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Whether a simple energy efficiency upgrade or a larger overhaul is needed, retrofitting is becoming an important component of the real estate industry.

Attendees of the 2023 ULI Fall Meeting in Los Angeles will have the chance to visit 888 Douglas, a former aerospace research and manufacturing facility in El Segundo that has recently been repurposed into a creative office campus.

Since its inception, build-to-rent has been misconstrued or confused with institutional investors purchasing homes out of the hands of hard-working Americans. In reality, the industry is adding purpose-built homes to the housing supply and providing another option for those who don’t want to or can’t afford to buy.

ULI Greenprint partnered with ARUP to develop a Global Green Building Policy Dashboard that allows real estate practitioners to filter by location and see a summary of key requirements related to building certifications, greenhouse gas emissions, embodied carbon, energy, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and resilience.

The Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, a new program, has made funds available from the Inflation Reduction Act to support decarbonization and resilience upgrades.

Although deals are still getting done, it is a tough market to find capital to fund acquisitions and development, and the need to deleverage maturing loans in a higher rate environment is fueling concerns about rising commercial real estate loan stress. That challenging market is evident in slumping transaction activity.

Experts discuss the growing crisis of housing attainability for lower- and middle-income households across the United States, including ways the private and public sectors could help increase housing production, preserve existing affordable housing, and give more people access to housing; strategies for encouraging communities to accept more housing construction; and other related trends.

Owned by HopeWorks and Housing Hope, this mixed-use retail and multifamily housing development provides comprehensive housing, social services, and job re-entry services for low-income, unhoused, and veteran populations.

Buro happold (bh) is an international engineering and advisory firm that began in the United Kingdom 45 years ago and now has offices in over 25 cities and 12 countries. Through its accumulated experience and lessons learned across a diverse array of subjects, the BH team offers a few thoughts on the decarbonization opportunity awaiting the land use industry.

The ULI Young Leaders Group (YLG), district council, and product council teams recently completed another cycle of the Emerging Leaders Product Council Program. This opportunity is designed to help qualified young leaders secure guest spots on product councils at the Spring Meeting and was originally established as a means for YLG members to integrate more deeply into ULI programming.

An upcoming ULI report highlights key steps that developers and asset managers can take to mitigate environmental impacts and enhance health through materials.

In St. Louis, a pressing home repair crisis is disproportionately affecting Black homeowners who struggle to afford the upkeep of their homes. This issue is deeply rooted in a legacy of racial injustice, including redlining and restrictive covenants. To find solutions, ULI St. Louis collaborated with local organizations to develop strategies aimed at establishing a Home Repair Network, which will create a new centralized umbrella organization to address the city’s home repair dilemma.

Since 2011, ULI Greenprint has introduced its real estate members to emerging ESG technology and service providers by allowing ULI Greenprint members to nominate providers they have worked with to become “Innovation Partners.” Through this program, providers share their expertise with Greenprint members through webinars, newsletters, and in-person events.

New U.S. home sales among the 50 top-selling master-planned communities increased by 7 percent compared with the pace set by the top communities in the first half of 2022

After 3,400 years, Athens will soon get its first big park. When completed in 2030, Ellinikon Metropolitan Park will be an enormous addition of public green space that may prove as important to Athenians as Central Park is to New Yorkers.

Two chronic circumstances of the real estate industry compromise the design and productivity of cities—the fact that assets and host markets are often out of sync, and the developer’s inability to control processes and functions. It is time to take better control and facilitate change.

ULI member Kirsty Greer shares a perspective on the importance of mentorship in diversifying the commercial real estate industry.

Joseph Azrack, principal of Azrack & Company, and his wife Abigail Congdon, along with Dan Cashdan, president of Jones Lang LaSalle Securities, and his wife Allisyn Cashdan, have donated a combined $500,000 to the ULI Foundation’s first capital campaign, Our Cities, Our Future, in support of the Net Zero Imperative (NZI), ULI’s multiyear initiative to accelerate decarbonization of the built environment.

As leaders in land use, real estate, and commercial development, ULI members can counter homelessness and advance solutions that are cost-effective and rapidly deployable. Indeed, last summer, through the support of members led by Preston and Caroline Butcher, ULI launched its Homeless to Housed (H2H) program.

Experts discuss best practices for incentivizing property owners and developers to switch to all-electric buildings, ways to ensure the transition is equitable for low-income communities, challenges to the widespread implementation of building electrification, and other innovations and trends.

As creative placemaking has proliferated in the real estate industry, questions regarding its costs and benefits have often surfaced: What is the cost and what is the business case? Does it enhance the value of real estate? And what value is delivered?

With the Asia Pacific region comprising 4.3 billion people and many of the world’s biggest cities, the sheer scale of the sustainability challenge there is daunting. However, asset owners are increasingly using more sustainable designs and technologies to boost the performance of their assets.

The outgoing global chair of the ULI has urged the real estate industry to collaborate rather than compete in the battle to decarbonize and be more proactive over information and knowledge-sharing, particularly to investors who are less well-capitalized. Peter Ballon, who is stepping down as global chair in July, told delegates at the ULI Europe conference in Madrid in June: “We want everybody to figure [decarbonization] out. This is not where we want to compete.

In September 2022, ULI honored architect Jeanne Gang with the ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. Gang is the founding principal and partner of Studio Gang, an architecture and urban design practice based in Chicago, with offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Paris.

The Summer 2023 issue of Urban Land is now available for ULI members. The cover topic is “Design for Net Zero: Taking a holistic approach to sustainable development.”

Ten developments from across North America have been selected as winners of the 2023 ULI Americas Awards for Excellence. This year, 68 projects and programs from across the Americas region were submitted for the competition.

At a recent ULI webinar, industry leaders walked attendees through some common problems with achieving net zero through electrification and offered actionable tips for moving forward to carbon neutrality.

As the world’s population continues to grow, there will be a need for increased urbanization to accommodate more people. The question is how and when should urban planners decide to regenerate, when to expand and when to create new cities, for sustainable growth and development of future cities, since each approach comes with its benefits and its drawbacks.

In 2020, Mahlon “Sandy” Apgar, a ULI trustee and Julia Morgan Society member, provided an endowment to the ULI Foundation to create the ULI Apgar Thought Leader Award. The award program encourages the sharing of original research and innovative ideas related to the real estate industry. Every two years, a committee chooses a winning article published in Urban Landmagazine and written by a thought leader, awarding a $1,500 honorarium and free registration for the Institute’s Fall or Spring Meeting.

Although residential fell more in the first quarter of 2023, office remains Europe’s most scarred commercial real estate sector, according to advisory firm Green Street. Government mandates around sustainability are also tightening, and Cushman & Wakefield says 76 percent of European office space could be obsolete by 2030 unless landlords start investing now.