residents were concerned about soaring rents and illegal evictions for condo conversions. Housing organizers were seeking a model that could prevent evictions and give lower-income residents more control over their living situations.

The CLT is a standalone entity, but it maintains a close relationship with the housing organizers who founded it. When its partner groups organize to prevent evictions or condo conversions in an at-risk building (generally small apartment buildings), SFCLT steps in as a preservation purchaser and converts them to co-ops on CLT-owned land. SFCLT has in-house real estate expertise, but does not develop new buildings, and it contracts out any needed rehabilitation. It handles the financial aspects of the acquisition and the conversion, the stewardship of the land, and the training and support that helped residents form a co-op board and carry out co-op governance. “Housing groups refer everyone to us; we’re the only housing organization that can help stabilize a multi-unit apartment building by buying it,” says director Tracy Parent. SFCLT organizes its member base to support the broader issues that its coalition partners push for, but it doesn’t “initiate organizing” on issues, according to Parent.

T.R.U.S.T. South LA, Los Angeles, CA

When T.R.U.S.T. South LA was formed in 2005, its target neighborhoods were filled with vacant lots and deteriorated housing, while surrounding areas were under increasing development pressures. While the founders—Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, Strategic Actions of a Just Economy, and Abode Communities—originally envisioned the CLT as primarily a housing tool, it has taken on a broader role in implementing a community vision. “Originally, we formed as a land acquisition group. Then our members wanted to organize,” says executive director Sandra McNeill. The CLT has, for example, organized against a slumlord who was trying to evict residents from a building he had strategically let deteriorate in order to cash in on expiring section 8 affordability restrictions. It has also organized to raise funding for transportation and green space improvements in its neighborhood and participated in coalitions to support broader citywide policies such as increased funding for affordable housing.

The group now describes itself as “a community-based initiative to stabilize the neighborhoods south of downtown Los Angeles.” T.R.U.S.T. South LA is a standalone organization that considers itself part of the development team on housing projects, partnering with others to purchase, finance, and construct or rehabilitate housing.

Although T.R.U.S.T. South LA does a lot of organizing, nearly all of its policy work is conducted in collaboration with other groups, including its founding partners. “Affordable housing developers generally aren’t risk takers,” says McNeill. “They may be involved in political work to ensure that funding streams are in place for affordable housing, but that’s as far as most of them go.”

Community Justice Land Trust, Philadelphia, PA

Community Justice Land Trust in Philadelphia formed in Northeast Philadelphia in 2010 amid combined cold and hot market challenges. Although the neighborhood suffered from a large number of vacant and abandoned properties, it was surrounded on all sides by booming markets, and those rising prices and development pressures seemed likely to spread. The Women’s Community Revitalization Project (WCRP), along with a coalition of local civic organizations, held dozens of public meetings to help the community members understand what forming a CLT would mean and to explore their concerns about resale restrictions. Attendees voted in favor.

Community Justice CLT is set up as a program of WCRP, which has its own in-house development and organizing expertise, including an entire department devoted to organizing.

But as WCRP’s executive director Nora Lichtash warns, “Sometimes you lose relationships when you’re organizing. . . . Sometimes people don’t like to be pushed to do the right thing.” Indeed, WCRP apparently pressured its local council person enough on certain issues that she declined to give the CLT vacant land it had hoped to secure for its first development. In the end, however, the council person helped the group establish a citywide land bank (Feldstein 2013–14), which furthers some of the same goals as the land trust.

Despite potential tensions like these, Lichtash believes that organizing and CLT functions should stay closely related. “It’s important to remember that organizing and building affordable housing fit together,” she says. “Your funders think you should be doing one or the other, but it’s not good for CLTs to be separated from organizing. You’re building your capacity for present and future work. When you organize, you’re respected because you have people power.”

To Develop or Not to Develop: A Big Decision

Affordable housing development is a complicated and expensive business that no community organization should take lightly if it is thinking about starting a CLT. As DNI’s Smith says, “If you do development work, it will take time away from organizing, which is cumulative. It takes time and a lot of sacrifice to form a truly representative, neighborhood-based organization. If you cut corners, you risk jeopardizing a lot of the power you’ve built up over the years.”

The Boston experience, for example, begins with a cautionary tale. DSNI stepped in when the original developer for the CLT’s first project backed out of the deal. It was “traumatic” for staff and board, says Smith. “It took so much time. It distracted DSNI from its core functions.”

The idea of controlling development resources and accessing developer fees can be seductive to grassroots groups, says WCRP’s Lichtash. But they should proceed with extreme care. “Becoming a developer can muddy the waters,” she says. “You have to focus on every detail in million-dollar deals. It takes you away from educational work.”

“Real estate work is very hard, speculative,” Lichtash continues. “You think you’re getting one thing and instead you get another. I tell people to partner for a long time first. It’s hard to keep both tenants and funding sources happy.”

Patterson of Sawmill agrees and adds that it’s particularly difficult “to meet all the deadlines and reporting requirements on funding [for development]. I’m always shocked by the amount of administrative overhead that’s required.” He also advises that if you can’t make the numbers work, “it’s important to know you can pull out of a project if needed.”

T.R.U.S.T. South LA’s McNeill says, “Development definitely has its own language. It’s complex stuff. Nonprofits that do it have large budgets and tend to have sizable staffs. I respect the skill it takes to pull off these deals. It’s a very different skillset from what we do.”

Another consideration is that affordable housing development is not an easy industry to break into these days. In the current funding environment, many of the subsidies that CLTs have traditionally used to develop and steward their units are being slashed, and mortgages for potential CLT home buyers are harder to find. McNeill says, “We’ve gone through enormous shifts in the housing industry. The reality is that there isn’t an opening now for new organizations to get into the development business. It’s definitely not the time.”

Even the ongoing stewardship of a CLT requires a different kind of relationship with residents than an organizer would have. “Developer fees and rent collection could impact the relationship with residents and the power dynamic,” says Smith of DNI. “You’re responsible to leaseholders and non-leaseholders in your community, so there are tensions,” according to Lichtash of WCRP. And as SFCLT’s Parent comments, “Organizers often paint issues as clear moral choices,” but when you are involved as a property manager, “there are nuances.”

Eyes on the Prize

Once a community group has determined that a CLT is an appropriate tool for keeping housing affordable to local residents, the next questions should be: How will the roles be divided up? Who is taking the lead on implementing the broader vision? Is there an organization already in place that’s committed and able to take that on, or does one need to be created? Are there groups serving the community that already have development expertise and access to funding that could partner with a CLT or even fold one into their work? How can the new CLT partner with and support the community’s organizing work rather than distract from it?

Many newer CLTs are following the lead of groups like DSNI and T.R.U.S.T. South LA by setting up a separate organization to manage the stewardship and land ownership functions, and then drawing on the capacity of existing affordable housing developers through partnerships. While every locality is different, this approach seems like a wise place for groups to start, especially if they want to preserve their energy for the important work they started with: fighting for vibrant, equitable communities.

Miriam Axel-Lute is the editor of Shelterforce, a magazine devoted to the field of community development. She has written extensively on both organizing and community land trusts.

Dana Hawkins-Simons is an award-winning journalist who has published groundbreaking investigations in U.S. News & World Report. She is also the former director of the Opportunity Housing Initiative at the National Housing Institute.

References

Beckwith, Dave, with Cristina Lopez. 1997. “Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots.” http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers97/beckwith.htm

Feldstein, Jill. 2013/14. “Winning a Land Bank We Can Trust.” Shelterforce. Fall/Winter 2013/14. www.shelterforce.org/article/3910/winning_a_land_bank_we_can_trust2/

Horwitz, Staci. 2011. “It’s All About Choice.” Shelterforce. www.shelterforce.org/article/2313/its_all_about_choice/

Joint Center for Housing Studies. 2015. State of the Nation’s Housing 2015. Harvard University. www.jchs.harvard.edu/research/state_nations_housing

Oh, Seunghoon, Josh Silver, Annelise Osterberg, and Jaclyn Tules. 2015. Does Nonprofit Housing Development Preserve Neighborhood Diversity? An Investigation into the Interaction Between Affordable Housing Development and Neighborhood Change. Manna, Inc. www.mannadc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Final_Neighborhood_Impact_Analysis_7_1.pdf

Olick, Diana. 2014. “Housing Still Too Expensive Despite Positive Signs.” CNBC.com, July 10. www.cnbc.com/2014/07/10/housing-still-too-expensive-despite-positive-signs.html

Shelterforce. 2012. “What’s the Point of Shared-Equity Homeownership in Weak Market Areas?” Shelterforce. www.shelterforce.org/images/uploads/theanswer171-2.pdf

Schutz, Aaron and Marie G. Sandy. 2011. “What Isn’t Community Organizing.” In Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organizing, London: Palgrave McMillan. pp. 31–44.

Thaden, Emily and Greg Rosenberg. 2010. “Outperforming the Market: Delinquency and Foreclosure Rates in Community Land Trusts.” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1846_1154_LLA10102%20Foreclosure%20Rates.pdf

In a report titled A Rise in Downtown Living, the Brookings Institution and the Fannie Mae Foundation (1998) highlighted an emerging land use movement in 24 U.S. cities. The release of the 2000 U.S. Census data verified the progress in those cities in another brief, Downtown Rebound (Sohmer and Lang 2001). While these publications alerted the nation to a possible trend, they did have some limitations, which inspired Eugenie Birch’s follow-up study, A Rise in Downtown Living: A Deeper Look, funded by Lincoln Institute, the University of Pennsylvania and the Fannie Mae Foundation.

This study, initiated in summer 1999, employs census data analysis, survey research, personal interviews and field visits to the sample cities. Birch draws on a larger and more representative sample of 45 cities, including 37 percent of the nation’s 100 most populous cities selected for balanced regional distribution, and of these 100 percent of the top 10 and 62 percent of the top 50. The sample includes 19 percent of the 243 cities having a population of 100,000 or more. Birch defined each city’s downtown by census tracts to create a baseline for mapping and collected data on nine population and housing factors for the downtowns and their cities and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) over three decades. Birch administered two mail surveys, in 1999 and 2001, of city officials and business improvement district leaders to identify their respective roles in encouraging downtown housing, and she is currently making site visits to all 45 cities to verify the census data and survey results.

In this article, Birch summarizes seven key findings of her research, which were also presented at a Lincoln Institute lecture in March 2002 and reported in the APA Journal (Birch 2002).

The Definition of Downtown

Although most people think they understand what downtown is, there is no single socioeconomic meaning or geographical definition for the term. While U.S. downtowns share several common characteristics (a central business district at the core, access to substantial transportation networks, a supply of high-density buildings, expensive land), they differ dramatically in their age, size, functions, contents and character. Furthermore, downtowns are in a state of flux as their boundaries and contents are changing. Tracking downtown boundaries over time reveals that in almost all the cities in the sample, the downtowns of today are remarkably different in size (measured in the number of census tracts included) than they were 20 years ago. Downtowns that are incorporating residences are also attracting more community-serving facilities, such as supermarkets or cineplexes that used to be in neighborhoods. Maps of the several downtowns, created as part of this study, illustrate the size variations.

Residential Populations by the Numbers

The rates of increase in downtown residential populations vary enormously among cities. While downtown growth rates are impressive, numerical counts for MSAs still overshadow those of downtowns. Measuring the growth against basic benchmarks (1970 population levels for the defined downtowns and comparative growth rates with city and MSA) reveals just how fragile this movement is. For example, only 38 percent of the sample cities had more downtown residents in 2000 than in 1970. Only one-third had a downtown population growth rate between 1970 and 2000 that was greater than that of their cities. For the same period, 42 percent of the sample showed a negative downtown growth rate even when their cities had positive numbers. Finally, only seven cities (Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, Norfolk, San Francisco and Seattle) had downtown growth rates that exceeded those of their MSAs in the entire 30-year period.

Looking at the data decade-by-decade tells a different story. Not surprisingly, downtown population declined most severely in the 1970s, when 89 percent of the sample showed losses that ranged from 2.4 percent (Des Moines) to 60 percent (Orlando). In contrast, by the 1990s more than three-quarters (78 percent) of the sample posted increases. However, only four cities (Los Angeles, New York, San Diego and Seattle) had gains in all three decades. Comparing city and MSA data shows similar nuances.

Downtowns also vary in the amount and level of residential development. In 2000 for example, 24 percent of the sample cities had 20,000 or more downtown residents, while 20 percent had fewer than 5,000, and a great deal of diversity exists within the categories. Denver’s downtowners number just over 4,200, but most observers perceive the city’s record in attracting residents as a stand-out success, while Cincinnati, with about 3,200 downtown residents, is struggling to maintain a critical mass. At the other end of the scale, Chicago’s 73,000 and Philadelphia’s 78,000 downtowners are integrated into their larger metropolises.

Differences in the proportion of a city’s population that lives downtown are also striking. For example, Boston and Philadelphia have roughly equal downtown populations, but Boston’s comprises 14 percent of the total while Philadelphia’s is only 5 percent. Finally, a simple numerical listing of the sample downtowns is misleading. Downtown population growth has occurred at varying rates with some cities experiencing the phenomenon for a longer time than others. This may account for the greater success of some cities. Also, given the varying geographical size of the different downtowns, density measures as well as demographic analysis should be added to any assessment in order to gauge the potential impact (economic, political, social) of new residents.

Approaches to Creating Downtown Housing

Over the past decade, policy makers and investors have relied on six types of approaches to create downtown housing, and they often blend more than one of these:

• fostering adaptive reuse of office buildings, warehouses, factories and stores;
• building on “found” land such as a reclaimed waterfronts or remediated brownfields sites;
• redeveloping public housing through HOPE VI;
• constructing residentially driven, high-density, mixed-use projects;
• targeting niche markets such as senior or student housing; and
• using historic preservation to forge a special identity.

To accomplish these ends, cities have engaged in creative financing, leveraging public funds, tax credits, gap financing pools and other tools at their disposal. Philadelphia, Boston and Lower Manhattan present examples of the office conversion trend, while Atlanta, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Cleveland have employed warehouse store adaptive reuse. Charlotte represents a combination of HOPE VI, new construction and historic preservation. The found-land approach is seen in Milwaukee with its riverfront redevelopment (including brownfields remediation), Cincinnati with its expressway diversion/riverfront development, Des Moines with its construction of a new downtown neighborhood, and New York at Battery Park City. Chicago is the king of mixed-use new construction. Columbus (Georgia), Lexington and Chattanooga have fostered historic districting as a means to protect older, downtown residential neighborhoods.

Deep Roots of Success

Today’s growth in downtown living is the fruit of more than five decades of sustained attention to downtown revitalization. It has come about because cities have steadily improved their environments through downtown planning and additions of new elements to reinvent their old central business districts. In so doing, they have transformed their downtowns into new, hip places, thus making them competitive and attractive for housing. Although specific municipal policies such as favorable tax treatment, zoning amendments and infrastructure investments have, without doubt, flamed the private market activities in downtown housing, public investment in large-scale projects dating from the mid-1950s to the present have helped create a sympathetic climate for this investment. Preliminary evidence shows a strong relationship between investor choices and the presence of new downtown amenities. For example, developers in Los Angeles, Denver, Baltimore, Detroit and Memphis cite the presence of stadiums or sports arenas as important factors in their location decisions.

Demographic Characteristics of Downtowners

Downtowners are more affluent, more highly educated and more white than the city dwellers overall, but more diverse than those in the MSA. Singles, empty-nesters, gays, and childless or small households are more highly represented in downtowns than in MSAs. Families with children are present but not dominant. Other submarkets are students and the elderly. In some cities where the housing market is tight, notably Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco, low- and moderate-income groups are reporting difficulty in finding space for affordable housing. In other cities like Charlotte that have an excess of downtown land, much of it devoted to parking lots, the issue is not space but cost. In these contexts, questions arise as to what resources should be devoted to high-rent downtown units.

Private Development Efforts

Promoting downtown housing has emerged as a central strategy of private downtown groups, mainly business improvement district (BIDs), working with municipal government, often city planning and/or economic development departments. In 59 percent of the sample, BIDS or other privately sponsored organizations have engaged in pro-housing campaigns. As membership organizations their internal needs drive the agenda, so the amount and nature of their efforts vary widely.

Contribution to Citywide Growth

Downtown growth has contributed to the numeric changes in citywide populations in many cities. While the percentage contribution to overall municipal growth is often quite small, in 53 percent of the sample cities the downtown numerical contribution is a significant portion of the total, and in another 22 percent of the sample cities the downtown portion has offset losses in other parts of the city. In other words, without the downtown population growth, 60 percent of the sample would be worse off. In Boston, for example, downtowners constituted 25 percent of the increased number of people living in the city, while in Pittsburgh the additional downtowners reduced the city’s population loss by only one percentage point.

Conclusions

Reviewing these seven findings reveals a few themes. Downtowns are ever-changing places. Their functions, their boundaries and their very characters have been evolving in the postwar period. They are like complicated jigsaw puzzles with players (urban leaders) fitting the pieces together slowly. Just as assemblers first frame a puzzle and then fill in the center, city leaders have provided infrastructure outlines—streets or street improvements, schools, redeveloped river edges, improved open space—and now are adding other parts. Downtown living is one of these. In many places it has fit very well, especially in the past ten years. In a few cases, new downtown residents contribute significantly to the numerical growth of their city’s population. Just as certainly, many downtowns have not really kept up with their MSAs, and a majority of cities have yet to recover their 1970 populations. Nonetheless, having formerly vacant and/or abandoned buildings occupied (and eventually paying taxes) and having more (and more diverse) people on the streets night and day, weekday and weekend, are positive factors for urban life.

Making sense of this housing phenomenon requires not only placing it in the context of contemporary metropolitan development but also making it part of an evaluation of past urban redevelopment programs. Downtown living is not a silver bullet for curing urban ills but one element of an ongoing planning and investment effort for a part of the city.

Public/private partnerships have been essential in achieving changes in downtown living. The existence of productive interplay between focused interest groups, especially the growing number of business improvement district leaders, and public planning and economic development units has resulted in bold, imaginative, creative and thoughtful approaches to creating housing opportunities.

The findings and themes in this research give rise to other questions related to individual downtowns. These include an evaluation of the costs and benefits of attracting different types of downtowners and an assessment of the reasons why some places have been more successful than others in gaining the populations. This information that would be useful, for example, for policy makers in cities having less developed downtowns who first must decide whether a downtown living approach is appropriate for their cities and, second, must determine whether supportive incentives or complementary activities are needed. Other questions revolve around how to spread downtown progress to nearby neighborhoods without provoking displacement or unwanted gentrification and how to resolve the inevitable political disputes that will arise with the newcomers.

All in all, the rise in downtown living is as complex and layered as any urban issue. While widely reported in the popular press, it deserves a balanced, scholarly appraisal. This study raises important planning and development issues that still need attention: for example, information on the critical mass of residents required to make a difference in downtown life, the relationship between downtown housing units and employment, and the number of households needed to support community-serving functions. All of these issues lead to questions of balancing appropriate density for new development and quantity for adaptive reuse with other downtown functions like office, parking, retail and entertainment. No one really knows the proper composition of a balanced downtown.

Eugenie Ladner Birch is professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

References

Birch, Eugenie Ladner. 2002. Having a Longer View on Downtown Living. Journal of the American Planning Association 68 (1):5-21.

Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and Fannie Mae Foundation. 1998. A Rise in Downtown Living. Washington, DC.

Sohmer, R.R., and Lang, R.E. 2001. Downtown Rebound (FMF Census Note 03, May). Washington, DC: Fannie Mae Foundation and Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Una versión más actualizada de este artículo está disponible como parte del capítulo 1 del libro Perspectivas urbanas: Temas críticos en políticas de suelo de América Latina.

Si bien se le conoce como una región de gran diversidad, América Latina también se caracteriza por una serie de herencias comunes que afectan la tierra de manera directa o indirecta. Entre dichas herencias figuran el proverbial patrimonialismo, basado en una estructura de propiedad del suelo que otorga inversiones y servicios públicos según las influencias políticas que haya detrás; asimismo, administraciones centrales fuertes con una débil responsabilidad fiscal en el ámbito local; y una tradición de códigos elitistas y reglamentos rígidos ¾incluso anacrónicos¾ referentes a los temas vinculados al uso del suelo. La planificación urbana, sesgada hacia el diseño físico, ha tendido a concentrarse en la ciudad “legal” al mismo tiempo que ha descuidado a la “real”. Las inversiones en el ambiente construido, en un proceso de rápida expansión, gozan de relativa autonomía del proceso de industrialización. En un ambiente caracterizado por mercados de capital débiles y por una alta (y a menudo crónica) inflación, la tierra frecuentemente asume el papel de un mecanismo de capitalización o de un sustituto de la falta de seguridad social.

Tendencias regionales

En América Latina, los mercados de suelos urbanos se destacan por la magnitud y persistencia de actividades ilegales, irregulares, informales o clandestinas relacionadas con el acceso y ocupación de la tierra, todas ellas derivadas principalmente de la escasez de tierras urbanizadas costeables. Esta escasez desempeña un papel importante en la cultura social latinoamericana, dado que el acceso al suelo es frecuentemente una condición tácita para obtener sentido de ciudadanía y movilidad social.

Quizás más importantes son una serie de tendencias multifacéticas que están diseminándose a paso firme por todo el continente y abriendo nuevas oportunidades a la política de tierras urbanas. Podemos comenzar citando la redemocratización de muchos países latinoamericanos tras largos períodos de regímenes autoritarios o militares, con numerosas implicaciones en la política del suelo. Hoy en día existe una intensificada conciencia general sobre la responsabilidad de los funcionarios por el manejo del suelo urbano u otros aspectos de la administración pública, así como también se observa el reconocimiento público de nuevos agentes sociales como lo son las organizaciones no gubernamentales (NGO). Nuevas formas de participación comunitaria y acción civil han surgido en respuesta a la necesidad de legitimar alternativas al acceso a la tierra para la población urbana de bajos recursos, alternativas que incluyen innovadores abordajes de propiedades en cooperativa, y atención a asuntos de género en la regularización de tierras de ocupación ilegal.

Una segunda y relacionada tendencia refleja la necesidad de poner en práctica reformas institucionales y constitucionales acompañadas de nuevas definiciones del papel del Estado. Este proceso ha tenido una gran variedad de manifestaciones, a saber:

• una descentralización fiscal que ha creado presión para generar nuevas fuentes de ingreso en el ámbito local, y oportunidades para mejorar la recaudación de los impuestos inmobiliarios;
• una descentralización política y administrativa que ha aumentado el poder y la autonomía de las autoridades locales e intermedias. Este proceso ha creado nuevas y numerosas responsabilidades asociadas a la regulación del mercado de la tierra para la provisión de servicios y viviendas de interés social;
• nuevos instrumentos para la intervención normativa y fiscal, tales como herramientas de movilización de los incrementos en el valor de la tierra (plusvalías) para beneficio de la comunidad;
• la privatización o eliminación de restricciones estatutarias referentes a la cesión de terrenos que antiguamente pertenecieron al Estado, lo cual ha aumentado las oportunidades de utilizar (o volver a utilizar) tierras vacantes existentes;
• nuevos modos de provisión de servicios, en parte originados por la privatización generalizada de las compañías de servicios públicos, con efectos directos sobre el proceso de uso del suelo y la redefinición de los patrones de segregación espacial;
• el afloramiento de sociedades públicas o privadas en el desarrollo urbano, conducente a una variedad de nuevas clases de subcentros urbanos.

La tercera tendencia importante de las décadas recientes ha sido una reestructuración macroeconómica que ha llevado a estabilizar los tradicionales ¾y frecuentemente crónicos¾ problemas de inflación y que ha influido en la evolución de los precios de la tierra. América Latina también ha experimentado tendencias más acentuadas hacia la globalización, la apertura de economías nacionales y los cambios tecnológicos. Entre otros efectos, estas tendencias han generado una mayor competencia entre las ciudades para atraer inversiones privadas, mediante mecanismos que van desde el uso de planificación estratégica como un dispositivo de mercadeo de la ciudad, hasta el ofrecimiento de incentivos locales a través de las denominadas “guerras fiscales”. Todo este movimiento ha afectado profundamente la base económica de las ciudades y la naturaleza y escala de la pobreza urbana. Igualmente afectados se encuentran los tipos de intervenciones urbanas (que abarcan desde proyectos de rehabilitación a gran escala de áreas abandonadas o en malas condiciones, hasta los nuevos proyectos inmobiliarios de uso mixto en las áreas de bordes urbanos) que están redefiniendo la forma urbana, la dinámica de las ciudades, y los patrones de segregación espacial y social.

Establecimiento de una presencia

Desde 1993, el Instituto Lincoln ha hecho un esfuerzo coordinado para participar activamente en el debate sobre las políticas del suelo y de tributación en América Latina. Adoptamos un abordaje multinacional para trabajar dondequiera que existan asuntos contemplados en las áreas de estudio de nuestros programas, buscar oportunidades para el fortalecimiento de recursos en el ámbito local, o desarrollar iniciativas con potencial de diseminación o replicación en otros países. Esta estrategia nos permite estar presentes en regiones donde se vislumbren cambios significativos en la política o donde se estén discutiendo asuntos importantes relacionados con el tema del suelo.

El Instituto Lincoln ha demostrado inequívocamente su capacidad para desempeñar tres funciones importantes conducentes a su mandato educativo: promover la fertilización cruzada de ideas; convocar y moderar debates entre diferentes grupos de interés; y ofrecer liderazgo intelectual. En todos nuestros programas enfatizamos la diseminación de informaciones valiosas basadas principalmente en estudios de caso que puedan utilizarse para nutrir intercambios intrarregionales y para resolver problemas. Este énfasis en la fertilización cruzada de ideas mediante un diálogo horizontal es particularmente importante dado el centralismo de la administración pública en América Latina y la predominancia de canales de comunicación verticales.

El reconocimiento y la credibilidad internacional que goza el Instituto Lincoln como una respetada institución no partidista que se dedica al estudio de la política del suelo y la tributación a la propiedad, nos coloca en una posición única para facilitar discusiones complejas y políticamente delicadas entre diversos grupos de interés, particularmente funcionarios de diferentes niveles administrativos y representantes del sector comercial, de organizaciones no gubernamentales y de la comunidad política en general.

Igualmente importante es el papel del Instituto en ofrecer un liderazgo intelectual para llenar el vacío existente entre los conocimientos teóricos más avanzados y las necesidades más prácticas e inmediatas de los funcionarios que tratan directamente con la puesta en práctica y la administración del uso de la tierra y de las políticas de tributación. A menudo, esta función involucra “traducir” ideas y argumentos académicos al lenguaje de los profesionales comunes, lo cual se hace mediante materiales impresos, cursos y seminarios. Al apoyar proyectos de desarrollo curricular y de investigación, también ponemos de manifiesto esas dimensiones críticas y a veces “invisibles” de asuntos complejos tales como los efectos económicos de la informalidad en el acceso a la tierra. Como proveedor de recursos a nuestros socios internacionales, ayudamos a localizar expertos y facilitar casos de estudios y otros materiales de diferentes países y contextos.

Redes y áreas temáticas

Desde 1995 el Programa Latinoamericano del Instituto ha ido desarrollando una red central de representantes de doce países con quienes se han realizado trabajos conjuntos en programas educativos y de desarrollo curricular. Nuestra estrategia ha evolucionado conforme hemos adquirido un entendimiento más profundo de los asuntos que atañen a los programas internacionales del Instituto. Actualmente trabajamos con varias redes de funcionarios, profesionales y expertos que están organizadas por áreas temáticas en vez de por regiones geográficas. Estas cinco redes transnacionales, cuyos temas de interés a menudo se traslapan y se refuerzan mutuamente, están vinculadas a las tres áreas programáticas principales del Instituto:

En el Programa de Tributación de Tierras y Edificios, la captura de plusvalías es el tema primario para el cual el Instituto tiene claras ventajas comparativas definidas en el continente latinoamericano. Nos hemos dedicado al estudio de las condiciones técnicas y de gestión para poner en práctica instrumentos que puedan promover la redistribución de los incrementos en el valor de la tierra, sea directa o indirectamente (a través de impuestos, tarifas, exacciones y otros instrumentos legislativos), a fin de impulsar el desarrollo urbano y beneficiar a la comunidad como un todo.

Además de utilizar los mecanismos de captura de plusvalías para controlar el crecimiento urbano y la expansión territorial, así como también para reducir los negativos efectos de la especulación de la tierra, nos interesa su aplicabilidad a circunstancias derivadas de la proverbial informalidad de los mercados de suelo en América Latina. Éstas incluyen situaciones caracterizadas por una relación confusa en la tenencia de la tierra, donde las ocupaciones de la tierra son mayoritariamente irregulares o ilegales, y donde los incrementos significativos en el valor de la tierra son generados por la comunidad, en vez de por acción estatal. Esta red explora si los incrementos en el valor del suelo (resultantes directa o indirectamente de intervenciones públicas) pueden promoverse para mitigar la pobreza urbana en general y mejorar el acceso al suelo urbanizado, particularmente para las familias de las bajos ingresos.

Nuestra segunda red estudia los temas de recaudación, tasación y tributación inmobiliaria. Mediante comparaciones internacionales se ha demostrado que la recaudación del impuesto a la propiedad en América Latina es generalmente inadecuada para satisfacer las necesidades de la urbanización acelerada. En muchas áreas, los sistemas de tributación inmobiliaria están plagados de problemas tales como fuertes inequidades verticales y horizontales, deficientes sistemas de recaudación y prácticas de tasación, fuertes influencias de valores históricos, y débiles marcos legales. No obstante, muchos programas nacionales, a veces apoyados por agencias multilaterales, están promoviendo reformas y mejoras en los sistemas de tributación inmobiliaria. Entre dichas mejoras se incluye el uso innovador de sistemas autodeclaratorios y complejos sistemas de información, giros creativos a los impuestos sobre el valor del suelo, y oportunidades para restablecer el impuesto inmobiliario en países donde actualmente no existe. Esta red contempla más iniciativas interconectadas de educación e investigación, que van desde el estudio de las ventajas y las desventajas de aplicar impuestos sobre el valor de la tierra, hasta el papel del impuesto predial para facilitar el acceso al suelo para los pobres urbanos, y el uso de nuevas herramientas operativas para promover las metas de tributación inmobiliaria en general.

La segregación social y espacial son inquietudes que compartimos con el Programa de Mercados de Suelo del Instituto. El paisaje de las ciudades latinoamericanas está frecuentemente marcado por la contradictoria coexistencia de áreas residenciales para la clase adinerada (que se asemejan a los sectores más elegantes de ciudades de cualquier país desarrollado), y aquellos asentamientos precarios o áreas marginales donde está confinada la mayor parte de la población urbana de bajos recursos. La formación de este divisivo patrón social del uso de la tierra puede atribuirse a factores variados, a saber: “expulsiones blancas” a través de mecanismos de mercado; políticas de exclusión más sutiles escondidas dentro de normativas legales y administrativas (p. ej., normas urbanísticas, reglamentos y requisitos de crédito); o los desalojos forzosos de los que han sido víctimas los pobres de prácticamente todas las ciudades latinoamericanas. Si bien mucho se ha escrito acerca de estos procesos, hasta ahora existen pocos estudios que documenten políticas que prevengan dichos problemas o que puedan revertir sus resultados. Esta red se plantea interrogantes tales como: ¿Cuáles son las políticas que se han usado o que pudieron haberse usado? ¿Qué tan eficaces son dichas políticas? ¿Qué deben saber los planificadores urbanos sobre el tema de segregación espacial? ¿por qué?

La cuarta red, también en el área de Mercados de Suelo, reconoce la necesidad de revisar los entornos normativos existentes en el programa de política del suelo latinoamericano, y de diseñar nuevas normas y reglamentos urbanísticos que puedan ser cumplidos de manera más realista y razonable por las familias de escasos recursos. Para ello se requiere conducir una evaluación adecuada de los efectos de reglamentos alternativos en el patrón de usos de la tierra, específicamente en el acceso a la tierra y a los servicios urbanos para el pobre urbano. En la mayoría de las grandes ciudades latinoamericanas se está observando una tendencia a construir nuevos proyectos inmobiliarios para la población adinerada en las tierras de la periferia, aquellas que tradicionalmente habían estado “reservadas para la clase baja”; esto ha provocado el encarecimiento del precio de dichas tierras, con la consecuente imposibilidad del pobre para pagarlas. Los administradores de las ciudades se enfrentan a la tarea de promover la densificación sostenible de barrios y la reutilización de áreas industriales abandonadas, al mismo tiempo que deben tratar de controlar la urbanización desenfrenada en las periferias urbanas.

Entre los puntos de estudio más importantes del Programa de Suelos como Propiedad Común, se encuentra el de seguridad de tenencia, regularización y mejoramiento urbano. Muchos países de todo el continente se están esforzando activamente por establecer programas de regularización legal y urbana; no obstante, la puesta en práctica de estas iniciativas se enfrenta frecuentemente con obstáculos políticos y prácticos. Las señales que dan estos programas esencialmente “curativos” ejercen influencias marcadas en las actividades ilegales, irregulares, informales o clandestinas de grupos que buscan el acceso y la ocupación de tierras urbanas. A menudo, la resolución de las disputas derivadas de los programas de regularización y del arbitraje de valores tasados adecuadamente para la adquisición pública de tierras para proyectos de interés social, se enfrenta con un mundo de obstáculos y cuellos de botella legales e institucionales en el ámbito nacional y local. Esta red se propone mejorar el entendimiento del impacto económico que tienen estos programas sobre los mercados de la tierra en general, en particular sobre los asentamientos beneficiados.

Diseminación de la información

Al mismo tiempo que continúa patrocinando programas de investigación y educativos en países latinoamericanos, el Instituto Lincoln está también trabajando para transmitir la información a una audiencia cada vez mayor. En el sitio Web del Instituto hay una sección dedicada a América Latina donde se publica la versión completa de muchos proyectos y artículos de investigación presentados en nuestros seminarios y conferencias, en su idioma original. En este sitio también están publicados una gran variedad de artículos del folleto Land Lines traducidos al español.

El Instituto está trabajando para sistematizar todos los materiales curriculares (artículos de investigación, presentaciones de seminarios, bibliografías, materiales audiovisuales de soporte y otros materiales educativos) y productos (libros, artículos, videos) para facilitar la organización e integración de nuestras actividades académicas presentes y futuras. Un buen número de publicaciones sobre América Latina están ahora disponibles o en etapa de planificación. Por ejemplo, recientemente se publicó una bibliografía sobre documentos que tratan sobre los mercados de suelos urbanos de México. Dicha bibliografía estará pronto disponible en nuestro sitio Web, y la misma debe servir como un modelo para otros miembros de nuestras redes latinoamericanas. Además, para fines de publicación, actualmente se está realizando la revisión de un grupo de artículos presentados como parte de programas educativos presentados en nuestra sede.

Esta edición de Land Lines contiene una lista de proyectos de investigación y desarrollo curricular y becas para la realización de tesis para el año académico actual, en donde se destacan proyectos afiliados con el Programa de Latinoamérica.

Martim Smolka es Senior Fellow y Director del Programa para América Latina y El Caribe del Instituto Lincoln. Laura Mullahy es Investigadora Asociada del Programa.

América Latina: Un territorio de gran diversidad

Un vistazo al continente latinoamericano revela una amplia variedad de situaciones referentes al estado de la tierra y de los mercados de suelo, tal como se indica debajo. El Instituto Lincoln ha trabajado con expertos y funcionarios públicos en cada uno de esos países para entender y discutir sus inquietudes relacionadas con la política del suelo.

La liberalización de los mercados de suelo y virtual eliminación de los bordes urbanos en Chile en 1979 (reintegrados sólo parcialmente en 1985) es un contraste marcado con los esfuerzos en Colombia para poner en práctica una fuerte herramienta de planificación de captura de plusvalías, conocida como “participación en plusvalías”. Esta legislación requiere a los gobiernos locales la designación de un 30 a 50 por ciento del incremento en el valor de la tierra resultante de cambios en la designación de la tierra de uso rural a urbano para dotar de infraestructura y viviendas sociales a las vecindades privadas de servicios públicos.

En los países latinoamericanos existen marcadas diferencias en el manejo de los asentamientos informales y las ocupaciones de tierras. En Argentina, por ejemplo, prácticamente no existen restricciones en el uso del suelo, y por tanto no hay un reconocimiento oficial de los asentamientos ilegales. Por su parte en Perú, desde 1961 los gobiernos de han reconocido las tierras ocupadas carentes de servicios situadas en la franja urbana (arenales), mientras que en Ecuador hay una ausencia total de normas y reglamentos para el manejo de las ocupaciones informales.

También son importantes las marcadas variaciones que hay en las políticas de suelo. Por ejemplo, es poco probable que el gobierno de Cuba renuncie al aproximadamente 70 por ciento de la tierra que está bajo su control, mientras que México aprobó en 1992 una ley nacional que permite la privatización de las tierras mantenidas bajo su sistema de ejido.

Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, was inaugurated in the early 1960s as a “new city” that was to usher in a new era for Latin American metropolises, demonstrating how the government’s efficient use of land would allow for orderly urban growth. Two basic instruments were provided for this purpose: normative control of the use of land based on a master plan devised by Lucio Costa; and government ownership of land in the federal capital, which would permit the capital to be planned without the kinds of restrictions and conflicts that normally result from private land ownership. However, three and a half decades later, the problems associated with urban development in Brasilia do not differ substantially from those experienced by other large cities in Latin America.

Land Tenure Shortsightedness and Administrative Patronage

Brasilia presents a unique example of urban land management in Latin America because the administration of public land has always been the responsibility of the local government. Nevertheless, the city’s periphery has experienced an explosive rate of growth with its concomitant pattern of irregular land occupation, illegal subdivisions and lack of infrastructure. In Brasilia the possibility of steering the process of urban growth by means of an explicit policy of access to public land has been slowly and irreparably jeopardized by spontaneous (and illegal) land occupation. This shortsighted use of public land is generally dysfunctional for both urban density and public finance, thus hindering the local administration’s efforts to provide infrastructure to these irregular sites.

Furthermore, political influences on the development process have significantly compromised the chances of efficiently managing the supply of public land in Brasilia. In the early 1990s the government distributed about 65,000 lots in areas without any basic infrastructure. Besides reducing the stock of public land, this “land tenure patronage” created the need for new funding sources to finance new infrastructure. Since the main resource available to the Federal District’s Development Agency (Terracap) is the land itself, this patronage policy resulted in the sale of additional public lands to finance infrastructure in irregular settlements. This vicious cycle has caused serious distortions that the present local administration aims to solve by using public land as “capital” to create an effective policy to manage land tenure revenues and urban costs.

The Brasilia experience seems to confirm the arguments of Henry George and others that public land ownership does not per se lead to more balanced and socially egalitarian urban growth. The current local government strategy to define ways to manage revenue from public lands in order to manage the use of urban land indicates a new form of government interaction with the land market. In this sense, the government changes its role from being the principal landowner to becoming the administrator of land benefits.

Public Land as Land Tenure Capital

The core principle of Brasilia’s new strategy of administering land equity is the definition of public land as “land tenure capital.” The use of this land is submitted to a set of strategic actions that transform public land capital into a factor that induces the consolidation of the Federal District’s technological complex. This is the public counterpart in the process of reconverting land use in the city center into an instrument of social promotion in the land tenure regulation program: public lands are used as land assets through sales, leases and partnerships in urban projects.

The use of differentiated land tenure strategies lends more flexibility to the government in coordinating its actions. The search for a balance between initiatives of a social nature and others where the government seeks to maximize its income is now taking on the appearance of an actual policy of public land administration that breaks with former patronage practices.

In this context of exploring new approaches to the use of public land to control urban development in Brasilia, the Lincoln Institute, the Planning Institute of the Federal District and Terracap organized an International Seminar on Management of Land Tenure Revenue and Urban Costs in June 1998.

The program brought together international experts, government secretaries and local administrators with a view to evaluating international experiences in using public lands to finance urban growth in Europe, the United States and Latin America. Martim Smolka of the Lincoln Institute described the relationships between land market operations, land use regulations and the public capture of land value increments. Alfredo Garay, an architect and former planning director for the city of Buenos Aires, reported on experiences in the development of public land around the city’s harbor.

Bernard Frieden of Massachusetts Institute of Technology described how commercial activities on public trust lands in the western United States are used to raise funds for education and other local purposes. Henk Verbrugge, director of Rotterdam’s fiscal agency and The Netherlands’ representative to the International Association of Assessing Officers, described the country’s system of hereditary tenure, a legal regulation by which land can be used for full private use and benefit while remaining under municipal control and economic ownership.

The participants discussed how these experiences compared with the situation in Brasilia and concluded that the success of various strategies for the use of public land depends on the suitability of specific projects to the respective country’s business culture and the institutional practices in effect in the local administration.

Pedro Abramo is a professor at the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.