{"id":109147,"date":"2026-02-09T15:45:05","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T15:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/109147\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T15:45:05","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T15:45:05","slug":"276000-acres-of-public-land-in-plain-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/109147\/","title":{"rendered":"276,000 Acres of Public Land in Plain Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In January, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy <\/a>announced a new initiative, Public Land for All Communities and the Environment <\/a>(PLACE), which aims \u201cto empower local government and civic partners to overcome common procedural and legal barriers to the effective transfer and transformation of public land, including for affordable housing, nature-based solutions, conservation, and other public benefits.\u201d As someone who has written <\/a>time and again<\/a> (and again<\/a> and again<\/a>) about public property and potential innovations for it, I wanted to learn more and interview Lincoln Institute\u2019s President and CEO Dr. George \u201cMac\u201d McCarthy.<\/a> I was heartened to learn how much Lincoln Institute is doing to build communities of practice, supported with data and insight, around this issue. Below is an edited version of our conversation.<\/p>\n

Q: What\u2019s your hope for what the PLACE initiative will achieve?<\/p>\n

McCarthy: Our goal is to find more effective ways to allocate and dedicate public land for better public purpose. A lot of publicly owned land is not really used well or managed well, and that\u2019s because it\u2019s politically challenging to use. We\u2019re going to build political will to figure out ways to use it more effectively. What are the best ways for whomever owns the land, whether it\u2019s a local jurisdiction, a county, a state, even the federal government, to actually convey it and make sure that it\u2019s conveyed in a way that redounds to public benefit?<\/p>\n

As a first step, it\u2019s critical that places know what they own. We talk about public land as if it\u2019s a known entity. But as it turns out, there\u2019s so many different public sector institutions that own or control land and it\u2019s sometimes really hard to figure it out. When you actually look at all the land records, the owner of record could be just some acronym. One of the other goals is to identify and map publicly owned lands.<\/p>\n

Then we want to contribute methods and a framework for people to make better decisions about how to use land for public benefit. Some of the land might be suitable for affordable housing, some might be suitable for nature-based solutions. So we are producing scenario-planning tools that allow users to identify their own priorities for different kinds of land use and then run their different land parcels through a gauntlet of questions to find out what it\u2019s most suited to.<\/p>\n

Our goal isn\u2019t to tell people how they should use their land. Our goal is to tell people how they should think about using their land and let them figure it out themselves.<\/p>\n

Finally, we want to build a record of success in lots of places so we can tell those stories. Other places will hear about them and then they will try to replicate that success. There are already examples of places that have made good use of public land. One of our first efforts is to start to document that and tell those stories.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia is leading the nation in finding ways to manage storm water with land use solutions instead of building more sewers. We have to create a community of practice around that and figure out who can help develop the land to provide those benefits.<\/p>\n

Public land has been in the news more during the Trump administration since the announcement of selling off the non-core buildings that the government owns. Do you see this work as being in collaboration with the federal government, or are partnerships at the local and state level?<\/p>\n

We did an initial screening to find buildable parcels in transit-accessible, urban areas,<\/a> and we defined this as parcels that are more than half an acre, with no building more than 1,000 square feet, not in a wetland or public park. Parcels had to have at least one transit stop within a quarter-mile radius and one active trip per hour during evening rush hour. We found 276,000 acres \u2014 just 5,000 owned by the federal government, about 237,000 by local governments, and the rest by states. Most urban land is not in federal control, though the federal government can incentivize local governments to use their land better.<\/p>\n

In Philadelphia, our publicly owned land bank has not been a resounding success and there\u2019s concern about poor public sector stewardship of land. Yet, the public is also distressed to see the government selling off its property. Are you building a community of practice around public land management?<\/p>\n

If you sell without attaching negative covenants, you have little control over how it\u2019s used, and the potential for public benefit is limited. All you get is a one-time shot of revenue.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been trying for years to build a pipeline from land banks to land trusts. The key is that a community land trust keeps the land and improvements treated separately. The government could convey land through a very long-term, low-cost lease and maintain ownership, which means they maintain oversight to ensure it\u2019s used permanently for public benefit.<\/p>\n

The perfect partner for government is the community land trust\u2014a nonprofit entity existing in perpetuity to steward land for affordable housing and more. Really good land trusts do commercial development, owner-occupied stuff, community space, rentals and low-income housing tax credit projects. Burlington\u2019s Champlain Housing Trust<\/a> has thousands of rental units.<\/p>\n

We want to build a specific community of practice around establishing partnerships between cities and community land trusts to allocate public land long-term and get affordable housing and community-serving uses permanently stewarded.<\/p>\n

There might be other examples where you don\u2019t want to convey to a community land trust \u2014 maybe because there isn\u2019t one with capacity to do stuff at scale. But there might be other local entities or public-private partnerships.<\/p>\n

There are other communities of practice focused on using land for nature-based solutions. Philadelphia is leading the nation in finding ways to manage storm water with land use solutions instead of building more sewers. We have to create a community of practice around that and figure out who can help develop the land to provide those benefits. Every publicly beneficial use should spawn a community of practice.<\/p>\n

A lot of publicly owned land is not really used well or managed well, and that\u2019s because it\u2019s politically challenging to use. We\u2019re going to build political will to figure out ways to use it more effectively.<\/p>\n

Cities have owned this land for a long time but have not done anything with it, I think, because it costs money to do so. What\u2019s the business model for cities to engage on this?<\/p>\n

It depends on the use and what you\u2019re hoping to generate. We have many land use tools used for millennia to help land pay for its own development.<\/p>\n

One used hundreds of times around the world is land readjustment.<\/a> Washington, D.C. was built using it \u2014 in 1789 the United States wasn\u2019t flush. Manhattan was built using it north of Wall Street when they built the grid without money for streets, sewers, and subways. You sell some at its post-improvement value to pay for improvements. That\u2019s how they rebuilt Japan and Germany after World War II. We\u2019ve just never done it in the United States since the 19th century.<\/p>\n

Depending on nature-based solutions, you\u2019ll generate increased land values in adjacent properties. Most local governments\u2019 knee-jerk reaction is to use a TIF, which I think is the silliest way to generate value. If you\u2019re gonna use a TIF, you might as well do land readjustment. Anybody who does a TIF knows that improvements raise land value and generate more tax revenue. But if it\u2019s gonna raise the value, why don\u2019t you garner some of that value?<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s sale of development rights around these improvements by changing zoning. Lots of places are just getting their brains around the idea the public sector could sell development rights. But there\u2019s a billion-dollar private market in New York where private parties transfer development rights. Chase Manhattan paid $240 million to add 500 feet to [its headquarters at] 270 Park.<\/a><\/p>\n

We have dozens of tools, and it\u2019s almost never a problem of inadequate access to capital. That\u2019s a specious argument made by people who don\u2019t want to go through it. What they\u2019re really saying is: This is hard. Not that it\u2019s impossible or the money can\u2019t be found. They don\u2019t want to go down the road because it\u2019s hard.<\/p>\n

How do cities take the next step?<\/p>\n

First, cities have to figure out what they own. We built the Who Owns America database<\/a> \u2014 we know every parcel in the United States. We can tell them what they own, plus the dimensions, slope, and context information to figure out suitability. They could access that tool. We\u2019re not giving it away for free \u2014 we\u2019ve invested a couple million dollars in it \u2014 but we won\u2019t charge what the private market would for GIS analysis.<\/p>\n

The other technology tool is a suitability planning tool we\u2019re building. And we have communities of practice that can walk local governments through how to fund development depending on use. We\u2019re building boilerplate mechanisms to facilitate land transfer.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re going to be as facilitative as possible. We\u2019re offering to work with places that send a team \u2014 community land trust members, public officials with land control \u2014 to work with us. But we have limited capacity. There are 90,000 municipalities in the U.S. We\u2019re not going to help every one, but once communities of practice get going, they\u2019ll teach each other.<\/p>\n

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter,\u00a0The New Urban Order.<\/a>\u00a0Sign up for the newsletter\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\" MORE FROM THE NEW URBAN ORDER<\/p>\n

Cherry Trees in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. Photo by Pauline Rosenberg<\/a> via Flickr <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In January, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy announced a new initiative, Public Land for All Communities and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4736,10889,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-109147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-housing","tag-new-urban-order","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}