Erie, Pennsylvania, is on the cusp of change and can be reimagined if the city embraces the land use, economic, and technological changes that are affecting growth there and in other cities in the Rust Belt, a new ULI report says. ULI’s recommendations follow a visit to Erie last year by a group of land use and urban development experts convened to advise the Erie Downtown Development Council on how best to revitalize the downtown core.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded the ULI Foundation a $2 million grant to support efforts to advance healthy real estate and community development practices. An additional grant of $50,000 also was awarded to support activities that further collaboration between ULI and its partners on health.
ULI has released two new reports related to building for health and wellness—one offering lessons for development of healthy affordable housing for the broader marketplace, and the other for development of agrihoods, single-family, multifamily, or mixed-use communities built with a working farm or community garden as a focus. Together, the reports illustrate opportunities for developers to create financially successful projects that improve resident and community health and promote social equity and sustainability.
The Case for Open Space, a new report from the ULI Center for Sustainability and Economic Performance, makes the business case for real estate investments in parks and open spaces. Case studies highlighted in the report were drawn from 30 open-space projects across the United States supported by the private sector, with five compelling projects that incorporate open space.
A new report from ULI’s Greenprint Center for Building Performance shows that the commercial real estate industry is making significant progress in reducing energy consumption, carbon emissions, water use, and waste disposal. Volume 9 of the Greenprint Performance Report™, which tracks, benchmarks, and analyzes the performance of nearly 8,000 properties globally owned by Greenprint’s members, demonstrates a 3.3 percent reduction in energy consumption, a 3.4 percent reduction in carbon emissions, and a 2.9 percent reduction in water use between 2016 and 2017.
While the scenario is fictitious, cities all over the world deal with these sorts of problems on a daily basis. Such scenarios form the basis of UrbanPlan, a high-priority ULI initiative that seeks to broaden the discourse and encourage creative thinking among high school and university students and public officials in tackling some of the most intransigent problems facing urban planners. The fundamentals of UrbanPlan, one of the programs ULI offers members as a volunteer opportunity, were presented to members during a Fall Meeting session.
Internationally acclaimed artist and urban planner Theaster Gates was awarded the prize during the opening general session of the 2018 ULI Fall Meeting.
Two urban parks—Levy Park in Houston and Madrid Río Park in Madrid, Spain—have been selected as winners of the ULI Urban Open Space Award. The award recognizes outstanding examples of successful large- and small-scale public spaces that have socially enriched and revitalized the economy of their surrounding communities. Ricardo Lara Park in Los Angeles was also honored with a Special Community Impact recognition.
New Energy Star building performance metrics being applied on August 27 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could lower the score of almost every building participating in the program, which encompasses over half of commercial real estate building floor space in the United States. This will cause some to fall below the 75-point level needed to achieve certification through the program.
