Propvizer sits at the front edge of putting public assets to work, in both thought leadership and execution. We helped start this movement through Putting Assets to Work, and Atlanta has become its early proof point. Today the model is scaling across the country, and we work on both sides of it: publishing the papers and case studies that define the field, and doing the hands-on work of repositioning public assets on the ground.
Cities and counties across the country are putting their assets to work. Select a marker or a name to locate it on the map.
Our team is helping build a national model for putting public land to work. Below are the projects our team has led, the writing we've published, the coverage of the work, and the podcasts where our team has shared the approach.
Case studies
In Midtown Atlanta, the city's Fire Station 15 is being rebuilt into the base of a new 21-story building, with 231 apartments above it and roughly a third of them set aside as affordable. The land stays in public ownership and gains housing, delivered by the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation.
Read more
The Atlanta Urban Development Corporation is the public entity the city created to build housing on land it already owns, acting as the developer instead of waiting for one. Its creation grew directly out of Atlanta's place in the inaugural Putting Assets to Work cohort, a coordinated effort led by Josh Humphries inside City Hall, with Ben McAdams and the PAW team as early partners.
Read more
Through Putting Assets to Work, Evanston's original civic center at 2100 Ridge Avenue, a former school that sat empty after the city moved its offices to 909 Davis Street, was identified as an underutilized public asset. Propvizer is now leading the public engagement on its future use, gathering residents' ideas from apartments to affordable senior living, and will bring a recommendation to the City Council this fall.
Read moreWriting
The Philadelphia Citizen, 2026
Josh Humphries and Bruce Katz show how cities are leveraging government assets to bring grocery stores back to neighborhoods that private grocers left, with Atlanta's Azalea Fresh Market opening in a vacated downtown Walgreens nine months after Invest Atlanta approved the financing.
Brookings Institution, 2026
Ben McAdams and his co-authors show how redeveloping underused U.S. Postal Service land could deliver up to 237,000 homes and new revenue to help offset the agency's operating losses.
National Housing Crisis Task Force, 2025
Ben McAdams, Bruce Katz, and Luise Noring lay out the Municipal Property Advisor model, the approach Propvizer now uses to help governments identify and activate the property they already own.
National Housing Crisis Task Force, 2025
Josh Humphries and Bruce Katz document how Atlanta's Housing Strike Force coordinated more than ten agencies to move housing onto public land.
National Housing Crisis Task Force, 2025
Ben McAdams and Josh Humphries contributed to this profile of public asset corporations, the in-house development agencies that Atlanta and Chattanooga created to combine public land with low-cost financing and build mixed-income housing while keeping a majority public stake in the projects.
National Housing Crisis Task Force, 2025
The Task Force profiles fifteen tools that state and local leaders can use now, grouped under land, capital, construction, regulation, and governance. Two of them are the Municipal Property Advisor role that Propvizer fills and the public asset corporation model for holding assets.
Brookings Institution, 2025
Ben McAdams and Aaron Shroyer propose reforms to the federal TIFIA and RRIF loan programs so that lending capacity the government already holds can reach housing projects near transit, which they argue would enable hundreds of thousands of new homes at no additional cost to taxpayers.
National Housing Crisis Task Force, 2024
The Task Force sets out forty recommendations for the next administration and Congress, ranging from day-one executive orders to emergency appropriations legislation, with the aim of producing more than 750,000 new homes a year.
GFOA, 2022
Shayne Kavanagh, Ben McAdams, and Adam Carr use Atlanta's first year in the Putting Assets to Work Incubator to walk through the asset map, the inventory of publicly owned land and buildings that a city has to build before it can see where the value it already owns has gone unrealized.
Atlanta Studies, 2021
Josh Humphries and Kendra Taylor sort Atlanta's neighborhoods by how their low-income and higher-income populations shifted between 2010 and 2018, then compare that against where the city made its major public investments. Projects like the BeltLine trails clustered in neighborhoods that were already growing or already losing low-income residents, while neighborhoods where poverty was concentrating saw no major public investment in that period.
The Salt Lake Tribune, 2026
Sens. John Curtis and Chris Van Hollen introduced a bipartisan bill to let communities lease Postal Service land for housing while barring its sale, citing the Brookings analysis Ben McAdams co-authored that found room for more than 200,000 homes.
Governing, 2023
Atlanta finishes the first PAW cohort with 35 public land projects in the pipeline, including thirty stories of housing above a new midtown fire station.
Governing, 2023
Governing profiles Ben McAdams and the Salt Lake County inventory that valued the county's real estate at $45 billion, roughly 45 times its annual budget.
Evanston RoundTable, 2026
The RoundTable profiles the resident proposals drawing the most votes for Evanston's three underused public buildings, out of more than 80 submitted through the process Propvizer is running with MPACT and Sentient Co.
Georgia Public Broadcasting, 2025
Five years into the effort, Atlanta has built or started 12,441 of its 20,000 affordable units.
Atlanta Civic Circle, 2025
In an exit interview, Josh Humphries looks back on three years as Atlanta's chief housing advisor, with close to 12,000 units delivered or under construction.
Evanston Now, 2025
After a rival bidder's protest paused the work, Evanston re-scored the six proposals and Propvizer again came out on top with 91 of a possible 100 points.
Bloomberg Cities, 2025
Bloomberg Cities examines how Atlanta won over transit and school officials by tying housing to ridership and enrollment, quoting Josh Humphries as the city passes 60 percent of its 20,000-unit goal.
Axios Atlanta, 2025
Atlanta breaks ground on 100 units at a former Mechanicsville encampment, with 70 market-rate townhomes planned for the second phase.
Atlanta Civic Circle, 2025
A year after The Melody opened, Atlanta has 63 rapid rehousing apartments finished and another 200 on the way toward a goal of 500.
Axios Atlanta, 2024
Josh Humphries tells Axios the city will use modular construction for a third rapid housing site, 100 units on city-owned land at 17th and Northside.
Evanston Now, 2024
At a 5th Ward meeting, Ben McAdams urges Evanston to lease the old civic center rather than sell it, saying he would hate to see a garage sale held to patch a budget hole.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2024
A Central Atlanta Progress study finds only 10 of 105 downtown office buildings pencil out for conversion today, and that Calgary-style incentives would raise that to 25 buildings and 4,800 units.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2023
Atlanta Housing weighs creating the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation to build mixed-income housing without relying on low-income housing tax credits.
Atlanta Civic Circle, 2023
Atlanta will form an urban development corporation to consolidate public land and build mixed-income housing, a model Josh Humphries tells Atlanta Civic Circle is drawn from European social housing.
11Alive, 2023
Atlanta's Faith-Based Development Initiative aims to build 2,000 affordable units on land owned by churches by 2030.
Atlanta Civic Circle, 2023
One year in, the strike force has 32 affordable housing projects moving on public land, with roughly 1,900 units delivered.
Atlanta Civic Circle, 2023
Invest Atlanta buys the 41-story 2 Peachtree tower for $39 million next to the Five Points station, a conversion now planned to deliver 600 residential units.
GFOA, 2023
GFOA welcomes Austin, Evanston, Mt. Vernon, and Sugar Land into the second PAW cohort.
City of Evanston, 2023
Evanston joins the second PAW cohort, with City Manager Luke Stowe saying the six-month program will help the city evaluate the full potential of its assets.
Atlanta Civic Circle, 2022
Strike force members explain how pooling land that sits with separate agencies like MARTA and the school system could unlock hundreds of buildable acres.
Newswise, 2022
The Sorenson Impact Center, GFOA, and Urban3 launch the PAW incubator under Ben McAdams to help governments raise revenue without new taxes.
GovLove, 2024
Ben McAdams and Austin deputy CFO Kimberly Olivares explain why a tighter state property tax cap pushed the city to look at its own real estate for revenue.
CityAge Podcast, 2023
Ben McAdams traces the incubator back to his years as mayor, when an inventory valued Salt Lake County's real estate at roughly $45 billion.
CityAge Podcast, 2023
Josh Humphries explains how Atlanta regained fifty years of lost population in a single decade without the housing stock to absorb it.
Capitol Gains, 2024
Ben McAdams walks hosts Matt Posner and James McIntyre through Putting Assets to Work, from telling a city it owns $7 billion in real estate to pointing out that the land under its road salt pile is worth $10 million.
Rethink Real Estate for Good, 2024
Ben McAdams tells host Eve Picker how mapping what a city already owns opens a path to paying for affordable housing and homelessness work.
ImpactAlpha, 2023
Ben McAdams tells David Bank that a city contributing a $5 million parcel to a $20 million housing project could earn a quarter of the rental income.
Streetsblog USA, 2022
Ben McAdams joins a four-person panel on how cities can inventory what they own and turn that value into public wealth.
Archive Atlanta Podcast, 2021
Josh Humphries walks through how Atlanta's 1929 zoning code traded explicit racial zoning for economic exclusion, and why 86% of the city's redlined neighborhoods are still low-income or gone entirely.