London calling

Nicky Gavron, as deputy mayor of London, was a driving force behind London's ambitious climate action plan and a sustainability overhaul for a city increasingly central on the global stage. Then along came Boris Johnson, who surprised Gavron and Mayor Ken Livingstone with a victory in the elections in May. As is common in the U.S., the new administration wasn't necessarily keen on carrying on the signature agenda of the predecessor.
"One does hear occasionally talk of drowning the kittens," Gavron said at a visit to Lincoln House June 10, where she delivered a special Lincoln Lecture on the London climate action plan and other planning initiatives. But as a member of the London Assembly, the equivalent of an American city council, Gavron said she is hopeful she can continue to be a green influence on policy. And, she noted in her talk, some requirements for developers -- for on-site renewable energy, for example -- are now set in stone.
     "The battle on climate change will be won or lost on cities," Gavron said. "Cities use 75 percent of global energy and are responsible for 80 percent of emissions. We may be the problem -- but we’re also the solution."
     London dedicated itself to slashing carbon emissions even as the current 7.5 million population grows by 50,000 per year, by emphasizing density, Brownfields redevelopment, transit use, and the celebrated congestion pricing scheme where private cars are charged the equivalent of $16 to enter the center city. New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a similar proposal that was defeated, though Gavron -- noting "hysterical opposition" that gave way to universal support in London -- predicted that eventually Manhattan below 86th Street would operate like London in the years ahead.

     Such initiatives can reduce emissions by 30 percent, Gavron said, but beyond that what is needed is a price on carbon, the removal of barriers on locally generated energy, and investment in green technologies. "Surface transport is 22 percent of emissions. But buildings represent 70 percent. We’ll get half from energy efficiency, a quarter from greening the grid [electricity produced from wind power and other renewable sources] and a quarter from locally produced energy supply [thermal, decentralized energy, combined heat and cooling, co-generation]. It's going to be nothing short of an energy revolution,” Gavron said.

     Gavron, who appeared the day before at the MassImpact conference at MIT, noted that the Boston area was "unrivaled in terms of research and academic excellence," and could take the lead in emerging green technologies. She urged the audience to "mobilize, proselytize, and catalyze" on the issue of climate change. Her appearance marked the conclusion of the spring Lincoln Lecture series, which will resume at Lincoln House in the fall.

Enduring affordability

The stretch of Dudley Street around Brook Avenue in Boston is a streetscape in transformation: red-brick attached townhouses rise on vacant lots, filling in the gaps of a neighborhood with much-needed housing. Over 200 LEED-certified new homes are being built by the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation under the auspices of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston's two-decade-old community land trust -- a burgeoning affordable housing strategy where residents buy the homes but not the land underneath, thus reducing the price.
     Earlier this month, the Lincoln Institute recognized the partnership between DSNI and the City of Boston that made all this possible, with a special event at the corner of Dudley Street and Brook Avenue in Boston's Roxbury section, announcing publication of The City-CLT Partnership: Municipal Support for Community Land Trusts, the institute's latest policy focus report. The report, co-authored by John  Emmeus Davis (pictured above) and Rick Jacobus, both visiting fellows at the Lincoln Institute, reviews model practices of municipalities that are not just supporting CLTs after they have been created by non-profit entities, but more actively nurturing them -- donating city-owned land, for example.
     "We know that CLTs work. We also know they are not widely implemented," said Roz Greenstein, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Economic and Community Development, which has led a thriving program in community land trusts in recent years.
     Davis,  partner in Burlington Associates in Community Development in Vermont, said CLTs were reaching "something of a tipping point," growing from 20 when DSNI was founded in 1988 to over 220 today, with a growth rate of about 20 a year. CLTs used to be exclusively community-based and independent from city programs, but now cities are realizing what an effective affordable housing strategy they are, Davis said. Unlike some inclusionary zoning ordinances, where the affordability can be lost after the first resale, CLTs have controls over resale. The community land trust acts as the long-term steward. The question is how cities can let CLTs flourish and retain neighborhood-based independence.
     "Partnerships are hard work," said John Barros, executive director of DSNI, which in the 1980s was given the unusual added power of eminent domain, and now has secured 26 acres in its community land trust. Neighborhoods must be "partner-ready" to take the lead on establishing CLTs, he said.
     John Feuerbach, chief development officer at Boston's Department of Neighborhood Development,  said that 20 years ago the city and the Dudley Street neighborhood were focused on "trying to build trust," and that now the area shares a common vision as an urban village. The site is served by two bus lines and is near the Uphams Corner commuter rail station and Dudley Station.
     Boston City Councilor Michael Flaherty attended the event, and took away a box of the reports, which he promised to distribute at City Hall. Boston is looking for ways to let more CLTs flourish.

Acts of man

The report in today's Washington Post suggesting that man-made interventions in the 100-year floodplain -- development, farming, wetlands disruption -- was to blame for the catastrophic flooding losses in Iowa got a few of us thinking here at the Lincoln Institute whether this matter had been examined before. Sure enough, publications director Ann Leroyer recalled a 1996 policy focus report entitled On Borrowed Land: Public Policies for Floodplains.  The impetus was a review of what happened in the Great Flood of 1993 along the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries. "Although governments may not yet be able to manage the weather, they can improve the management of floodplains to reduce damages caused by flooding," the report says. "Rather than spend national tax dollars on flood control structures and post-diaster aid, the federal government should provide continuously updated information about changing flood risks and land uses across whole watersheds." If it's not one thing after another, it's the same thing over and over again.

A Texas dispute

The next installment of the Shifting Ground series, David Baron's multi-part chronicle of land use in America, is scheduled to air on National Public Radio's evening program All Things Considered Tuesday June 17, 2008. This installment, the fourth in the series, concerns a property rights dispute in Texas caused by the eroding shoreline.
     Here is David Baron's description: "As global warming causes the seas to rise and shorelines to recede, what will happen to homes stranded on the beach?  A community along the Gulf of Mexico may provide a glimpse of America's future. Surfside, Texas, is a beach town south of Houston, and it's experienced some of the worst erosion on the Gulf coast.  Homes that were once set back from the beach now sit at the water's edge.  According to the state, these private homes now sit on the public beach, and officials have demanded that the homeowners remove their structures.  Some homeowners, however, are fighting the eviction.  They say that the erosion that placed their homes on the beach was not natural but was the result of government projects, and they contend the government is now trying to take their property unconstitutionally.  This fight, which may go as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, could determine how other communities will prepare for the problems likely to result from rising seas.  Whose responsibility will it be to move buildings out of the way?  And who will take the hit for lost property value?"
     The Shifting Ground series is supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; programs that have aired thus far are archived here.

Infrequent eminent domain

In August 2006 a headline on the cover of Parade magazine asked, "Will the government take your home?" The article followed the previous summer's 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, affirming governmental use of eminent domain for economic development projects. But how often are these powers actually used? Relatively infrequently, says Jerold Kayden, professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, who presented preliminary findings from research done for the Lincoln Institute at the institute's third annual international land policy conference, Land Policies and Property Rights. A survey of 154 cities with populations of 100,000 or more revealed that 207 properties were taken for economic development purposes over a five-year period, and 112 of the 154 cities surveyed reported no takings at all. Kayden stressed that the findings were preliminary and the research did not include the threat of eminent domain; the count reflects completed takings only. But, he said, "It appears that Americans can sleep tonight without legitimate anxiety that their homes will be turned into a motel." The conference examined eminent domain, regulatory takings, and property rights both in the U.S. and in transitional economies such as China and Vietnam, where property rights are beginning to figure into evolving land markets.

Thinking deeper

Gasoline may be headed to $5 a gallon, and it wouldn't surprise anyone if oil hit $150 a barrel. The impacts are reverberating throughout the economy. The policy responses thus far have included a gas tax holiday, calls for drilling in the US, the Gulf Coast, the Arctic, and the tar sands of Canada; and hitting the oil companies with a windfall profit tax. We'd be better off if we seized this moment to plan new systems for our physical arrangements and how we get around, argues Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell in this op-ed essay in today's editions of The Boston Globe. A new national plan for infrastructure that includes rail and transit investments, organized around megaregions like the Boston-Washington corridor, is a way to attack the problem from the demand side, he says. Zoning reform for compact, mixed-use development to reduce VMT (vehicle miles traveled) will also reduce reliance on burning so much fossil fuel.

Adapting -- and soon

Millions of acres of pine forests are being destroyed by beetles that are flourishing in warmer temperatures in the northern woods across the Canadian border; the dead trees are disrupting the habits of birds and grizzlies, and provide fuel for potentially devastating forest fires. Runoff from agricultural land packs a potent chemical punch that is intensified by severe storms. And the snowshoe hare is threatened by new predators, as spring occurs earlier than its programmed changeover from white to a colored coat, which is triggered by longer days rather than temperature change. Instead of blending in with the greenery, the hares are sticking out like a sore thumb.
   The impacts of climate change on forests, water resources, farmland, and wildlife are already apparent, and require new strategies of adaptive management of natural and working landscapes, over 100 land conservation professionals, policymakers and environmental advocates concluded at a two-day conference held by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Washington D.C. May 27-28. The stories of the destroyed forests and disrupted ecosystems suggest that the changes "are occurring now, rather than 25 or 50 years from now," said James Levitt of Harvard's Kennedy School, who organized the gathering with Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell.
   The conference, Conservation and Climate Change: Building a Framework for Adaptive Manegement, coincided with the release of a report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, co-authored by one of the presenters, Anthony C. Janetos, director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, citing more frequent forest fires, changes in snowpack and drought trends in the West and elsewhere.
   The challenges are daunting for the management and future acquisition of conservation land. Levitt said he hoped the conference would lead to a new consortium of researchers and professionals to tackle the problem, which would focus on the need to monitor and collect better data, determine effectiveness of adaptive management strategies, and provide a rationale for intervention. A crucial component will be market-based innovations for the conservation of forests, said Levitt, who is author of the book From Walden to Wall Street: Frontiers of Conservation Finance. The conference was covered in-depth by Bryan Walsh at Time magazine, including a podcast.