Lincoln Lectures for spring, and now on video

The Lincoln Institute has begun to post video of selected Lincoln Lectures, beginning with a talk on prospects for inter-city rail by former Governor Michael S. Dukakis Nov. 19 at Lincoln House; an excerpt is also available on YouTube. The spring schedule of Lincoln Lectures has also been set, featuring Benito Arruñada, professor of Business Organization at Pompeu Fabra University Feb. 20 presenting Property Rights, Titling, and Regulation: An International Perspective; Lincoln-Loeb Fellow Heather Tremain on Cities and Climate Change: Regional Integration; and UCLA professor Randall Crane, a former visiting fellow, on Place-Based versus People-Based Community Economic Development  April 22.

Foreclosed opportunity

In Arizona, where in some communities every one in 20 homes is in foreclosure, banks are letting homeowners and sometimes work crews occupy foreclosed homes to prevent the theft of copper piping. In California, abandoned swimming pools have become health hazards. And in Cleveland, where the foreclosed homes pile up by the block, housesare being sold for $1,000 on the Internet.
     The number of foreclosures in the US was estimated at 3 million in 2008, representing nearly 2 percent of all American homes. While a new president takes office who has promised to address the current and future problem, the conditions on the ground have become increasingly messy. Cities across the country are trying the best they can to shift vacated properties before they have a negative impact on entire neighborhoods. The Department of Housing and Community Development, meanwhile, is planning to distribute some $4 billion in aid, including some initiatives that have been questioned by some, such as razing buildings and "de-densifying" housing.
    About 200 practitioners of community land trusts, who gathered last month at the National CLT Network annual conference in Boston, co-sponsored by the Lincoln Institute, discussed a different approach -- turning foreclosed properties into community land trusts. The keynote speaker, Tina Brooks, undersecretary for housing for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, proclaimed that she was "a believer" in this strategy. Boston Herald reporter Laura Crimaldi, who attended the conference along with Sacha Pfeiffer from WBUR-FM, filed this report on the efforts by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative to acquire foreclosed properties in Boston. John Barros, a major figure at the conference, said the idea is getting traction but that "everybody's a little skittish right now."
    In the community land trust model, buyers purchase the home exclusive of the land it sits on, reducing the price. They agree to limits on resale profit, which has the effect of creating permanently affordable housing; buyers can also receive backup support and counseling on financing if needed. The foreclosure rate in community land trusts is virtually nonexistent.

Smart growth, evaluated

     Smart growth initiatives have been in place since the 1990s, and there is likely to be new interest in land use planning as states and possibly the federal government moves to regulate carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. But there has been virtually no independent and comprehensive evaluation of how these policies have worked. For more than a year, a team assembled by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has been working on a major project to examine how statewide smart growth polices have delivered in the areas of land consumption, housing, transportation, the environment, and fiscal impact. Gregory K. Ingram, who was director-general of operations evaluation at the World Bank before becoming president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute, will lead a panel discussion providing a glimpse of the findings at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Albuquerque, N.M. beginning Jan. 22. Joining Ingram at the session, Smart Growth and Growth Management: An Evaluation, scheduled for January 22, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. at the Albuquerque Convention Center, are Terry Moore, Planning Director, ECONorthwest; Tim Chapin, chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Florida State University; and Allan Wallis, professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado, Denver, who will discuss the evolution of smart growth and the results of a survey that is also part of the project. The material will be published in a forthcoming book and Policy Focus Report.

From the Iditarod to Patagonia

     The energetic Jim Levitt, director of The Program on Conservation Innovation at The Harvard Forest, Harvard University, has teamed up with Lincoln Institute senior fellow Armando Carbonell, Steve Reifenberg, director of the Santiago field office of Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Antonio Lara, dean of the Faculty of Forest Science at  the Universidad Austral de Chile, to put on Conservation Capital in the Americas, a gathering of leaders in the protection of land and biodiversity in Valdivia, Chile January 17-19.
     Levitt, who has also organized a summit on land conservation and climate change for the Lincoln Institute the last two years, held in Cambridge and Washington D.C., says the gathering will confront the complex challenges of protecting land and biodiversity in the western hemisphere -- adapting to the impacts of global warming, fighting the proliferation of invasive species that threaten to out-compete rare and beautiful native species, and confronting the spread of residential and industrial development, from southern Patagonia in Chile and Argentina to the Northern Forest in the United States and Canada.
      “Conservationists will need generous capital resources – that is, money – to protect and be good stewards of a representative sample of our natural treasures, and of the ecosystem services that are essential to life on earth,” Levitt says.  “The good news is that there is an abundant supply of ingenuity in the growing conservation community.”
      Conservation finance specialists are coming up with a variety of innovative methods to underwrite land and biodiversity conservation projects, cutting across geographic boundaries and economic sectors, and engaging public agencies, private companies, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions, he says.
      Nearly 100 invited conservation practitioners, educators and students from North, Central, and South America will gather to hear presentations from the Chilean Senator from Valdivia, Andres Allamand; the United States Ambassador to Chile, Paul Simons;  Christopher Elliman, president of the Open Space Institute based in New York;  Laurie Wayburn, president of the San Francisco-based Pacific Forest Trust and the Lincoln Institute’s Kingsbury Browne fellow;  Victoria Alonso, private lands coordinator at The Nature Conservancy in Santiago, Chile;  and  Jose Gonzales, special adviser to the Caral Project  in Lima, Peru. Topics include Limited Development and Sustainable Land Use; Financing for Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Sustainable Enterprises; Conservation Investment Banking; Tax and Fiscal Incentives for Conservation; and Ecosystem Service and Forest Carbon Markets.
   Partners and funders for the conference and for a forthcoming book to be based on presentations made at the meeting include the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, Forrest Berkley and Marcie Tyre, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, the Environmental Leadership and Training Institute (a joint initiative of the Smithsonian Institution and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies), Jesse and Betsy Fink, the Harvard Forest, the Horizon Foundation, the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Trust for Public Land, the Nature Conservancy and the Universidad Austral de Chile.

The next city, continued

In the documentary film Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City, part of the Making Sense of Place series by the Lincoln Institute and Northern Light Productions, an analysis emerged that the city should learn to be comfortable with downsizing -- its population, its employment base, its tax base and public finance framework. This notion is sometimes referred to as the shrinking city. Now comes York University economist Peter Victor, who sees a smaller, more local emphasis for regional economies nationwide, as the current recession deepens. The Great Depression led to a reordering of society's priorities and institutions, and this downturn may prompt a future where we don't work longer, spend more or accumulate more to keep the economy hurtling along, notes Caroln Goar in this Toronto Star column on York, who is author of the book Managing Without Growth -- Slower by Design not Disaster. A different kind of city supported by transit and other new infrastructure is also explored by Matt Dellinger in this short piece in The Atlantic.