Dear friend,

Welcome to Frontier, the monthly newsletter from the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America.

🔊 FLH is pleased to welcome Social Impact Fellow Affiong Ibok to the team. Affiong is a Master in Public Affairs student at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Read her full bio here.

🔊 Join New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative on March 11th at 2pm ET for a virtual event on residential segregation and school district inequality. Register here!

Here's what we've been up to:

What We're Doing

New Report: Can Ukraine Transform Post-Crisis Property Compensation and Reconstruction?

📑 Read the report.

Even as war rages on, the Ukrainian Government is getting thousands of families back into their homes each week, thanks to its innovative eRecovery program that allows Ukrainians whose homes have been damaged or destroyed by Russian aggression to apply for and receive compensation using their smartphone. The program utilizes Ukraine’s Diia e-government platform and marks the first-ever example of a compensation process for damaged or destroyed property that is implemented digitally, at scale, while hostilities are ongoing.

Last week, FLH and New America’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative (DIGI) released a report, Can Ukraine Transform Post-Crisis Property Compensation and Reconstruction?, which examines Ukraine’s eRecovery property compensation program and provides actionable recommendations that are designed for the Ukrainian Government and its international partners supporting humanitarian and recovery efforts.

CNN Opinion: "The true victims of the US eviction crisis"

📑 Read the article.

FLH Director Yuliya Panfil and Brigid Schulte, director of New America’s Better Life Lab, co-wrote an OpEd for CNN highlighting recent findings that children under five years old are the group most likely to face eviction across the United States.

Panfil and Schulte ask: are sky high childcare costs, and poor availability of care, to blame for this disturbing trend? The article closes with a call to action for Congress to continue funding the pandemic-era Child Care Stabilization Program, and for readers like you to support universal child care systems in your own community. 

Webinar: "How to Use ARPA Funds to Improve Local Data on Evictions"

📹 Watch the webinar recording here.

On February 14th, FLH and the National League of Cities hosted a webinar offering guidance to state and local governments on how to use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars to build their eviction data infrastructure ahead of the December 2024 funding obligation deadline. Representatives from the City of Alexandria shared how they used ARPA funds to stand up and maintain a local eviction database amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and legal aid expert Karen Lash provided strategies on leveraging this funding to build local capacity for better understanding evictions.

What We're Reading

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

Yuliya Panfil

Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity: In this article, the authors—the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, and a mother whose home was destroyed in the war in Gaza—argue for the creation of a new crime against humanity: Domicide. They argue that the widespread or systematic destruction of homes, which is a ubiquitous but sometimes overlooked feature of modern wars, is so pernicious as to merit the designation of a crime against humanity. Such a designation would elevate the current status of property destruction, which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions but is seldom prosecuted on its own. Given the immense human and cultural toll that the leveling of cities, from Gaza to Mariupol, takes, I wholeheartedly agree with this argument.

Tim Robustelli

Welcome to Silicon Desert: How Biden helped boost an Arizona boomtown: Over $60 billion in investment is pouring into Phoenix for chip manufacturing, and the desert metropolis is booming. With help from federal subsidies included in the Biden Administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, companies like Intel and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company are building huge factories in the region. The work is transforming the Valley of the Sun into one of the world’s most important manufacturing sites, and is drawing in thousands of high-tech jobs. Dozens of other companies are also flocking to town, to supply the factories, and residential developers are busier than ever. In part, the investments helped Phoenix’s 2022 GDP grow at double the national rate, and the boom clearly shows how the federal government can spur demographic and economic growth in certain cities. But is this progress sustainable in a place like Phoenix, where extreme heat and other climate hazards will soon make many parts of the year unlivable?

Helen Bonnyman

Individualism Is Making Public Transit Worse: So many complaints about public transit and requests to improve it center around its inadequacy for certain groups, such as seniors, students, tourists, commuters, and essential workers. But designing transit that attempts to cater to the needs of distinct groups renders it inefficient and, in the face of finite resources, small. A feature, not a bug, of effective public transit systems is that it considers the needs of riders from different walks of life and seeks to serve them all, inviting a diverse ridership on board. As we recover from the pandemic, relearning to tolerate one another's company—and advocating for stronger safety nets to address the mental health crisis leading to bad behavior on transit—will make our public transit systems and our society more resilient.

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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