Dear friend,

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

🔊 Register for our talk with SAVI, “Empowering Indiana Communities with Eviction and Foreclosure Data,” on December 7th!

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

What We're Doing

Recommendations for Leveraging Funding and Technical Assistance to Improve Eviction Data

📑 Read the new recommendations.

Communities use eviction court records to track who is being evicted where, develop effective prevention strategies, and build momentum for housing policy changes. But access and quality of this data varies across the United States. Building off a set of eviction data recommendations released in 2021, FLH and a coalition of housing experts and municipal leaders expanded on recommendations related to increasing funding and technical assistance for eviction data efforts locally. 

Targeted towards federal, state, and local government actors, these recommendations offer ways that funding and technical assistance can be leveraged to improve the local eviction data landscape and help unlock access to, and build local capacity for, eviction data.

Climate Change and Corporate Buy-Ups: A Double Threat to Mobile Home Communities

📑 Read the blog post.

Housing in the United States is less affordable now than at any point in the last four decades, with the number of rent-burdened households around 40 million. In the midst of this crisis, mobile homes, which house an estimated 15 million Americans, are a key source of affordable housing. But mobile home residents are also uniquely affected by extreme heat and other climate impacts, resulting in disparate health outcomes.

In parallel, a growing trend of corporate buy-ups of mobile home parks threatens to further reduce the climate resilience of mobile homes while also making them less affordable.

Jacob Kepes and Yuliya Panfil recently wrote for the FLH Blog on how these intertwined crises could leave mobile home owners—some of the most vulnerable Americans—even more at risk of financial struggle, health challenges, and displacement.

FLH's "National Housing Loss Rate" Idea Selected as Finalist in Housing Supply Challenge

📑 Read about the challenge.

We're pleased to share that New America's proposal for a National Housing Loss Rate has been accepted by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) as a finalist in its "housing supply ideas challenge." Our idea, which we outlined for Politico this spring, is that similar to the U.S. unemployment rate, if we want to get serious about tackling our national housing security crisis, then America must establish a National Housing Loss Rate to track how many people are displaced from their homes each year. 

Over the coming months, we'll work with FAS and a team of expert reviewers to craft our idea into a public policy memo.

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.

Tim Robustelli

As Climate Shocks Grow, Lawmakers Investigate Insurers Fleeing Risky Areas: Climate disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are becoming more frequent and severe, prompting insurance companies to pull out of risky states like California, Louisiana, and Florida. The Senate Budget Committee wants to know which states could be next, fearing that “climate uninsurability” could lead to cascading economic problems. Led by climate hawk Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the committee sent letters to some of the United States’ largest insurance companies, including State Farm, Progressive, and Nationwide, asking for data to help states anticipate and plan for future withdrawals. And while there’s existing incentives for insurance companies to stay put in at-risk states, we also know that there’s a multitude of policy levers to both limit new development in climate-vulnerable areas and help American households relocate to safer ground. 

Jacob Kepes

Vienna Launched a Public Housing Revolution in the 1920s: Although incredibly unpopular in the United States, public housing is quite common across Europe. Americans often picture “the projects”—high-density, low-income housing like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes and St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe. Much of America’s public housing stock was demolished, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build back better. In fact, there are international examples that work to make cities more livable for more people. Vienna, Austria is one such model, and its public housing dates back to the 1920s. To house the average Viennese citizen, large housing projects were constructed with shared amenities, including medical facilities, schools, and libraries. These were attractive, livable places for any local, not just the lower class. (Unlike America’s public housing, these buildings are still standing.) In an era of unaffordable housing, American cities should take a lesson from Vienna and consider public housing for all.

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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