The American housing crisis has reached a critical juncture, with record-high homelessness coinciding with historically low rental affordability and homeownership rates. This crisis not only impacts individual Americans and their families but also has profound socioeconomic implications for the entire population and economy.
A promising solution exists: the public sector could play a major role in catalyzing the production of affordable housing via the strategic disposition or repositioning of underutilized assets. Public entities at federal, state, and local levels collectively own substantial land and building portfolios. As communities have grown and evolved, many holdings like surface parking lots and administrative facilities have become underutilized, particularly those that are in or near employment centers and transit stations; and are now ideal candidates for redevelopment. By conservative estimates, a strategic disposition or repositioning of public assets could help drive the production of hundreds of thousands of housing units.
A partnership between Accelerator for America and government technology firm Tolemi is supporting 17 cities through the Data for Housing Solutions initiative, which leverages a data analysis tool and peer learning to provide insights into local real estate markets. The goal is to use those insights to help preserve and build affordable housing, keep families in their homes, combat predatory real estate investors, and ensure publicly owned real estate is utilized for the greatest community benefit. To-date, the initiative has identified over 100,000 publicly owned properties managed by more than 450 public entities across the cohort of 17 cities, allowing local leaders to evaluate these sites for potential transformation into affordable housing.
In some European cities like Copenhagen and Hamburg, public asset corporations have been established to design and deliver ambitious asset leveraging strategies. In Copenhagen, since 2007, the publicly owned, privately managed City & Port development corporation has spearheaded large-scale urban redevelopment overseeing half of all new developments in the city. Those developments adhere to the national mandate that requires 25% of all new housing projects be allocated for affordable and social housing. Simultaneously, City & Port has channeled revenues from redevelopment into financing the city’s extensive metro system. In Hamburg, the HafenCity Hamburg development corporation has pioneered innovative urban solutions in collaboration with private developers for both housing and businesses. These initiatives have significantly shaped the city’s unique future by creating a diverse mixed-use redevelopment area and catalyzing a diverse set of clean energy initiatives.
The U.S. now has an urgent imperative to adapt European and other models to accelerate the production of affordable housing. Over the past two years, the Putting Assets to Work Initiative (hereinafter “The PAW Initiative”), a collaboration of the Government Finance Officers Association, Common Ground Institute, and Urban3, has worked with multiple cities andcounties to find a sensible and scalable approach to public asset disposition in the U.S. The PAW Initiative has worked with localities as diverse as Atlanta, Austin, Chattanooga, Cleveland, Evanston and Salt Lake County to identify and map publicly owned land holdings and real estate assets, estimate their value, and develop strategies to engage intergovernmental partners and community stakeholders. The goal is to attract private capital and generate new revenue from these assets.
The PAW Initiative has pioneered the creation of an Asset Map, which is a tool used to inventory government-owned land and buildings across various jurisdictions. For instance, Boston’s City-wide land audit identified parcels owned by the nine different city-controlled entities, segmenting them between “large opportunity sites,” infill sites, and others. While many jurisdictions maintain lists of owned parcels, they often lack complete understanding of their assets’ full scope, market value, or development potential. The ownership of government assets is fragmented among a multitude of public entities including general purpose city and county governments, separate public utilities and public authorities (e.g., Public Housing Authorities, Port Authorities, Airports, Redevelopment Agencies (RDAs), Land Banks, Transportation Authorities, Public Works Departments), and various state and federal entities. An Asset Map addresses these gaps by providing a geospatial representation of publicly owned properties, integrating data from geographic information systems (GIS), county assessors, internal records, and staff interviews. These maps highlight specific parcels suitable for prioritized investment or development efforts. Asset mapping, while foundational, is insufficient on its own.
The typical next step, issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP), can be time-consuming and requires specialized expertise, placing additional burdens on already stretched government staff. Following asset assessment, most jurisdictions have limited capacity to advance complex redevelopment initiatives, as elected officials and agency staff understandably focus on core functions and immediate priorities. Regardless of their potential economic upside, complex, long-term initiatives like PAW often get placed on the back burner.
For that reason, several cities involved in the PAW Initiative are pushing new innovations. The City of Atlanta, for example, has established a specialized entity, the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation (AUDC), to lead the redevelopment of public land into marketable, mixed-income housing that is attractive and accessible to tenants across all income levels. The City of Atlanta appropriated $4 million to launch the AUDC and authorized additional bonding of $100 million to support the mayor’s affordable housing initiative, leveraging the city’s underutilized public assets. The City of Austin, by contrast, is using local procurement to hire third-party entities to manage the disposition and repositioning of public assets and drive redevelopment. The City of Austin worked to identify city-owned parcels of land that are unused or underutilized that are suitable for housing development or other beneficial uses which they identified as “reposition properties”. The city then issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to solicit comprehensive Reposition Property Advisor or Development Advisor services aimed at advancing strategic planning and redevelopment. Tasks outlined in the RFQ encompass analyzing the utilization of public assets, devising innovative financing models, fostering collaboration among city departments and stakeholders, conducting market analyses, drafting RFPs for development projects, offering guidance on zoning regulations, and facilitating the negotiation of development agreements. Both the Atlanta and Austin reforms, taken holistically, are pathbreaking and deserve serious consideration. The Atlanta effort adapts the institutional successes of Copenhagen and Hamburg to the U.S. and is already playing a major role in Mayor Andre Dickens’ stated objective to produce 20,000 affordable homes over eight years. The AUDC has the further benefit of blending public, private and philanthropic capital in efficient and effective ways, creating new capital stacks and financing mechanisms that can yield results over the long term. The harsh reality, however, is that most U.S. communities lack the capacity to design, incorporate, capitalize and stand up a fully operational Urban Development Corporation.
Austin offers a more readily scalable and adaptable approach. Using RFQs is a familiar practice in public-private real estate partnerships, and many cities already employ similar procurement methods across sectors. This approach also accommodates the reality of limited local resources by leveraging external expertise through competitive procurement, allowing cities to manage development initiatives without overextending internal capabilities. For these reasons, this tool focuses on scaling Austin’s innovation and establishing Municipal Property Advisor services as a standard practice nationwide.
