Best Practices
Communities around the world are racing to control the spread of the novel coronavirus and the disease that it causes, COVID-19. Increasingly, that means implementing aggressive social distancing measures, which can inhibit the spread of the virus and flatten the transmission curve. Given what is known about the virus so far, using building strategies to help slow the spread of the disease makes sense to help protect those who must work in an office or commercial setting and in multifamily settings.
A central goal for developers as they assess changing priorities for tenants is being prepared for future disruptions, panelists said at a ULI Washington event titled “Designing for a New Decade.” This can mean anything from thinking about how climate change affects projects to how technology can alter the industry landscape.
Nearly every speaker at the ULI Europe 2020 Conference in Amsterdam had something to say about one issue: climate change. The property industry is directly at risk from increasingly frequent extreme weather events, and stricter regulations are shaping the development and maintenance of properties.
Hotels and office buildings are taking on many of each other’s characteristics in terms of design and use. This confluence has several drivers, among them the evolution of technology, shifts in guest and tenant expectations, and the increasing mobility of the American workforce.
Farm-centric master-planned communities are a hit with buyers, but it takes skill and planning to keep the agriculture in bloom.
The wave of interest in well-being in the United Kingdom is expected to translate into significant investment over the next three years, according to ULI research released in the report Picture of Health: The Growing Role of Wellbeing in Commercial Real Estate Investment Decision-making. The report was released this month at an event in Birmingham, England, by the ULI U.K. Sustainability Forum to highlight the rise of well-being investment in commercial buildings.
No introduction required for the Empire State Building, likely the most famous office building in the world. Already an icon and a historic landmark, it is also becoming a symbol of the future, thanks to a showcase renovation that overhauled the bones of the 88-year-old structure, and ongoing efforts to implement ULI’s Tenant Energy Optimization Program (TEOP), the focus of a half-day event in that building in July.
“There is great confusion about what the future will be,” legendary architect Jan Gehl said at ULI Europe’s Real Estate Forum in Copenhagen in June.
Industry leaders speaking at the recent ULI Asia Pacific Summit said that green financing and new building materials are helping them make their developments more sustainable without hurting their bottom line.
With rental rates skyrocketing in many U.S. cities, more states are exploring ways to protect tenants and address the mounting issues of affordable housing, without wading into the controversial morass of rent control, said panelists during the ULI Housing Opportunity 2019 conference.
The ULI Greenprint Center for Building Performance, a worldwide alliance of leading real estate owners, investors, and financial institutions committed to reducing carbon emissions across the global property industry, has announced the addition of three new members: Kilroy Realty, the Howard Hughes Corporation, and Morgan Creek Ventures.
Avenue Place/Avenue Terrace in Houston; Clybourn 1200 in Chicago; Keauhou Lane in Honolulu; Conway Center in Washington, D.C.; and Harbor Place Residences in Haverhill, Massachusetts, were announced as winners of the 2018 Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award. The State of New York Mortgage Finance Agency and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority are joint winners of the 2018 Robert C. Larson Housing Policy Leadership Award.
One of the most difficult challenges for those seeking to adopt emerging technologies in commercial real estate is justifying the cost of implementing such measures. A recent ULI event in Boston highlighted the benefits of the evolving standards on health and wellness by five industry practitioners.
The growing popularity of building for health and wellness and the value derived from it are explored in a new ULI report, The Business Case for Healthy Buildings: Insights from Early Adopters. The report documents how real estate leaders worldwide are increasingly seeking to create environments that support healthy lifestyles in both workspaces and homes.
A new report, Supporting Smart Urban Development: Successful Investing in Density, is the result of collaboration between a powerful group of innovative real estate investors and developers that are actively building the cities of the future. Collectively, this group owns or manages over US $300 billion worth of real estate assets worldwide.
Panelists at the ULI Washington Trends Conference in April said having a more diverse staff benefits the bottom line and addressed some of the ways they are trying to attract talent to the industry. “If everyone around the table looks the same, it’s hard to get outside of that box,” said Jodie McLean, chief executive officer of EDENS and a ULI trustee.
A recent ULI Advisory Services panel, funded entirely by the ULI Foundation, provided recommendations specific to the city of Los Angeles but adaptable to other metropolitan areas.
A new report from the Urban Land Institute’s Center for Sustainability and Economic Performance outlines ten fundamental principles for building resilient cities and regions that successfully anticipate, respond to, and recover from both immediate shocks such as hurricanes and other extreme weather events and long-term stresses such as sea-level rise, poverty, and declining population.
Like many areas of the United States, California is facing a housing affordability crisis in its most populous area, and the San Francisco Bay area is ground zero, with sky-high rents and housing prices. To help address the issue, ULI San Francisco created the Housing the Bay initiative in early 2017. Through research, events, and workshops, the initiative aims to explore the underlying causes of the Bay Area’s high housing costs and inadequate housing supply and propose solutions.
In February, ULI South Florida/Caribbean gathered a panel of researchers, real estate developers, and economic development agencies at the new Arts & Entertainment District—the latest neighborhood to emerge as a cultural destination for city residents.
Devon Energy Center is a corporate headquarters highlighted by a 50-story skyscraper that creates a focal point for the company and for Oklahoma City by integrating civic-scaled spaces as a vital component of its overall development.
While it is generally known that good schools enhance property values, it is not always clear how to improve an existing school system in a way that would benefit a community. Speakers at the 2016 ULI Fall Meeting described their approaches to adding value with stronger schools in both distressed urban neighborhoods and affluent greenfield developments.
During a session at the 2016 ULI Fall Meeting, panelists involved in the ULI Healthy Corridorsproject discussed strategies for transforming unsafe, unattractive, and poorly connected commercial corridors into thriving places that further the goal of creating healthy and economically vibrant communities.
A new ULI program that helps office tenants design and manage their spaces to reduce energy consumption could help the real estate industry reduce emissions that are driving climate change. But at the program’s rollout at ULI’s 2016 Fall Meeting in Dallas, panelists said that the new ULI Tenant Energy Optimization Program is likely to have a more far-reaching impact than that of many previous environmental initiatives because it offers a compelling, well-documented business case that energy efficiency can generate a lucrative return on investment.
Author Gary Sernovitz sees the American oil and gas renaissance as “the Internet of oil, a spark . . . that led to an industrial change of such scope and magnitude that we have woken up . . . in a once impossible world.” Yet public understanding of the shale revolution has lagged, leading to hype, scaremongering, and a failure to candidly discuss its urgent moral, technological, regulatory, and environmental challenges.
Free public wi-fi and charging stations are being deployed through outdoor public furniture and fixtures—benches, shelters, streetlight poles, trash cans, and other common features.
Barangaroo is an AUS$8 billion (US$5.8 billion) waterfront renewal project transforming a long-neglected part of Sydney’s central business district. It is also the city’s largest urban renewal project since the Olympic Games 15 years ago.
Women in the real estate and land use industries have strong ambitions to lead companies and are willing to make multiple moves or start their own companies in order to advance their careers, according to a panel discussion of a report developed by the ULI Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI); the discussion took place at the 2015 ULI Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
The primary goal of SFpark—a major initiative for the city of San Francisco—is to make it easy to find a parking space. The rationale behind the initiative is a belief that drivers unable to find a space on the street will cruise around or double-park, adding to congestion.
Not long ago, it seemed as if e-commerce would make brick-and-mortar retail as obsolete as rotary telephones. Instead, catalog and web retailer L.L.Bean is leading a wave of businesses that are building physical storefronts to drive their online trade.
