A few years ago, the city of San Antonio conducted research into the anticipated impacts of climate change on local temperatures. The study projected that, by midcentury, the city might experience 61 days a year with temperatures over 100 degrees. In reality, the city notched 75 days over 100 degrees—in 2023.
Like many cities, San Antonio has been strategizing responses to climate change for years, but recent record-shattering temperatures have given such efforts a new sense of urgency, says Douglas Melnick, San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer. One major component that’s been getting a serious rethink: city surfaces, from roads to roofs. These human-made surfaces are often dark and impermeable, amplifying hot weather, worsening flood risks, and contributing to the heat island effect. But soaring global temperatures are sparking a wave of experiments with new materials and engineering innovations designed to reimagine surface problems as deep opportunities.
Pavement is a particular focus for San Antonio and many other cities, because it’s hot and there’s a lot of it: researchers estimate that it accounts for 30 to 40 percent of urban land cover. After an initial “very small” pilot in 2021 experimenting with a reflective pavement coating, San Antonio embarked on a $1 million project that will test five such materials in various parts of town, Melnick says. The streets were selected based on data related to equity and heat, and the work is being integrated into already-scheduled maintenance and repaving projects; the city will work with the University of Texas San Antonio to evaluate the results.
A similar effort is underway in Phoenix, a city “on the front lines of extreme heat,” as David Sailor, professor and director of the school of geographical sciences and urban planning at Arizona State University, puts it. The city was an early proponent of rethinking surfaces, launching a major Cool Pavement Pilot Program three years ago. But even in this notoriously hot place, efforts have accelerated lately: ASU has been involved as a research and advisory partner in a city-led project that has treated more than 100 miles of local roads with reflective coatings. “This is something that would not have happened five years ago,” Sailor says, “and it’s increasingly happening across different cities.”
Los Angeles has introduced a number of pilot programs, including one in the Pacoima neighborhood testing a reflective coating on streets, a school playground, and a recreation center parking lot. Researchers at Purdue University, meanwhile, have developed and are preparing for market the “world’s whitest paint,” which reflects 98 percent of solar heat and could be used on buildings, trains and buses, and other surfaces. A number of US cities are offering tax incentives for reflective roofs. Others have installed green roofs, topping waterproofing material with plants and other greenery that can be both cooling and absorb rainfall. And smaller projects are popping up all over the world, like parking lot solar canopies that provide shade and generate energy; corrugated self-cooling walls that stay as much as 18 degrees cooler than flat walls and can help reduce the need for air conditioning; and innovative, affordable cool-roofing materials for informal and self-built structures in India, Africa, and elsewhere.
The idea that governmental will to address extreme heat is expanding—and municipal funding is growing along with it—is spurring more material innovation in the market, says Sailor of ASU. He notes the creation of new, acrylic-based asphalt treatments. Because lighter colors can show tire markings, demand has also led to the development of a coatings that are dark in the visible spectrum but engineered to have high reflectance outside that spectrum, and reflect 30 to 40 percent of the sun’s energy, compared to 4 percent on a standard road. Other materials getting their moment in the sun include new kinds of coating for extruded metal roofing; reflective, porous concrete; and passive radiative cooling film engineered to actively radiate heat away from surfaces (instead of simply reflecting it, as coatings do). ASU is testing such products from giants like 3M as well as smaller startups.
But the real breakthrough isn’t any single material or innovation, says Greg Kats, founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition (SSC)—it’s the sheer variety of projects afoot, and a new willingness to “think broadly and citywide” about surfaces. Launched in 2019, SSC is now working with some 40 organizations and 10 cities and metropolitan areas across the country, providing data and tools to help implement smart surfaces effectively. “The city has gotten hotter and darker and more impermeable, with higher energy bills, more environmental injustice,” Kats says. “A lot of cities have really reached a point where they’re looking for systemic solutions.” Kats notes that there are fiscal motivations, too: major credit rating agencies have begun to factor climate change into their calculations, which could affect municipal credit ratings.
Kats and other smart surface advocates emphasize that tech-based materials must be complemented by trees and other natural solutions. Brendan Shane, climate director for the Trust for Public Land, which focuses on creating and enhancing parks and green spaces in cities and communities (and works with SSC), argues that smart surfaces and green infrastructure go naturally together. “Our tree canopies are at historic low levels,” he points out. But they are part of a city’s surface area, and “the surface of the city is one of those things that really does change. You’re going to repave roads. And you’re going to replant trees.”
The coalition hopes to help cities devise multi-pronged but locally tailored approaches, Kats says, through improved data synthesis and analysis. SSC is already working with a dozen US cities, and two in India, to compile data from hundreds of sources, producing detailed heat maps from satellite data and other information, and running cost/benefit scenarios on different implementations and timelines. The goal is to be both comprehensive and flexible, given that a dry city like Stockton, California, will have different needs and solutions than a wetter city like Baltimore. Whatever a given city’s objective, Kats asserts that with a full suite of responses—smart reflective surfaces, trees, and green infrastructure projects like rain gardens—the vast majority of cities can cool average temperatures by five degrees, or even more in previously neglected heat island neighborhoods.
Back in San Antonio, plans are taking shape to use heat-mapping technology to identify the neighborhoods that would most benefit from municipal investments in cool pavement, street trees, and shade structures. The wake-up call of recent extreme weather, Melnick says, has created a real opportunity for coordinated, citywide plans. “Cities tend to be very siloed. The parks department’s doing trees over here, and then the public works department is doing roads over there,” he says. “Everyone’s got a role in mitigating heat, but how do we get everybody talking together?”
As technologies evolve and the world’s cities continue to grow, investing in solutions to create cooler, more livable cities—and working together to implement them—is essential, Kats says: “Waiting is now a higher-risk strategy than taking action.”
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.
Established in 2020, the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) works to ensure that organizations of all sizes have access to data and advanced technologies to improve decision-making for land and water conservation, climate action, and other efforts to promote social equity. We extract better insights from data through a combination of geographic information systems (GIS), earth observations, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics. We deliver products and services that support decision-making, track impacts, and tell powerful stories.
“The Center for Geospatial Solutions is moving the global environmental field forward to meet ambitious goals set forth by scientists to save and restore our planet.”
Geospatial technology enables users to combine and analyze datasets to understand complex interactions and decide where and how to act. Adjacent to the core technologies of GIS and Remote Sensing are a variety of other technologies, such as artificial intelligence, field data collection tools, and advanced analytics, that can help people extract more and better insights from data.
We discovered that many people and organizations still cannot access complete or consistent data or use advanced datasets and analytic capabilities when necessary. The Center for Geospatial Solutions was founded to overcome this barrier.
Our team will support your organization to frame the relevant questions, gain a more holistic understanding of the issues you face, and make an action plan. We will ensure you have ready access to the highest-quality data and tools you need.
Case Study: Nature Conservancy of Canada
The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is the leading land conservation organization in Canada. Since 1962, the nonprofit and its partners have helped protect more than 35 million acres (14 million hectares) across Canada. NCC is working with us to develop a long-term technology strategy that streamlines data collection and management across the organization and allows all of its programs to leverage the latest technology to improve conservation prioritization, securement, and management. This strategy is helping reduce the time it takes staff to effectively manage properties and communicate key metrics to outside partners and funders. Access to better technology is also making it easier for NCC to effectively leverage new revenue sources, such as carbon offsets, by quantifying and capitalizing on the ecological benefits of land conservation.
In March 2022, the Lincoln Institute launched the Internet of Water Initiative at CGS to help modernize and connect water-related data in the United States from thousands of different sources to enable better decisions, ultimately making communities more sustainable and resilient. The Internet of Water Initiative will significantly expand the suite of tools CGS is developing.
Everything we do seeks to advance social and climate justice. With a mindset open to learning, we want to fully realize equity and inclusion through our partnerships, our work, and our organization. We believe that when these values are applied, data, science, and technology are powerful tools, enabling everyone to act effectively and with equal responsibility to all stakeholders.
The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.
As the director of The Nature Conservancy’s North America Center for Resilient Conservation Science, ecologist Mark Anderson led a team of scientists in the development and mapping of TNC’s resilient and connected network: a detailed, nationwide map of linked landscapes that are uniquely suited to preserve biodiversity and withstand the impacts of climate change. In 2021, Anderson received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance. In this interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, he explains why connected natural strongholds are critical to combating our biodiversity crisis.
JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?
MARK ANDERSON: Conservation of land and water is extremely expensive, and it’s long term. What we’ve really been focused on is making sure we’re conserving places that are resilient to climate change—really thinking about biodiversity loss, and where are the places on the ground or in the water that we think will continue to sustain nature, even as the climate changes in ways that we can’t fully predict.
As we dove deeper and deeper into the science, the beauty of it is that the properties of land and water—the topography, the soil types, the way water moves and collects—actually build resilience into the system. When you hear about a climate disaster, for example, a drought or a flood, you kind of picture it as a big swash everywhere. But in fact, there’s all sorts of detail to how that plays out on the land, and we can actually use an understanding of that to find places that are much more resilient and places that are much more vulnerable. So the effects of that are spread in understandable and predictable ways, and that’s what we are focused on: finding those places where we think nature will retain resilience.
Climate change is very different than any other threat we’ve ever faced because it’s a change in the ambient conditions of the planet. It’s a change in the temperature and moisture regimes. And in response to that change, nature literally has to rearrange. So a big question is, how do we help nature thrive and conserve the ability of nature to rearrange? Connectivity between places where species can thrive and move is key to that.
We divided the US into about 10 regions, and in each of those regions, we had a large steering committee of scientists from every state. They reviewed it, they argued about the concepts, we tested stuff out, they tested it on the ground, and that’s what improved the quality of the work, it’s all thanks to them. By the time we finished, it took 287 scientists and 12 years, so it was a lot of work. We involved a lot of people in the work, and so there’s a lot of trust now of the dataset.
JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?
MA: The US has not signed on to the global 30 by 30 agreement [to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030], but we have America the Beautiful, which the Biden Administration has launched as a 30 by 30 plan. People get hung up on that 30 percent, which is important, but if we want to sustain biodiversity, what’s really important is, which 30 percent is it? Are we representing all the ecosystems, are we reaching all the species? Are we finding places that are resilient, and are we connecting them in a way that nature can actually move and be sustained?
Our work is all about resilience and connectivity and biodiversity, and it turns out that the network we came up with, that has full representation of all the habitats and ecoregions and connectivity, turned out to be 34 percent [of the US]. So we have internally adopted it within TNC as our framework: We are trying to conserve that network, and that’s been super exciting. Because over the last five years, we conserved 1.1 million acres, of which about three quarters was directly in the network.
It’s very unlikely that the federal government is going to actually do the conservation; it’s really going to be done by the private NGOs, state agencies, and land trusts. In fact, in the Northeast, private land conservation over the last 10 years surpassed all the federal and state agency conservation combined. So our strategy has been to create a tool and get the science out and just encourage people to be using the science and thinking about climate resilience—with our fingers crossed that, if this makes sense to people, wherever they are, and we’re all sort of working off that, it will conserve the network in a diffuse way.
What we’re working on now is freshwater resilience, focusing on rivers and streams and the connectivity and resilience of those systems. Our vision of a resilient system is a long, connected network with good water quality that allows fish and mussels to move around and adapt to the changing climate. But a lot of those systems are fragmented by dams, their floodplains are developed, their water quality is poor, and there’s a lot of water use, because they’re in a residential area that’s extracting all the water.
JG: What do you wish more people knew about conservation, biodiversity, and ecology?
MA: Well, two things—one good, one bad. I wish more people understood the urgency of the biodiversity crisis. The fact that we’ve lost 3 billion birds—there are 3 billion fewer birds than there were 40 years ago. Our mammals are constrained now to small fragments of their original habitats. There’s a crisis in our insects, that is really scary. Most of my career, we were focused on rare things; now these are common things that are dropping in abundance. So I wish people really understood that.
And I also wish people understood that we can turn that around, by really focusing our energy and conserving the right places, and there’s still hope and time to do that. It’s a big task, and it can only be done by thousands of organizations working on it, but it can be turned around.
JG. When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?
MA: Well, I’m a scientist, and there are so many potential errors and problems and data issues, they never end. So our results are not perfect. They’re pretty good, they’ve been ground tested a lot, but they’re not perfect.
The other thing is the future. I really want my kids and grandkids to have a wonderful world full of nature, and to get there, we’re going to have to really change our course.
JG. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?
MA: When we started this work, we didn’t have a concept of what the end was going to look like. And I probably thought of the end as a bunch of big places, you know? But it’s not a bunch of big places, it’s a net, it’s a web—a web of connected places, some big, some small. So that was a surprise to me.
JG: You work a lot with maps—what’s the coolest map you’ve ever seen?
MA: We have a concept called climate flow, which is predicting how nature will move through the landscape following unfragmented areas and climatic gradients. And one of our scientists successfully animated that map, so that you can see the movement of the flows—and that is one of the coolest maps. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it gets the concept across really nicely. And it was this map that helped us figure out that there’s a pattern to all this. It’s not random, there’s a pattern—there are places where flows concentrate, there are places where flow diffuses, and that’s really important to know.
JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
MA: My favorite book recently was Wilding by Isabella Tree. It’s a nonfiction book from the British Isles, where a farming couple in Knepp, they were never able to make the area a productive farm so they decided just to stop farming it and let it go wild, and they document the change from farming to wildness. They introduce some grazing animals that would be the counterpart of the aurochs and warthogs that would have been there, and immediately, the farm becomes a total mess—lots of weeds, dug up areas, the neighbors complain. But over time, all these rare species start to show up, all these owls that have not been seen, nightingales, turtle doves, and pretty soon it is like a total biodiversity hotspot. So it’s a very interesting read, it’s very hopeful.
In the last year I’ve read several books about African American perspectives on the environmental movement, and those are powerful. One was called Black Faces, White Spaces, by Carolyn Finney, and I’m reading one now called A Darker Wilderness, and it’s really eye-opening on the equity issues that are buried in conservation.
Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Mark Anderson. Credit: Courtesy photo.
Seven Need-to-Know Trends for Planners in 2024
By APA Foresight team, January 24, 2024
SHARE
This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning.
Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.
To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.
The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.
There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.
You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown
As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.
The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.
Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP
Climate Displacement on the Rise
In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.
In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.
Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.
Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP
Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities
Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.
Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.
Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.
Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado
‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back
Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.
Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah
Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth
The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.
De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.
However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado
Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends
Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.
Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado
It’s Time to Welcome the Robots
Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.
In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.
With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis
Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.
New Tool Measures Vertical Equity in Property Tax Assessments
The coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 30 miles north of Boston, has about 6,000 homes built over the course of five centuries. There are the typical cul-de-sac Colonials, the new townhouses, and both modest and massive waterfront properties. But Ipswich is also awash in historic homes—including roughly five dozen “First Period” houses built before 1725, more than any other community in the United States. Lately, the town’s antique houses have been popular with homebuyers, fetching the kinds of multimillion-dollar sales prices usually associated with new construction.
Ipswich Chief Assessor Mary-Louise Ireland isn’t sure whether it’s a temporary blip or the start of a trend. But she does know one thing: it’s making her team’s task of assigning fair and accurate property tax values to every home in town a bit more challenging.
After all, one of the biggest difficulties for a local tax assessor isn’t just making accurate property valuations—it’s doing so consistently, across all price points, home styles, and neighborhoods. If a $1 million Colonial is assessed at $950,000, for example—or 95 percent of its market value—then a $100,000 condo in the same district should be assessed at $95,000. When that ratio is consistent across a community’s price tiers, the valuations have what’s called vertical equity.
That’s tricky enough to achieve in a homogenous postwar suburb. But when 300-year-old saltboxes share the streets with new luxury townhomes, and storied houses get converted to character-rich condos, making equitable assessments across such a sundry assortment of housing styles gets even more challenging. “We’re three people,” says Ireland, “and we do all of the field work on our own.”
Now, Ireland’s small department is using an innovative—and free—new online tool from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to evaluate and interpret the vertical equity of their assessments. “We don’t have a lot of money for extra tools,” she says. “So having this has been fabulous.”
Evaluating the Valuations
Getting assessments right across the board is crucial to a fair and equitable property tax. But accurately assessing very low- and high-priced properties is notoriously difficult, partly because there are fewer market sales in those brackets. And in recent years, researchers analyzing national data sets have found headline-worthy evidence that lower-priced homes are being over-assessed—and therefore overtaxed—relative to higher-priced properties nearby.
“If assessments are equitable, then low-, medium-, and high-priced properties are all assessed at the same level relative to the market,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy fellow Ron Rakow. “But even though it’s a fairly simple concept, vertical equity is really tricky to measure.”
The International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO) has two vertical equity standards in place to guide assessors, says Rakow—former commissioner of the City of Boston Assessing Department—but even those measures are imperfect. The price related differential is a simple ratio most assessors use, but Rakow says it can be imprecise; the coefficient of price related bias is a little more robust, but also more complex—it requires a type of analysis that many small departments don’t have the resources or expertise to conduct.
“Because of the difficulty of measuring vertical equity, there’s no single best, definitive measure,” Rakow says. “So rather than just looking at one indicator, it’s better to look at several indicators to paint a more complete picture.”
Needless to say, that’s no simple undertaking. So the Lincoln Institute partnered with the nonprofit Center for Appraisal Research and Technology (CART) to develop a new online tool to help assessors measure and understand the vertical equity in their own valuations.
The browser-based vertical equity app, which is free to use, instantly analyzes property data that any local assessor already has on hand, evaluating it against six different measures of vertical equity and providing a detailed report. “We wanted to give assessors a tool where they can not only get these measures calculated out, but also get some assistance in interpreting them,” Rakow says.
The new tool, launched in September, simply requires users to upload a data set of assessment records, which are anonymized to protect the privacy of property owners. The tool then runs a calculation based on two main ingredients: time-adjusted sale prices and assessed values.
From there, assessors can see different illustrated measurements of vertical equity in their data set, with customized graphs and explanations, and can download a full PDF of the results.
“If you can upload an attachment to an email, you can now do these complex statistical quality control studies—you don’t have to have a PhD, you don’t even have to have programming experience,” says CART founder and research scientist Paul Bidanset. “There are a lot of different ways to do it that would have been more complicated—but we thought if we could meet people exactly where they were, we would be helping the most people.” (Read our profile of Bidanset, a former C. Lowell Harriss fellow at the Lincoln Institute.)
Ireland says she’s thrilled to have access to such a powerful tool. “It was super simple—I have everything in Excel spreadsheets anyway, and you only needed two columns,” she says. “I can use this really beautiful report to go before the Select Board and say, ‘OK, here’s the data to support what we’ve done.’”
The professional look of the report was impressive, Ireland says—and not something her department of three could have put together on their own with their limited budget. And the illustrated graphs aren’t just useful for communicating vertical equity data to non-assessors. Paired with contextual explanations of what each measurement means and how it’s calculated, they helped Ireland wrap her head around some of the more complex and novel metrics. “I’ve taken all the classes, and we’ve talked about [these measurements], but for some reason it really hit home for me seeing it all put together this way,” she says.
Six Sides to Every Story
The tool provides results based on six approaches. The first looks at the commonly used assessment-to-sale ratio, which simply divides assessed values by their sale prices; the tool then sorts and charts those results into price deciles.
“We basically split all the sales into 10 bins—lowest-priced properties in the first bin and highest-priced properties in the tenth bin—and then we compare that ratio and see if it changes,” Rakow explains. “If we have proportional assessments, the ratio should be the same in each of those bins. But what we commonly see is that the assessment ratios tend to be a little bit higher for the low-priced properties than they are for high-priced properties.”
The coefficient of dispersion analysis plots out how far each property’s ratio is from the median. While that’s more commonly used as a measure of horizontal equity, Rakow says, it still reflects the overall quality of the assessments. “Generally speaking, if you have problems with vertical equity, you’re also probably going to have a pretty high coefficient of dispersion,” he says.
The tool also calculates the price related differential, one of two standards the IAAO uses to measure vertical equity (a PRD between 0.98 and 1.03 indicates vertical equity, according to IAAO guidance); the coefficient of price related bias, which can help users understand patterns in assessment-to-sales ratios at higher price points; and Spearman’s rank-order correlation, which compares rankings of assessments and sales from lowest to highest.
Finally, the tool includes Gini coefficients, which have long been used to measure inequality in economics. It’s only fairly recently that the assessment profession has begun to apply the Gini ranking technique to analyze vertical equity. “We’re really excited about these,” Rakow says. The Gini ranking not only offers an overall indicator of equity in the assessments, “but it also can point to where in the price distribution you’re actually having problems,” Rakow says. “It’s great to know whether or not the assessment distribution is equitable or not, but it’s even more important, if it isn’t, to know where to start looking and where you may have some issues.”
While any one of these six measurements in isolation might provide an imperfect analysis of vertical equity, Rakow says, they offer a more complete picture when taken altogether. And the app can also help an assessor look more closely at specific data. “If you suspect that the issue may be in certain neighborhoods, or within certain housing styles, you could basically cull your sales file and just feed those types of properties into the app and see whether or not that is in fact the case, and how severe the problem is,” Rakow explains.
Ultimately, the developers of the tool hope that it will make it easier for assessors not just to understand vertical inequity, but to take steps to address it. In future iterations, Rakow would like to add diagnostic elements. One feature currently in development is a geographically weighted tool to highlight areas with the most significant divergences between market values and assessments. “So then you can zoom in and see what’s going on there,” he says. “Maybe there’s a certain style of house in that neighborhood that you’re not capturing right in the model, or maybe it’s very large homes that tend to be in that particular location versus the rest of the community.”
This kind of data could also help assessors make the case for their municipalities to consider targeted tax relief policies, such as a homestead exemption, that can help make assessments more equitable.
Like any good technology, the tool will never truly be finished, Bidanset says: “It’ll always be changing and evolving as the industry evolves, and as we get more feedback, and as the industry comes up with new metrics and better statistics.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Houses in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Credit: Leigh Mantoni-Stewart.
2023 Journalists Forum: Innovations in Affordability
More than 30 reporters, editors, podcasters, and Substack writers attended the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s 2023 Journalists Forum, engaging in two days of conversations about the problem of housing affordability and the impact of current policy interventions.
The 2023 Journalists Forum: Innovations in Affordability was held November 17–18 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University (JCHS) and TD Bank. The annual convening bridges the media and academic inquiry, allowing journalists to hear new ideas and network with each other.
Researchers, scholars, practitioners, and appointed and elected officials shared perspectives on recent policies aimed at increasing the supply of housing. The group considered statewide zoning mandates that require cities and towns to allow more multifamily development; tax policies that can help manage runaway land prices and real estate speculation (with Detroit’s efforts to establish a land value tax serving as a case study); local strategies to outmaneuver institutional investors; and calibrating the home financing system to help close a stubborn racial wealth gap.
Local Strategies, a Nationwide Crisis
Arthur Jemison, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, kicked off the proceedings by describing Boston’s “all of the above” efforts to address affordable housing, a major issue for the entire region.
On the supply side, Jemison said, the city is looking to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as of right in the city’s Mattapan neighborhood to start, coupled with low- or zero-interest financing programs for residents, and to upzone transit-oriented neighborhoods citywide through a “Squares and Streets” initiative.
The city is also pursuing “a very deep tax incentive” for property owners who convert vacant office buildings to residences, Jemison said. Global architecture firm Gensler surveyed downtown Boston, “and they found about 60 great candidates for office-to-residential conversion,” he said. “We think that maybe 10 percent, maybe 15 percent of those buildings could be and will likely be converted with this incentive.”
Daniel McCue, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, then set the stage for the next two days of discussions by detailing worrying trends in home prices and rents, pulled from the JCHS’s annual State of the Nation’s Housing assessment. Home construction hasn’t kept pace with demand since the Great Recession, McCue explained, but low interest rates kept monthly mortgage payments somewhat affordable even as home prices climbed amid the scarcity.
That dynamic, though, has changed.
“Over the past two and a half years, we’ve seen prices go up 40 percent nationwide,” he said. “That’s combined with a rise in interest rates that has really ratcheted up mortgage costs,” adding $1,200 a month to the average homebuyer’s mortgage payment. “That’s the carpet getting pulled out from under you if you’re a millennial, maybe even a Gen Z-er.”
Zoning Reform
As more states from California to Connecticut pursue statewide zoning reform in an effort to boost housing production, density, and affordability—prompting backlash from local governments seeking to retain control over land use—the issue of upzoning mandates and the impact of increased density was deftly taken up by a panel including Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute; Jenny Schuetz, senior fellow at Brookings Metro; Patrick Condon, professor of urban design at the University of British Columbia; and David Garcia, director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
Moderator and urban policy writer Diana Lind asked Grogan to start by explaining why some states are looking to override local zoning rules. Housing is often a regional problem, Grogan said, “but most of the tools that we’re given to address that problem are at a local level.” In a sense, she noted, that geographic mismatch creates more of a politics problem than a policy one.
“We’ve created this system of perverse incentives—particularly for the more affluent, higher opportunity places—where current residents, even if they acknowledge the need for more affordable housing and more housing supply more broadly at a regional level, it’s really in their best interest to keep the gates up,” she added. “If housing supply is low, property values remain high. . . . It’s great for them, it’s terrible for the region.”
As a result, Grogan said, there are now quite a few states either passing or actively discussing statewide zoning policies that generally aim to do one of three things. “First, they try to boost overall housing supply. Second, they try to increase the amount of inexpensive and below-market-rate housing. Third, they try to build housing in strategic places, like near transit.”
Developers need to wait for their municipality to write and pass new state-compliant zoning rules before they can apply for permits, she explained, and some communities—like those in Massachusetts that have pushed back on the state’s MBTA Communities Act—put up a fight. “It’s not unusual for it to take three to five years from the state law passing until you actually have local zoning that’s compliant,” Schuetz said.
“We would like to think, ‘Oh, the state now legalized a bunch of new housing, you can build apartments near transit stations, so how many apartments are getting built?’ And of course the answer is, well, so far, none—because we don’t actually have local zoning in place,” she said. “It’s going to take a couple of years before we start seeing even the early stages, like developers requesting permits for these apartments.”
That said, while some communities may push back or even sue the state in response, many others acknowledge the problem and are willing to comply. And state policies can give cover to local officials who want to upzone but fear political blowback.
“A forward-looking mayor or city council can go to their voters and say, ‘Hey, the state is telling us we have to allow apartments, we have to allow duplexes. We know that we have an affordability problem, that many of the kids who grew up here can’t move back to the community because it’s so expensive, so we’re going to take this opportunity and lean into the idea and figure out on our terms what works for us to comply with the state mandate,’” Schuetz said.
Condon, who has studied housing affordability in Vancouver for decades, raised a contrarian point: There are lots of good reasons for zoning reform and increasing density, he said, but affordability is not one of them.
“We have doubled the number of people per square kilometer in the city since 1970; there is no other center city that I’ve been able to find in North America that’s come even remotely close to the addition of new supply,” Condon said. “If adding supply was going to reduce prices, Vancouver should have the cheapest housing in North America. It now has the most expensive housing in North America.”
And so the question, Condon continued, is why the additional supply didn’t help affordability. “The answer seems to be that land prices absorbed all the benefit of that new supply,” he said. “Because the capacity of those parcels was increased in terms of the financial return, it’s reflected in this tremendous rise in land value.”
Condon pointed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as one community taking the right approach: Its 100 percent Affordable Housing Overlay allows extra density in exchange for assured, permanent affordability. “The wrong thing is just to increase allowable density and think that that’s going to solve the problem,” he said. “The right thing is to figure out ways to capture that new land value increase in the context of rebuilding these neighborhoods.”
Municipalities should insist on affordability “to discipline the land market, which is out of control,” Condon concluded. “A lot of the initiatives that we’re talking about today do the opposite—they unleash the land market. It’s a fundamentally different philosophy of how to solve the problem.”
The impacts of increased housing supply can be subtle. Grogan pointed to Minneapolis, where Pew Research has been tracking rents since the city legalized triplexes on all residential lots and did away with parking requirements. While rents increased 31 percent nationwide between 2017 and 2023, they were up just one percent in Minneapolis. “It’s very, very, very early in their experiment of increasing density, but they are finding that their rent prices are not increasing as steeply as other places in the country,” she said.
As the conversation turned to California, where some 200 new statewide housing policies have emerged since 2016—including preempting local zoning to allow ADUs by right on nearly all residential lots— more evidence was available to analyze. The Terner Center at UC Berkeley has been tracking the passage of California’s zoning interventions and housing laws, Garcia said, and the results have been mixed.
Legalizing ADUs has been a success, for example, but has proven no match for the larger problem. “ADUs now make up almost 20 percent of new homes permitted in California,” Garcia said, “which seems like a good thing, but also is a little bit scary, because it means the rest of the market is not working.”
Other policies out of Sacramento now require communities to prove they’re planning for significant new housing, and make it more difficult to skirt that obligation. Changes to the state’s density bonus law, meanwhile, allow developers to build higher in exchange for more affordable units, and a bill called Senate 35 allows affordable housing developers to bypass local approval and the “infamous” California Environmental Quality Act.
“Is it working? My very simple answer to that question is not yet, but maybe,” Garcia said. California used to build 200,000 housing units per year, he said. “More recently, even with all of these state-level changes, California hovers at around 100,000 units per year,” he said. “Last year we had 120,000 units. That’s an increase, that’s good—but it’s still lagging well behind the 180,000 units California needs to be building per year.”
Tax Policy
Cities and towns are also considering the effects of their tax systems on housing affordability. A panel including Jay Rising, chief financial officer for Detroit; Nick Allen, a researcher based at MIT; Joan Youngman, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute; and former Boston assessor Ron Rakow examined Detroit’s proposal for a land value tax to lower residential taxes and encourage development.
About 17 percent of Detroit’s 138 square miles lies vacant, said Rising, and owners of unproductive land pay very little property taxes. “This is incentivized speculation,” he said. Taxing land more than buildings will also lower the property tax burden for many homeowners who have stayed in Detroit and seek to raise their families there. The city, which needs permission from the Michigan state legislature to implement the land tax, is trying to “protect public revenues and public services by making it fairly revenue-neutral. That’s how we got to where we are today.”
Detroiters “are paying the highest property tax rates in the nation, particularly on the housing investments that they own,” said Allen, coauthor of a Lincoln Institute study on the feasibility of splitting the tax rates for land and buildings. “A land value tax, in some ways, is just a neutral tax. Some economists have called it the least bad tax. It taxes an asset that doesn’t move, that when you tax it, it doesn’t chase that asset away. It raises revenue to fund the types of services that cities are providing.”
The theory is that landowners will build housing or make other improvements rather than pay taxes on vacant land. Many are holding on to the land expecting to sell at a higher price, but that speculation is based on an unearned windfall. “If you have a piece of bare land in the middle of Manhattan, you have wealth, but not because of anything you did. It’s because society has grown and there’s demand around you,” said Youngman, author of A Good Tax.
A well-functioning property tax based on market value is also critical to greater equity, the panelists agreed, with many jurisdictions designing property tax relief programs and homestead exemptions to lessen the tax burden in targeted circumstances.
“In terms of tax equity, it’s really important to . . . have a good and solid assessment system where assessments are kept up to date and with targeted exemption programs to make sure that we’re only giving relief where needed, and ensuring that we’re having adequate revenues for our communities,” said Rakow, who analyzed Boston property taxes to test for regressivity.
Policies that are less effective include some urban agriculture exemptions and broad-based tax caps like Proposition 13 in California, the panelists agreed. “The dirty little secret with assessment caps is that far more people pay more in taxes than they would if there were no cap at all,” said Rakow.
Institutional Investors
In one of the liveliest discussions at the workshop, the issue of institutional investors—large companies that are buying, flipping, or charging high rents for properties in weak real estate markets and elsewhere—was subject to a thorough examination.
Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval, appearing on video, touted the use of a Port of Cincinnati bond issue to outbid institutional investors for control of nearly 200 properties across several neighborhoods.
“We have an aging built environment, aging buildings and aging single-family homes. That reality, combined with the fact that we’re an affordable city in the national context, has made us a key target for predatory institutional investors,” Pureval said. “Like other cities, we’ve seen a trend of bad-acting out-of-town corporations coming in to buy up huge swaths of single family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, and then jacking up the rents overnight. This practice contributes to pricing legacy communities out of their neighborhoods. It hurts the well-being of the tenants who are being neglected and it has a negative impact on our entire housing market.
“[We] jumped at the chance to get these houses back into the hands of local homeowners,” he said. “Local governments are inherently limited in terms of both resources and our ability to move markets, but I believe that this program has been a strong piece of evidence for the value there is in thinking outside of the box and in leaning in and testing innovative ideas.”
The success in Cincinnati was the result of a thoughtful organization of public finance structures that can be replicated in other communities to preserve affordable housing, said Robert J. (RJ) McGrail, who leads the Accelerating Community Investment initiative at the Lincoln Institute.
The extent of property ownership by institutional investors, covered by many news outlets as a key facet of the housing affordability crisis, can be documented using increasingly sophisticated mapping and data technology, said Jeff Allenby, director of innovation at the Center for Geospatial Solutions.
“What we can do with this information . . . is begin to look at a lot of different pieces and really dig into things like transaction history, layer on other information from the city [including building code violations] . . . to begin to tackle what I call data fusion,” Allenby said. CGS has developed an approach that uses this data to map property transactions, in some cases revealing swaths of institutional ownership in a single neighborhood.
David Howard, CEO of the National Rental Home Council, a DC-based nonprofit trade association that represents the single-family rental home industry, countered that property ownership by institutional investors is a small fraction on a national basis, though he acknowledged it is more concentrated in certain metro areas. While there are some bad actors, he said, outside investors are simply meeting market demand—fueled by a slowdown in construction of starter homes.
“It’s becoming harder and harder to purchase single-family homes. They’re harder to finance. They’re more expensive. There are significant inventory challenges. There’s excess demand for single-family rentals,” he said.
Home Financing
On the second day of the conference, Dan D’Oca of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design explored how innovative design can promote affordability, summarizing a recent report published by the GSD and the Joint Center for Housing Studies.
The presentation was followed by another lively discussion about home financing. After the Community Reinvestment Act and the financial crisis of 2008, a reset has been in the works, with new programs and policies intended to help both individuals and neighborhoods access capital and to help close the racial homeownership gap. But there is disagreement on how much can be accomplished with policy tweaks versus a more radical reassessment of the $12 trillion mortgage market.
NPR reporter Chris Arnold opened the discussion by noting that if zoning reform and other measures increase housing supply—“as the ice floe breaks up,” as he put it—clearly evident barriers remain for financing homeownership, particularly for low-income families and communities of color.
Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, applauded incremental changes that could make it easier for more people to enjoy wealth-building through homeownership, including down payment assistance, making the application process easier, improving the credit score and appraisal process, and making it possible to get financing for ADUs, manufactured homes, and property purchases through community land trusts.
Majurial (MJ) Watkins, community mortgage sales manager at TD Bank, cited the use of special purpose credit programs to expand access to home finance—though there is concern such outreach could trigger a legal challenge on the basis of reverse discrimination.
Jim Gray, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, which is a member of the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition, noted that about 70 percent of all mortgages end up with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. “The way we change the system is primarily through Fannie and Freddie because they control such a big part of the market,” he said. “If you want to get a system that now recognizes your rent credit in your credit score, well, when you get Fannie and Freddie to do it, that’s when the system changes. That’s why we at the Lincoln Institute feel like it’s so important and we hope that you all will pay more attention to what Fannie and Freddie are doing and how they’re continuing to evolve our mortgage market.”
Also important, he said, are the Duty to Serve rules that govern the GSEs and, as a result, shape the lending criteria used by non-bank lenders, an increasingly prevalent category of mortgage providers that are not subject to provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act.
Will incremental measures be sufficient? Not really, said Chrystal Kornegay, director of MassHousing, an independent, quasi-public agency created in 1966 and charged with providing financing for affordable housing in Massachusetts.
“The current housing finance system is a total creation of the government. When you think about all of the injustices and inequities in that system, it is a total creation of the government. It was all done with intention,” she said. “When we ask questions around why there are homeownership gaps, should you buy a house now, the question is really much more about what can the government do to create a system that’s equal for everybody. They created this system that’s unequal; they can also create a different system.”
Kornegay described the MassDreams program, which was supported with American Rescue Plan Act funds and designed to expand homeownership opportunities for people in communities disproportionately affected by COVID by providing down payment and closing cost grants. By providing funds directly to buyers, she said, “all of a sudden, we had 64 percent of people who bought houses were people of color. Seventy-five percent were at 100 percent of area median income and below. It just goes to show what the power of money can do for people who make good decisions.
“What if we, the government, all of us, decided that we wanted to have . . . a whole system for people of color to actually buy houses?” Kornegay said. “We could do that. We know how to do that . . . [but] it’s not going to happen if we don’t make the federal government make it happen.”
Herbert emphasized the important role that housing owned by nonprofits and the public sector can play in expanding homeownership. “We’ve got 11 million renters paying more than half their income on housing, and we think that we’re going to fix zoning and make a little innovation in financing and solve this? No,” said Herbert. “We’ve got to get enough housing for those 11 million people to be able to afford housing, and it’s got to be outside the private market. Because most of that increase in price is land prices. If we get that out of the market, and you have good housing that’s well-financed, over time, we can actually start to have housing for those 11 million people.”
He also noted that the terms “public housing” and “social housing” don’t fully capture the concept of mixed-income, permanently affordable developments. “We need to have this conversation. We need to have a name for it that doesn’t make people think it’s socialist or Swedish,” he said.
A final session reviewed some of the approaches the Lincoln Institute is currently taking to help address the housing affordability crisis in the United States, followed by the traditional concluding roundtable, facilitated by Paige Carlson-Heim from the TD Charitable Foundation and TD Bank’s Shelley Silva, who earlier in her career ran the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
The journalists shared their perspectives on the challenges of being on the housing beat, given the complexities of the different elements of the story, from the dire needs of an aging population to increasingly visible homelessness, to the potential of new forms of government-enabled social housing.
Stories flowing from the Journalists Forum continue to appear, including a dispatch by Josh Stephens in the California Planning & Development Report, “Does Density Lead to Affordability?,” based on the first session on zoning reform; and an editorial encouraging a proposal for legalizing basement apartments in New York City by Mayor Eric Adams in Crain’s New York Business.
“The mayor is in good company,” the editorial states. “As discussed at a recent Lincoln Institute of Land Policy conference on innovations in affordable housing, municipalities across the nation are considering ADUs, which can include apartments fashioned out of garages and other structures, as solutions to housing shortages. One speaker pointed out that the high cost of constructing an ADU, which some local analysts say could run about $400,000, and the fact that federal programs such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae don’t help with financing, were major hindrances to getting them into the legal housing stock, with only about 772,000 created across the country since 2015.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.
Lead image: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy President George W. McCarthy welcomes participants at the start of the 2023 Journalists Forum. Credit: Dakin Henderson.
Fellows in Focus: Designing a New Approach to Property Tax Appraisals
The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.
Determining the value of property is a complex and often controversial job, but new tools are making it easier for appraisers to ensure the fairness of their work. Those tools include an approach developed by Paul Bidanset, a doctoral candidate at Ulster University in the United Kingdom and former C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellow. The fellowship, named for a longtime Lincoln Institute of Land Policy board member and Columbia University economics professor, assists PhD students whose research complements the Lincoln Institute’s interests in land and tax policy. As founder and research scientist at the nonprofit Center for Appraisal Research and Technology, Bidanset has now advised officials from the United Kingdom to Moldova. He described his efforts to help democratize and modernize the appraisal field in this interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.
JON GOREY: What is the focus of your work, and how did your fellowship help advance that research?
PAUL BIDANSET: I came from a data science background, where I was forecasting anything people wanted—forecasting revenues based on advertising expenditures, forecasting pass-fail rates based on number of hours studied—anything where you could put in some inputs and try to forecast an output. That led into predictive algorithms for appraising property, specifically for property taxes—looking at recent sales and creating models that would estimate how much certain property characteristics determine what a property would sell for, then using those to appraise all the properties within a jurisdiction, so the government can tax them based on their market value.
There’s a quality control that we do in this industry that tests how accurate those models are, and not only if they’re accurate, but if we’re being consistently accurate across all properties. Are we being consistent? Are we being fair? Are we being equitable? A lot of research I do goes into making these predictive models more accurate and more consistent for taxpayers.
In this dissertation, I took an algorithm that was already being used in the industry that brought in a lot of really granular location data, so it’s much more sensitive to local fluctuations across neighborhoods and even within neighborhoods, and I modified it to not only be more accurate with regard to location, but also to the current time of the market. So making sure that old sales, for example, if they happened before COVID, weren’t counted the same way as recent sales.
The research is all done, and all the algorithms were actually improved as far as government standards and property tax standards and governing documents are concerned. I don’t like to brag, but the valuation oversight authority in the UK actually took this algorithm and used it to revalue properties in Wales. So it was cool to see this research taken out and actually used.
JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?
PB: I founded a think tank, it’s a 501(c)(3) called the Center for Appraisal Research and Technology. I’ve been working in Moldova, and in Romania currently; I’ve done some work in Estonia and Ukraine, and I’m starting to work in Asia as well with the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. A lot of the stuff that I’m teaching or working with them on is more basic modeling and technology, so it’s not directly tied to my thesis or my dissertation, but I think it is a result of my experience in the doctoral program.
And recently our nonprofit partnered with the Lincoln Institute to create this vertical equity app dashboard that governments can use. So when they’re done with their valuations, they can upload their spreadsheets . . . to test to make sure that taxes are fair across those price points. You upload it, you click a couple buttons, and you get this nice generated report that breaks things down for you very simply. We’re looking to get that type of help in the hands of governments all around the world.
JG: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?
PB: I think the most interesting thing to me is it doesn’t matter where you are, the issues and questions are the same. I started in Norfolk, Virginia, working in a government office, that’s where I cut my teeth in this industry. But [there is] continuity from Norfolk, Virginia, to Chişinău, Moldova, to post-Soviet countries, to developing countries in Asia—it’s amazing how similar it all is, when you’re talking about relationships between the government and taxpayers, limited budgets, outdated software, staff being spread too thin. Even the questions that the taxpayers have when they come in, their questions, their protests—I mean, it’s copy and paste. It’s fascinating.
JG: What do you wish more people knew about the appraisal industry?
PB: I wish people knew how much people in local government—at least the governments that we work with—care, and how much they actually do. Because I don’t think people realize that. I used to work for a different nonprofit and when I tell people that we would host conferences where government practitioners would come to learn how to get better at valuing properties and do things more equitably, they’re like, ‘Governments [care] about that? I just thought they threw a dart at the highest number they could get away with.’ I think if people just knew how much your average government assessor cares, how much work goes into this, how much due diligence and continuing education and hard work . . . the majority of them are really trying hard to get better at this and do a good job for the community.
JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?
PB: Something that keeps me up would be just how much people ignore good statistics and research. It’s very convenient and easy for people to just dismiss something because it doesn’t jibe with their preconceived notions.
Something that gives me hope? I would say the open source ethos. We don’t want to foster a consultancy dependence, we want to empower these countries with limited resources. So in Moldova, for example, we were teaching them how to use free open source software that they don’t have to pay for, and really put the power in their hands, which is going to help them hopefully develop faster and comprehensively across the entire country.
JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately, or best show you’ve streamed?
PB: As far as shows go, Silicon Valley. I’m a huge Mike Judge fan. The book that I’m reading now is by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’s called Fooled By Randomness. He talks a lot about financial markets, but it’s really just a very pragmatic way to look at statistics and make sure we’re not drawing the wrong conclusions or putting false hope in certain things, which I think is massive when it comes to vertical equity and ratio studies. We’ve got to make sure that we’re not drawing false conclusions and thinking we’re good when we’re not, or vice versa. Because it’s a tough job as it is—we don’t need any more confusion.
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Paul Bidanset in Beirut, Lebanon. Bidanset traveled to the city for a project with the Lincoln Institute and Beirut Urban Lab. Credit: Courtesy photo.
Feed the Farm, Not the Algae
By Jon Gorey, November 1, 2023
SHARE
Natural ecosystems offer some powerful solutions to our climate crisis. And nature holds answers to other environmental challenges as well—like figuring out how to feed a growing human population without contributing to climate change, pollution, and toxic algal blooms.
The invention of synthetic fertilizer allowed farmers to double their yields per acre in the past century, supporting some four billion additional humans. But its use and production can have serious ecological impacts. Along with methane from livestock and the carbon released by soil disturbance, fertilizer is a primary reason why agriculture accounts for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. But new funding models in the Midwest are providing an incentive to farmers to swap status quo techniques for more sustainable practices.
The high-temperature production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is by itself responsible for 1.4 percent of global carbon emissions. After that fertilizer is applied to crops, it can release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 245 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And excess nitrogen also finds its way into waterways, polluting drinking supplies and wildlife habitat and, in the American Midwest and Plains, flowing down the Mississippi River to create a vast, headline-making “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, where it feeds toxic algal blooms that suck the oxygen out of the water.
“That is the principal cause of these dead zones and toxic algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The Mississippi River collects fertilizer runoff from Montana all the way to Pittsburgh, and sends it down in one big spout that flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and it becomes this concentrated soup of nitrogen and phosphorus.”
However, some fairly simple practices can reduce how much fertilizer farmers need, and how much ends up polluting watersheds. First and foremost, says Matthew Helmers, director of the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University, is resisting the tendency to over-fertilize. About a third of farmers apply more nitrogen than necessary, sometimes in an effort to maximize yields or hedge against risk.
“If we can reduce the rate, and not reduce yields for the crop,” he says, that cuts nitrogen loss as well as costs for the farmer. Iowa State and other universities developed a calculator to help Midwestern farmers determine the best amount of nitrogen to use depending on their goals. And simply fertilizing in the spring instead of in the fall can also reduce nitrogen runoff by an average of 6 percent.
Beyond better fertilizer management, regenerative farming—a more holistic and sustainable approach to agriculture that can help restore degraded soil, enhance biodiversity, and protect water and other resources—can also help reduce nitrogen runoff.
One of the most basic regenerative farming practices is planting cover crops in between growing seasons. “That’s where we try to have something green out there during the period when we’re not growing our cash crop,” Helmers says, “covering the soil surface and taking up nutrients that might otherwise be susceptible to loss.”
A perennial cover crop such as rye or oat stabilizes the soil, but also converts excess water-soluble nitrate into plant matter, “so there’s less nitrate that could be leached away in the next rainfall event,” Helmers explains. Rarely employed just 30 years ago, the use of cover crops nearly doubled in Iowa between 2017 to 2021, to an estimated 2.8 million acres.
Other in-field practices include a diverse crop rotation—alternating corn or soybean seasons with forage crops, for example—or growing an energy crop such as switchgrass, which can be used to produce renewable natural gas. (That may sound like gas-powered greenwashing, but it’s a real technology.) Low- or no-till farming, meanwhile, which reduces soil disturbance and leaves most of the plant residue on the surface after harvest, can cut nitrous oxide emissions and help soil retain more carbon and nutrients. No-till farming is now employed on 41 percent of Iowa farmland, or 9.5 million acres.
The edge of a farm offers one more chance to halt nitrogen loss as water drains off the cropland and into nearby waterways. “We have a whole suite of practices to treat that water before we deliver it to a stream, and they’re kind of utilizing Mother Nature to promote denitrification,” Helmers says, referring to the natural process that converts nitrate into dinitrogen, the inert, stable gas that makes up most of Earth’s atmosphere.
In one configuration, underground drainage systems can be diverted so they release water perpendicular to a stream instead of directly into it, forcing it to flow slowly across a 30-foot vegetated buffer. If the soil in that buffer zone doesn’t contain enough organic matter to promote denitrification, then installing a bioreactor—which sounds high-tech, but is simply a trench full of wood chips—can help do the job. These simple methods can reduce nitrate loss by 42 percent or more.
“We could also route that drainage water to a wetland—that might be a riverine wetland next to the stream, or an oxbow wetland, or one that we restore,” Helmers says. In addition to providing ecological benefits to the landscape, “those can be very effective for promoting denitrification.”
Despite the impact of nitrates on both local drinking water and the Gulf’s marine environment, these practices remain voluntary in Iowa and in most other states. But there are federal and local cost-share programs designed to encourage their adoption, some more robust than others.
Iowa’s Polk County, for example, offers both financial and logistical assistance for installing edge-of-field buffers, making it easier and more economical for farmers who might otherwise be put off by the hassle or cost. And since water treatment plants are finding that it’s more efficient to pay farmers to reduce fertilizer runoff at the source than to build additional treatment facilities, new funding models have emerged that encourage more farmers to introduce conservation measures to their land.
The multistate Soil and Water Outcomes Fund, for example, pays farmers to create vegetative buffers, plant cover crops, or employ other regenerative agriculture techniques chosen by the farmer. Later in the year, an independent scientific team measures and verifies the reduction in nitrogen or increase in stored soil carbon. The fund then sells a mix of environmental credits to various public and private entities seeking to meet required or voluntary sustainability goals. Water quality credits, for example, allow water treatment facilities subject to strict nutrient reduction standards to fund pollution mitigation at the source instead of paying for expensive new equipment. Carbon offsets, meanwhile, are tied to the amount of additional carbon stored in the soil.
Importantly, given the growing and valid criticism aimed at carbon offset schemes, those credits are tied to actual outcomes, “after they have been produced and verified,” says Eric Letsinger, CEO of Quantified Ventures, whose AgOutcomes subsidiary jointly manages the fund with the Iowa Soybean Association. The outcomes-based model is “a demonstrably more cost-effective means of achieving environmental improvements than existing ‘pay for practices’ approaches,” he adds, in a paper prepared for the Environmental Defense Fund.
“Basically the sewage treatment plant pays into a fund, and the fund will contract with soybean farmers to manage their land in a different way, so as to reduce the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that reaches the streams,” Levitt explains. “That’s a natural climate solution that is applicable to the entire Mississippi River Valley, and will clean up the water more efficiently than building engineered filters into the streams of Guttenberg, Iowa, or Des Moines.”
In 2021 and 2022, the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund expanded from Iowa into eight more states, and paid farmers an average of $31 per acre to implement new conservation measures on over 241,000 acres of cropland. Those practices prevented 3.4 million pounds of nitrogen and 206,000 pounds of phosphorus from reaching waterways, and sequestered over 465 million pounds of carbon.
Still, there’s a lot more ground to cover—literally—including millions of acres in Iowa alone. Cultural barriers remain, with some longtime farmers wary of deviating from a proven formula.
“We need to get over that hump of changing what’s the norm,” Helmers says, perhaps hinting at the most powerful untapped nature-based solution of all: human nature. “We still need to create a sense of urgency—that we have a problem, and we need to do something about it.”
Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: This map illustrates how runoff from farms (green areas) and cities (red areas) drains into the Mississippi River, delivering nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico and fueling the annual hypoxic zone. Credit: NOAA.
City Tech
Estas rutas se hicieron para cargar
Por Rob Walker, July 31, 2023
SHARE
Durante los últimos dos años, el gobierno federal se ha apresurado para acelerar la transición de vehículos a gas a alternativas eléctricas. La administración de Biden pretende que los vehículos eléctricos representen la mitad de las ventas de autos nuevos para el 2030, y la Ley de Reducción de la Inflación del año pasado potencia ese objetivo a través de un crédito fiscal individual de US$ 7.500 para los compradores de vehículos eléctricos que cumplan los requisitos. Pero la transición a los vehículos eléctricos no es solo un tema de consumo, sino también, un desafío de infraestructura.
Después de todo, una nación de conductores de vehículos eléctricos dependerá de muchos lugares de carga, y tal sistema simplemente no existe. Si bien, en la actualidad, los propietarios de vehículos eléctricos realizan alrededor del 70 al 80 porciento de las cargas en el hogar, esto no funcionará para hacer distancias largas. Así que la administración de Biden anunció un objetivo de construir 500.000 cargadores de vehículos eléctricos públicos para el 2030, a lo largo de las autopistas, en las ciudades y en las zonas rurales, y la Ley Bipartidista de Infraestructura de 2021 asignó US$ 5.000 millones a esta red incipiente.
Pero algunos expertos advierten que, incluso si nos acercamos al menos un poco al objetivo ambicioso de ventas de vehículos eléctricos de 2030, dicho nivel de infraestructura de carga no será suficiente, ya que el número de cargadores necesarios rondará los dos millones. Además, los camiones de carga de larga distancia, una categoría de transporte crucial, suponen desafíos especiales, a la vez que un potencial de fascinantes soluciones.
“La mayoría de las personas, al pensar en vehículos eléctricos, piensan, ‘¿Cómo reemplazamos las estaciones de combustible por estaciones de carga?’”, comenta Tallis Blalack, director administrativo del Centro de Investigación ASPIRE (Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification [Mejora de la Sostenibilidad a través de la Infraestructura de Energía para la Electrificación de Rutas]) de la Universidad Estatal de Utah. Pero están surgiendo posibilidades alternativas, o complementarias, entre ellas, rutas que tienen incorporadas bobinas de carga en intervalos regulares que recargan los vehículos que circulan sobre ellas, similar a un celular apoyado sobre una almohadilla de carga inalámbrica. Básicamente, avenidas eléctricas.
Esta tecnología, que suele denominarse “carga inductiva”, ha recibido menos atención que las estaciones de carga más tradicionales. Pero se están haciendo pruebas piloto en muchos lugares de los Estados Unidos, como Salt Lake City, Orlando y Detroit, así como en varios lugares de Europa y el resto del mundo.
“Creemos que los vehículos de pasajeros están muy por arriba del punto de inflexión: se están electrificando, y a pesar de los desafíos, esto se concretará”, afirma Blalack. Pero la historia no es tan clara cuando se trata de los camiones y los vehículos de carga pesada de los que depende el trasporte a larga distancia, y esto puede requerir una forma diferente de pensar sobre la infraestructura de los vehículos eléctricos.
Como señala Blalack, cerca de la mitad de los envíos de los Estados Unidos viajan más de 400 kilómetros, en su mayoría en camiones, y los camiones de carga pesada o media representan casi un cuarto de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero del transporte de dicho país. ASPIRE calcula que el costo de operar un camión de carga podría casi duplicar el uso de baterías de largo alcance y las opciones de estaciones de carga rápida disponibles actualmente. Esto se debe a que las baterías de largo alcance para camiones de carga pesada son grandes, costosas, pesadas (lo que reduce el espacio de carga útil), e incluso la carga rápida, si estuviera disponible, puede implicar demoras costosas. Con una ruta eléctrica que brinda carga en el camino, los camiones simplemente necesitan un receptor de carga. Pueden usar baterías más pequeñas que no tienen que almacenar tanta carga, y, según ASPIRE, el costo, de hecho, se reduciría, quizás hasta la mitad del costo actual de operación de un camión diésel.
La tecnología podría construirse gradualmente, pero los defensores prevén que, en definitiva, estará disponible en secciones largas de las autopistas de los Estados Unidos. Además, se podrían cargar de forma adecuada camiones más livianos equipados y, también, vehículos de pasajeros; los conductores decidirían si prefieren cargar mientras están en movimiento, y pagar por medio de un software incorporado al vehículo o una app. En algunos casos, el proceso de equipar las autopistas con bobinas de carga podría sumarse a otras mejoras y servicios de mantenimiento necesarios. Las bobinas se colocarían cada unos pocos kilómetros, con especificaciones según los patrones de tráfico. La tecnología de bobinas (cuyo desarrollo data de la década de 1990, incluido el trabajo sobre transferencia de energía inalámbrica en la Universidad de Auckland, un socio de ASPIRE) también puede usarse de forma estática: básicamente, los vehículos con receptores solo estacionan sobre estas, sin necesidad de un puesto de carga.
Obviamente, cualquier expansión generalizada de rutas eléctricas llevaría años. Pero los programas piloto existentes sugieren beneficios y posibilidades crecientes en diferentes escenarios. ASPIRE, a través de sus propias instalaciones y asociaciones en Salt Lake City, está realizando pruebas de programas de transporte eléctrico y logísticas de envío. Además, participa de forma directa en muchos otros proyectos piloto, incluido uno del Departamento de Transporte y de la Universidad Purdue. Un esfuerzo independiente consiste en un nuevo tramo de ruta al oeste de Orlando que incluirá una sección electrificada para demostrar cómo la tecnología puede ser parte de una construcción nueva en lugar de un acondicionamiento.
Otro ejemplo que ha llamado la atención, en parte debido a su ubicación en el corazón de la industria automotriz estadounidense, consiste en un par de rutas eléctricas en Detroit. La primera, cuya finalización está prevista para este año, es un tramo de alrededor de medio kilómetro cerca de la Estación Central de Michigan, un centro de innovación de movilidad; la segunda, proyectada para el próximo año, es una franja de casi un kilómetro cerca del centro. Ambas facilitarán experimentos con una variedad de vehículos eléctricos. “Este proyecto piloto nos permitirá identificar casos de uso [potencial]”, apuntó el vocero del Departamento de Transporte de Michigan (MDoT, por su sigla en inglés). “Algunos ejemplos de casos de uso para la tecnología de carga inalámbrica podrían ser integraciones a servicios de viajes compartidos y taxis, lo que permitiría que los vehículos se cargaran mientras esperan a los pasajeros; colas de vehículos comerciales en los cruces fronterizos; carga estática en plataformas para paradas de transporte público y de servicios de entrega en el último tramo; y carga en movimiento para rutas de servicios de enlace o transporte público”.
Hasta el momento, se ha excluido a la tecnología de las grandes iniciativas de financiamiento federales que han impulsado el gasto en infraestructura para vehículos eléctricos. ASPIRE trabaja con los gobiernos locales y estatales así como con la industria privada: el proyecto de Detroit recibe financiamiento de MDoT y la empresa tecnológica de Israel Electreon, que participó en unos cuantos proyectos de infraestructura para los vehículos eléctricos en los Estados Unidosy Europa. “El interés en la carga inalámbrica es mayor ahora que en cualquier otro momento desde que Electreon se estableció en 2013”, comentó Stefan Tongur, vicepresidente de la empresa. “Muchos países en Europa tienen como objetivo electrificar miles de kilómetros . . . También observamos que hay interés y planes en otras partes del mundo”. Suecia, a modo de ejemplo, realizó diversos programas piloto, y recientemente anunció que en los próximos dos a tres años implementará la tecnología en 21 kilómetros de la autopista que conecta Estocolmo y Gotemburgo, y que, para el 2035, puede comprometerse con hasta 3.000 kilómetros de rutas eléctricas.
En los próximos cinco años aproximadamente, tales proyectos piloto pueden extenderse a experimentos más ambiciosos, explica Blalack, añadiendo segmentos de ruta de forma gradual con base en los patrones de tráfico de transporte. Para el 2040, un mapa de ruta de ASPIRE sugiere que se podrían incluir autopistas interestatales.
ASPIRE se asoció con múltiples instituciones educativas, laboratorios, entidades de gobierno y organizaciones sin fines de lucro que están comprometidas con una gama de proyectos de tecnología energética. La idea no es tanto reemplazar la estrategia de estaciones de carga; sin duda, también necesitaremos construir esa infraestructura. Pero otras opciones pueden ayudar a alcanzar el desafío de los vehículos eléctricos. Según expresó Blalack, “Nuestra solución de carga tiene que ser: todas las anteriores”.
Rob Walker es periodista; escribe sobre diseño, tecnología y otros temas. Es el autor de The Art of Noticing. Publica un boletín en robwalker.substack.com.
Imagen principal: Proyectos piloto en ciudades desde Tel Aviv hasta Detroit están probando calles eléctricas que cargan los vehículos que circulan sobre ellas. Crédito: Electreon.