There is a widespread belief that reparations for Black people is too tough a pill to swallow for most Americans. Even those who support reparations say we should pursue only a narrowly tailored congressional act, eschewing smaller-scale, municipal, state, and institutional programs.

Such self-imposed limitations dismiss the legitimate claims for real damages that states, cities, universities, churches, and companies inflicted on Black Americans. This week, as we celebrate Juneteenth, we should recognize that there is a way to change the cultural attitude toward reparations—and it might already be occurring.

This March, the city of Evanston, Ill. approved the country’s first municipal reparations program, providing housing grants of $25,000 to cover mortgage costs, down payments, and home improvements for Black residents injured by the city’s past redlining practices. In 2020, Asheville, N.C. passed a “community reparations” program, which endeavors to invest in Black neighborhoods. In the same year, the town council of Amherst, Mass. approved a resolution to engage in “a path of remedy” for Black residents “injured or harmed by discrimination and racial injustice.” States such as California, Virginia, and Maryland are also moving in this direction. In 2019, Georgetown University students overwhelmingly approved the addition of a $27.20 per semester tuition fee to help pay reparations to the descendants of the slaves the university sold in the 1830s.

In the fight for reparations, we should not assume that opposition to reparations will stay constant, therefore necessitating a rigid, political approach to the issue. According to Gallup, in 2002, only 14% of Americans were in favor of reparations; less than 20 years later, in 2019, 29% of all Americans supported them.

This growing support is both a byproduct of local activism and political pressure as well as a reflection of changing attitudes. Such change has been spurred by an awakening on the racist origins of the United States, beginning on the backs of enslaved Black people and continuing with the devaluation of Black property and life.

Like most policy agendas, reparations won’t come from Washington, D.C. It will go to the nation’s capital, as the local initiatives described above demonstrate. These initiatives signal a change in culture, and encourage a shift that will eventually deliver a comprehensive reparations plan to Congress.

How do we know this? We’ve seen it from the opposite side—how a culture of white supremacy influenced policy.

In 1910, racist attitudes baked into Baltimore’s housing policy became a model for federally backed redlining and other racist housing policies across the country. Baltimore’s then mayor J. Barry Mahool’s negative view of Black people was laid bare in his explanation of the municipal policy: “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighbor- hoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”

While federal policies in the 1960s and 1970s officially banned such racist housing practices, Black people are still burdened in ways that manufacture and cement de facto redlining. For example, homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are worth 23% less than homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with very few or no Black residents. After accounting for factors such as housing quality, neighborhood quality, education, and crime, owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average—amounting to a whopping $156 billion that these homeowners would have received if their homes were priced at market rates.

A long-standing culture of white supremacy in the United States has repeatedly pushed aside equitable and democratic laws and practices in favor of systems of exclusion, devaluation, and suppression. However, culture does change; in fact, we are witnessing it right now.

A culture that’s supportive of reparations for anti-Black policies is emerging, as evidenced by the local initiatives in Evanston, Asheville, Amherst, and Georgetown University. Four out of the top 15 books on The New York Times nonfiction best seller list are about race and racism in America. Progress is even occurring on the federal level: For the first time in the 30-plus years since the late Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced H.R. 40—a bill that would establish a commission to study reparations—the legislation finally made it out of committee this April.

To be clear, we will always have to beat back racists and racist policies. However, a reparative culture that embraces anti-racism and equity can shift the balance of power in those political fights. Just as white supremacist culture gave birth to slavery, redlining, and segregation, we can develop a new culture that recognizes human worth, fairness under the law, and restorative justice.

      

Much like in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the pandemic is prompting well-capitalized individuals and institutions to buy real estate in communities where land values are likely to rise—what some are referring to as the “post-COVID-19 land grab.” Many of the buyers are large real estate investment firms from outside the community or even the country, such as private equity group Blackstone, which recently acquired 5,800 low-cost apartments in San Diego.

Meanwhile, beleaguered working families that live in or near these areas are being left behind from this historic transfer of ownership and opportunity for wealth-building. But with substantial federal dollars flowing to local governments via the American Rescue Plan (ARP), local leaders have an opportunity to address some of the structural issues that have been laid bare over the past year, and help their residents “buy back the block.”

The multiple disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—including higher fatality rates for Black and brown people and steeper employment losses among lower-income workers—have underlined the vulnerability of life in the United States for particular people and places. The American Rescue Plan was created, in part, to bring transformative stability to this precarity. Indeed, the Treasury Department’s interim guidance on the plan’s Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds states that the goal of the funds is to mitigate the pandemic’s “longer-term impact in compounding the systemic public health and economic challenges of disproportionately impacted populations,” and encourages uses “that foster a strong, inclusive, and equitable recovery, especially uses with long-term benefits for health and economic outcomes.”

In other words, it’s time to change the game so that the same players don’t always win or lose.

There is a growing awareness in many cities around the country that expanding or reclaiming real estate ownership is a compelling tool to transition from relief to a just recovery. Enterprising community leaders are forming land trusts and locally managed neighborhood investment funds that allow residents—together with other private, public, and nonprofit sector investors—to purchase, hold, and develop or redevelop land or buildings in their communities. These accessible models are designed to allow small-dollar investors to aggregate their resources for collective buying power—becoming fractional owners or financial beneficiaries, and sometimes even steering the trajectory of local development. These funds take various legal forms: cooperatives, community development corporations, land trusts, corporate entities that sell shares, or trust structures set up principally as investment vehicles.

But in a competitive land market, property can change hands quickly; only those with capital stand a chance of securing ownership. The process of organizing small-dollar resident investors or owners, on the other hand, must be advanced patiently through community-based organizations that have earned local trust and have the capacity to organize, educate, and mobilize.

In the short term, officials should consider using ARP’s highly flexible state and local aid funds to acquire property in transitional neighborhoods before outside firms block out residents. This should follow a two-step process: a rapid acquisition of property so that it can be “banked,” followed by a methodical process of engaging local investors or community owners. The goal here is not to publicly hold land or building assets in the long term, as that will not close the racial wealth gap. Rather, this intermediate step resets the clock on land speculation, creating space for strategic organizing, planning, and capacity-building.

For example, in Minneapolis, LISC Twin Cities launched the Community Asset Transition Fund to temporarily acquire land around culturally significant commercial corridors before transferring ownership to cooperatives and resident groups. LISC has already secured $30 million for the fund, which it hopes will enable local communities to buy back land owned by speculative interests, repair the damage from civil unrest, and retain local ownership of entire districts. The idea has taken root because of the region’s long history with cooperative ownership and neighborhood self-determination efforts, as well as pandemic-related discussions among private foundations, social investors, and other civic actors. It’s part of the push for “more inclusion, engagement and ownership by people of color, not only to repair what was damaged, but also to help generate new prosperity and wealth for members of the community,” LISC Twin Cities Executive Director Peter McLaughlin told Impact Alpha.

Although Minneapolis may have been an epicenter for 2020’s year of racial reckoning, it is not unique. Parallel movements for more racially inclusive property ownership have unfolded across the country, in both urban and rural areas.

The interim Treasury Department guidance on state and local ARP funds maximizes spending flexibility when dollars are targeted through a place-based approach to qualified census tracts. The guidance further identifies “Building Stronger Communities through Investments in Housing and Neighborhoods” as a priority, and specifies affordable housing development as an eligible use. As the Treasury Department develops additional ARP guidance, it would be particularly helpful to explicitly clarify that the acquisition of existing property is eligible and which types of property acquisitions (e.g., rentals, hotels, commercial real estate) are eligible.

As with any spending, ARP dollars can either reinforce familiar ways of local problem-solving, flowing along established channels to more of the same solutions, or they can irrigate new ground. By helping residents “buy back the block,” cities have a simple but transformative opportunity to galvanize and support new cross-sector arrangements and coalitions with structures for deep resident engagement, ensuring that resources land in ways that will make a real long-term difference for communities harmed by COVID-19, racism, and poverty.

      

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated housing insecurity for millions of low- and moderate-income renters. The most recent Census Bureau survey estimates that roughly 7 million renters have fallen behind on rent, with debts averaging $5,400 per household.

In addition to general financial support such as stimulus checks and expanded unemployment insurance, the federal government has employed two primary strategies to help stabilize renters. In September 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered a temporary nationwide moratorium on evictions, to reduce the public health risks of forcing people to move during the pandemic. (The Biden administration has extended the moratorium to June 30, although legal challenges have created uncertainty about how much longer it will last.) The federal government has also allocated an unprecedented amount of funding that state and local governments can use for emergency rent relief programs. December 2020’s COVID-19 relief bill included $25 billion in rent relief, and March’s American Rescue Plan Act offered an additional $22 billion.

As these programs have unfolded over the past year, we have learned several lessons about how their design and implementation influence their effectiveness.

Programs must be intentional and transparent about who can receive relief—and how scarce funds will be rationed

Like all U.S. housing subsidies, there isn’t enough COVID-19 rent relief money to help everyone in need. Federal rules provide some broad guidelines for who is eligible to receive rental assistance, but state and local policymakers also have some flexibility. Some programs have chosen to prioritize very poor renters (households earning less than 50% of area median income), while others have limited aid to those who are not receiving other forms of assistance (including unemployment insurance benefits).

Having a clear definition of the target population allows state and local policymakers to design an effective outreach and communication strategy. Working with local nonprofits who have ties to specific communities may be more effective at reaching marginalized groups. For example, the state of Wisconsin is partnering with United Migrant Opportunity Services to reach migrant workers. Understanding language barriers, social media usage, and technology access are other critical elements. If the assistance will be paid directly to property owners, then outreach to local landlords’ associations may increase participation and speed up the process.

Regardless of how eligibility guidelines are defined, there will be more renters in need of help than there are funds to go around. Allocating funds on a first-come, first-served basis creates disadvantages for renters with weaker information networks—often the most vulnerable households. Several programs, including in Boston, Chicago, and Houston, have used lotteries to allocate funds; this mechanism has the advantages of being transparent and providing policymakers with more information on unmet demand.

Don’t create unnecessary hurdles for renters, landlords, or staff

Complex, multilayered eligibility requirements and paperwork-heavy application processes are the enemy of effective rent relief programs. Online application systems create additional burdens for low-income households, many of whom do not have reliable internet access. Renters who work in informal labor markets (including gig economy jobs) may have difficulty obtaining documentation of lost income. Low-income renters who live in informal housing arrangements—such as renting a room without a lease in someone’s private home, or doubling-up with family and friends as unofficial subletters—were largely excluded from the first rounds of federal assistance because they required landlords’ cooperation.

Complex application processes also put higher demands on state and local governments who administer rent relief programs (or their nonprofit partners), who then need to devote more staff resources to verifying eligibility. Local governments with very limited capacity should design the simplest possible programs to make administration manageable.

Keep long-run goals in mind: Healthier rental markets and a comprehensive safety net

The CDC’s eviction moratorium and federal rent relief were never designed to be permanent; they were emergency measures intended to bridge communities until the public health crisis was under control and the labor market rebounded. As vaccination rates rise and employment picks up, local governments should align their short-term investments with policies that can improve the long-run health of their local housing markets: ensuring an adequate supply of decent-quality rental housing and providing low-income households with long-term rental assistance.

Too many cities and counties use zoning to prohibit the development of multifamily rental housing on the majority of their land, leading to chronic undersupply and artificially high rent levels. Even as the pandemic has highlighted renters’ financial insecurity, city and state governments are dragging their heels on necessary reforms. Elected leaders need to recognize that protecting affluent homeowners’ “neighborhood character” comes at the direct expense of renters, who face restricted choices and higher housing costs.

The other half of the equation is for the federal government to guarantee universal rental assistance for low-income households. During the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden expressed support for making housing vouchers an entitlement, rather than subject to annual budget appropriations from Congress—a policy position already in place in peer countries such as Germany and France. It’s time for the Biden administration to make good on that promise.

      

While the long-term economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are still uncertain, the sharp increase in remote work has raised some fundamental questions about the geography of jobs and the demand for both housing and commercial real estate.

If professional workers who drive the demand for premium-location office space remain working from home, it could have profound impacts on downtown business districts. Dense clusters of office jobs have traditionally brought in customers for nearby businesses like coffee shops, restaurants, and dry cleaners. If remote work (or a hybrid model) persists, it could have ripple effects throughout regional labor markets and commercial real estate, as well as altering where workers choose to live.

In our new report, we examine the geography of jobs in the Washington, D.C. region prior to COVID-19, with an eye toward understanding how the pandemic could change employment and commercial real estate throughout the region. Below, we highlight a few of our key findings.

» Download the State of the Capital Region: Where Capital Region workers live and labor report

Downtown Washington, D.C. had the largest concentration of jobs prior to COVID-19

The capital region’s jobs were highly concentrated near its central business district (CBD), which we approximate as the area within 5 kilometers of the White House. This area encompasses most of central Washington, D.C. and some close-in parts of Arlington, Va., including Rosslyn and the Pentagon. The inner core had an employment density of more than 9,000 jobs per square kilometer (Figure 1)—more than four times the density of further-flung neighborhoods. The District is home to 20% of the region’s jobs, but only 10% of the region’s workforce. 

Downtown Washington, D.C. offers location advantages to both employers and workers. The region’s hub-and-spoke rail system was designed to channel commuters from suburban residential areas into the CBD. Because downtown is roughly in the geographic center of the region, it is reasonably accessible from all directions. Job-rich areas attract still more jobs, offering new firms access to existing businesses, customers, and amenities.

Offsetting these employment centralization and density advantages is the fact that downtown office and retail rents are higher than in other parts of the region. Similarly, streets, sidewalks, and public transit can become congested, especially during peak commuting times.

The capital region has several large suburban job clusters outside downtown, which track closely to major highways. The largest suburban job centers include Tysons Corner and Reston in Fairfax, Va., and the northwest corridor along I-270 in Montgomery County, Md., between Bethesda and Gaithersburg.

White-collar industries drive the capital region’s economy

Although the Washington, D.C. region is famous as the seat of the federal government, the government is not the region’s largest industry. Rather, the largest share of workers is employed in professional and business services, a category that includes law, finance, consulting, and a variety of other fields. (Notably, this also includes companies that contract for government agencies.)

The capital region employs more workers in both professional services and government than the U.S. as a whole (shown by the red lines in Figure 2). These industries tend to employ more college-educated workers, pay relatively high salaries, and—salient during the past year—can more easily be performed remotely.

Not all parts of the region have a similar employment mix. Figure 3 shows the industry composition for three large job clusters: Farragut North in downtown Washington, D.C.; Tysons Corner, Va.; and Rockville, Md.

Farragut North has roughly equal numbers of workers in the region’s two dominant industries (professional services and government), but also a substantial number of jobs in leisure and hospitality. The area includes many restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and hotels, which serve office workers, tourists, and business travelers. Rockville has the most balanced industry mix, while Tysons Corner is the most specialized, with a clear dominance of professional services and very few government jobs. Industry mix has implications for commercial real estate demand, especially if remote work continues as a longer-term trend.

COVID-19 has decimated leisure and hospitality jobs

The COVID-19 pandemic caused job losses in all sectors of the capital region’s economy, but these losses were not equally distributed. The leisure and hospitality industry—which previously formed about 10% of the region’s employment—saw the largest job losses, reflecting both new regulations and consumer preferences. State and local public health agencies placed restrictions on restaurants and bars, while risk-averse consumers have avoided congregating in shared indoor spaces like movie theaters.

During the first few months of the pandemic, leisure and hospitality jobs fell to nearly half of their January 2020 levels. By the end of 2020, jobs had recovered somewhat, but were still well below pre-pandemic levels. A key question for economic recovery is when enough consumers will resume in-person gatherings—which will likely correlate with more widespread rollout of vaccines and subsequent updates to public health guidelines.

Low-wage workers live farther from job clusters

Job losses during the pandemic have hit low-wage workers the hardest, especially those employed in service sectors that cannot be performed remotely (e.g., food service). Low-wage workers were already at a disadvantage in housing markets because they cannot compete with higher-income households for desirable locations. Neighborhoods close to major job centers and with good public transportation tend to have more expensive housing—pushing many low-income workers to seek cheaper rents in inconvenient locations.

Figure 5 shows that low-wage workers (those earning less than $3,333 per month) are more concentrated on the eastern side of the District, the inner ring of Prince George’s County, Md., and the farther western exurbs. Commuting from these areas to dense job clusters such as Farragut North, Tysons Corner, and Rockville requires more time and money from workers. Proposed cuts to public transportation will create the most hardship for workers who cannot afford to own cars and those who work irregular or off-peak hours, when transit service is less frequent. 

Our work habits will affect the future of cities, neighborhoods, and workers

The past year has brought enormous uncertainty to workers, businesses, and policymakers about the future of work. Will highly educated professionals revolt if asked to return to daily commutes and rigid schedules? Can employers save money by reducing their office space and related expenses such as insurance, utilities, and supplies? Should local governments alter land use planning to accommodate “15-minute cities” that incorporate more commercial space in residential areas? Are downtowns as we know them finished? Will people flee urban areas altogether for more space in far-flung rural areas—or are people itching to return to face-to-face contact?

While it’s still too early to have much data on people’s long-term preferences, our research suggests three areas to watch.

First, in-person industries such as leisure and hospitality will take time to recover. Continuing uncertainty over when enough people will have been vaccinated to reach herd immunity makes it difficult to predict when consumers will want to fully re-engage with previous activities. And some workers in this sector may have moved on, geographically or into different jobs.

Second, don’t count downtowns out yet. The fundamental reason that draws businesses to CBDs and large employment subcenters still exists: Firms and workers are more productive when they locate close together, especially in “knowledge industries.” It’s hard to imagine congressional representatives and lobbyists choosing to hobnob indefinitely over Zoom instead of resuming in-person power lunches.

Third, cultural institutions and amenities will still attract residents and tourists to the capital region. Even if a substantial share of highly educated professionals adopts a hybrid telework/in-office schedule, people will still want places to socialize and recreate outside their homes. Attractively maintained outdoor spaces such as the District’s waterfront parks and the C&O Canal trail have been enormously popular during the pandemic. The Smithsonian museums aren’t likely to move off the National Mall anytime soon. Local governments that want to retain residents who may have wider job options would do well to continue investing in high-quality public services and amenities that improve daily quality of life.

      

After declaring the climate crisis to be a top priority of his administration, President Joe Biden recently solidified his greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets as part of a major global summit. The national goal is to reduce GHG emissions to 50% of the amount emitted in 2005 by 2030, with an even bigger goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The targets are necessary and ambitious. They also will require a set of systems-level changes across every sector of the economy. But there’s a problem. The administration’s high-level strategy skimmed over a central driver of our climate crisis: unsustainable land use practices.

Simply put, the United States cannot reach its GHG reduction targets if our urban areas continue to grow as they have in the past. After decades of sprawl, the U.S. has the dubious honor of being a world leader in both building-related energy consumption and vehicle miles traveled per capita. Making matters worse, lower-density development also pollutes our water and requires higher relative emissions during the initial construction.

That leaves the country with no choice: We must prioritize development in the kinds of neighborhoods that permanently reduce total driving and consume less energy. Such human-centered neighborhoods have the added benefit of helping us adapt to climate impacts, improve public health, and promote access to activities. Encouraging their development should be a central part of any national climate resilience strategy.

This won’t be an easy task. Fundamentally changing where and what we build requires new ways of planning and investing in our communities. Since the federal government doesn’t directly control local land use, changing where we live and how we get around will require buy-in from states and local governments that manage zoning and other regulations, real estate developers who lead construction, and the finance industry that underwrites it all. With little time to waste, the U.S. must begin testing and scaling policy levers than enable a more resilient approach to regional development.

Decarbonizing electricity is essential—but insufficient

Among its various climate concerns, the U.S. is one of the world’s largest GHG emitters, even with aggregate drops of over 12% since 2005. To make even bigger cuts over the next decade, the Biden administration is betting on a two-step process: aggressively decarbonizing how we generate electricity and then switching as many activities as possible to clean electricity. This promise to adopt a “clean electricity standard” is a great approach for a few reasons.

For the first step, the electricity generation sector is already a national decarbonization leader (Figure 1). Between 2000 and 2019, the electricity sector reduced its total GHG emissions from the fuels it burns by 33%. Utilities are retiring coal-fired power plants, often replacing them with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. The continued drop in costs to build and operate renewable power plants should only further incentivize this transition.

Advances in a sweeping set of manufactured products can then help the American economy achieve the second step. Heating, cooling, and water management within our buildings can all turn to electrical equipment. The same goes for other building-related appliances, even if some may forever prefer to cook over an open flame. Even the equipment associated with many heavy industries can increasingly use electrical currents.

The biggest categorical target, though, is electrifying our transportation sector—especially consumer vehicles and small trucks. As the country’s top GHG-emitting sector, eliminating gasoline from the transportation sector is essential. So while electric vehicles (EVs) only comprise 2% of new light-duty vehicle sales, rising demand among large fleet owners (including the U.S. Postal Service) and private households is aligning with the commitment among automakers to boost EV production.

This two-step process benefits from scientific and manufacturing innovation, but the sector’s governance helps ideas scale. There are a relatively small number of energy utilities across the country, and utility regulation is primarily handled at the federal and state level. Federal law can create clean energy standards among appliance and vehicle manufacturers. States can mandate clean energy building codes. Electricity generation and transmission is an ideal area for top-down regulation.

But for all the possibilities, climate scientists freely admit that decarbonizing electricity generation will not meet all of our 2030 carbon targets—and certainly does not touch all of our broader climate goals. Some electrical appliances continue to emit harmful pollutants (at least for now). Natural gas plants have been a big part of bringing down utilities’ GHG emissions, but their methane-related byproducts are not yet under control. A decarbonized electricity sector also doesn’t respond to a range of other climate-related challenges, from unsustainable water management and coastal erosion to urban heat islands and agriculture-related emissions.

Nor are EVs perfectly clean, and that’s assuming the entire country suddenly runs on zero-emission electricity. Manufacturing vehicle-grade batteries is still an inherently dirty process, especially the global mining of rare earth minerals such as cobalt. Building EVs will still generate GHG emissions if processes such as steel production aren’t decarbonized. Plus, the simple act of driving leaves an environmental footprint, including the rubber particles from tires that are now found in oceans. It’s a myth that EVs are as “dirty” as vehicles with internal combustion engines, but they’re also not perfect.

Car-dependent neighborhoods restrict multiple climate goals, including GHG targets

A clean electricity standard is an essential step for the country, but it doesn’t address our land use issues. Car-dependent neighborhoods lock us in to a baseline of harmful emissions while creating other climate impacts in the process.

Vehicles present an eternal and unsolvable geometric challenge: They require significantly more space per person than any competing mode of transportation. Figure 2 displays two Kansas City, Mo. neighborhoods with a similar number of residents and jobs; one was built before the mass adoption of the automobile, and the other was built decades later. The comparison shows an enormous difference in how humans approach land use: While earlier neighborhood models were built around mass transit such as streetcars and at distances friendly for walking and cycling, newer neighborhoods frequently design all real estate to accommodate the automobile.

Metropolitan America has spent decades shifting the vast majority of economic activity to car-dependent neighborhoods, leading to greater per-person land consumption and more driving. Between 1960 and 2010, U.S. urban land area grew at a rate 1.7 times faster than population growth. To connect all the housing and activities spread across so many more square miles, the average American’s daily travel mileage grew by 85% between 1969 and 2017. Looking at detailed data in six major metro areas, we found the average trip exceeded 7 miles.

This kind of regional development has significant climate consequences, even if we assume all vehicles are running on clean electricity. Low-density neighborhoods require more physical capital per person, meaning more building materials and emissions to manufacture concrete, asphalt, piping, and other material inputs. All that concrete and asphalt radiate heat back into the atmosphere and can reduce public health due to higher temperatures. The same impervious surfaces also lead to water resource challenges such as greater stormwater runoff and flash flooding. In the most extreme situations, sprawling development moves into areas prone to flooding or forest fires.

Car-dependent development—combined with local zoning that prohibits higher-density housing—incentivizes less energy-efficient building designs too. Detached buildings, including single family homes, miss out on the energy efficiencies of shared walls. Car-dependent neighborhoods are also associated with bigger homes, meaning more square footage to climate-control and higher utility bills for households. Commercial and industrial buildings with large area footprints and low heights require more energy to heat and cool. Clean electricity and weatherization can help, but the overall inefficiency is structural.

One way to see the net effect of neighborhood design is to map carbon footprints. Advanced modeling, such as the below map from the University of California, Berkeley, consistently finds higher GHG and other pollutant intensity per capita in many suburban neighborhoods when compared to older urban cores.

Add it all up and metropolitan America—where over 86% of people live—is awash in missed opportunities. Biking and walking produce nearly zero emissions, but we’ve built neighborhoods that either make distances too long or travel paths too unsafe. Transit can be more energy-efficient for longer-distance trips, but the geometry of car-dependent neighborhoods limits demand for buses and trains. We know “gentle density” offers sizable housing units while still promoting energy-efficient buildings and transportation behavior, but we’ve prohibited smaller structures on the majority of land in metropolitan areas. We even know which geographic areas are prone to more chronic and acute climate shocks, but we continue to subsidize development in those areas.

To build resilient regions, we need better functioning markets and more policy coordination

There are thousands of real estate developers, almost 40,000 local governments, and over 100 million households that all have some level of individual control over where we develop land, what we build on it, and how we choose to travel over it. The country needs a new approach to land development—coordinated from the federal to local level, tapping each level’s unique jurisdictional authorities—to push those key actors to behave in more climate-friendly ways.

That will require at least two areas of action:

• Use market principles to send climate-sensitive price signals. Real estate developers, lenders, and households will make more resilient investment decisions if they understand the climate-related costs of their decisions and bear some brunt of the financial impact. For example, charging higher mortgage interest rates or increasing insurance premiums could steer development away from sensitive areas. It also works in reverse, as federal or state incentives could encourage more resilient development patterns, such as conserving land and incorporating greener designs.
• Use statutory authorities to scale policy adoption. The federal government doesn’t directly control land use, but it has several policy levers to influence it, including flooding and disaster insurance, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lending rules, the location and quality of transportation investments, and environmental permitting laws. Federal rules—whether done through a carrot or stick approach—can push states, fragmented metropolitan areas, real estate developers, and households to act in predictable, sustainable ways.

The country does not lack innovative policy ideas in the land use space or the ability to craft new ones. Climate-focused procurement reforms, land value taxes, statewide zoning reform, and safe streets policies are just a sample of what’s available to test or scale. But those policies will only maximize their impact if they become the default toolsets for how we develop metropolitan America.

Overcoming the climate crisis requires addressing land use

There’s a sense that electrifying our transportation sector and in-home appliances may be enough, but metropolitan land use demands other systemic changes. We need to undo decades of bad habits, returning to traditional people-centered neighborhood designs and incorporating forward-looking building technologies that promote more sustainable and equitable living. It’s a generational lift—and time is running out.

Statements of intent are important signals, and don’t cost politicians much. It’s imperative that our national leaders start naming land use challenges when they discuss our climate future. But we can’t afford to stop there. America needs federal leadership to test ideas and scale solutions. Land use may be local, but our climate future is shared.

      

On Wednesday, May 19, the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and George Washington University’s Center for Washington Area Studies (CWAS) co-hosted an event examining the geography of jobs, housing, and commercial real estate in the capital region prior to COVID-19, with an eye to understanding how the pandemic has changed—often dramatically—employment, housing markets, and commercial real estate throughout the region. The event started with a presentation by CWAS Director Leah Brooks. An expert panel followed, discussing some of the challenges faced by workers, employers, property owners, and policymakers.

Viewers submitted questions for panelists by emailing events@brookings.edu or tweeting to @BrookingsMetro using the hashtag #StateofCapRegion.

      

Through the course of the pandemic, we have investigated the disproportionate pandemic impacts on U.S. families. In June, we reported that Black and Hispanic Americans faced higher rates of housing hardship than white Americans, and we emphasized the importance of identifying a long-term rather than a “Band-Aid” solution. In November, we found that housing inequality had gotten worse as the COVID-19 pandemic stretched onward. Now, almost a year after the pandemic’s onset, with COVID-19 vaccines distributed, we explore how housing inequality has changed over the course of the pandemic. Over the recent months, we find that the disproportionate experiences of housing hardship have lessened, but only because everyone became worse off. We also observe that Black families have become “long-haulers” when it comes to their experience of housing hardship.

Both housing-related hardship experiences and related inequality have been alleviated

We first explore how housing-related hardship experiences have changed through the pandemic with respect to eviction/foreclosure (Figure 1), rent/mortgage payment delay (Figure 2), and utility bill payment delay (Figure 3). As previously reported, housing inequality worsened during the first six months after the pandemic. As of June 2020, 9 percent of Black and 7 percent of Hispanic respondents had experienced eviction/foreclosure, which was significantly higher than white respondents (5 percent) even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic attributes. Likewise, in the same period, minority respondents were significantly more likely to experience rent/mortgage and utility payment delays compared to white respondents—rent/mortgage: 15 percent (Black), 13 percent (Hispanic), and 9 percent (white); Utility: 21 percent (Black), 20 percent (Hispanic), and 14 percent (white).

Housing inequality has since declined after its peak in August. This trend is, however, not because minority groups’ housing situations have become significantly more stable. Instead, white respondents are increasingly experiencing housing instability. For instance, between August and November, the eviction/foreclosure risks for Black and Hispanic respondents decreased by less than 10 percent (from an eviction rate of 8.8 percent to 7.9 percent for Black respondents and from 7.4 percent to 7.5 percent for Hispanic respondents). In the same period, however, white respondents’ eviction/foreclosure risk increased by 23 percent (from an eviction rate of 5.3 percent to 6.6 percent). Similarly, in November, we observe reduced inequality gaps in delayed payment of rent/mortgage and utility bills mainly due to the delayed peak of white respondents. The outlooks are becoming positive however, as we observe that both housing instability levels and inequality have decreased in March and April of 2021 compared to the previous survey in November 2020.

Black families have been more likely to be housing hardship long-haulers

In addition to the housing instability, we also explore the incidence of housing hardships and how households have experienced differences in prolonged hardship by race and ethnicity. Similarly to the way the physical symptoms of COVID-19 can stay with the body and lead some individuals to become COVID-19 “long-haulers,” housing hardship has stayed with some households from one survey wave to the next. We looked specifically at families who experienced housing hardships (i.e., eviction/foreclosure, delayed rent/mortgage payments, and delayed utility bill payments) during the previous survey (three months prior to the present survey) and estimated how many of them still experienced these hardships three months later. For robust estimations, we controlled for both demographic and socioeconomic attributes.

Figure 4 reports how the incidence of living as a housing hardship long-hauler changed over the course of the pandemic. Of all respondents, 61 percent experienced housing hardship long-hauling at some time during the pandemic. This means that at two consecutive survey dates (each three months apart from each other) they reported experiencing housing hardship within the prior three months. In November, the proportion of long-haulers peaked with over two-thirds of respondents reporting that they had experienced housing hardship through at least two survey periods. Figure 5 deconstructs the proportion of housing hardship long-haulers by race/ethnic groups. Throughout the pandemic, Black respondents (69 percent) have more commonly endured housing hardship long-hauling than white and Hispanic respondents (58 percent and 62 percent respectively). This discrepancy was particularly pronounced at the beginning of the pandemic. In August, Black respondents were 1.5 times more likely than white respondents to keep experiencing housing hardships for two consecutive survey periods, this gap being statistically significant at p<.01 even after keeping other socioeconomic factors constant. However, similarly to the previous analysis, this disparity lessened in November due to more white respondents becoming housing hardship long-haulers.

Conclusion

Through a year of surveys, we’ve learned that minority groups, especially Black families, have been much vulnerable to the pandemic’s shocks. However, we also observe that hardships on minority families have been soon transmitted to everyone, including white households. Similarly, while a greater proportion of Black households are housing hardship long-haulers, more Hispanic and white households have joined that group in experiencing the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on their financial and residential stability.

Lingering housing hardship demonstrates the continued need for relief for both renters and homeowners with mortgages. The shrinking inequities between households of different races coupled with the slow crawl toward recovery shows tha­t widespread financial relief is still needed across the country. Economic impact payments would be of little help, particularly for housing hardships long haulers who are already a couple of months behind in housing/utility bill payments. Rather, ­as our previous blog claimed, more proactive and sustainable remedies, such as a universal housing voucher, are needed.

Some people may argue that such proactive remedies are too expensive. For instance, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2015 that it would cost an additional $29 billion if the housing voucher were to cover those earning 30 percent of area median income (AMI) or less. Yet, infection and eviction are interlinked. Even though the expenditure seems huge, the cost of infections far outweighs the cost of supporting housing. Throughout the pandemic, social distancing has been key to minimizing COVID-19’s impacts by reducing the frequency and duration of contact individuals have with one another. The most powerful and effective way to keep social distancing is, obviously, to have people stay home. ­­