Dear friend,

Welcome to Frontier, the monthly newsletter from the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America. This month, we released our latest report, The Lending Hole at the Bottom of Homeownership Market, in partnership with Winston-Salem State University. We're also looking ahead to an exciting end of the year. Be sure to check out:

🔊 Our upcoming #EvictionDataNow video campaign, featuring civic innovators, housing advocates, and data scientists all answering: "If you had good eviction data, what would you do with it?"

🔊 A Land Portal webinar on December 16th at 9:00am ET, moderated by FLH director Yuliya Panfil and centered on how emerging technology can help improve land governance.

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

What We're Doing

New FLH Report on the Lack of Small Dollar Mortgages

The Future of Land and Housing Program is excited to share The Lending Hole at the Bottom of Homeownership Market, a study written in partnership with the Center for the Study of Economic Mobility at Winston-Salem State University.

One-fifth of all owner-occupied homes in the U.S. cost less than $100,000, yet banks and other lenders are extending fewer and fewer small dollar mortgages. Our report examines this lack of small loans, its causes, and its consequences both nationally and through an in-depth case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

The study was featured in a Bloomberg Opinion piece on “mortgage discrimination” and an NPR station segment on barriers to homeownership. And if you missed our release event, a recording is available here.

Is Compulsory Managed Retreat Our Future?

As the impacts of climate change worsen, U.S. policymakers are turning to the strategy of managed retreat—the purposeful and planned relocation of people and property away from vulnerable coasts and floodplains.

Yesterday, FLH Fellow Fanilla Cheng released a brief examining a new chapter in the U.S. government’s efforts to move vulnerable residents out of harm's way. Is Compulsory Managed Retreat Our Future? examines the use, legality, risks, and benefits of the government using its eminent domain powers to force managed retreat.

Read it here.

FLH Writes for the Winston-Salem Journal

Following the Great Recession, the Dodd-Frank Act was passed to protect lower-income homeowners from being exploited by unscrupulous lenders issuing predatory mortgages. But some regulations in the act have instead made it costly for banks to issue loans under $100,000, hurting many of the same families the legislation intended to protect.

Our analysis in Forsyth County, North Carolina demonstrates these impacts: small dollar loans have fallen by more than 50 percent since 2007, and are denied at rates two-to-three times higher than those of larger loans.

FLH senior policy analyst Sabiha Zainulbhai and Winston-Salem State University's Zachary Blizard recently wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal on how this inability to secure mortgage loans for low-value homes locks out local Black and Hispanic communities from the benefits of homeownership.

Read the piece 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

Memo to COP26: To Save Our Forests, Recognize Local and Indigenous Land Rights Now: Forest conservation was front and center at COP26, the annual UN Climate Change Conference, as world leaders committed to pledges around sustainably managing the world’s forests. But what about the people who live and work in these places? This OpEd from AllAfrica spotlights the role of Indigenous Peoples in protecting the world’s forests, and the importance of securing these groups’ property rights as a way to empower them to participate in REDD+ and other forest-saving projects. To quote the piece: “A key reason why some projects are ineffective is that they neglect to include and pay the people who own, live and work on the land - the indigenous and local communities who take care of the forests like their lives depended on it, because they do.” How will we ensure that forest conservation pledges are accompanied by efforts to secure the rights of those best positioned to actually protect forests?

Sabiha Zainulbhai

With Cases Piling Up, an Eviction Crisis Unfolds Step by Step: The "evictions cliff" that housing experts warned about hasn't come to pass, but that doesn’t mean tenants are faring well. After the federal eviction moratorium was struck down in August, what we see instead is a more gradual eviction crisis, especially in communities with weak tenant protections and slow rental aid distribution. Without a national database on evictions, and no standardized methods to collect or report that data, we don't have a baseline for measuring trends in evictions, and thus rely on a patchwork of evidence. But there are a few things we do know. For one, any available estimates of evictions dramatically undercount the number of tenants displaced from their homes, as landlords often force "informal evictions" through tactics like changing the locks, shutting off utilities, and not renewing leases. We also know that landlords more or less collected rent as regularly during the pandemic as they did before, suggesting that the industry has by and large been made whole. What plays out in the coming months, however, remains to be seen.

Tim Robustelli

The man turning cities into giant sponges to embrace floods: Climate change continues to drive more frequent and intense rainstorms across the globe. And the widespread use of concrete and asphalt in urban areas means that these heavy rains are quickly leading to deadly and damaging flash floods. In China, an award-winning urban planner is working to embrace flooding, rather than fear it, through his “sponge city” concept. The basic plan seeks to soak up rainfall and slow down surface run-off through creation of many ponds and meandering rivers full of vegetation, as well as preservation of empty flood plains. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has embraced the idea, and Beijing now plans to have “sponge city” elements in at least 80 percent of its municipal areas by 2030. Others remain more skeptical, viewing the concept as difficult to implement at scale, especially in decentralized states, as well as insufficient to deal with larger storms. But as the planet continues to warm, it’s increasingly clear that we must find some way to better live with water as part of our urban environments.

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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