Dear friend,

Welcome to Frontier, the monthly newsletter from the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America. This month, we began testing our eviction and foreclosure data tool with 14 local partners. We're also gearing up for a busy few weeks. Keep a lookout for:

🔊 Report Release: Homeownership and the Hidden Mortgage Hurdle, accompanied by a public webinar on November 9th at 12pm ET (invite forthcoming).

🔊 Briefer Series: Innovative Models for Land Formalization, developed in collaboration with Suyo, a Colombian-based social enterprise.

🔊 Video Campaign: "If you had good eviction data, what would you do with it?"

Here's what else we've been up to:

What We're Doing

Coastal Risk is Rising: How Will We Respond?

U.S. coastal areas were home to 128 million people in 2018—40 percent of the country's population—and Americans continue to flock to the shore. But climate change is making it increasingly precarious to live in these areas. Sea-level rise and more frequent and powerful storms are now inescapable threats to coastal settlements, infrastructure, and economies. Faced with dramatic changes to the environment, communities from Alaska to Florida are grappling with existential questions of whether to stay and invest billions in fortification or move away through the process of managed retreat.

Earlier this month, FLH Fellow Dona Stewart released a report, Coastal Risk is Rising: How Will We Respond?, examining the costs of staying in vulnerable coastal communities, considerations for moving away, and the implications of lacking a federal plan to deal with rising waters.

In partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, we also hosted a virtual launch event. Climate reporters Jeff Goodell and Halle Parker joined Dona to discuss the ultimate decision coastal communities face: do they stay or do they go? 

View a recording of the event here.

Land Use and Disease Spillover at the Forest Edge

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlights the critical need to better understand and mitigate zoonotic spillover, or the transmission of disease from animals to humans. An overlooked yet crucial aspect of this development challenge is land use change at the border between human settlement and wild forests.

As a partner on the Integrated Natural Resource Management Activity, FLH helped USAID convene a workshop series to examine how land use change and the anthropogenic conversion of natural habitats contributes to zoonotic disease emergence and spillover. 

The workshop series culminated in a first-of-its-kind report, Governance, Land Use Change, and Mitigating Viral Zoonotic Emergence at the Human-Environment Interface.

You can access the report via the USAID LandLinks website here.

What We're Reading

FLH staff share what has stood out to them lately on land, housing, and property rights in the U.S. and internationally.

Yuliya Panfil

The World’s Oldest Rainforest Was Just Handed Back to Its Indigenous Owners: Eighty percent of global biodiversity lies within traditional lands, and research shows that deforestation rates in Indigenous forests are two to three times lower than in forests managed by other stakeholders. Yet Indigenous Peoples only have secure rights to one-fifth of their land globally. This article outlines a historic deal between Australia’s Queensland State and the Indigenous Peoples of the 180-million-year-old Daintree rainforest, to formally give the forest back to its traditional owners. Might this be a model for the return of other forests worldwide to their Indigenous owners?

Sabiha Zainulbhai

Scarce Credit Hinders Homeownership on Tribal Land: Obtaining a mortgage on a relatively low-cost home in the U.S. is increasingly difficult. On tribal lands, additional challenges abound. For one, swaths of tribal areas are held in trust, preventing lenders' ability to recoup their funds if a homeowner doesn’t pay their mortgage. Since the 1990s, HUD’s Section 184 Indian Home Loan Guarantee Program, designed specifically to increase mortgage credit for Native communities, has allowed loans to be made against land leased from a trust. But the country’s biggest banks don’t participate in the program, and infrastructure for getting a loan approved is lacking: appraisers are scarce in rural areas, and contractors often lack necessary  certifications. The cash reserves required for loan approval are also in short supply, especially after generational wealth has been stripped from Native communities. Whereas processing a traditional mortgage can take as little as a month, obtaining financing on a home in tribal lands often takes years.

Tim Robustelli

As Manchin Blocks Climate Plan, His State Can't Hold Back Floods: A recent study found that West Virginia is the most at-risk state for river flooding in the contiguous United States. Sitting entirely within the Appalachians, many of the Mountain State’s homes, roads, and infrastructure are built along winding rivers, creeks, and streams. And as climate change brings more frequent and intense rainfall, damage from swollen waterways has become more severe. At the same time, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) is blocking a climate bill in D.C. that could significantly reduce carbon emissions and state officials in Charleston are reluctant to even talk about climate change. Perhaps left to fend for themselves, what resources and support networks can local leaders leverage to protect West Virginian communities, their homes, and their livelihoods from climate impacts?

Thoughts on our work or where we're headed? Reach out to us at FLH@NewAmerica.org or tag us at @FLHatNewAmerica.

Until next month, the FLH Team.

About New America

New America is dedicated to renewing the promise of America, bringing us closer to our nation’s highest ideals. We’re a different kind of think tank: one dedicated to public problem solving. Our team of visionary researchers, changemakers, technologists, and storytellers study and seize the opportunities presented by dramatic social and technological change. We search for powerful ideas, wherever they are, and collaborate with civic innovators around the world to develop evidence-based solutions.

The Future of Land and Housing Program at New America aims to help solve today’s land and housing rights challenges, both in the United States and internationally. Through our research and writing, convening, and collaboration with civic innovators worldwide, we strive to connect new constituencies, shed light on underreported issues, and implement creative approaches in the property rights space.

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