At Lincoln House

Making Land Legible: Cadastres for Urban Planning and Development in Latin America

     The traditional cadastre – a public land registry typically used to track ownership and property taxation – is being reimagined throughout Latin America as a powerful tool to promote fiscal stability and guide urban planning initiatives, including building resilience in the face of climate change, according to new research published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
     Advances in technology and data crowdsourcing have made this new multipurpose cadastre possible, say Diego Alfonso Erba and Mario Andrés Piumetto, authors of Making Land Legible: Cadastres for Urban Planning and Development in Latin America. Successful implementations of the multipurpose cadastre in cities in Colombia, Brazil, and other countries have demonstrated its benefits to policy makers, write the authors, both veteran land surveyors with years of experience in research and practice in this burgeoning field.
     A territorial cadastre is a public registry that manages information relating to parcels of land. In much of Latin America, cadastres are structured under the orthodox model imported from Europe long ago, which accounts only for economic, physical, and legal characteristics. This model has several limitations: it is typically restricted to private properties; much of the information may be out of date and incomplete; and it does not encompass key parcel-level data needed for urban policy decisions—such as information on transportation, infrastructure, and utility networks—which is scattered among several unconnected institutions and in different formats.
     A multipurpose cadastre is based on a partnership of stakeholders committed to generating extensive, precise, detailed, and up-to-date information about a city. It shares alphanumeric data and maps as well as human and financial resources, and can be implemented at the national, regional, or local level at reasonable cost. The use of camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, can provide extensive information quickly.
     Orthodox land cadastres are implemented by public agencies using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and updated with information from periodic surveys. In contrast, a multipurpose cadastre is built within a spatial data infrastructure system. Its component parts are updated continuously with data obtained from urban observatories and other sources. Both systems can be implemented with free software applications—one of the keys to the success of the multipurpose cadastre model.
      Latin America – with vast uninhabited areas and extensive urban sprawl, the Amazon jungle and increasing deforestation, and tremendous wealth and crushing poverty existing side by side – is a unique testing ground. Part of the legacy of colonization is a lack of accurate records, which continues to facilitate illegal land occupations that persist to this day and strongly conditions urban policies—particularly those related to tenure security and tax collection practices.
     Although it does not define land policies, a multipurpose cadastre is a key instrument for that purpose. The data integration provided by the model is the most direct way to identify and monitor the economic, physical, legal, environmental, and social characteristics of parcels and their occupants. Planners need this information to manage the growth of cities, define strategies for financing urban development, and to reduce informality and analyze the impact of government interventions. The information is also critical for disaster preparedness and adaptation to the impacts of climate change.
     Making Land Legible describes the evolution of cadastres, and surveys the adoption of the multipurpose model and associated benefits. The authors also spell out best practices to facilitate a shift to multipurpose cadastres, including building land value observatories that involve the greatest number of partners possible; implementing assessment methods based on econometric and geostatistical models that can correlate assessment maps with the real estate market; mandating the georeferencing of parcels and requiring updated blueprints on each real estate transaction; and incorporating data on public properties and informal settlements in cadastre maps.

At Journalists Forum, in search of fiscal health

   All told, it will take about $1.5 billion to deal with the lead poisoning catastrophe in Flint, Michigan, about 3,000 times what it would have cost to employ safeguards that could have prevented the crisis in the first place, Congressman Dan Kildee said last month at the Lincoln Institute’s 2016 Journalists Forum on municipal fiscal health in Washington, D.C.
   Speaking to about 50 leading reporters and editors, Kildee described Flint, his hometown, as an extreme case of a downward spiral that could happen in many U.S. cities: economic decline, loss of population, neglect of infrastructure, and drastic cost-cutting measures. “There are a lot of Flint, Michigans in this country – more than I think most of us want to admit,” he said.
   Kildee shared the stage with Mayor Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City to kick of the Journalists Forum, a wide-ranging conversation about the structural issues that shape the financial health of cities. Partners included the Pew Charitable Trusts, Omidyar Network, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Ford Foundation.
   It’s easy to forget that many cities that are thriving today, like New York City and Washington, D.C., once teetered on the brink of insolvency. Richard Ravitch of the Volcker Alliance suggested that what makes things more severe today are pensions and other post-employment benefits. Washington’s unique governance structure facilitated a swift response, said John Hill, who managed that city’s fiscal crisis in the 1990s, and is currently Detroit’s chief financial officer. Kevyn Orr, former emergency manager for Detroit, said it was critical to balance financial and humanitarian interests, especially in the depths of a fiscal crisis.
   Looking at the revenue portfolio of cities, Lincoln Institute fellow Lourdes Germán described the current state of capital markets, innovations such as value capture, and the integration of financial and spatial planning. New York City Planning Director Carl Weisbrod shared examples of value capture from the Vanderbilt Avenue corridor and Hudson Yards, where the city is partly funding public investment with the expected increase in land values. Jerold Kayden of Harvard's Graduate School of Design provided the historical context in which planning and infrastructure investment has occurred in the United States.
   Transparency is crucial for cities to access the $3.7 trillion municipal debt markets, said regulators  Lynnette Kelly of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, LeeAnn Gaunt of the SEC’s Municipal Securities and Public Pensions Unit and Christina Ho, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Accounting Policy and Financial Transparency at the Treasury Department. The MSRB’s Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) website is a resource for investors, journalists and the public to learn more about municipal borrowers and bonds. Germán introduced the Municipal Fiscal Health Dashboard, a forthcoming Lincoln Institute database that will allow for comparisons of 150 U.S. cities. Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First noted that more information will be available through new Governmental Accounting Standards Board requirements to report the true costs in lost revenue of tax breaks for business location.
   Looking at fiscal stress from the state perspective, Kil Huh, Pew’s senior director for State and Local Fiscal Health, said an important function of monitoring was to detect early warning signs of stress, in cities from Stockton, California to Central Falls, Rhode Island. Craig Kinns, assistant operations director for the New York State Comptroller’s Office, reviewed the state’s unique Fiscal Stress Monitoring System covering more than 4,000 local governments and school districts, which shows that nearly a quarter of New York’s cities are fiscally stressed. In terms of state budgets themselves, 41 states have balanced-budget laws, but the public packaging of expenditures, revenues, and debt can be opaque, said Bill Glasgall, director of state and local programs for the Volcker Alliance and an advisor to the Ravitch Fiscal Reporting Program at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He shared results from the project Beyond the Basics, a survey of state budget practices.
   The federal role in the fiscal health of cities has diminished over the years, but remains critical in many ways, whether unfunded mandates or the problem of unspent block grant funds. The Obama administration has been attentive in helping Detroit and more than a dozen other cities through the Strong Cities Strong Communities Initiative, said Don Graves, Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to Vice President Joe Biden.
   Fiscal stress knows no boundaries, as the international session led by Lincoln Institute president George W. “Mac” McCarthy made clear. Hector Negroni from Fundamental Advisors LP presented on Puerto Rico’s looming debt crisis, calling for a resolution that adheres to the rules under which debt was sold, and preserves the seniority of creditors. The rapidly growing cities of China have racked up staggering amounts of debt, and must find a more sustainable path that may include exploring the use of the property tax, said Zhi Liu, director of the Lincoln Institute’s program in China.
   As a prominent feature of the Journalists Forum, now in its 10^th year, writers and editors shared their insights and observations in the practice of the craft – and the particular challenges of communicating complex fiscal issues for a broad audience. James Surowiecki, author of the Financial Page column at The New Yorker, kicked off the event at the Reagan Trade Center, noting the many impediments to local fiscal health, from an obsession with the short-term that restricts investment in infrastructure, to the culture of American individualism that shapes attitudes about cities and planning. Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR’s On Point, provided a behind-the-scenes look at managing callers and fostering live discussion.
   Liz Farmer of Governing shared Finance 101, the magazine’s ongoing series covering fiscal stress across the nation. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Constance Mitchell Ford, now teaching fiscal journalism at the University of Maryland, noted the wealth of information that is available through credit rating agencies.
   In a session devoted to analyzing and packaging complex data, Sarah Cohen from the data team at The New York Times shared efforts to help readers understand statistical analysis, such as the interactive Olympics Musical infographic, and Laz Gamio and Ted Mellnik from The Washington Post walked through the creation of a map of where millennials are moving in Washington. Data visualization developer Ben Chartoff and senior research associate Jon Schwabish of the Urban Institute used the visual metaphor of a pyramid to show the inverse relationship between the depth of research and the size of the audience for various modes of communication, ranging from technical papers to social media posts. Finally, Tom Burgis from The Financial Times showed how data collection and analysis must frequently be accompanied by old-fashioned on-the-ground reporting, as he found in the project The Great Land Rush.
   Challenging economic pressures in the media industry make it even more difficult to produce in-depth stories on fiscal issues, so the Forum concluded with a session on foundation-supported journalism, led by Steve Sapienza from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The panel included presentations by Matthew Niederhauser on the project The Megacity Initiative, Claire Provost of The Guardian on the in-depth reporting opportunities provided by her fellowship with the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, Chris Arsenault at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Stateline editor Scott Greenberger on covering issues like the opioid crisis, and veteran syndicated columnist Neal Peirce, founder of Citiscope.
   The Forum was enhanced by a lively conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #fiscalhealth, and coverage by Reuters, ABC, The American Prospect, Africa Check, CityMetric, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.