Two months ago, I wrote in this newsletter about the rise of public asset corporations, and the National Housing Crisis Task Force published a playbook for building one. Atlanta, Chattanooga and Cincinnati are the early movers in the United States. Ireland’s Land Development Agency, capitalized with a 6.5-billion-euro equity investment against a population of 5.5 million, is the version of the model operating at full scale. The playbook lays out six steps: goal setting, organizational and programmatic design, staffing, seed funding, and incorporation.
What the playbook assumes is that a government knows which of its properties belong inside the new corporation. For most of the country that has not been a safe assumption. I have been saying for years that U.S. cities know more about what they owe than what they own, and the line has held up because public ownership in the United States is spread across city governments, county governments, school districts, port authorities, transit agencies and special districts that have never had reason to compare notes.
That is now changing, and faster than I expected. Section 104 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act took effect on October 1. Every Community Development Block Grant recipient, several thousand local governments, must now maintain a public, searchable database identifying the undeveloped land it owns, and the cost of building that database is itself an eligible CDBG expense. The technology for mapping a public portfolio has gotten cheap enough that a mid-sized city can do in a week what used to take a year.
I do not want to overstate it. A searchable list of undeveloped parcels is not the same thing as understanding a portfolio, and most governments still cannot tell you what their property is worth, what it could be worth under zoning they control, or which pieces of it could advance a policy goal they have already adopted. That understanding is the foundation of everything that follows and a large share of the country does not have it yet.
What has changed is that assembling an inventory of public assets is no longer the hard part. As creation of inventory becomes routine and cheap, the governments that build one are discovering that knowing is not the same as doing. The harder question is what happens on the day after the inventory is finished, and that question has a much shorter list of people who can answer it from experience.
To explore these and other challenges, I decided to reach out to two friends, Ben McAdams and Josh Humphries, who are leaders in the field and members of the National Housing Crisis Task Force.
Ben was Mayor of Salt Lake County from 2013 to 2019 and later represented Utah’s fourth district in Congress. He commissioned one of the first comprehensive county asset inventories in the country and has since taken more than two dozen governments through the same exercise. Josh was Senior Advisor for Housing to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, where he ran the city’s public land strategy and helped stand up its development corporation that I highlighted in my public asset corporation piece. They are the cofounders of Propvizer, which runs the Putting Assets to Work cohort described below.
I asked them to walk through what they have learned, and to reflect on where this goes next.
Bruce: Ben, you were a county mayor, not a real estate person. What sent you looking at the county’s property portfolio in the first place?
Ben: A budget problem, not a land problem.
I took office in 2013 with the usual list: a jail that needed replacing, a transit system that needed extending, a homeless services system under strain, and a revenue base that was not going to cover any of it without a tax increase I did not want to ask for. So, I started looking for money in places the budget office had not already picked over.
The county owned a lot of property. Nobody could tell me how much it was worth. We had a fixed asset register that recorded what we paid for things, some of it going back decades, and we had a facilities team that knew every building and what it cost to heat. What we did not have was anyone who could tell me the market value of our holdings under current zoning, let alone under zoning we could change ourselves.
We ran the inventory. The number that came back was over $45 billion in county-owned real estate, which was roughly 45 times our annual budget. I want to be careful here, because that figure has traveled further than it probably should have. Whether that is the exact number or not, there is real value there. The subset that was genuinely underutilized, meaning property we could do something different with, without disrupting a county service, was closer to $10 billion. That is the number I would use if I were making the case to a council today.
Even the conservative version is striking. If you put a third of the underutilized portfolio to work at a 3% return, you generate something like $450 million a year. Salt Lake County collected less than that in property tax each year. We were sitting on a gold mine, and we did not know it, and I do not think we were unusual.
The property inventory revealed major underutilized assets. We owned a public works yard on 30 acres, a quarter mile from a light rail station, where we stored equipment that could be deployed anywhere in the valley. We owned surface parking next to the county complex that generated a few dollars a day and sat on land worth millions. We owned buildings we had stopped using and kept heating. None of it was hidden. It was all sitting on somebody’s list. It had just never been looked at as a portfolio by anyone who could act on it.
The resistance was not what I expected either. Nobody argued with the numbers. What I heard was that each property belonged to a department that had plans for it, or had always had it, or needed it for something not yet scheduled. Every one of those claims was made in good faith and almost none of them survived a direct conversation about what else the land could do.
I think this gets at what you mean about owing versus owning. It was not negligence. Every individual decision had been made by a competent person who then moved on, and the institutional memory went with them. The portfolio view did not exist because nobody’s job description included building it.
Bruce: Josh, you got to the same place from a different problem. You were trying to hit a housing number.
Josh: Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens campaigned on 20,000 units of affordable housing in eight years, and by early 2022 I had the inevitable task of telling him the most optimistic projection got us to about 15,000. We were going to miss by four or five thousand units using the tools we had, and the tools we had were the ones every city has: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, an inclusionary zoning ordinance, gap financing, a housing trust fund. We modeled all of them at maximum output and still came up short.
Building housing on city land had been in every Atlanta housing plan for twenty years. Almost none of it had happened. When we went looking for why, the answer was that public landownership in Atlanta was split across more than a dozen public entities, and the city government had very little granular understanding of what the public sector owned. The housing authority had land. The school district had land. Invest Atlanta had land. The water department had land. The transit authority had land. No one held the consolidated map.
The policy problem came first. Public land showed up as the answer to it. Land was never the goal, but it was the one asset we had that was large enough to close a gap that size.
Once we could see the portfolio, the work changed character. We sorted what we found into two piles, ready-to-build and catalytic, and ran them on different clocks. The ready-to-build sites went out fast. The catalytic ones, often big, complicated assemblages, were worked on quietly in the background while the easy ones carried the news.
The Melody was one of the first ones out. Forty supportive housing units built from donated shipping containers on a city-owned lot, delivered in four months, which was the fastest multifamily delivery in Georgia history. It cost the city real money, and we took the whole risk ourselves because no partner would underwrite a model nobody had tried in Atlanta. It proved we could deliver real results quickly and get political and public opinion on our side.
Then 2 Peachtree, which was the opposite kind of bet. A 41-story empty office tower downtown that the private market would not touch. The city bought the building. It is becoming more than 600 units of housing, and half a dozen other office conversions have started nearby since, with their developers pointing to the city’s purchase as the reason they got comfortable.
Then we created a new development corporation to lever up our public land efforts. Atlanta Urban Development was set up in 2023, with a small portfolio of land, the power to grant tax exemptions, and a $38 million construction financing fund. Its first projects were an office-to-residential conversion, an 80-acre initiative in Thomasville Heights, and a Midtown site where a fire station is being rebuilt underneath 231 apartments. In all of them the land stays public.
Bruce: And this is where you and Ben found each other.
Josh: It is. Ben and I started talking in 2022, mostly because other cities kept calling Atlanta to ask how we built the Melody so quickly or how we were able to marshal all the different departments to move two dozen public land sites forward. Ben had been working with governments all over the country to develop detailed portfolio analysis on developable public sites, but Atlanta was one of the only cities that was actually going from a list of sites to shovels in the ground. The more we talked, the more we realized that the gap between Atlanta and most of the other places Ben had worked with was something we could help solve.
Bruce: What sets the successful movers apart from those that let their Putting Assets to Work report sit on a shelf?
Ben: Places where we’ve seen success always have four key ingredients: policy rationale driving the work, executive buy-in, empowered staff leading cross-departmental execution, and real estate expertise.
First, public policy must be the driver: housing, grocery access, climate resiliency. A general interest in doing something with city property will only go so far if efforts aren’t tied to a discreet policy goal. An adopted goal with a number attached and someone’s name on it. Atlanta had 20,000 units. Annapolis had a flood protection program it had already committed to funding. The portfolio work only gets useful once there is a question for it to answer, because the ranking must be against something. Absent that, a city produces a list of its property and no basis for choosing.
Second, is an executive who owns it. Mayor, county executive, governor. Not a department head with a side assignment. Public land projects draw opposition at specific addresses from specific people who vote, and somebody must be willing to spend political capital in a room where that is happening
Third, is a named person inside the government whose job this is. One person, not a committee. Atlanta ran a strike force of 18 agency heads that was largely successful because there was also a small team in the mayor’s office whose entire assignment was the 20,000-unit goal. The coordinating body alone would not have done it. We needed people who woke up thinking about this and nothing else.
Fourth, is real estate expertise, on staff or hired. Nobody moves a ground lease or a bond structure or a competitive solicitation without people who have done it. Invest Chattanooga has one full-time employee. That is the honest scale of this. It is not a department. It is one person with real authority and the expertise bought around them.
On that last point, when I was mayor, I assumed that because the county employed people who managed property, we had the capability to develop it. Those are different jobs. Managing property means keeping a building running and a lease current. Developing property means underwriting a deal, negotiating with a developer who does this fifty times a year, and knowing which of the terms in front of you are the ones that matter in year 30. We had the first and not the second, and for two years I did not understand that the gap was the key reason nothing moved.
Bruce: What happens when the executive leaves?
Ben: It is the biggest single risk in this work, and I have watched it play out more than once. A mayor sponsors the effort, the inventory gets built, two sites are in motion, and then there is an election or a resignation, and the new administration arrives with its own priorities and no particular attachment to this one.
Some of it you can design around. Publishing the ranking criteria before anything is scored is the main protection, because it turns the shortlist into something the government produced through a process rather than something the last mayor wanted. Putting the work inside an entity with its own board helps, which is part of why Atlanta and Chattanooga both built corporations. Getting one project visibly open before the transition helps most of all, because a new administration will cancel a plan and will rarely cancel a building.
But I want to be straight that none of that fully solves it. A portfolio strategy with no executive behind it becomes a document. That is the part that cannot be outsourced, and it is why I would tell a government with a mayor in the last year of a final term to either move fast on a few sites or wait for the next one, rather than spend a year building something the next administration has no reason to pick up.
Bruce: How should a government sequence the work once it has all four?
Josh: Run the easy and the hard at the same time. Atlanta sorted into ready-to-build and catalytic and worked them in parallel, with the simple sites moving right away while the complicated assemblages got put together quietly. The early wins are what buy the room to keep going. The catalytic sites are the reason the work was worth doing. A city that only does the easy ones ends up with a few good projects and no strategy, and a city that only chases the hard ones loses the room before anything opens.
Bruce: What have governments actually done with what they found?
Ben: What we’ve learned is that public land is a malleable tool that can accomplish a number of our country’s most pressing public policy needs.
Evanston is working through redevelopment of three major civic buildings with a $985,000 federal technical assistance award, and that work is in motion rather than finished. Chattanooga used it to build housing finance capacity, standing up Invest Chattanooga as a subsidiary to the housing authority with a $20 million revolving fund that takes a first-loss position during construction and gets taken out by philanthropic capital at permanent financing. Atlanta used it for grocery access: Azalea Fresh Market opened in a vacated downtown Walgreens by leveraging public sector revenue sharing. It has served more than 150,000 customers, with a second store coming. Annapolis used it for climate resilience: the Resilience Authority went looking for property whose value could pay for flood protection without raising taxes and moved a priority site into cleanup with a $4 million brownfield grant.
None of these governments set out to do the same thing. They set out to do what they had already committed to doing, and the portfolio told them which property could do it.
Bruce: Josh, say more about why the returns compound. That is the part I think the field still gets wrong.
Josh: Because a government collects in ways a developer cannot, and it collects all of them from the same building.
Start with the parcel. Public land is exempt, so it produces no property tax at all, and the move from exempt to taxable is arithmetic rather than a forecast. Add sales tax on whatever operates on the ground floor. Add ground lease payments if the city keeps the land, which it almost always should. Add an equity stake or revenue share if the city took development risk. Subtract the maintenance and liability the city was carrying on a building it no longer has to heat.
Then look off the parcel. Assessed value on the neighbors. Private investment that follows the public move, which is what happened around 2 Peachtree. Construction jobs and then permanent ones.
And the policy goal arrives in the same act. The project that delivers the affordable units is the same project that turns on the tax base. Cities tend to put community benefit and revenue on opposite sides of a ledger and trade one against the other, and on public land that trade is usually false. You are counting one act twice.
Run the fire station through that. The city owned a parcel in Midtown with a fire station on it, producing no property tax, costing money to maintain, and using a fraction of what the zoning allowed. Atlanta Urban Development put a new fire station in the base of a 21-story building and 231 apartments above it. The city still owns the land. It now collects ground rent, the improvements go on the tax roll, about a third of the units are affordable, the fire station is newer than the one it replaced, and the 501(c)(3) bond structure moved more than 20 million dollars into the deal without a city appropriation.
Priced as a surplus site, that parcel was worth one number, once. Nobody on that council would have called selling it a mistake at the time. It is just that the alternative was never put in front of them, because nothing in the city’s process was built to produce it.
What that adds up to is a way to pay for the next site. Cities fund new costs two ways, by raising the rate or by cutting something, and growth in the base is the third way. Public land is the one input a city controls completely.
Ben: I would add the part that makes it hard, which is that the returns Josh is describing arrive on a schedule no annual budget can see. Property tax on a converted site shows up three or four years out. Adjacent value takes longer. A ground lease pays for 60 or 99 years. Almost every system a local government uses to make decisions is built around a one-year appropriation and a four-year election. The value is real and the institutions are not set up to perceive it.
Bruce: Ben, your Postal Service work has moved this conversation into Congress. Walk me through it.
Ben: The Postal Service owns more than 8,500 properties across roughly 20,700 acres, worth somewhere between 61 and 88 billion dollars. Aaron Shroyer, Glen Nuckolls and I published that analysis through Brookings Metro in May. On the sites where housing is physically and legally feasible, you could build about 237,000 units without the federal government buying a single acre.
In August, Senators Van Hollen and Curtis introduced a bill that would let the Postal Service lease its property for housing, bar outright sale, require at least 20 percent affordability, and recycle project revenue into repairs and new facilities. Their release cites our analysis by name. The bill was referred to committee and has not moved since so there’s still work to do, but this early progress is a testament to the increased congressional appetite to begin thinking about federal lands more creatively.
The federal piece also matters for local governments in a way that is easy to miss. A post office is often the best-located underused parcel in a small downtown, and it sits with an owner no city has any leverage over. If this bill or something like it passes, a few thousand places get access to a site they could not previously touch, and they will need to have figured out the rest of this by then. The cities that have already built capacity will be ready to transact on day one. The ones that have not will spend two years standing something up while the window is open.
As you know, I’m currently running to represent Utah’s 1st District in Congress. If I win, unlocking USPS land to build housing while increasing postal office revenue is one of my top priorities.
Bruce: Talk to me about the Putting Assets to Work cohort and how it helps governments get a handle on what they own and how to move it forward.
Ben: We created the Putting Assets to Work cohort to help governments go from idea about using public land to an executable plan. The next round is an eight month sprint, starting in early 2027. Our team sits down with everyone that touches public land, from elected officials to department heads and the people who actually control property maintenance. Then we build a shortlist that is ranked against a place’s public policy goals and map the political and regulatory path for the top sites. At the end of the cohort, a participating government will have a clear understanding of what they own, a shortlist of viable sites worth moving, and a pathway to get projects underway. Applications are open now.
Bruce: Last one. Paint me a picture. Where is this in five years?
Ben: The next five years are about taking this work from successful examples to a national norm. I see three main areas critical to this: land, capital, and capacity.
On land, every CDBG grantee has published an inventory, because the law requires it. My sober prediction is that most of them comply minimally and then do nothing with it. The ones that matter will be the governments that treat the inventory as the beginning of a strategy rather than a filing. These are the places that will see the most movement in the next half decade.
On capital, regional revolving funds capitalized with low-cost federal, state and local money are lending against public land deals. Kansas City, Los Angeles and Chattanooga are already building dedicated housing funds, some of them voter-approved. The step that has not happened yet is connecting those funds deliberately to a public land strategy, particularly along transit corridors that are funded and under construction, where the land the public already owns is about to become much more valuable and nobody has decided what to do with it. There are also major opportunities to tweak federal programs, like U.S. DOT’s Transportation and Infrastructure and Finance Act (TIFIA) program, to better unlock public and private lands near transit.
On capacity, a mix. Public asset corporations in larger places with scale to justify them, property advisors working with smaller and more fragmented ones. I would like property advisory to be a recognized profession by then, with shared standards, model term sheets and some form of certification, so that a city hiring one is choosing among qualified firms rather than guessing.
Josh: I would add one and it is less tidy. In five years, I want the question a city council asks about a surplus site to have changed.
Right now, the question is what a city can sell it for. The property goes on an agenda, there is a number, somebody moves to accept, and the city converts a permanent asset into one year of revenue. That is the default and it is still the default in most places, including places that have done an inventory.
The version I want is a council that asks what this parcel could do for the things we already said we were going to do, and that has somebody in the building who can answer with a ground lease structure, a revenue projection and three ways to deliver it. This mindset shift is what we’ve started to see in governments across the country, small and large. Once this shift sets in, the various tactics and tools we’re talking about become levers of change to use public assets for public good.
Ben: There is a version of the next five years I worry about, which is that the inventory requirement produces several thousand published databases and nothing else, and in 2031 somebody writes a piece about how the public land moment came and went. That is a real possibility, and it is the one I would bet on if I had to bet today.
What would change the odds is capital showing up on the same schedule as the land. Right now, a city finishes an inventory, identifies six good sites, and then discovers that the predevelopment money to get any of them to a solicitation does not exist in any line of its budget. We are talking about a few hundred thousand dollars standing between a list and a project. The revolving funds I mentioned would solve that, and there is no reason a state housing finance agency or a regional council could not capitalize one next year.
Bruce: And for a government reading this that has published its inventory and does not know what comes next?
Josh: Pick a handful of sites and start. Not the whole portfolio. Not the perfect site. Three or four properties you can actually move, chosen against a goal your council has already adopted, with someone whose job it is to move them.
The governments that stall out are often focused more on a good report and a perfect plan rather than an actionable project. A finished inventory, a better market, an entity stood up before the first deal exists. The ones that move start small and let the machinery follow the projects, because it is much easier to justify a development corporation when you have a deal that needs one than to stand one up and go looking for work.
A government does not need a completed inventory, a chosen site, or real estate finance expertise in house to start. It needs an executive who will sponsor it, somebody to lead it, and a few hours a week from people in the departments that hold the property. That’s your base. Once you’ve got that, you’ve got what you need to get real projects moving.
Bruce Katz is the Founder of New Localism Associates and a Senior Advisor to the National Housing Crisis Task Force.
Ben McAdams served as Mayor of Salt Lake County and as a member of Congress from Utah. He is cofounder of Propvizer and is currently running for Congress in Utah’s 1st District.
Josh Humphries is cofounder of Propvizer and a Senior Advisor at the California Community Foundation.