Major airports have long been hubs for commercial real estate development. Increasingly, airport complexes are driving economic growth and business innovation as well.
ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT: After a pair of hurricanes pummeled the Virgin Islands’ aging public housing in 2017, a public/private partnership used advice from ULI panels to develop a resilient, sustainable replacement.
NASA’s landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars in February and its deployment of a tiny robotic helicopter—both achieved in the midst of a pandemic—provide a lesson in how teamwork, flexibility, and creativity can overcome daunting challenges, the mission’s chief engineer told a remote audience at ULI’s Virtual Spring Meeting.
ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT: Developers, architects, engineers, and scientists are blending design and technological innovations to transform buildings into enduring lines of defense against disease.
ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT: As climate change puts coastal areas at risk from rising seas and subjects Sun Belt and Southeast cities to hotter temperatures, some of their residents may go elsewhere. Experts say it is time to start preparing.
An ambitious seven-building development near Toronto’s urban core is an innovative effort to deliver density and a diverse range of uses, along with a walkable urban environment, plenty of green space, and innovative energy storage technology.
Sidewalk Labs recently announced that it would withdraw from a proposed smart city project in Toronto. But Sidewalk is already in talks to repurpose those innovations, said participants in ULI’s Spring Meeting Webinar Series.
Technology and innovation were hot topics at the 2019 ULI Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. These are some of the insights that speakers and attendees shared.
Whereas the commercial sector increasingly is abandoning its old analog ways and shifting to property technology, or proptech, the buzzword for building-related applications, the real revolution will come when commercial real estate companies not only have amassed large amounts of data, but also have figured out how to combine information from different apps and turn that data into actionable intelligence, said panelists speaking at the 2019 ULI Fall Meeting.
In Toronto, Sidewalk Labs has sketched out an ambitious vision for a high-tech urban environment designed with human needs rather than technology in mind. Whether it will come to fruition remains unclear.
In the years to come, as increasingly high temperatures, rising sea levels, and an increase in the intensity of hurricanes and other storms make it more difficult to live in coastal areas, the United States may see a wave of internal migration, as people and businesses relocate to where climate change’s effects are not as severe. That could turn cities such as Cincinnati into “climate havens,” boosting their populations and opportunities for development, according to a pair of speakers in a presentation on migration trends and their effects at ULI’s 2019 Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Real estate investors and analysts who rate local government bonds already are grappling with how to evaluate the future risks from rapid climate change, panelists said at ULI’s 2019 Resilience Summit, part of the Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C.
