Target 11.3: Inclusive, sustainable urbanization and planning
By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Participatory, integrated planning capacity is built by municipal and national governments. The UN reports that around 160 countries have adopted or are developing national urban policies, work that corporations neither fund nor run. The corporate footprint is on the inputs to planning. Developers and the real-estate lobby spend heavily on land-use rules. The National Association of Realtors alone spent 86.3 million dollars on federal lobbying in 2024, while backing zoning reform in Oregon and blocking rent control and transfer taxes elsewhere. If developers, REITs and homebuilders lobbied consistently for integrated, inclusive plans and complied with them, planning would face less organized resistance. That helps at the margin. Most of the outcome, the institutional capacity and public participation processes in thousands of cities, sits with governments and civil society and is outside owner reach.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
No shareholder advocacy found yet
We looked and found nothing that met our standard, which is a source we opened and confirmed. No shareholder proposal, investor letter or engagement was located asking a listed developer, homebuilder or real estate investment trust to disclose or align its land-use and zoning lobbying, or to support inclusive and integrated urban planning. Lobbying-disclosure proposals are common across other sectors but none located targets the real estate industry on planning.
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.