Dec. 5, 2024
In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Keep that in mind when you find that your next trip on a long weekend — which could be every weekend as more and more companies move to a four-day work week — will be on a solar-powered plane. Or when you buy your next multitool, which turns out to be made of a plastic that can change its form and properties when it's heated or cooled.
With a world moving faster than even a 24-hour news cycle can handle, it's more important than ever for planners to stay one step ahead of the issues and prepare communities as change occurs.
2025 Trend Report for Planners
On January 29, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish the 2025 Trend Report for Planners in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. APA's Foresight team and the APA Trend Scouting Foresight Community have identified existing, emerging, and potential future trends that planners will want to be aware of and understand so that they can act, prepare, and learn.
The report includes about 100 trends and signals, exploring them in future scenarios, deep dives, podcasts, and more. Here are just a few of the trends you need to know about.
1. More Housing Hurdles: Insurance Costs, Climate Impacts, and Population Shifts
Population is growing much more slowly in the U.S. than in previous decades, and the Census Bureau projects just a 9.7 percent population growth over the next 75 years. The concept of family is changing, too. Single-person households and married couples (including same-sex couples) without children now make up more than half of all U.S. households. Single-parent and multigenerational households also are on the rise, as are roommate situations.
Less than one-fifth of U.S. families now fit the traditional "nuclear family" model, and the typical concepts regarding households continue to evolve. But one thing that has not changed in recent years: finding housing that's affordable is getting more difficult. According to research by Zillow, households need to earn $47,000 more than they did just four years ago to afford a single-family home. Inflation, high interest rates, and the shortage of affordable housing have put the American Dream out of reach for many, with homeownership now almost 50 percent more expensive than renting.
Meanwhile, cities in the Northeast and Midwest are seeing population losses, while states in the South and West continue to gain residents even as climate change impacts are striking those areas the hardest. Relative tax burdens and lower costs of living are likely key factors. In fact, the drastic impacts of climate change are threatening the health, safety, and lives of millions of people, with 34 percent of people in the U.S. living in areas at risk of natural disasters and flooding and 41 percent of rental units vulnerable to climate change.
Climate change-related losses are also generating chaos in the insurance market. Insurance providers are raising rates substantially in many areas and have become reluctant or have refused to insure homes in hazardous areas. Big insurers have pulled out of Florida, Louisiana, and California, a state where insurance giant State Farm stopped accepting applications because of "rapidly growing catastrophic exposure." (Future scenarios in the Trend Report can help planners explore how this situation could play out in the next 10 years.)
To mitigate insurance market impacts to homeowners, regulators can employ strategies such as mandating insurance industry transparency and forbidding "bluelining," the increase in premiums or withdrawal of services in high-risk areas by providers. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners recently adopted a National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance to guide regulators and providers alike, and Florida has passed several laws aiming to reduce insurance premiums and provide mitigation grants to homeowners and multifamily property owners.
As pet ownership grows, so does the need for pet-friendly public spaces. Illustration by Mark Ulriksen, originally commissioned by The New Yorker.
2. Public Spaces for Shaggy — and Scooby Too
As the need for public, "third places" grows, some cities are reimagining how spaces can adapt or where new ones can be created. This includes factoring in places for pets, especially since more U.S. households have pets than children. The global pet industry is expected to reach nearly $500 billion by 2030. Cities can obtain a "pet-friendly" certification to fetch more tourists, and the number of U.S. dog parks is exploding, with a 40 percent increase in public dog park development from 2009 to 2020. In San Francisco, developers are adding dog-specific areas near housing complexes to attract buyers.
Steam rises from the cooling towers of Google's data center in The Dalles, Oregon. Photo courtesy of Google.
3. Water Is Precious and Under Threat
The Gulf of Mexico is the hottest it has been in the modern era, causing rapidly forming storms like hurricanes Helene and Milton this past year that devastated the U.S. East Coast. Meanwhile, temperatures in the Great Barrier Reef are the highest they've been in four centuries, while heat-driven ocean expansion has caused a third of global sea level rise. In the Persian Gulf, water is scarce and valuable, as growing populations and development reach an all-time high. Globally, a quarter of all food crops are threatened by unreliable or highly stressed water supplies. At the same time, water currents in the Arctic and the Atlantic appear to be slowing down, with the potential to change weather patterns and put food-producing regions at risk.
Meanwhile, large-scale commercial water bottling operations driven by private equity are posing an increasing risk to the stability of local water sources in the U.S., as is the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that need massive amounts of water for cooling. That is threatening local and regional reservoirs, aquifers, and freshwater sources, and some places are implementing water usage regulations as a response.
The Tampa-based social media agency Brick Media piloted a four-day workweek in 2023, and they aren’t going back. Photo courtesy of Brick Media.
4. Could We Evolve to a Post-Work World?
The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in remote work has blurred the lines of traditional work patterns. Take the growing popularity of "workcations" and "bleisure," which suggest that work and personal life may increasingly overlap. Not everyone likes it; Australia enacted a "right to disconnect" law for workers in August 2024.
Four-day workweek pilots introduced globally and in the U.S. show that reduced hours can lead to higher productivity and greater life satisfaction. Workers think so, too. About 80 percent said they would be happier and just as productive dropping a day from the traditional schedule, according to the 2024 Work in America study.
At the same time, our relationship with our work is shifting. A 2023 Pew Research Center study uncovered a new trend: only four in ten U.S. workers see their job as central to their overall identity. This shift is reinforced by the idea of viewing a job as a verb (something you do) rather than a noun (something you are, like an accountant or technician).
Attitudes toward leisure are changing, too. If individuals use their free time to pursue personal projects or passions, leisure could replace work as a primary focus in life. With the percentage of Americans older than 65 expected to rise to 23 percent by 2025, these current and future retirees also are seeking to make the most of their next chapter in life.
Phones remain secure while students are in class. Photo by Zack Wittman/The New York Times.
5. Digital Fatigue (and Pushback) Sets In
Digital fatigue is real. It is showing up in various ways, from a growing distrust of online news and increasing concerns over AI-generated content to disillusionment with online dating. Schools are banning mobile phones in classrooms, and states are restricting children's access to social apps. The U.S. surgeon general has even suggested that social media platforms should carry warning labels like those on cigarettes. In July, the Senate passed the first major internet safety bill for children in two decades.
These measures reflect a broader effort to balance the benefits of technology with the need to be more conscious about the younger generation's well-being. For planners, this trend suggests a greater need to balance digital public engagement with face-to-face interactions, fostering meaningful communication and empathy within communities. This includes creating in-person opportunities to engage younger people in planning processes, which can help connect those generations to their communities and each other.
Pleurotus ostreatus — an oyster mushroom — can eat plastic (and be eaten by humans). Photo by Sungsu Han/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
6. Fungus Is the Future
Pop culture may lead you to think an age of fungi marks the last of us, but the ecological and health benefits of fungi should have more than just "mushroompreneurs" jumping for joy. Fungi can help shift us away from fossil fuels, lower cholesterol, help with successful organ transplants, tackle plastic pollution, eliminate micropollutants from contaminated water, and transition to more sustainable food systems. In 2023, U.S. mushroom sales reached $1.04 billion, and the market is projected to triple in the next 10 years. As planners look for nature-based solutions for urban environments, fungi could become a key partner in creating better living spaces for all.
Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone tribe member Daranda Hinkey stands near her home on the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation in Nevada. She and her neighbors are fighting to halt construction of a lithium mine near a sacred site. Photo by Rick Bowmer/AP Photo.
7. Balancing Green Energy Demand with Indigenous Rights
As the interest in renewable energy has spiked, so has the need for mining the raw minerals and metals required by these technologies — with some estimates believing demand will quadruple by 2040. These include lithium, cobalt, and silicon, as well as over a dozen rare earth elements. But mining comes with myriad human and environmental costs, often occurring in and at the expense of disadvantaged areas. This potentially pits government and private interests against Indigenous peoples, primarily through the extraction and exploitation of resources on tribal lands.
More than half of projects to extract energy transition materials are on or near Indigenous land, and Indigenous peoples are directly impacted by over a third of global environmental conflicts, either through landscape, land, or livelihood loss. Some efforts are underway to boost Indigenous sovereignty.
Central to the issue — and potential solutions — are land use and ownership, as well as the ability to apply different lenses to see the points of view and needs of the people these decisions will affect the most. Protecting the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples could reduce the negative impact of environmental conflicts over the green energy transition and provide solutions. One such way is by adopting Indigenous knowledge into existing approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation, like how several Native American nations are reintroducing bison to the U.S. plains to enhance environmental and socioeconomic outcomes.
The 2025 Trend Report for Planners was written by Petra Hurtado, PhD; Ievgeniia Dulko; Senna Catenacci; Joseph DeAngelis, AICP; Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP; and Jason Jordan. It was edited by Ann Dillemuth, AICP.
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