Dear friend,

Welcome to Frontier, the monthly newsletter from the Future of Land and Housing Program at New America. This month, we released a series of briefs analyzing financing models for demand-driven property registration. We're also planning ahead for the start of 2022. Early next year, check out: 

🔊 Innovations in Demand-Driven Property Registration, a virtual event on January 19th exploring how service providers can remove barriers to scaling fee-based and demand-driven property registration.

🔊 A public release of the eviction and foreclosure data tool that we've developed in partnership with DataKind, the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab, and 14 cities and counties over the last year.

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

What We're Doing

Why We Need #EvictionDataNow

An estimated 3 million Americans are evicted every year. But without access to high-quality, comprehensive, and standardized data, it's hard to track where evictions are concentrated, who is most at risk, and when evictions are most likely to occur. And that makes it difficult to develop data-driven policy to keep tenants in their homes.

To illustrate why eviction data is so essential, we asked 20 leaders: "if you had good eviction data, what would you do with it?"

View their video responses here, and engage with our campaign on Twitter using #EvictionDataNow.

You can also read our eight recommendations for improving national and local eviction data infrastructure, which culminate in creating a nationwide eviction database.

Briefer Series: Innovations in Financing Demand-Driven Property Registration

A major contributor to property insecurity is that an estimated quarter of the world's population lacks formal property documents. This is because land registration is typically a labor-intensive process carried out by a small cohort of licensed professionals and slow-moving bureaucracies that are either unable or unwilling to provide efficient services.

Over the last decade, new non-governmental actors have emerged to alleviate this bottleneck and provide land registration at scale, for a fee. But delivering these services isn't easy or inexpensive.

In collaboration with Suyo, a social enterprise that provides tech-enabled land rights services to low-income households in Colombia, FLH released a series of briefs that explore the following questions:

How can organizations like Suyo remove barriers to scaling fee-based, demand-driven property registration? And how can they build innovative financing models that make this service accessible even for the poorest customers around the world?

Access the series here.

The Data Cities Need to Understand & Address Their Eviction Crisis

The U.S. needs a national eviction database: one-third of U.S. counties have no available information on annual eviction rates, let alone data that reflects the demographics of those displaced or how much past-due rent typically leads to an eviction. Research from the National League of Cities (NLC) found that 22 percent of city officials surveyed don't know whether evictions increased or decreased in the past year.

The eviction data gap is a major challenge to cities that are aiming to reduce displacement in their communities. FLH senior policy analyst Sabiha Zainulbhai, in collaboration with NLC and the Stanford Legal Design Lab, recently wrote an article about the hurdle that this missing data presents, as well as promising steps that cities can take to enhance their local eviction data landscape.

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

Advocates push nationwide movement for land return to Blacks after victory in California: In September, a landmark law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom allowed a Black family to reclaim a seaside park that the city of Manhattan Beach, CA had seized through eminent domain in 1924. This victory has spurred a legal movement by other Black families to reclaim land that had been taken from them through eminent domain and other means over the course of the last century. Experts worry that because some of those families' landholdings, and sometimes the seizures themselves, were never formally documented, they will have difficulty proving in court that the land was improperly taken. But as we know, the challenges of informal or non-existent land documents are pervasive across the world, and many organizations, for example Cadasta, have emerged to help communities map their land and document its ownership history in the absence of formal documents. Might some of these organizations offer assistance to Black families seeking to reclaim their land?

Sabiha Zainulbhai

How a billion dollar housing bet upended a Tennessee neighborhood: The Pandora Papers, a trove of offshore financial records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with The Washington Post, reveal a plan by a billion-dollar investment venture, Progress Residential, to profit off families foreclosed upon during the 2008 financial crash. By buying up homes at depressed prices using cash and renting them to families who lost their homes or can no longer qualify for mortgages, Progress Residential has acquired one of the largest single-family home portfolios in the U.S. Not only are homeownership opportunities being taken away from middle class families, but further investigation shows that tenants living in these properties have been subject to unfair rent hikes, poor maintenance, excessive fees, and pandemic-era evictions. As one elected official put it, “For the average person, the choice is no longer: Can I purchase a house? It’s instead: Can I afford to rent a house?”

Tim Robustelli

Fleeing global warming? 'Climate havens' aren't ready for you yet.: By 2050, an estimated 143 million people worldwide are expected to move because of climate change. In the United States, the Great Lakes region is perceived as a future ‘climate haven’ from the East Coast’s storms and the West’s droughts and wildfires. Midwest cities such as Buffalo, NY; Cincinnati, OH; and Duluth, MN—often overlooked today—are expecting significant population bumps in the coming decades. Many city planners are already welcoming the future economic development spurred by these newcomers, but they’ll concurrently need to address growing pains such as gentrification, housing shortages, and strains on the delivery of social services. So how can these communities prepare for an influx of migrants, while also dealing with their own political, social, and climate challenges? As Kate Yoder writes for Grist, these cities can plan ahead by building sustainable and resilient communities right now, taking into account both the needs of current residents and the coming climate migrants.

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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