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.
Climate change will have a drastic, disruptive effect on the commercial real estate sector over the next several decades as rising temperatures make some areas less habitable and increasingly intense storms and rising sea levels erode the value of coastal real estate, according to a a Harvard-trained economist and fellow at Woods Hole Research Center speaking at ULI’s Resilience Summit, part of the 2019 Fall Meeting in Washington D.C.
Developer JBG Smith is reinventing Northern Virginia’s Crystal City, a midcentury car-centric neighborhood, as the core of National Landing. It is a placemaking effort that will make Amazon’s new headquarters seem right at home.
