In the increasingly urgent effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow the damaging effects of climate change, local policy makers and planners are playing a critical role. The good news is, they have access to more data than ever. But wrangling, sorting through, and making sense of all this data can be a major challenge. A new crop of technological tools is helping to capture data related to municipal greenhouse gas emissions, organize it comprehensibly, and make it easy for municipal leaders to access.  

In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council is working on an ambitious new effort to support local climate decisions. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Minnesota’s emissions per capita as of 2016 were slightly above the national average of 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person. But breaking down the details behind that number can be complicated. Making it less complicated is a major goal of the council, which is a regional policy-making body, planning agency, and provider of essential services including transit and affordable housing for a seven-county region that includes 181 local governments.  

In the works for about three years, and set for release this summer, the Metropolitan Council’s Greenhouse Gas Scenario Planning Tool grew out of the council’s work to promote regional livability, sustainability, and economic vitality, and is ultimately intended for use by any municipality in the United States.  

Intriguingly, the process began by assembling a team of partners including several leading academics (from Princeton University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Minnesota) studying various aspects of climate change, as well as private-sector nonprofit partners—“giving us access to all the science and innovation that academia can bring, combined with the practical wisdom of government,” says Mauricio León, senior researcher for the Metropolitan Council.  

León’s duties include greenhouse gas emissions accounting for the Twin Cities region, which makes him familiar with the complexities of both measuring emissions in the present and figuring out how to project that data into the future under different scenarios. The council’s recognition that this can be a time- and resource-consuming challenge for local governments led to the idea of building a web application that draws on existing databases and is adjustable according to specific policy strategies.  

León and one of the council’s academic partners, Professor Anu Ramaswami—a civil and environmental engineering professor at Princeton who has been the principal investigator in the planning tool project—emphasized that such public/academic partnerships don’t happen often. “This is rare,” says Ramaswami, who has worked with individual cities for years, but seldom on a project meant to serve such a broad range of municipalities and local governments.  

In terms of the process, she says, scientists and policy makers jointly framed the relevant questions, then built the model together. The collaborators identified data sets related to the primary sources of emissions. In the Twin Cities area, for example, 67 percent of direct emissions come from “stationary energy” such as the electricity and natural gas used to power homes and buildings, while 32 percent comes from on-road transportation. The team also identified the most promising reduction and offset strategies and policies, including regulations, economic incentives, public investments, and land uses such as parks and greenways. With three focus areas or modules—building energy, transportation, and green infrastructure—the application is designed to show policy makers the potential outcomes of various mitigation strategies. The overarching framework is pegged to the goal of local governments achieving zero emissions by 2040, an aspirational target adopted by the Metropolitan Council. 

In a preliminary conceptual demonstration of the tool at the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP) conference earlier this year, León showed how different types of communities, from cities to rural areas, will have different impacts and strategy options. A city has a lot of transit options, for example, that a rural community doesn’t have. Policy makers using the tool can also factor in other key considerations, such as the equity implications of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that may impact some segments of a community more than others. “You can use this tool to create a portfolio of strategies that’s based on your values,” León explained.   

With similar goals but a different approach, Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) unveiled a localized greenhouse gas inventory tool several years ago. MAPC’s tool focuses less on future scenarios and more on providing community-specific, accurate baseline data and estimates of the impacts of various activities and sectors. Guided in part by a greenhouse-gas inventory framework developed by the World Resources Institute, C40 Cities, and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, it attempts to measure a municipality’s direct and indirect emissions. 

Jillian Wilson-Martin, director of sustainability for Natick, Massachusetts, says the MAPC effort made available data and estimated impacts of car emissions, home heating, lawn care, and other factors that would be difficult for an individual town to collect. This helped Natick gauge its biggest sources of emissions, the starting point of a process to devise strategies to reduce them. Paired with offsets, the town aims to reduce its net emissions from 9 metric tons per capita to net zero by 2050. “It’s making it easier for smaller communities with no sustainability budget to get this really important data so they can be more effective,” Wilson-Martin says.  

While MAPC provides guidance and training resources to the 101 cities and towns it serves in eastern Massachusetts, it’s up to leaders in each municipality to customize how they measure their local emissions inventory, and how they might use that for planning. This may limit specific forecasting uses, but has another payoff, says Tim Reardon, director of data services for MAPC. “Ultimately the value of having a nuanced and locally tailored tool is to gain credibility and buy-in with stakeholders at the local level,” Reardon explained at the CSP conference. While big-picture data that doesn’t apply to a particular community can be a turn-off, he said, local data brings the global climate crisis down to the ground and reduces a barrier to talking about what has to happen locally to ensure a resilient future. 

Often in discussions around greenhouse-gas scenario planning, León agrees, “there’s this element of ‘this is just too complex for us to even think about.’” The council’s simple web tool is meant to help counter that argument. It’s designed to show in clear, graphic form the difference in emissions levels that would result from adopting various specific tactics, versus simply continuing the status quo.  

One benefit of such an accessible tool, Ramaswami adds, is that it encourages wider involvement and thus “opens up more creative opportunities.” In fact, she says, the project has had a similar effect on its academic partners: “It requires a different kind of research mentality, and a different kind of research group” to work directly with municipalities and respond to real policy options. When the tool is released, it will be accompanied by the publication of related academic research from Ramaswami and the group’s other scholarly partners. 

León acknowledges that the application will have its limits, and that ultimately more sweeping federal and global policies will have greater total impact than any single local initiative. But anything that boosts engagement is important, he says. And the web application is designed to encourage municipalities of all sizes to interact with the calculations and numbers the project team has compiled; they won’t have to upload their own data. “It’s really easy,” León says, “and there’s no excuse for them not to use it.” 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Leaders in Natick, Massachusetts, have used a greenhouse gas tool developed by Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council to gauge the town’s largest sources of emissions. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

This article was originally published by the American Planning Association and is reprinted with their permission. 
 
With 47 miles of coastline subject to punishing inundation, Boston is considering a range of innovative techniques to build resilience against the inevitable impacts of climate change. But one of the most groundbreaking features of this effort may well be the mechanism to pay for it. 

City officials last year established a Climate Resiliency Fund to help finance the berms, seawalls, and natural systems restoration that will help protect real estate in the vulnerable Seaport district and other potential flooding hotspots. Private developers will make contributions to augment local, state, and federal funding. 
 
The mechanism will be applied to the estimated $124 million cost of protecting a city-run, 191-acre coastal industrial park, but is poised to become a template for building resilience at many other vulnerable areas. 
 
While chipping in to help build defenses seems to be an obvious thing to do, the resiliency fund reflects an important recognition: Public investments in critical infrastructure benefit the private sector by boosting property values—and in the case of rising seas, allow land to continue to be usable. 

“There’s been a cultural shift,” said Brian Golden, who retired this spring as director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency after eight years of service. With such a huge task—preparing for 40 inches of sea level rise by 2070 across a landscape of hundreds of acres of squishy landfill dating back to colonial times—developers understand they have to pitch in and foot part of the bill, he said at the Lincoln Institute’s Journalists Forum in April. 
 
“We don’t get a lot of people balking at any of this,” he added, suggesting that developers have come to understand exactions and charges for climate infrastructure as a basic reality of the times, and appreciate the consistency and predictability of the policy. “If you’re doing business with us . . . you’re going to be paying to build some resiliency measures.” 

Don’t ‘Leave Money on the Table’ 

What’s happening in Boston reflects a growing consensus around the world, rooted in the concept of land value capture: the retrieval of increased land and property values specifically associated with government action and public investment. Just as a new transit line can increase values for properties all along it, resilience infrastructure can be shown to do the same. That increase in value is identified as the land value increment. 
 
Allowing the private sector to enjoy those benefits without making any contribution is increasingly recognized as the equivalent of “leaving money on the table,” noted Enrique Silva, director of International Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute. 
 
Value capture won’t fully finance climate adaptation efforts, but can become part of a “stack” of public finance arrangements that jurisdictions can leverage together, said Lourdes German, executive director of The Public Finance Initiative and a Lincoln Institute board member, also speaking at the Journalists Forum. Drawing contributions from developers and landowners can help fill critical gaps that often remain at the local level, after national and state funding is allocated. 
 
The search for the necessary revenue to fight the battle against climate change, estimated by the UN to be some $90 trillion worldwide through 2030, is certain to intensify. Governments have been using versions of value capture in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, the United Kingdom, and throughout Asia for many years. Officials in Miami are studying similar mechanisms to help pay for resilience infrastructure in that flood-prone city. 

Protecting Assets 
 
The argument for developer contributions is bolstered by the quality of the climate action efforts, which build confidence that real estate assets on urban land will indeed be protected. Boston has been taking steady steps for decades to address climate change in its planning, backed up by changes to zoning regulations and its broad application of Article 80, which provides the discretion to approve projects with certain strings attached. The Climate Ready Boston plan won an APA award in 2019, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize bestowed special recognition for the city’s efforts to address climate change in an older coastal city. 

It may have taken the climate crisis for landowners and developers to accept the obvious benefits of such government-funded interventions, said Golden. In the past, public investments that enhanced land and property values may have been regarded as a gift to the private sector or a form of stimulus for economic activity. Now the enormity of the task—fending off the water in some places, letting it be absorbed in others—is clear to all the stakeholders, who are more willing to be part of such a daunting, but necessary, effort. 

“It’s an old city, our building stock is fundamentally 19th century and early 20th century, and none of this was considered,” said Golden, referring to climate impacts and flooding. “And it’s not just about the benefit to metropolitan Boston. We are, after all, the economic engine of all the New England states. So people are, in 2022, signing up for this. They get it.” 

 
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines. 

Image: Boston’s Seaport District. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Amid claims by corporations and other institutions of lowered carbon footprints and net-zero pledges, the city of Burlington, Vermont, is going green with a special commitment, promising to eliminate fossil fuel use across the board by 2030. 
 
Vermont has long been a progressive kind of place with a population dedicated to environmental measures, whether solar and wind power, electric vehicles, or sustainable farming practices. Burlington, its change-agent capital—the place that gave rise to Bernie Sanders, after all—became the first city in the country to source 100 percent of its energy from renewables in 2014. Now, city leaders are ready to go even further. 

“This isn’t just a governmental goal, it’s a community-wide goal,” said Miro Weinberger, Burlington’s four-term mayor, in an interview on Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
 
With its electric power coming from renewable sources, the conversion can proceed for “electrifying everything,” he said, from cars and trucks to heating and cooling systems for buildings. The strategy is a mix of incentives and regulation, such as a planned ordinance to phase out fossil fuel-based mechanical systems in major buildings. 

Green-minded utilities have been a critical element, bolstering the political will that has only grown in strength over time, Weinberger said. But he adds that “we are still fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back because it is not a level playing field for new electrification and renewable technologies. The costs of burning fossil fuels are not properly reflected in the economics right now.” 

Getting the energy mix right is especially important given Vermont’s growing population. Reflecting on a surge of both climate and pandemic “refugees” moving to Vermont for the quality of life, Weinberger acknowledged that “We’ve seen big new pressures on our housing markets . . . It’s worse than it’s ever been. The silver lining of that may be [that] it may finally force Vermont to get serious about putting in place land-use rules at the local and state level that make it possible to build more housing.” 

A native Vermonter who was first elected in 2012, Weinberger attended Yale and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and worked for Habitat for Humanity before founding his own affordable housing development company. He’s also a part-time athlete, playing catcher in an amateur over-35 baseball league.  
 
The net-zero pledge has become a full-time occupation, but one that has underscored the importance of mayors and cities in confronting the climate crisis, he said. 
 
“This is making a decision to lead in this area and to make change, and you can have a big impact,” he said. “At a time when clearly the climate emergency is an existential threat, at a time when clearly the federal government is paralyzed in (its) ability to drive change, and when many state governments are similarly gridlocked, mayors and cities can really demonstrate on-the-ground progress. I think when we do that, we show everybody else what’s possible.” 
 
The edited interview will appear in print and online as the Mayor’s Desk feature in Land Lines magazine—a series of Q&As with innovative chief executives of cities all around the world.  
 
The Lincoln Institute’s work on climate change is spelled out on the website page Our Work. 
 
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. 

Image: Burlington, Vermont Mayor Miro Weinberger. Credit: Miro Weinberger

 
Further reading 
 
Burlington Issues 2021 Net Zero Energy Roadmap Update (City of Burlington) 

Armed with new regulatory power, Burlington City Council commissions plan to reduce carbon output (VT Digger) 

Vermont’s largest city on track to hit ‘net zero’ by 2030 (Associated Press) 

Power to the People: Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous (The New Yorker) 

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will facilitate discussions about business site selection, preparing for an uncertain future, and racial equity at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference, which will be held in San Diego April 30 to May 3, and online May 18 to 20.

The Lincoln Institute will also host a booth (#601) in the exhibit hall, with multimedia displays and a wide range of publications. Policy Focus Reports will be available at no cost, and there will be a 30-percent discount for books, including Megaregions and America’s Future, Design with Nature Now, and Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures.

Further details about Lincoln Institute sessions can be found below.

MONDAY, MAY 2

9:30­ to 10:15 a.m. PDT | The New Site Selection Tool for ESG Strategies (Room 7B)

Team NEO, the Fund for Our Economic Future, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy partnered to develop an interactive online tool. All stakeholders in planning and economic development can use it to begin to make better land-policy decisions.

Speaker:

Christine Nelson, Team NEO, Northeast Ohio

11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT | Planning with Foresight: Preparing for an Uncertain Future (Room 06)

Explore how to use foresight—a future-focused approach to strategic decision making that leverages diverse perspectives—to understand future dynamics and address them in participatory planning. Presenters introduce foresight and explain why it’s important for planners. They describe methodologies to identify and review future trends relevant to planning; develop scenarios; create agile, resilient plans; and engage communities.

Panelists:

Petra Hurtado, American Planning Association, Chicago, Illinois

Ryan Handy, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sagar Shah, AICP, Naperville, Illinois

Alexsandra Gomez, American Planning Association, Chicago, Illinois

Joseph DeAngelis, American Planning Association, Chicago, Illinois

WEDNESDAY, MAY 18

12:30 to 1:30 p.m. PDT | Acknowledging and Righting Planning’s Racial Equity Wrongs

(Virtual, Channel 1)

Learn about planning’s role in historical and systemic racial discrimination and how it resulted in current racial inequity and community disparities, understand why it is important for planners and planning departments to clearly and publicly commit to addressing racial inequities and learn how to communicate this commitment to your community, and explore planning directors’ actionable methods to address racial inequity.

Panlists:

Heather Sauceda Hannon, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Margaret H. Wallace Brown, City of Houston Planning & Development Department, Houston, Texas

Emily Liu, Louisville Metro Planning and Design Services, Louisville, Kentucky

Donald Roe, St. Louis Planning and Urban Design Agency, St. Louis, Missouri

Photo by Art Wagner/E+ via Getty Images

This interview, which has been edited for length, is also available as a Land Matters podcast. 

When he was elected in 2017, Randall L. Woodfin became the youngest mayor to take office in Birmingham in 120 years. Now 40 and nearly a year into his second term, Woodfin has made revitalization of the city’s 99 neighborhoods his top priority, along with enhancing education, fostering a climate of economic opportunity, and leveraging public-private partnerships. 

In a city battered by population and manufacturing loss, including iron and steel industries that once thrived there, Woodfin has looked to education and youth as the keys to a better future. He established Birmingham Promise, a public-private partnership that provides apprenticeships and tuition assistance to cover college costs for Birmingham high school graduates, and launched Pardons for Progress, which removed a barrier to employment opportunities through the mayoral pardon of 15,000 misdemeanor marijuana possession charges dating to 1990.  

Woodfin is a graduate of Morehouse College and Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law. He was an assistant city attorney for eight years before running for mayor, and served as president of the Birmingham Board of Education. 

ANTHONY FLINT: How do you think your vision for urban revitalization played into the large number of first-time voters who’ve turned out for you?  

RANDALL WOODFIN: I think my vision for urban revitalization—which, on the ground, I call neighborhood revitalization—played a significant role in not just the usual voters coming out to the polls to support me, but new voters as well. I think they chose me because I listen to them more than I talk. I think many residents have felt, “Listen, I’ve had these problems next to my home, to the right or to the left of me, for years, and they’ve been ignored. My calls have gone unanswered. Services have not been rendered. I want a change.” I made neighborhood revitalization a priority because that’s the priority of the citizens I wanted to serve. 

AF: With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act bringing unparalleled amounts of funding to state and local governments, what are your plans to distribute that money efficiently and get the greatest leverage? 

RW: This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to really supercharge infrastructure upgrades and investments we need to make in our city and community. This type of money probably hasn’t been on the ground since the New Deal. When you think about that, there’s an opportunity for the city of Birmingham citizens and communities to win.  

We set up a unified command system to receive these funds. In one hand, in my left hand, the city of Birmingham is an entitlement city and we’ll receive direct funds. In my right hand, we have to be aggressive and go after competitive grants for shovel-ready projects. 

With our Stimulus Command Center, what we have done is partner not only with our city council, but we’ve partnered with our transportation agency. We have an inland port, so we partner with Birmingham Port. We partner with our airport as well as our water works department. All of these agencies are public agencies who happen to serve the same citizens I’m responsible for serving. For us to approach all these infrastructure resources through a collective approach, that’s the best way. We have an opportunity with this funding to supercharge not only our economic identity, but also to make real investments in our infrastructure that our citizens use every day. 

AF: The Lincoln Institute has done a lot of work aimed at equitable regeneration in legacy cities. What in your view are the key elements of neighborhood revitalization and community investment that truly pay off? 

RW: This is how I explain everything that happens from a neighborhood revitalization standpoint. I’ll first share the problem through story. The city of Birmingham is fortunate to be made up of 23 communities in 99 neighborhoods. When you dive deep into that, just consider going to a particular neighborhood in a particular block. You have a mother in a single-family household where she is the responsible breadwinner and owner. She has a child or grandchild that stays with her. She walks out onto her front porch, she looks to her right, there is an abandoned, dilapidated house that’s been there for years that needs to be torn down. She looks to her [left], there’s an empty lot next to her. When she walks out to that sidewalk, she’s afraid for her child or her grandchild to play or ride the bicycle on that sidewalk because it’s not bikeable. That street, when she pulls out from the driveway, hasn’t been paved in years. The neighborhood park she wants to walk her child or grandchild down to hasn’t had upgraded, adequate playground equipment in some time. She’s ready to walk her child or grandchild home because it’s getting dark, but the streetlights don’t work. Then she’s ready to feed her child or grandchild, but they live in a food desert. These are the things we are attempting to solve for.  

One is blight removal, getting rid of that dilapidated structure to the right of her. We need to go vertical with more single-family homes that are affordable and market rate so [we don’t have] “snaggletooth” neighborhoods where you remove blight, but now you have a house, empty lot, house, empty lot, empty lot. 

That child, we have to invest in that sidewalk so they can play safely or just take a walk. We have to pave more streets. We have to have adequate playground equipment. We have to partner with our power company to get more LED lights in that neighborhood, so people feel safe. We have to invest in healthy food options so our citizens can have a better quality of life. These are the things related to neighborhood revitalization that I frame and address to make sure people want to live in these neighborhoods. 

AF: What are your top priorities in addressing climate change? How does Birmingham feel the impacts of warming, and what can be done about it? 

RW: Climate change is real. Let me be very clear in stating that climate change is real. We’re not near the coast and so we don’t feel the impact right away that other cities do, like Mobile would in the state of Alabama. However, when those certain weather things happen on the coast in Alabama, they do have an impact on the city of Birmingham. We also have an issue of tornadoes where I believe they continue to increase over the years and they affect a city like Birmingham that sits in a bowl in the valley. Around air quality, Birmingham was a city founded from a blue-collar standpoint of iron and steel and other things made here. Although that’s not driving the economy anymore, there’s still vestiges that have a negative impact. We have a Superfund site right in the heart of our city that has affected people’s air quality, which I think is totally unacceptable. Addressing climate change from a social justice standpoint has been a priority for the city of Birmingham and this administration. What we are doing is partnering with the EPA for our on-the-ground local issues. 

From a national standpoint, Birmingham joined other cities as it relates to the Paris Deal. I think this conversation of climate change can’t be in the isolation of a city and unfortunately, the city of Birmingham doesn’t have home rule. Having the conversations with our governor about the importance of the state of Alabama actually championing and joining calls of, “We need to make more noise and be more intentional and aggressive about climate change” has been a struggle. 

AF: What about your efforts to create safe, affordable housing, including a land bank? 

RW: I look at it from the standpoint of a toolbox. Within this toolbox, you have various tools to address housing. At the height of the city of Birmingham’s population, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, there was about 340,000 residents. We’re down to 206,000 residents in our city limits. 

You can imagine the cost and burden that’s had on our housing stock. When you add on homes passing from one generation to the next and not necessarily being taken care of, we’ve had a considerable amount of blight. Like other cities across the nation, we created a land bank. This land bank was created prior to my administration, but what we’ve attempted to do as an administration is make our land bank more efficient. Then driving that efficiency is not just looking toward those who can buy land in bulk, but also empowering the next-door neighbor, or the neighborhood, or the church that’s on the ground within that neighborhood to be able to participate in purchasing the lot next door to make sure, again, that we can get rid of these snaggletooth blocks or snaggletooth neighborhoods, and go vertical with single-family homes. 

Another thing we’re doing is acknowledging that in urban cores, it’s hard to get private developers at the table. What we’ve been doing [with some of our ARPA funds] is setting aside money to offset some of these developer costs to support not only affordable but market-rate housing within our city limits, to make sure our citizens have a seat at the table so they can feel empowered, if they choose to want to actually have a home, that there’s a path for them. 

AF: Finally, tell us a little bit about your belief in guaranteed income, which has been offered to single mothers in a pilot program. You’ve joined several other mayors in this effort. How does that reflect your approach to governing this midsize postindustrial city? 

RW: The city of Birmingham is fortunate to be a part of a pilot program that offers guaranteed income for single-family mothers in our city. This income is $375 over a 12-month period. That’s $375 a month, no strings attached, no requirements of what they can spend the money on. 

Every city in this nation has its own story, has its own character, has its own set of unique challenges. At the same time, we all share similar fates and have similar issues. The city of Birmingham has its fair share of poverty. We don’t just have poverty, we have concentrated poverty, [and] guaranteed income is another tool within that toolbox of reducing poverty. Birmingham has over 60 percent of households led by single women. That is not something I’m bragging about. That is a fundamental fact. A lot of these single-family mothers struggle. 

I think we all would agree, no one can live off $375 a month. If you had this $375 additional funding in your pocket or your homes, would that help your household? Does that help keep food on the table? Does it help keep your utilities paid? Does it help keep clothing on your children’s backs and shoes on their feet? Does it help you get from point A to B to keep your job to provide for your child? 

This is why I believe this guaranteed income pilot program will be helpful. We only have 120 slots, so it’s not necessarily the largest amount of people, but I can tell you over 7,000 households applied for this. The need is there for us to do every single thing we can to provide more opportunities for our families to be able to take care of their families.  

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines. 

Image courtesy of Anthony Flint.