Solutions Sidebar: Who Owns America® with Jeff Allenby

Vacant land owned by the government may be able to help ease the housing gap. Most of it near urban areas and transit lines, is controlled by local governments. And with the help of the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), communities are starting to realize they may have land to build more housing. 

Interview guest: Director of the Center for Geospatial Solutions Jeff Allenby explains how his nonprofit agency can quickly comb through reams of data to locate land for potential housing. 

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Transcript

Ann Thompson:

Land is constantly changing hands. It's bought, it's sold, it's rezoned. Determining who owns it can be time consuming, but one nonprofit has figured out a way to do it fast.

Jeff Allenby:

Our technology starts with parcel data from oftentimes from counties and Hamilton County is a perfect example of this. A little over a quarter of Hamilton County's parcels actually has the mortgage company's address as the owner mailing address as opposed to the actual owner's address.

Ann Thompson:

The Center for Geospatial Solutions runs this data and others through layers of technology to map the entire US. This can help determine where to build much needed housing. Specifically on vacant land, the government owns in urban areas near transit lines.

Jeff Allenby:

About a quarter million acres of government owned land is available across the country, but the vast majority of that, about 75% of that is owned by local governments.

Ann Thompson:

That's a lot of potential housing, conservatively almost 2 million units. This technology also helps cities beat predatory lenders at their own game. Stay tuned for a solutions sidebar, and my colleague Hernz Laguerre Jr. will join me at the end for some takeaways. Let's get into it. This is Brick by Brick: Solutions for a thriving community.

Ame Clase:

Brick by Brick is made possible thanks to leading support from AES Ohio Foundation, Greater Cincinnati Foundation and George and Margaret McLane Foundation, with additional support from Laurie F. Johnston,  Murray and Agnes Seasongood Good Government Foundation, The Robert & Adelle Schiff Family Foundation, and more. Thank you.

Ann Thompson:

Jeff Allenby, director of the Center for Geospatial Solutions. Welcome to Brick by Brick.

Jeff Allenby:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Ann Thompson:

The subject of government owned land recently came up as HUD and the Department of Interior announced a joint task force on federal land for housing. It's designed to increase the housing supply and decrease what Americans have to pay for it. Your efforts are not associated with this task force, but it does make our conversation on the scope of government owned land a little bit more timely. What is the Center for Geospatial Solutions and what kind of research do you do?

Jeff Allenby:

The Center for Geospatial Solutions was founded within the Lincoln Institute to Land policy about four and a half years ago to bring the power of technology to really help put a lot of the challenges the Lincoln Institute is working on around land management, the intersection of land people and water into context. All of these challenges have a location associated with them, and what we really wanted to do was be able to take advantage of new technologies that were coming out, whether it was artificial intelligence, remote sensing, and satellite imagery, or even just the ability to handle just really massive volumes of data and make it accessible to partners on the ground who are working at the local level that really a lot of these technologies were inaccessible to them and they had the ability to be able to take advantage of 'em if they had the data that had been processed, but they were never going to be able to do it on their own. We really wanted to be able, really be able to make the best technology available to all the partners that needed it.

Ann Thompson:

Yeah. So let's talk about the study. Who owns America? That sounds like a lot of work. And so what were your perimeters and what were your goals?

Jeff Allenby:

So who owns America? Started with the conversation around institutional investors buying single family homes, and there's a lot of debate going on about it. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence going on. People were starting to put policies in place to try to combat it, but no one had hard and fast numbers to ground these conversations. And so we saw this as a perfect opportunity for Center for Geospatial Solutions to step in and really look at a holistic solution that allows us to create data sets across the country that allow local partners to really understand what's happening in their neighborhood so they can craft really well constructed regulations or policies that help address the situation in their neighborhood as opposed to what they think is the problem based on what they're hearing, but not necessarily the reality of it.

Ann Thompson:

Yeah, Cincinnati and Dayton have had a problem with predatory investors and we'll get to how your technology could help them. So in terms of identifying who owns what, it seems like the government owns a lot of land and it's not just the federal government.

Jeff Allenby:

That is absolutely true. The government does own a lot of land, especially in the western United States. It's definitely much lower percentages in the eastern portion of the country, kind of east of the Rocky Mountains, but it's not always the right land for the specific challenge of housing. If you look at the majority of the land the government owns across the United States, it's fairly remote. It's fairly disconnected from cities, from public transportation, from utilities, whether that's electricity or water or broadband, all of the things that are really going to be needed to have a functioning society where this housing is actually going to make an impact. And so the distribution of land, even though you have a lot of it, isn't necessarily in the right places, especially when you're looking at it from the lens of federal land. So we looked at land in particular that was in census designated urban areas, so areas that the US Census Bureau has designated as urban, that were publicly accessible through public transit.

And that was using data basically looking at whether you had at least one stop by public transit, whether it was bus or train or light rail every hour within rush hour. And we also looked at property that didn't have existing buildings on it. And so this really was for the idea of developing new housing, not necessarily converting existing buildings to housing, but really looking at the opportunity for developers to partner with local governments to build multifamily housing where we need it, where people have access to public transit, have access to a job market and all of those other pieces.

Ann Thompson:

Yeah, you raise a good point because in past administrations we have heard like, Hey, what about transforming this government building into this? Like, Hey, we're not using it, but as you mentioned, you were looking specifically at vacant land, so you excluded national parks and other things that you mentioned. And so how much land is buildable?

Jeff Allenby:

So a lot of that depends on the level of government that you're looking. Overall. About a quarter million acres of government owned land is available across the country, but the vast majority of that, about 75% of that is owned by local governments. Another about 10% or so is owned by state governments and the remainder is federal government. The reality is the federal government does not own a lot of vacant land in transit accessible urban areas. They own a lot of Bureau of Land Management land and US Forest Service land out west, but they really don't own a lot of urban land.

Ann Thompson:

And did this come as a surprise to local governments when they heard about your findings or I guess they know what land they have and then how do you work with them?

Jeff Allenby:

So I think it was a surprise in terms of the extent of their holdings because when they think of land, oftentimes they think about the buildings that they own. And because we were focused on land that didn't have buildings on it, that's things like parking lots or the transit depot or where you have your mounds of salt or gravel in the winter to put on the roads at snow when it snows for making travel safe. Those are the types of lands that you don't always think about the extent of. And oftentimes you might have kind of a main parking lot on that land, but then you might have just brush or other areas that really adds up when you look at it. And so when we talked with a lot of local governments, the way we looked at it is really more of an opt-out scenario to kind of say, here's all of the buildable land in your jurisdiction.

Tell us why some of these parcels may not actually be buildable. It's where we park snowplows in the winter kind of things where there is a use to it, even though it isn't necessarily a building. And so looking at it, you start from the full inventory and kind of parse back the properties that have a function or they're not willing to think about as opposed to going to a government and say, tell me the properties you don't use that you would be willing to transform into housing, where this is the land they don't often think about. And so it's not front of mind and they're not always thinking about what's going on and what could be transformed from that perspective. And so the conversations we've had has been really helpful to get local government in particular thinking a little bit differently about the land that they manage.

I think when we extend this to things like religious owned land or academic university owned land, there's a lot of land that isn't being used on a daily basis that kind of falls to the back of their mind and they're not always thinking about it. And so this helps bring that back up and say, well, what about this parcel? It's five acres and it's near a bus stop and it's near a school. And they're like, oh, well maybe we could think about that. And it's kind of starting conversations that we don't think would be happening otherwise.

Ann Thompson:

And so do they approach you or do you approach them?

Jeff Allenby:

A little bit of both. Typically through our work, we are interacting with a lot of local governments, and part of it is just trying to understand the realm of institutional investors in single family homes and their jurisdiction. But as we talk about our work, we talk about all of the other projects that we have going on and the other capabilities that we have to be able to look at the issue from different angles in different lenses. And so in those cases we bring up like we do have this inventory of government owned land, would you be interested in looking at that and thinking about that? Other times they've seen some of the articles that have mentioned our work or presentations we've given. And so they approach us saying, Hey, we really like what you've done in Maui County, Hawaii. We'd love to talk with you about the ability to do it in Hamilton County, Ohio.

Ann Thompson:

And we checked with our local government, Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Dayton, Montgomery County, and you can find that information on the property they own as well on our website@ctconnect.org and think tv.org.

Jeff Allenby:

Looking a little bit more specifically at Hamilton County, you start to see similar trends in terms of overall percentage. It's a little bit lower on the owner occupied side, a little bit higher on the corporate owned side, but it's where you start to really get that nuance and be able with our data, it's down to the parcel level. You can really dig into specific neighborhoods and understand are there differences in this neighborhood versus that neighborhood? And a lot of it oftentimes comes down to property values where corporate investors in particular are looking at kind of their profile of investment that they're trying to make that typically is starter homes. They're not looking at that five, six, $700,000 house as a investment property. They're looking at something that they can buy in the 50 to $150,000 range because that's where the economics makes more sense for them.

Ann Thompson:

And by drilling down on this data and understanding in what areas this is happening, is that how you say that cities can kind of get out in front of this disturbing trend?

Jeff Allenby:

Yeah, exactly. So there's two ways to do that. One is just to understand what's happening and where are there certain profiles of houses that, like I was just saying, typically starter homes, lower value areas tend to be more of a concentration there. The other thing we're able to do is we have the ability to look over time for our national dataset that we have now we have a baseline that we can assess going forward to be able to say every six months or every year, how have things changed? Are you seeing an increase? Are you seeing a decrease? As cities and counties are putting policies in place, you can actually start to measure the effectiveness of those policies and say, compared to your neighbors who did put a policy in place, are you seeing your trend getting better or is it not really having the intended impact? So you have kind of that evaluation capability.

Ann Thompson:

I hope you're enjoying our conversation with Jeff Allenby, director of the Center for Geospatial Solutions. There's more still ahead following this short break. This is Brick by Brick.

Ame Clase:

Brick by Brick is made possible thanks to the generous support of so many, including Diane and Dave Moccia, P & G, The Camden Foundation,  The Stephen H. Wilder Foundation, Rosmary & Mark Schlachter, a donation in memory of Frank and Margaret Linhardt, The A. T. Folger Jr. Lowe Simpson Fund and more. Thank you. We couldn't do this work without you.

Mark Lammers:

When we talk about thriving in our neighborhoods, I tend to think about sustainability because any improvements we make, we want them to endure. Right? Hi, my name's Mark Lammers and I'm the executive producer for Brick by Brick. And while our team stays focused on exploring and uncovering the next viable solution to what ails us, we're looking to you to help hold us accountable and keep this thing sustainable. And while a donation does go a long way at CET and ThinkTV, in this case, we're just asking for a little time and feedback right now. There's a big green button on our website and a link in the podcast show notes to our audience feedback form. We'd be so grateful if you shared your thoughts about the work we're doing so we can keep improving and connecting solution minded neighbors like yourself with the social responses that will move our cities in the right direction. Your feedback also helps us seek funding to keep this effort going. We appreciate your time and can't wait to hear from someone in every neighborhood. Thank you.

Ann Thompson:

Welcome back to Brick by Brick. I'm Ann Thompson. Let's get back into our conversation with Jeff Allenby and Hernz and I will be back at the end for some reflections. As we're talking here, I realize we kind of glossed over the difficult part of what you do. So if you could explain, because I know some many counties have paper records, they're not digital. How did you find out who owns what and how long did it take? And what about your technology? How did that make it easier?

Jeff Allenby:

Yeah, so it's a great question and our technology starts with parcel data from oftentimes from counties. We're working with a company that kind of aggregates that nationally and creates kind of a standard format for that. What we do then is a lot of cleaning. It's looking at just all of the different mistyped ways of how to spell the same thing and abbreviations, and whether it's street versus st on a end of an address, oftentimes there's misspellings in the name because as you mentioned, it's either from paper records that have been digitized and the computers that were digitizing it mix up O and a C between the letters or someone typing it in manually and just kind of mistype a key. And there's not necessarily those checks in place to make sure I just typed in a street name. Does that street actually exist in the world?

So just dealing with a lot of those things. There's other challenges, and Hamilton County isn't a perfect example of this, where the publicly available data for parcels oftentimes will list the tax mailing address in the owner mailing address. And so about a quarter of Hamilton County's parcels, a little over a quarter of Hamilton County's parcels actually has the mortgage company's address as the owner mailing address as opposed to the actual owner's address. And so with that, what we do is we actually combine information with a second data source looking at deed and assessor information where we can actually pull in the accurate owner name or mailing address or backfill that if it wasn't in the county's data or looking at just making sure it's the most up to date for recent sales and it's not the previous owner versus that to be able to look at that. And then we also combine it with a third data set around corporate ownership. And this is looking at particularly the relationship between parent and subsidiaries of corporations. So lots of times real estate investors will have individual LLCs for each property that they own for tax purposes and liability purposes and a whole lot of other reasons, but it makes it really hard to aggregate ownership back to that ultimate parent or ultimate beneficial owner.

Ann Thompson:

Have any other organizations attempted to do what you have done

Jeff Allenby:

In bits and pieces? Oftentimes, it's a very localized effort. And so the Port of Cincinnati actually did a very similar task about two years ago where they had an intern go through and look at the properties that had building code violations that were rentals, and basically try to trace and track who actually owned the biggest offenders on building code violations. And it took this intern about 200 hours just for Hamilton County to understand the top five infractions basically, or companies who had the most infractions with our data. We can do that in about five minutes. And so it's one of those things where we're putting in a lot time upfront to be able to have this data set accessible not just for one county, but for the entire country. So these challenges aren't, you have to spend a lot of time and money trying to understand what's going on in your county or in your neighborhood. You can just have that data at your fingertips to really be able to ask questions and not necessarily work as much on the data analysis piece.

Ann Thompson:

So this is great that you have done all this. Are you working with certain cities across the US and have you seen any results like them actually start building on this land?

Jeff Allenby:

So we are working with a handful of cities and counties across the us. It's really getting, this is new. We've only really had the national data for about three or four months. Previously we were working more city by city. A lot of those cities are ending kind of the first year of our work with 'em to be able to get that baseline understanding of what's going on to then start to look at implementing policies. And so we're just kind of turning the corner from the understanding what's going on phase to what are we going to do about it phase. And so over the next year, we should start to see more of those actual actions being taken and hopefully the needle moving on building houses. But a lot of this, it takes time. You have to get the policies in place, you have to get the financing in place. And so we're starting to see that more and starting to see the moving into that implementation phase. But for the most part, because this is so new, we're still kind of at the tail end of that planning phase.

Ann Thompson:

You using a conservative estimate estimated that nearly 2 million units could be built because we commonly hear, well, the housing shortfall is somewhere between four and 7 million.

Jeff Allenby:

Yes. So a lot of that depends on density. Looking at it from the low end of density, which is seven units per acre, which is kind of a standard city density, not kind of multifamily apartment buildings, but just kind of row homes or something like that. Nationally, you could fit a little under 2 million units on the acres identified, assuming all of them were built. That's not going to be the case. Not every acre is going to be built, but it shows the world of opportunity when you look at it from the perspective of higher density up to about 25 units per acre, which might be like a multi-floor apartment building, that number goes up to almost 7 million units of affordable housing across that land. And so even if you're looking at 10 or 25% of available acres are actually developed, you start to get into numbers. That 700,000 to 2 million units on that higher density can make a significant dent on closing the gap on affordable housing or just housing in general across the country.

Ann Thompson:

Yeah, interesting. So the recent from the administration talking about this joint task force on federal land and housing, what do you think of it? If you have an opinion of their idea to take inventory of underutilized federal properties and transfer or lease them to states or nonprofits to address housing needs?

Jeff Allenby:

At a macro level, it's a good idea. I think it's never a bad idea to take inventory of what you have, what you're actually using, what you're paying for, and heating and lighting and all of these things if it's not really being used where those opportunities are. I think that the challenge of just looking at federal loan land itself based on our analysis, there's a very, very small percentage of total federal land in the places that people actually want to live and work. And so just looking at land, that's not necessarily a viable option to move the needle. And in terms of affordable housing on federal government owned land, I think there's a much larger opportunity with local government land, as we mentioned earlier, and looking at incentivizing funding and policies to make available to local governments to address this at the local scale, I think you'd probably have much better traction working with local governments and helping local governments actually do the analysis of their land to figure out what opportunities there are than spending a lot of time and money looking at federal land for those opportunities. I think your time would be better spent looking at local government land.

Ann Thompson:

So given the amount of land that you found that could be used for housing, does this give you hope?

Jeff Allenby:

Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways it's a logistics challenge. It's not that the opportunities don't exist, it's how we try to get the opportunities that exist moving. A lot of it is finding the people who can build the houses, finding the financing that's needed and setting that up, whether it's private individuals, private partnerships where there's that return on investment of private investment, whether it's bonds, there's a lot of different financing mechanisms that are available to try to get this moving, but it takes time and effort to be able to put all of the pieces in place.

Ann Thompson:

We'll look forward to following your progress. Jeff Allenby, director of the Center for Geospatial Solutions. Thanks for bringing on Brick by Brick.

Jeff Allenby:

Thank you very much.

Ann Thompson:

It seems that Hernz is the only steady member of Brick by Brick lately. You held down the last episode. I was gone. Emiko is gone for this episode, but you are still here.

Hernz Laguerre Jr.:

Happy to be here.

Ann Thompson:

Yeah. So what did you think of the interview?

Hernz Laguerre Jr.:

Yeah, I thought it was a really awesome interview. Jeff Allenby really posed a question of how much vacant land do we have America that could be used for housing? And I know you guys mainly focused on federal government, mainly local government you guys spoke about, but he did mention how the organization is looking to look at land owned by other groups like churches as there's no secret church attendance has been declining all across America. Propmodo.com, they're an online commercial real estate company. They spoke about the average congregation size is about 60 members down from about 130 members, maybe like 20 years ago. Closures from Connecticut to California, even here in the Bible belt state of Ohio, there's closures. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese in New York announced 30 New York churches that were closing. And I think that's making local leaders reexamine what they can do. Like California Governor Gavin Newsom, he's passing YIGBY laws. I know you get into this in your article. We heard a NIMBY not in my backyard. YIMBY, yes, in my backyard. But there's also YIGBY. Yes, in God's backyard. And the whole idea, Governor Newsom signed a bill rezoning land owned by religious institutions to allow for affordable housing, and it's backed by even some religious organizations as well.

Ann Thompson:

And as a matter of fact, the Lynch Foundation commissioned CGS to find out how much affordable housing could be built on church land just in Massachusetts. And it turns out it was 140,000 units with just seven homes per acre.

Hernz Laguerre Jr.:

Oh, wow. So I think seeing stuff like that just makes me think about other things as well, like schools and public schools. The law just talked about that Gavin Newsom sign also applied to nonprofit colleges and public schools are also closing all across the country. So how much land our country's transforming, so how much land is being unoccupied that could be used for housing?

Ann Thompson:

And it seems everyone thinks this is a good idea. Even the federal government, which is proposing HUD and the Department of the Interior in a separate initiative join forces to identify federal land for housing. But as Jeff Allen B and the Center for Geospatial Solutions pointed out, not much of the 500 million acres owned by the government is suitable for housing. I mean, think about it. A lot of it is just out there, not near cities, not near transit. There are few details yet about this plan and lots of concerns like from Native Americans on the surface, it's a good idea. And the Center for Geospatial Solutions said it would be willing to share the work it's done. Now as far as local governments, as you point out, because they own much of this land, the center is working with Salt Lake City, Utah, for example, where officials wanted to be able to create a unified view across 24 municipalities to help form policies. And they're trying to put those into place to start building housing.

Hernz Laguerre Jr.:

So a lot of potential out there. We just got to do the research to see what's out there.

Ann Thompson:

And I want to encourage you to go to our website, cetconnect.org and thinktv.org because we did contact Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Montgomery County, Dayton, to find out what local land they have that might be able to be used for housing. And you can check that out online.

Hernz Laguerre Jr.:

Cool.

Ann Thompson:

Thanks, Hernz.

Hernz Laguerre Jr.:

No problem.

Ann Thompson:

Coming up on the next Brick by Brick, how good is a machine at printing houses? 3D structures are gaining traction across the US and in Ohio.

John Smoll:

It's very reasonable to think about building a 3D printed home within a month from the time you start printing.

Ann Thompson:

They have huge potential in saving time and money and filling in the gaps of worker shortages. A closer look at 3D printed houses on the next Brick by Brick. 

That's our show. If you like what you hear, please rate and review our podcast. It helps make it easier to find. We hope you learn something, and if you did, please share it out with your friends and family. For Emiko Moore and Hernz Laguerre Jr. I'm Ann Thompson. We'll be back soon with more solutions. Take care. 

Our show is produced, hosted an edited by me, Ann Thompson with reporting and story editing from Hernz Laguerre Jr. and Emiko Moore. Our Executive producer of Mark Lammers. Our show consultant is Gloria Skurski. Gabe Wimberly is our audio engineer and mixer. Zach Kramer runs the lights and cameras. Derrick Smith is our production specialist and Jason Garrison is our production manager. Kellie May heads up our marketing and promotions, along with Mike Shea and Bridgett Dillenburger. Elyssa Stefenson handles the website and Steve Wright is our designer. Bill Dean and Andres Kruza are the engineers for the show and our Chief Content Officer is Colin Scianamblo. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Brick by Brick: Solutions for a Thriving Community is a production of CET and ThinkTV, Southwest Ohio PBS member stations.