We can trace the origins of the Lincoln Institute to a chance encounter between a Cleveland inventor and industrialist and a barnstorming political economist in the 1890s. John C. Lincoln, an engineer who invented arc welders, high-torque electric motors, braking systems for streetcars, and even an electric car, was deeply moved by Henry George’s impassioned account of the stubbornness of urban poverty in the face of the unprecedented wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. Lincoln subsequently devoted years of his life—and a big chunk of his fortune—to advancing George’s ideas for social improvement.

George showed in a powerful and persuasive way that poverty was the result of distributive injustice. The wrong people were benefiting from economic growth. Idle landowners could sit and watch land values increase exponentially, while the productive classes, labor and capital, were taxed to support the government. George proposed replacing corporate and income taxes with a new tax that expropriated the unearned value of land from its owners. He estimated that land tax revenue would be sufficient both to eliminate poverty and to fund the government.

Given his own disposition toward social justice, ethics, efficiency, and basic fairness, this proposition resonated with John Lincoln. But the failure of George’s policy prescriptions to gain any political traction mystified him. One reason he could see was the lack of general academic embrace of George’s analytics and his conclusions. Quite frankly, except for a handful of universities like Columbia, UC–Berkeley, or the University of Chicago, George’s work was marginalized if it was taught at all.

It was never considered a mainstream component of the training of economists or political scientists. Lincoln decided to remedy this by creating the Lincoln Foundation and partnering with universities to establish programs in land economics and taxation. And that’s what the Lincoln Foundation did from 1946 until 1974. In 1974, John’s son, David C. Lincoln, took a hard look at the impact of the foundation’s efforts to mainstream land economics and taxation in the fields of economics and political science. He was underwhelmed. The programs supported with the foundation’s resources were evanescent and land economics remained specialized in a few universities. He decided to try a new approach and established the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to bring research and training under our own roof. And David was clear about one thing that he often repeated: “Henry George’s work was not about promoting the land tax—it was about eliminating poverty.” Thus, the Lincoln Institute was founded on the notion that land policy was not an end, but a means to solve bigger economic, social, and environmental challenges.

With that clarity, measurable impact quickly followed. In the 1980s, the arrival of Boston lawyer and conservationist Kingsbury Browne as a Lincoln Institute fellow led to the scaling up and national networking of private land conservation in the United States. Today, members of the Land Trust Alliance, an organization that evolved from Browne’s work, have protected more than 57 million acres of private land in perpetuity in the United States. In the 1990s, the Lincoln Institute invented computer-assisted mass appraisal. Systems built on that legacy are now used by local governments everywhere. In the 2000s, new international programs in Latin America supported, tested, and documented modern land value capture tools and techniques. Dozens of countries and thousands of jurisdictions are now studying ways to use these tools to mobilize their own public revenue. In the 2010s, the Lincoln Institute went global, establishing the International Land Conservation Network to promote private land conservation and sharing our work on the global stage at venues like Habitat III.

There is an important point here (and I know I buried the lede): we accomplished decades of significant work even though we could not easily define the discipline in which we operated. Over the last few years, we’ve been trying to rectify that. This spring, the board and management of the Lincoln Institute tried to effectively define land policy. By effectively, I mean clearly, accessibly, and efficiently. We found the task so daunting that we even consulted artificial intelligence. In my spring column, I shared our challenges and asked for your help. I asked you to submit your best definitions of land policy and offered a prize.

I’m delighted to report that we got many submissions. They ranged from the artistic to the theological. They arrived from four continents, with the furthest submission coming from New Zealand. They came mainly from individuals, but included a group effort from a network of 40 practitioners in Latin America. They ranged in length from 12 to 548 words. I even submitted my own definition.

While the judges were duly impressed with the scope and creativity of the submissions, I’m afraid I have unsettling news for the Luddites among us: they did not think we outperformed the AI bot. To remind you, here is the 85-word definition offered by ChatGPT:

Land policy refers to the rules and regulations that govern the use, ownership, and management of land. It involves making decisions about how land should be used, who should have access to it, and what activities are permitted on it. Land policy can affect a wide range of issues, from urban development and environmental conservation to property rights and social equity. Its goal is to balance the interests of different stakeholders and ensure that land is used in ways that benefit society as a whole.

That doesn’t mean, however, that accolades aren’t due. In the view of the judges, the best submission was from Harvey Jacobs:

Land policy is about the rules, the culture that underlies those rules, and the social expectations for the use of land. It draws together government, the market, and private actors. It has formal and informal outputs. Formal outputs are often plans, regulations, and programs. Informal outputs are often socially accepted patterns for how land is to be used and our behavior upon land.

The most economical submission was a haiku written by PD Blumenthal—

Use, control, share land
Protect earth, water, and air
To benefit all

—and the most creative submission was a poem entitled “A More Stealthy Georgist Cat,” by David Harold Chester. It is too long to reprint here, but you can read it in its entirety elsewhere on our site.

The pithiest submission was from Ben Brown:

Land policy is the bundle of rules through which governments formalize wishful thinking for responding to competing demands for land use in a future that is both inevitable and uncertain.

Even though we haven’t yet outperformed artificial intelligence, I am very happy with the outcome of this exercise. It affirms a couple of important things. First, land policy has a vast scope, and it touches many aspects of life. As such, maybe it is okay that it eludes easy definition. Second, it is possible to spend years doing something that you cannot easily explain. I’m guessing land policy experts aren’t the only people who cannot explain at get-togethers with their extended families what exactly they do.

It occurs to me that the problem might be taxonomical. In taxonomy, it might be harder to define a classification than it is to give an example of something in that classification. For the life of me, I can never remember the differences between class, order, family, genus, or species, but if pressed I can give an example of something in each.

In the end, I’m going to give everyone who submitted an entry in the contest a book of their choice from our impressive and ever-expanding library of land policy publications. In addition, I will give the authors of each of the four distinguished submissions above their choice of five books each.

It was a great exercise, and we appreciate the thought and effort put into all the submissions. We appreciate even more your collegiality, and we’re honored to share this hard-to-define endeavor with all of you. What started with a chance encounter between a barnstorming reformer and an inventor more than a century ago is even more relevant today: finding answers in land to improve the quality of life.

Lead image: Devonyu via iStock/ Getty Images Plus.

With sophisticated market research powered by prodigious profits, corporate real estate investors have long had the upper hand over vulnerable homeowners and the groups trying to protect them.

Investors can identify distressed homes in otherwise gentrifying neighborhoods, snap them up at a discount, and leave them empty for years waiting for nearby home values to rise. They can target longtime, elderly homeowners who may need to sell at a discount. And with plenty of cash on hand—and a new playbook that includes renting out houses rather than just flipping them—they can outbid individual homebuyers as they turn bedrooms into balance sheet items.

Now, a new data mapping tool from the Lincoln Institute’s Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) can help equip nonprofits, advocates, and local governments with similarly powerful technology to help identify and defend affordable housing stock threatened by real estate speculators and absentee landlords.

“It’s a very uneven playing field between private investors, who have the capital and are willing to invest the capital to get this market intelligence, and nonprofits that are struggling to keep the doors open, let alone invest in platforms like this,” says Jeff Allenby, CGS director of Geospatial Technology. “What you see is governments and nonprofits continuously trying to play catch up.”

Down-to-the-Parcel Data

In the wake of the Great Recession, corporations increasingly started purchasing and then renting out not just apartment buildings, but also single-family homes—especially in Sun Belt metro areas and postindustrial legacy cities, where rents remained stable despite lower property prices. Often, that’s had a cascade of negative impacts on low-income communities.

For one thing, it leaves more renters dealing with absentee corporate landlords, who can be quick to force an eviction and raise rents, but slow to fix a leaky roof or resolve code violations. It also reduces the supply of affordable housing stock available to would-be homebuyers, robbing local renters of opportunity.

In Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood, for example, just 53 of the 464 homes sold since 2017—12 percent—were purchased by owner occupants. In 2022, one of every five homes sold in the neighborhood (19.2 percent) was purchased by an out-of-state business, and nearly half were bought by in-state corporations with multiple-property portfolios.

“You just saw this backfill of corporate ownership come into this neighborhood, and it’s going to take years to come back from that,” Allenby says. Where real estate investors once focused on flipping houses for a quick buck, they now see rental properties as a long-term moneymaker. “These houses are just gone, likely in perpetuity, from a homeownership perspective.”

This grim, granular data is courtesy of a CGS initiative called “Who Owns America?” Starting with Baltimore, CGS used a variety of public data sources to map every parcel in the city by its ownership characteristics, cross-checking postal information with deeds and other records to distinguish owner-occupied properties from those owned by private landlords and large or out-of-state businesses.

After coding city-owned residential parcels, Allenby explains, CGS filters for all properties where the owner’s mailing address doesn’t match the physical address—meaning it isn’t owner-occupied. After that, CGS can differentiate between private, off-site owners—local “mom-and-pop” landlords who may own one or two properties, for example—and more formal corporations, checking the names against a series of business-related keywords and acronyms, such as LLC, LLP, incorporated, and so on. Further filtering reveals whether a business is based in or out of state, and whether it owns multiple properties in the city.

The resulting color-coded maps make it clear where owner occupancy is more prevalent and where corporate landlords are most active. Empowered with this intuitive, down-to-the-parcel data, communities can identify housing stock likely to be targeted by speculators. Then they can take steps to defend (or even reclaim) affordable housing before it’s lost to corporate ownership.

The Right to Fight Back 

One policy cities can employ to thwart predatory investors is a right of first refusal rule, which gives tenants the option to purchase their home before it’s sold to a corporation. Knowing where such investors are active can help community leaders support the rollout of such a program with more targeted public outreach, says Senior Research Fellow Robert “R.J.” McGrail, director of the Lincoln Institute’s Accelerating Community Investment initiative.

“That’s the neighborhood you do flyers in, where you have some community organization go knock on doors to tell people, ‘Just so you know, if the out-of-state company that you write your rent check to ever sells your house, you have the first chance to buy it,’” McGrail says. “The ‘just-so-you-know’ conversation can be incredibly agency building and empowering for an individual, in a way that I think is another downstream potential benefit from this tool.”

Allenby is quick to point out that the formalization of property ownership isn’t in itself a bad thing. For example, if a local landlord dies and his children inherit his three rental properties and put them all into an LLC, that doesn’t fundamentally alter the local real estate landscape. And true investment—companies that buy vacant, dilapidated buildings, restore them to good condition, and get them back into the housing market—is almost always welcome.

“Investor owner doesn’t necessarily mean bad owner,” McGrail agrees. But by overlapping additional layers of parcel-level datasets, CGS can provide more context and reveal bad actors. For example, mapping where corporate ownership coincides with code violations—reports of broken deck railings, lack of heat, leaky toilets, and so on—“tells a dramatically more nuanced, useful story around what is happening and what to do about it,” he says.

In that case, McGrail notes, mapping might offer chronically understaffed inspectional departments a better way to prioritize their code enforcement. Similarly, layering vacancy data over out-of-state ownership maps can inform discussions around land use policies such as a split-rate tax.

“So many times, policy discussions happen in a vacuum of data,” Allenby says. “You’re talking about theoreticals, abstract numbers, abstract concepts, and you don’t really have a good handle on the scale of the issue that you’re talking about. And these tools allow you to frame that conversation very specifically.”

Beyond Baltimore 

CGS can provide a granular data map customized to an organization’s or community’s needs in just a couple of weeks, Allenby says. And it’s not just a tool for cities. CGS has also mapped the entire state of Massachusetts for a housing nonprofit, and is currently documenting timberland ownership across Alabama.

CGS also partnered with the International Land Conservation Network to combine the research of multiple conservation organizations in search of “Consensus Landscapes”—areas that meet not just one conservation priority, such as biodiversity, habitat connectivity, or carbon storage potential, but many such goals, all at once. The goal of this collaborative mapping framework, according to CGS, is to identify “places that everyone can agree are important, and should be the immediate focus of collective conservation efforts” as the United States works to protect 30 percent of its land by 2030.

The Center for Geospatial Solutions created a framework for mapping “consensus landscapes” by assessing and integrating the research of several conservation organizations. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

Jim Gray, senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, is now working with CGS to study ownership trends among manufactured housing communities, which have also garnered the attention of real estate investors in recent years for their relatively low costs and reliable rents. Gray calls CGS’s work “invaluable” for its ability to transform a largely anecdotal challenge into real data.

“Knowing the extent of the problem, who is responsible, and where the problem is most acute will help inform and target which communities need to prioritize preserving this affordable housing stock, and how to go about that,” he says.

To learn more or to work with the Center for Geospatial Solutions, visit the CGS website or contact cgs@lincolninst.edu.

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

Lead image: This Center for Geospatial Solutions image combines spatial analysis with land parcel data to illustrate different types of property ownership, part of a project intended to help communities better understand how institutional investors are affecting local land markets. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.

In his three decades leading the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, Steve Rosenberg saw waves of people moving from cities to the Hudson Valley following major events: 9/11, Hurricanes Sandy and Irene, even Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in Rhinebeck. So when another wave arrived during COVID-19, part of the great migration of urban office workers to rural America, it wasn’t exactly novel.

But this time, things were different in the Hudson Valley, which runs along the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Land and real estate prices were skyrocketing, due to the influx of new residents and the broader pressures of the market. In the region’s cities and villages, gentrification had begun sweeping areas long marred by disinvestment, displacing low-income residents, posing a threat to Black and Brown communities, and making it hard to preserve and create affordable housing.

This “intense pressure on the land,” Rosenberg says, was also making the job of conservation harder. Just a decade earlier, land trusts could more easily assemble three or four parcels of land to create a contiguous protected area that would help preserve wildlife habitat and build climate resilience. Now it would take 10 or 12 purchases to assemble a comparable amount of acreage, and conservation groups were more frequently being outbid. As they vied with outside buyers for land, the region’s conservation and housing organizations faced similar challenges, and some began to wonder if they could accomplish more by working together. At the same time, some conservation organizations, prompted largely by the Black Lives Matter movement, were exploring how they might better address racial justice, public health, and climate equity as part of a more community-centered type of land conservation. But housing and conservation groups also seemed to exist in parallel worlds, with different missions, goals, funding models, and governance structures.

Still, Rosenberg saw potential. When he retired from Scenic Hudson in 2021, he teamed up with Rebecca Gilman Crimmins, a Hudson Valley native and affordable housing professional in New York City, to convene a working group of five conservation land trusts and five affordable housing organizations in the region. The groups began learning about each other’s work, identifying where that work intersects, and mapping potential places where they might partner. They combined census, biodiversity, and climate data with their knowledge about local officials, planning policies, and land use regulations. “Healthy communities need to have both” open space and affordable housing, Rosenberg said. “They shouldn’t be seen as mutually exclusive or in opposition to one another.”

As real estate prices spike, the climate unravels, and America undergoes a racial reckoning, conservation and affordable housing groups are beginning to explore how they can work together. In 2022, the Lincoln Institute convened practitioners and advocates, including Rosenberg and Crimmins, to discuss the potential for collaboration by conservation land trusts and community land trusts. Through a series of virtual and in-person discussions supported by the 1772 Foundation, participants from national, regional, and local groups explored the barriers that have gotten in the way of partnership—and the opportunities ahead.

Shared Concerns, Separate Roots

America’s first conservation land trust, The Trustees of Reservations, was dreamed up in the late 1800s by landscape architect Charles Eliot, whose father was president of Harvard. Eliot saw the nation’s cities yellowing with industrial pollution, and envisioned wild green pockets of open space in every city and town. The state enabled The Trustees to begin acquiring and protecting land in 1891. Today, America has 1,281 land trusts that have protected more than 61 million acres. Mostly operating in rural and suburban settings and often run by volunteers, land trusts protect wildlife habitats, critical ecosystems, and natural, historical, and cultural sites by buying and managing parcels outright or by holding conservation easements—voluntary legal agreements with landowners that limit development and other defined uses on a property.

Community land trusts (CLTs), by contrast, have more recent beginnings. In 1969, a group of civil rights activists led by Charles Sherrod set out to build collective wealth and power among Black farmers in southwest Georgia. They created New Communities, an undertaking that combined community ownership of land with individual homeownership, serving as a model for today’s CLTs. The organization was forced to foreclose on its land in 1985, after the USDA’s discriminatory practices deprived it of crucial grants and aid in the wake of a devastating drought. But it’s still operating as an educational organization, and it ignited a movement: today there are more than 300 CLTs in the country. CLTs are still oriented toward serving marginalized communities, and typically own land while giving individuals the opportunity to own the homes and businesses on top. Despite their rural origins, most CLTs now focus on providing permanently affordable housing in urban settings.

These distinct origins have led to an array of differences, as Katie Michels and David Hindin describe in a working paper prepared for the Lincoln Institute convening. Land trusts have tended to focus on and be led by wealthier, whiter, and more rural constituencies, while CLTs are more often geared to and governed by people of color. The resources available to the groups are also different.

“Compared to CLTs, land trusts may be wealthier organizations with greater access to political power and financial resources,” Hindin and Michels write, noting that public and private funding is usually dedicated to conservation or housing, but not both. Because both groups need land to fulfill their mission, they add, “some local conservation and community land trusts have had negative experiences with each other and may view the other as competitors.”

But that’s beginning to change. “We’re starting to see some conservation land trusts and CLTs really trying to figure out how to work together,” said Beth Sorce, vice president of sector growth at Grounded Solutions Network, a national nonprofit that promotes affordable housing solutions and grew out of a network of CLTs. As cities metastasize and affordable parcels grow scarce, conservation and affordable housing organizations are beginning to see past their differences, says Sorce, who participated in the Lincoln Institute convening: “We have a common goal of a really healthy, livable place. Maybe instead of everyone trying to acquire land individually, we could work together to figure out how to do this in a way that makes our community green.”

Land trusts across the country “are providing so many benefits to our environment and to people’s lives and well-being,” said Forrest King-Cortes, director of community-centered conservation at the Land Trust Alliance (LTA), a national coalition of conservation land trusts. LTA hired King-Cortes—who also participated in the Lincoln Institute convening—to lead its efforts to put people at the center of conservation work, and he sees “more opportunity to have dialogue with other movements like the affordable housing movement.”

As these conversations continue, participants are identifying many possible forms of collaboration, from exchanging ideas and information to jointly pushing for policy reform. In some cases, groups are taking action on the ground. In Ohio, the Western Reserve Land Conservancy, which has long worked with local land banks to acquire properties for public green space, is beginning to partner with CLTs on community-led, joint planning that will include affordable housing. On Mount Desert Island in Maine, where housing constraints and costs lead 54 percent of workers to live off-island, the Island Housing Trust, a CLT, is partnering with the Maine Coast Heritage Trust on a 60-acre project that combines wetland conservation with the development of affordable workforce housing. And in a rapidly developing, predominantly Black suburb of Seattle, the Homestead Community Land Trust and community-led Skyway Coalition are partnering with the support of the Community Land Conservancy to protect affordability and green space as they stave off gentrification.

A Collaborative Model in Athens, Georgia

While conservation and affordable housing advocates explore opportunities for collaboration, they can learn from organizations that have built both goals into their mission. The Athens Land Trust is considered by many to be the shining light at the intersection of these worlds.

In the early 1990s, Nancy Stangle and Skipper StipeMaas were developing a rural intentional community, Kenney Ridge, on 132 acres in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia—about 200 miles north of Albany, where the CLT movement was born. The plan was for Kenney Ridge to consist of private lots for homeowners, a community farmhouse and gardens, and common, conserved open space. But as they laid out the development, they realized that setting aside more land for conservation also made the private lots more expensive, because the costs of building roads, water lines, and sewer lines were divided between the lots, and more conservation amounted to fewer lots—and fewer lot owners to bear the costs. “They were seeing this tension between environmental-type development and affordability,” said Heather Benham, the Athens Land Trust’s executive director. And it was pricing out some of their friends.

Around this time, Stangle was taking her kids to the zoo in Atlanta when her car broke down. A woman pulled over and offered to take Stangle to her office, where she could use the phone. The woman worked at a community land trust, the Cabbagetown Revitalization and Future Trust. After reading up on the CLT model, Stangle and StipeMaas decided to create an organization that would function as both a land trust and a CLT, and the Athens Land Trust was born.

For the first few years, the Athens Land Trust functioned mostly as a conservation land trust. Then in 1999, one of its board members bought a vacant lot in a historically Black neighborhood of Athens and donated it to the group. The local government provided an affordable housing grant, and the organization built its first house.

The two wings of the organization continued to grow—the trust came to hold over 20,695 acres of conservation easements, from farms outside Athens to pine plantations and mountains in north Georgia, and it built and rehabbed homes inside the city—but they remained practically separate. “Basically, when we answered the phone, it was pretty clear if somebody was calling for one thing or the other,” said Benham. The callers were typically either low-income Black families interested in housing, or white farmers wanting to protect land they had owned for generations.

In the early 2000s, these parallel strands of work began to intersect. A board member mentioned that drug activity was taking place on a vacant lot in their neighborhood. Could the land trust turn it into a community garden?

“It didn’t seem like such a far leap to do gardens when you’re protecting farms,” said Benham. “That became a project, and then it just kept growing.” Other neighborhoods began reaching out about starting similar projects. The group partnered with the local university to create a network of community gardens, and an urban farm where neighbors could grow food to sell, supplementing their income. A USDA grant provided funds, and the city also offered some land. To maximize the community’s benefit from the land, the Athens Land Trust began running gardening classes and farm workdays, youth programming around agricultural skills, and a farmers market in a low-income Black neighborhood. These activities support the Athens Land Trust’s goals of fostering economic development and community empowerment, Benham says. “The economic opportunity around the farmers market and the small business development,” she says, weaves the parcels into the “neighborhood ecosystem and economy.”

Where Conservation and Justice Meet

As the urban work of the Athens Land Trust grew, its leaders began applying an equity lens to their rural conservation work too, identifying populations underserved by previous efforts to protect farmland. In April 2023, the land trust was close to reaching a deal for the first conservation easement on a Black-owned farm in Georgia. Throughout the United States, 97 percent of farms and 94 percent of farm acreage belongs to white farmers. Many Black landowners lack clear title—a legacy of unjust property inheritance rules—and are unable to donate or sell easements on their land, while those who have fought to gain clear title may be understandably hesitant to sign over any rights. Benham adds that the scoring mechanisms used by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service to determine whether to conserve a parcel tend to favor farms located on prime agricultural soils. “Well, surprise, surprise—most Black farmers didn’t get the most prime lands,” she notes.

Benham believes the Athens Land Trust has managed to straddle both worlds because its fundamental goal is to give the community control over lands and development. Eschewing tunnel vision toward either housing or conservation, the trust and other similarly minded organizations “might have more shared framework, vocabulary, practices, and ways of engaging” with the environmental justice movement than conservation land trusts do, she said.

That’s reflected in philanthropy too: the funders who seem to understand how the trust’s conservation and housing work align are the ones who recognize their environmental justice–like “sustainability work in low-income neighborhoods.”

In the South Bronx, New York, a community land trust launched in 2020 operates with a similar hybrid model, working to preserve housing affordability and protect open space, including the neighborhood’s network of community gardens. The South Bronx Community Land and Resource Trust grew from the work of local community development corporation Nos Quedamos (We Stay), which started in the 1990s as grassroots resistance to an urban renewal plan that would have displaced a low-income, mostly Latino community. Committed to “development without displacement”—development driven and controlled by the community—Nos Quedamos now has a portfolio of affordable housing. It launched the CLT to “create and support a healthier community by bringing into balance land use, affordability, accessibility to services and open space, environmental sustainability and resilience, community scale and character.” It is designed to be a centralized, community-owned entity.

Julia Duranti-Martínez, who works with CLTs at the national community development organization LISC and is a board member on the East Harlem/El Barrio CLT in New York City, recommends that conversations about collaboration “defer to the groups who come out of environmental justice organizing.” In a real estate market where land is expensive and scarce, housing and conservation group vie for parcels, and new parks are often seen as harbingers of gentrification, the community development projects that have navigated these tensions most successfully have been driven by the same fundamental goal as the environmental justice movement, she says: ensuring that “Black, Indigenous, and communities of color are really the ones in a decision-making role.”

Duranti-Martínez adds that the framework of CLTs has historically shared more in common with environmental justice groups than with the conservation movement. “They are promoting these community stewardship models not in opposition to affordable housing,” she said, but simply because “a healthy community” has “all kinds of different spaces: dignified and affordable housing, affordable commercial space, green space, and community and cultural spaces.”

Moving Forward

Despite promising ideas for collaboration and enthusiasm for these initiatives, ideological and cultural hurdles remain. Success, for land trusts, has historically been measured in the number of acres protected and dollars leveraged, but these conventional measures “don’t really capture the full impact” of smaller or more complex projects, said Michels. Protecting green space and building housing on five acres could take the same time, effort, and resources as conserving 10,000 rural acres, she notes, which means there are some ideological frameworks on the conservation side that have to shift.

Potential collaborators also need to proceed purposefully and thoughtfully; meaningful and inclusive community engagement will be key to the success of combining affordable housing and open space goals, say many involved in this work, whether that effort is happening inside a single organization or as part of a collaboration between groups. “Conservation has a lot to learn about building community stakeholders in as decision-makers within our organizations,” says King-Cortes of LTA. Despite growing interest in broadening the movement’s work, “many of us are not ready, I would say, to jump into partnership with affordable housing groups until we’ve done our homework: until we’ve learned about the roots of the affordable housing movement, the ties to the civil rights movement.”

Yet conservation groups also have a wealth of resources and expertise to offer. For CLTs, “by far the biggest inhibitor to being able to scale is access to land and money,” said Sorce of Grounded Solutions Network. Partnerships often help fill that gap, and conservation groups could help with this too. “They could team up to acquire a larger parcel, some of which is going to be conservation, some of which is going to be housing.”

In fact, this kind of partnership could benefit both sectors. “Everyone’s struggling to fundraise,” said King-Cortes. “Everyone’s trying to make the most of what we’ve got. But by working together on planning, I think both movements can get more done and maximize resources.”

Succeeding at that will take some effort, because most funding for conservation and housing has historically been separate, as Michels and Hindin noted. “All of the public policy-supported programs and funding are totally siloed,” Rosenberg confirmed. A housing group that wants to build a development with trails, parks, or community gardens can typically only get funding to build the housing, while on the flip side, conservation groups can’t get funding to do anything besides conserve land.

However, there are exceptions to that rule. In Vermont, housing and conservation groups organized in 1987 to create a single public funding source, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund, administered by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB). Michels, who worked at VHCB for several years, says it demonstrates a potential model for collaboration. It has nurtured relationships and understanding between the two communities, and both practitioners and policymakers have come to see the dual goals as complementary, not competitive—reinforcing an almost 100-year-old land use tradition of compact settlement surrounded by a working landscape.

Every year, a coalition of affordable housing and conservation groups lobbies the state legislature for VHCB funding. The result is “a lot of relationship building across those communities of practice, and they each know what the other is working on,” Michels said. VHCB has invested in projects with both elements in many towns, ensuring that affordable housing and open space are both available. “There’s a version of collaboration that doesn’t involve working together on a single parcel,” but pulling for the same outcomes, Michels said; when an opportunity does present itself on one parcel, it is widely embraced.

Back in the Hudson Valley, Rosenberg’s working group is also eyeing Massachusetts’ Community Preservation Act as a model. Voters in Massachusetts can opt for their municipality to apply a surcharge on property taxes, which can then be used to fund conservation, affordable housing, outdoor recreation, and historic preservation. New York’s legislature has authorized some municipalities to vote for a local real estate transfer fee to create a community preservation fund, but the proceeds can only support conservation, not housing.

Identifying policy reforms that could help accomplish its work and agreeing on a statement of shared purpose have been priorities for the Hudson Valley group, which has continued its explorations with support from Regional Plan Association, the project’s fiscal sponsor, and the Consensus Building Institute. “There are actually some collaborations that are already beginning,” said Rosenberg. The Kingston Land Trust, which has been studying and promoting the community land trust model since 2017, has partnered with the regional affordable housing group RUPCO to launch a CLT as part of its Land for Homes initiative. The organization also worked with graduate students at Columbia University and Bard College to develop a regional housing vision and a guide for collaboration between conservation and housing groups. The Chatham, New York–based Columbia Land Conservancy, meanwhile, is serving as the fiscal sponsor for another new CLT.

And within the working group, one of the conservation land trusts identified a 113-acre farm parcel for sale in the town of Red Hook that “defines the gateway to the community,” Rosenberg said. Red Hook has a community preservation fund to support conservation, and Scenic Hudson and other groups have long been active there. But having recently expanded its public sewer system, Red Hook was also looking to develop more affordable housing—and, in the case of this property, to fend off private buyers who were interested in developing the whole parcel.

Conditions seemed favorable. So two of the working group’s housing organizations and two of the land trusts met with local officials to discuss collaborating with the town on a project that would achieve both goals: conserving farmland and building some affordable housing. The town now plans to purchase the land, working with one of the land trusts to place a conservation easement on most of it and setting aside the rest for homes to be built by one of the affordable housing groups. “That project is not done, but it is moving forward,” said Rosenberg. “That’s really exciting.”

LINCOLN INSTITUTE COLLOQUIUM ON CONSERVATION AND COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS

During 2022, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy led a yearlong research effort on the potential for collaboration between conservation land trusts and community land trusts (CLTs). With the support of Peter Stein of Lyme Timber Company and a grant from the 1772 Foundation, the institute convened a core group of experts in conservation and affordable housing for a series of meetings, culminating with a colloquium and working paper.

The colloquium has informed ongoing efforts to advance land conservation and affordable housing priorities. In February, working paper coauthors Katie Michels and David Hindin advised the Connecticut Land Conservation Council’s summit for advocates and leaders in the conservation and housing sectors to consider shared agendas and future policy goals. In March, Jim Levitt, director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute, moderated a keynote panel titled “Affordable Housing and Land Conservation: Not an Either/Or” at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition; the panel included a colloquium participant.

“To thrive, communities need permanently affordable housing and permanently conserved land that provides green space, natural infrastructure, and biodiversity-friendly habitat,” says Chandni Navalkha, associate director of Sustainably Managed Land and Water Resources at the Lincoln Institute. “By working in greater collaboration, these communities of practice have unique potential in leveraging their decades of success and experience to implement multigoal, multibenefit projects that address communities’ most pressing challenges.”

Audrea Lim is a writer in New York City whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Guardian. Her book Free the Land, on the commodification of land and alternatives in the United States, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Lead image: Graduate students from Columbia University worked with the Kingston Land Trust on a project that envisions new affordable housing models on communally owned property, including medium-density apartments. Credit: “(E)CO-Living: Towards a More Affordable and Green Kingston” by Yiyang Cai, Kai Guo, Lingbei Chen, Wenyi Peng. Urban Design Studio II, Spring 2021, Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Faculty: Kaja Kühl coordinator, with Lee Altman, Anna Dietzsch, Shachi Pandey, Thaddeus Pawlowski and Associates, Zarith Pineda, Victoria Vuono. Local Partner: Kingston Land Trust.

It might not be instantly obvious how housing finance could be considered a land policy, and even less obvious why pundits like me describe national financial regulation like the Community Reinvestment Act as one of the most important land policies of the 20th century. How in the world could national financial regulation influence local land use, and what does the lending and investment activity of banks have to do with land?

As I’ve noted here before, discriminatory federal lending maps devised by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and adopted by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in the 1930s had enduring impact. Some 90 years later, a 2022 review by the Federal Reserve reported on research that definitively linked these maps to contemporary inequities in economic opportunity, health outcomes, access to green space, heat island effects, COVID mortality, and life expectancy.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was one of three congressional actions following the 1964 Civil Rights Act that were designed to undo the damage inflicted on communities by federal housing finance policies. Decades of capital starvation and discrimination-by-design had hollowed out American cities and immiserated millions of Americans and their communities.

Passed in 1977 on the heels of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in real estate transactions, and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, which required lenders to report on their activities with geographic precision, the CRA imposed an affirmative obligation on federally regulated banks to serve the credit needs of all communities in their service areas. It did not tell banks what they could not do, but rather what they needed to do to reverse decades of bad behavior.

Three federal agencies—the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)—were tasked with ensuring that banks complied with this new regulation. Interestingly, the law was only fully enforced a dozen years later, when regulators were asked to approve banks’ geographic expansion, primarily through mergers or acquisitions.

The CRA has been revised many times to respond to the evolving banking industry. Most recently, in 2020, the OCC proposed a modernization rule to address the shift from “bricks and mortar” to digital banking, but the rule was opposed by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and thousands of community groups. The proposal was rescinded in 2021, but few observers would argue that the CRA does not need modernizing. Even more pressing than digital banking are concerns about the huge shift in mortgage lending away from regulated banks to nonbank lenders.

According to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, 10 of the top 12 mortgage lenders in 2021 (and four of the top five) were independent mortgage companies. These nonbank lenders have no affirmative obligation to address historic discrimination. Beyond Home Mortgage Disclosure Act compliance, their lending activity is very weakly regulated. They are not, however, beyond the reach of land policy qua financial regulation.

Nonbank lenders rely on industry giants for capital. According to the Urban Institute, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, purchased around 60 percent of mortgages originated in the United States in 2021. The FHA and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) accounted for an additional 16 percent. Importantly, nonbanks originated around 70 percent of the loans purchased by the GSEs and more than 90 percent of the government-backed loans in 2021. So, if one wanted to continue affirmative efforts to serve the housing finance needs of historically underserved markets, the pathway is fairly obvious: look for existing or new policy frameworks that provide opportunities, by way of regulating the GSEs, to affect the lending behavior of nonbanks.

As luck would have it, the housing finance giants are publicly controlled. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed in federal conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in 2008 when they became insolvent during the foreclosure crisis. In 2017, the FHFA implemented the Duty to Serve program, which imposed statutory requirements on the GSEs to serve three specific underserved markets: manufactured housing, affordable housing preservation, and rural housing. Under Duty to Serve, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are required to submit three-year plans that describe how they will better serve those markets. The plans are finalized based on public input and reported on annually to Congress.

In 2021, the FHFA imposed additional obligations on the GSEs to expand access to safe, decent, and affordable housing opportunities; they are now required to prepare, implement, and report annually on Equitable Housing Finance plans that describe how they will “meaningfully address the racial and ethnic disparities in homeownership and wealth that have persisted for decades.”

The decade following the first enforcement of the CRA in 1989 was a golden era for community development as advocates mobilized to pressure banks to meet CRA obligations. Almost immediately, hundreds of billions of dollars of new lending flowed to CRA service areas. The national homeownership rate rose from 64 percent to 68 percent, with growth in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods double the national rates. Community development corporations prospered, and the community development finance industry was incubated.

We are at a similar moment for the Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans—something I’ve taken to calling “the New CRA.” The FHFA is building more muscular regulatory oversight, and with the Lincoln Institute’s help, the civic sector is again mobilizing to ask for better plans, better enforcement, and better results.

Last year, we convened 20 of the largest nonprofit affordable housing developers to launch the Underserved Mortgage Markets Coalition (UMMC). Its objective is to speak with one voice to push, and collaborate with, the GSEs to meet their mission under the Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans. Together we are working with the GSEs to design better lending products to finance the purchase of manufactured homes, build the capacity of Community Development Financial Institutions to originate new mortgages in hard-to-reach markets, and persuade the FHFA to support new pilot lending programs to test new products and processes to better serve these markets.

The UMMC is demystifying the secondary mortgage market—where lenders and investors buy and sell loans and servicing rights—and proposing realistic solutions to make real systems change. In its first full year as a coalition, the UMMC notched an important victory when the FHFA rejected new Duty to Serve plans submitted by the GSEs, asking for more ambitious plans with more specific goals like those reflected in a comprehensive blueprint the coalition had prepared. Recent UMMC efforts include a scorecard showing how well the GSEs followed the blueprint and a dashboard that will provide accessible, detailed quantitative data on their performance.

The Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans are not a substitute for the Community Reinvestment Act. The CRA remains the most important land policy in our national arsenal of financial regulation, and is responsible for huge amounts of new credit that flowed back to communities that were denied access for decades. But times have changed. When the CRA was passed, there were an estimated 18,000 banks insured by the FDIC. Today, there are 4,844. On top of that, many banks are closing or shrinking their retail mortgage business, ceding the space to nonbank lenders. We can try to reform the CRA to reflect this new market reality, or we can meet the market where it is.

Racial and ethnic homeownership gaps remain distressingly high, as does an unacceptable and stubborn racial wealth gap. If we hope to make a dent in either, we’ll need to find a way to expand homeownership in unprecedented ways. Nobody expected the CRA to redress all the shameful impacts of misguided lending policies. The Duty to Serve and Equitable Housing Finance plans are wonderful supplements to the CRA. Perhaps a portfolio of lending regulations is a better approach than one size fits all. It is our hope that the UMMC will empower practitioners and advocates to ask the GSEs and the FHFA for what they need to take on these immense challenges.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: President Jimmy Carter signs the Community Reinvestment Act into law in 1977. Credit: Federal Reserve.

Realizing a low-carbon future that is economically and racially just is an enormous undertaking at any level, but especially for small and midsize older industrial cities. Following their rapid expansion in the early twentieth century, smaller “legacy cities” tend to have established built environments, access to natural resources, and substantial brownfields that make them ripe for sustainable redevelopment. Yet these places often lack the investment and capacity to create and implement comprehensive sustainability initiatives that contribute to a greener local future.

To advance “green” policymaking and implementation, local governments must build the capacity to integrate three concurrent policy areas: climate resilience, environmental justice, and green economic development. By building this strong policy foundation and leveraging newly available funding streams, these cities can chart bold paths toward green regeneration, according to Greening America’s Smaller Legacy Cities, a new Policy Focus Report written by Joseph Schilling, Catherine Tumber, and Gabi Velasco and published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Even with limited resources and budgets, these cities can pursue accessible, meaningful strategies to facilitate equitable community engagement, coordinate sustainability initiatives, and cultivate cross-sector partnerships. Indeed, the authors write, “‘greening’ cities is essential, despite these hurdles . . . [in part because] these practices offer a promising place-based pathway for equitable economic and environmental rebirth, or ‘green regeneration.’”

For local officials and their partners across the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors, this report offers strategic policy guidance for achieving meaningful climate resilience and climate justice, and for scaling early efforts effectively. It explores the fast-changing world of local-level climate policy and planning, as well as the existing policy levers municipalities can use to reform land use practices, plan for blue-green infrastructure, redevelop brownfields, construct green buildings, and prepare for low-carbon energy build-out.

To help readers take action, the report breaks down the practical strategies, specific steps, and key resources that smaller legacy cities need to link their sustainability efforts to broader partnerships and networks and to secure transformative investments. The authors recommend investing in green intermediaries that can strengthen regional networks, which can help smaller jurisdictions center climate resilience, racial equity, and green economic development. They also recommend integrating climate considerations into existing plans and policies, such as land use plans and codes, electric grid upgrades, and other specific interventions.

“Communities have an unprecedented opportunity to tackle the climate crisis with new federal funding,” said Lisa Wong, the former mayor of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. “This report offers practical steps to implement equitable solutions by creating a road map to increase capacity and integrate policies. With the stakes so high for ourselves and generations to come, this important resource will help local leaders and activists build a better future for legacy cities.”

“Smaller legacy cities bring abundant assets and incredible history to the table when it comes to economic development, but the specific challenges these cities face need tailored solutions, especially when the work is as critical and resource-heavy as green regeneration,” said Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “With this report, smaller legacy cities now have their own array of greening tools for leveraging their unique circumstances—tools committed to equity and justice as essential to enduring regeneration.”

Greening America’s Smaller Legacy Cities offers a novel framework for smaller legacy cities’ leaders and for regional, state, and federal allies and partners to create near- and long-term sustainability programming at every level. With consistent awareness of the budget pressures and myriad other constraints these cities face, the authors explore newer funding and capacity-building opportunities, and they offer an insightful guide to the regional intergovernmental policy ecosystems and players that can help or hinder growth.

“This is crucial work,” said Bill McKibben, activist and author of The End of Nature. “These small cities are often the hubs of large regions, and they can’t be allowed to just molder away. Instead, they have a bright—and bright green—future, if we can come together to help them make the transition!”

Today, smaller legacy cities are regional economic centers and county seats, with a modest sense of scale, history of productive know-how, and access to farmland, forests, and water assets. They are crucial to constructing a more sustainable, equitable low-carbon world. While individual places have different histories, demographics, and spatial challenges to consider, the report ultimately details how, through integrating climate resilience, environmental justice, and green economic development initiatives, each smaller legacy city can forge its own path toward equitable green regeneration.

Allison Ehrich Bernstein is principal at Allative Communications.

Lead image: Providence, Rhode Island. Credit: tupungato via iStock/Getty Images Plus.