Dear friend,

Welcome to Frontier, the monthly newsletter from the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America. This month, we continued to work with cities and counties to address eviction and foreclosure-related housing loss, and are also conducting research on innovative lending for homeownership in low-and-moderate income communities.

🔊 We're hiring! FLH is adding a Senior Program Associate, Global Land and Resource Rights to the team. Apply by August 12th!

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

What We're Doing

Incorporating Land and Resource Governance in Other Development Programs

Robust land and resource governance (LRG) is increasingly recognized as foundational for many other development objectives. As part of our support to USAID's Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) activity, we developed four reference sheets to help development stakeholders better integrate LRG into their own work across key sectors:

Interested in cross-sectoral development work? You can check out the series here.

Does Coastal America Have a Future?

Climate impacts—such as sea-level rise, more frequent and powerful storms, wildfires, and extreme heat—are increasingly and dramatically affecting where Americans live and their relationships to their homes and communities.

We're not helpless in determining our climate future, however. As part of “The Future of the Coasts,” our ongoing partnership with Future Tense, we've continued to reimagine life in the United States amid climate change:

In a recent OpEd, Sharon E. Burke, president of Ecospherics and former Director of New America’s Resource Security program, considers the U.S. Government's difficult decisions on closing military installations due to climate change.
Last month, FLH and Future Tense hosted a panel event to discuss the mix of creative public policies and societal reimagining needed to ensure the future of coastal America. Find the recording here, a Twitter recap here, and a write-up from ASU News here.

Explore our ongoing "Future of the Coasts" series on this page.

We're Hiring! Join Our Team as a Senior Program Associate, Global Land and Resource Rights

We're expanding our team to include a Senior Program Associate focused on global land and resource governance (LRG). This position is an excellent opportunity to gain a broad range of experience across the application of LRG to gender, environment, and conflict resolution in a supportive, creative, and collaborative environment.

This position will largely support FLH's work on USAID's Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) activity, which strengthens the impacts of USAID’s core environmental programming. In addition, the Senior Program Associate will work with the FLH team to support strategy development, research synthesis, writing, event planning and support, and project management related to land tenure and property rights globally.

See the position description for more details, and apply by August 12!

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 Worst Place in the World to Drill for Oil Is Up for Auction: This New York Times OpEd, written by University College London climate change professor Simon Lewis, spotlights a tragic dilemma faced by one of the most resource rich but fiscally poor nations in the world: the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congolese government is reportedly auctioning drilling rights to nearly 60 million acres of pristine rainforest, including the site of the world’s largest tropical peatland. Congo needs the cash, but the consequences—for the country and for the globe—could be disastrous. “Is there another way?” Lewis asks. Yes. One powerful tactic the global community can deploy is to pay local landholders in exchange for agreeing to keep protecting their forests. Doing that starts with helping these communities map and document their rights.

Sabiha Zainulbhai

Can One Bay Area Housing Complex Radically Change Affordable Housing?: There’s a growing national movement towards community control of housing, where residents maintain affordability, prevent displacement, and share equity among themselves and for generations to come. But a detailed and ambitious resident-led plan for Golden Gate Village in Marin City, California—home to around 700 residents, all low-income and mostly Black—represents a unique opportunity within this growing movement. As one of the first public housing complexes to attempt to convert to a resident-owned housing cooperative, residents are hopeful that they can pave a new path to homeownership and serve as an example of what’s possible.

Tim Robustelli

Without land, Bangladesh’s Manta people live—and die—on boats: Bangladesh’s ever-eroding rivers have swallowed more than 400,000 acres of land in the past few decades, destroying farms, homes, and livelihoods. Many of the displaced—known as the Manta people—are forced to settle on small river boats and rely heavily on fishing to earn a living. Constantly on the move, the 300,000 Manta lack formal addresses and national ID cards and are consequently shut off from state services. And their precarious livelihoods are increasingly under threat: worsening climate impacts, such as cyclones, heavy rains, and flooding, batter their boats, while commercial fishing and overpopulation are thinning out their catches. The Manta await a government solution that allows them to live safe and stable lives on land, and we also wonder what policies are available to mitigate erosion and other climate impacts, protecting additional Bangladeshis from a hard life on the water.

Ellis Obrien

‘A lot of challenges’: can housing industry build homes habitable in high temperatures?: Extreme heat is not just uncomfortable, it’s deadly. As unprecedented heat waves sweep across the UK, housing that was built for keeping people warm in cooler weather is now crumbling. Following one of the hottest summers on record in 2018, an estimated £64m in insurance claims were made in the UK, a number that is expected to rise with the heatwaves of 2022. Other countries are employing adaptation strategies to ensure housing is heat resilient, such as retrofitting properties or constructing houses with less exposure to the direct sun. However, the UK housing industry doesn’t necessarily seem to be adjusting its practices comprehensively or quickly enough to adapt to rising temperatures.

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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