Game-Changing Potential: How an urban wealth fund is helping the City of Atlanta put their assets to work to achieve their affordable housing goal.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: RETHINKING REVENUE

The City of Atlanta, Georgia, like many others, faces an affordable housing shortage. The mayor's goal is to create or preserve 20,000 affordable housing units between 2022 and 2030. Achieving this goal will require better land use strategies and more resources. Moreover, it will require an institution within the local government that can generate new resources and coordinate publicly owned land and assets that could have a role in achieving the city's affordable housing goal.

In 2022, Atlanta joined the Putting Assets to Work Incubator to implement an urban wealth fund. An urban wealth fund first takes stock of the land and buildings owned by local government, then recognizes where the economic potential of those assets has not been realized. Finally, it works to realize that potential while maintaining an ongoing financial interest for the city. This way, the public shares in the financial upside produced from "putting the assets to work." Atlanta's goal is to direct those resources toward affordable housing, but local governments are looking to this concept to unlock resources to deal with other complex problems as well. For example, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the City of Annapolis, Maryland, have joined the project, seeking new resources to fund climate-resilient infrastructure needs without raising taxes.

In this article, we will use the City of Atlanta's experience to illustrate the first step involved in taking advantage of revenue potential from existing assets: developing an "asset map."

An asset map is a tool for taking stock of the land and buildings owned by government entities of all kinds. Most local governments aren't aware of the breadth of assets they own; and if they are aware of the assets, they likely don't know the market value or potential of the assets. An asset map addresses both problems. We will discuss how an asset map comes together, what Atlanta learned from it, and where Atlanta is going next.

HOW AN ASSET MAP COMES TOGETHER

As the name implies, an asset map is a geospatial representation of publicly owned assets. Thus, mapping begins with geographic information system [GIS] data on publicly owned properties. This data is combined and crosschecked through the county assessor, internal data from jurisdictions, and interviews with community staff who have day-to-day interactions with the respective property.

The City of Atlanta made the decision to evaluate assets owned by Atlanta Public Schools and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority [MARTA], even though these are legally separate entities. The market for real estate does not care which government owns the land. There could be cases where the greatest returns on public assets will come from cooperation between these public entities pooling their available assets and collaborating to unlock opportunities for their mutual benefit.

With this comprehensive catalog of assets, the next step is to identify opportunities, then highlight to community leaders and the public the potential of putting assets to work and generating support and enthusiasm. While doing so, it is important to recognize that not all assets in public inventory are the same. The Putting Assets to Work Incubator team identified three groups of assets:

Legacy: includes land, structures, and other assets the community chooses to continue legacy uses for cultural, historical, environmental, or similar reasons.

Policy: includes assets that provide an active public...