Zeroing in on gov’t land for possible housing
The U.S. is short four to seven million units of housing. Vacant land owned by the government may be able to help ease the gap. Most of it near urban areas and transit lines, is controlled by local governments. And with the help of the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), communities are starting to realize they may have land to build more housing.
In 2024 CGS finished mapping property ownership for the entire U.S., including government-owned land. The national mapping data came months before the announcement of a separate initiative from the Trump administration.
What the federal government is proposing
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of the Interior are joining forces to create the Joint Task Force on Federal Land for Housing. HUD Secretary Scott Turner and Interior Secretary Doug Bergum wrote an opinion piece about it in the Wall Street Journal. They explain, “HUD will pinpoint where housing needs are most pressing and guide the process by working with state and local leaders who know their communities best.” Additionally, “Interior will identify locations that can support homes while carefully considering environmental impact and land-use restrictions.”
The Interior Department oversees more than 500 million acres of federal land. However, most of it isn’t close to urban areas, employment and transit. It’s unclear when the Trump administration will release specifics on this plan. Some are concerned Native American interests may not be protected.
Who Owns America®
In a separate effort, the Center for Geospatial Solutions, (CGS) which tries to ensure all organizations have access to data and advanced technologies to improve decision-making, figured out who owns all properties in America in record time. This included government vacant land and whether it could be used for housing. CGS created a national database in December 2024.
CGS wondered what additional housing could be built on government-owned vacant land and established parameters including land near urban areas, employment and transportation. (excluding Native American-owned parcels) CGS identified more than 270,000 acres of buildable transit-served lots owned by government agencies in major metro areas. Most of it, 237,000 acres, is controlled by local governments. CGS says building just seven units per acre would be enough to support nearly two million homes.
For most people identifying who owns what is not easy. CGS found the current system “inaccessible, fragmented and in many cases, outdated or incomplete.” Even though property ownership is a matter of record, it requires looking at paper records held in 3,142 county offices across the country. Digital records exist but they are rife with errors. For example, the team found “over 50 different ways to spell USA or United States of America, and the variations in naming conventions only increase” at the local level.
CGS Director Jeff Allenby gives a local example saying, “A little over a quarter of Hamilton County’s parcels actually has the mortgage company’s address as the owner mailing address as opposed to the actual owner’s address.”
Watch a webinar of CGS explaining how it mapped America:
The technology
CGS is owned by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and its CEO George McCarthy explains CGS was able to identify ownership quickly with advanced technology. He says, “This ambitious data mapping endeavor used best-in-class parcel-level data-optimized for analysis at an aggregate level-to respond to specific questions about the ownership of single-family housing in U.S. cities.”
McCarthy says dozens of entities, “from municipal agencies to national affordable housing organizations” have asked CGS to help them better understand the data.
Allenby told Brick by Brick, “We’re doing a lot of work right now with Salt Lake County, Utah….they wanted to be able to create a unified view across these 24 municipalities to help form policies they’re putting in place…and so we’re working with them to create this unified view across Salt Lake County to really begin to put in place unified policies.”
A for-profit company, Regrid, also mapped America. It describes itself as “an industry-leading property data and location intelligence company.”
Helping cities beat predatory investors at their own game
The inspiration for the Who Owns America® project was protecting cities from predatory investors. Knowing the ownership in particular neighborhoods can help cities “defend or even reclaim affordable housing before it’s lost to corporate ownership.”
“It’s a very uneven playing field between private investors, who have the capital and are willing to invest the capital to get this market intelligence, and nonprofits that are struggling to keep the doors open, let alone invest in platforms like this,” says Allenby. “What you see is governments and nonprofits continuously trying to play catch up.”
The Port (of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority) was interested in finding out who owned what properties and combed through ownership data a few years ago, specifically looking at the biggest offenders on building code violations. Allenby says, “It took this intern about 200 hours just for Hamilton County to understand the top five infractions basically, or companies who had the most infractions with our data. We can do that in about five minutes.”
Both Dayton and Cincinnati are working to address predatory investors.
YIGBY
CGS can taylor its technology to specific needs. It also looked at some faith-based properties and the availability of land as more and more states pass so-called “YIGBY” laws or Yes in God’s Backyard. These laws make it easier to build on church property.
The Lynch Foundation commissioned CGS to find out how much affordable housing could be built on church land in Massachusetts.
In less than two months, using 15 Boston College students who were able to “virtually visit” each site through a custom application, CGS determined of about 7,000 properties that 1,973 had over 203 million square feet of total developable space. With seven homes per acre, “that’s enough land to build over 140,000 units of affordable housing in Massachusetts alone.”
CGS is now working with churches in Virginia.
Local land
Cincinnati
In 2024 Cincinnati’s Department of Community and Economic Development filed a report which looked at how developable city owned land was along transit corridors. It studied surface parking lots and vacant parcels along or near Hamilton Avenue and Reading Road. Forty-eight different sites were identified representing roughly 74 acres of potentially developable land with an average size of 1.5 acres. (report and Attachment II) The report says the sites were located across 20 different neighborhoods.
Hamilton County
Hamilton County Assistant Planning Director Steve Johns says much of the land it owns involves just small slices of right-of-way (ROW) near county roads and pieces of property used by the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD). He says other jurisdictions in the county sometimes do own a lot of property like the City of Blue Ash’s Summit Park or the Village of Lincoln Heights with a number of scattered home sites.
The Port
The Port, through the Hamilton County Landbank, removes blight and prepares sites for redevelopment.
According to the quasi-governmental agency, “There are approximately 1,100 vacant residential parcels within the City of Cincinnati and 72 vacant residential parcels outside the city in Hamilton County within the Hamilton County Landbank.”
On its website, The Port says, “The Landbank focuses on finding not just purchasers for the property that will benefit the larger community. The Landbank works with residents, rehabbers, developers, governmental entities, and community partners across Hamilton County.”
In December, as reported by the Business Courier, The Port expanded its reach by merging with the community development association Uptown Consortium.
For the next five years it will try to jumpstart development near the University of Cincinnati, specifically the I-71/MLK interchange and the major hospitals.
The Courier reports, “The Port intends to build an Uptown-specific equity fund to acquire land and get projects off the ground, funded by Uptown’s institutions and outside investment.”
Dayton
Dayton Planning Division Manager Tony Kroeger told Brick by Brick he doesn’t immediately know how many acres the city has for redevelopment but, “some of our largest areas suitable for new construction of housing are former school sites.”
He mentions:
- The northeast corner of Homewood and Old Orchard (future HoM Flats Development, 260 units)
- 1201 N. Main Street
- 501 Niagara
- 2201 N. Gettysburg
- 1231 N. Euclid
- 258 Wyoming Street (The Flight student housing development)
- 4309 Arcadia Blvd.
Looking Ahead
With the identification of 274,000 buildable acres the government owns, most of it local, and the chance to build conservatively about 2 million housing units, will communities work with the Center for Geospatial Solutions and take action?
Allenby says it’s a logistics challenge. “It’s not that the opportunities don’t exist, it’s how we try to get the opportunities that exist moving and a lot of it is finding the people who can build the houses, finding the financing that’s needed and setting that up.”
He says The Lincoln Institute’s been doing a lot through their accelerating community investment program to identify what those opportunities are and to help partners understand what they are and put them in place….but its just moving all the pieces to be in line to see that forward progress.”
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Ann Thompson – Host, Producer
Over the last thirty years in Cincinnati, Ann Thompson has brought a wealth of knowledge and expertise to her reporting. She has reported and anchored for WVXU, WKRC, WCKY, WHIO-TV and Metro Networks and freelanced for NPR, CBS and ABC Radio. Her work has been recognized by the Associated Press and she has won awards from the Association of Women in Communications and the Alliance for Women in Media. She is a former News Director and Operations Manager. Ann has reported from India, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Belgium as part of fellowships. Ann thinks of the Brick by Brick project as “journalism for good.” She serves as host and producer. Ann lives in Anderson Township with her husband Scott. They have two boys. Jake graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2022 and Kurt attends West Point.
