Leadership
In 2003, Andrew B. Turner was a senior at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, when a new interactive program that challenged students to create a development scenario for a local neighborhood made its debut. Nearly 15 years later, Turner is now a project director at Argent LLP, one of London’s most respected developers.
The mayors of Grand Rapids, Michigan; Anchorage, Alaska; and San Jose, California, spoke at a forum presented by the Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use in Seattle discussing their solutions for the issues of revitalization, equity, and resilience in cities.
Officials in West Palm Beach, Florida—located in a region that boasts some of the wealthiest residents in the world—have made strides in attracting leading financial firms, while also making significant investments in enhancing residents’ quality of life. At a ULI Southeast Florida event in March, local officials and real estate development experts outlined the city’s plan for attracting new companies to the region.
Teams from Carnegie Mellon University, Université Laval in Quebec, the University of Maryland, and the University of Texas at Austin have been selected as the four finalists for the 15th annual ULI Hines Student Competition.
Cities and suburbs are natural places for designs inspired by natural systems, according The Permaculture City by Toby Hemenway, a guidebook to permaculture design in the concrete jungle. “Permaculture design is turning out to be beautifully suited to urban contexts,” says Hemenway.
Former Indianapolis Mayor William H. Hudnut III, who served as a ULI senior resident fellow and the ULI/Joseph C. Canizaro Chair for Public Policy from 1996 to 2009, passed away on December 18 after a lengthy illness. He was 84.
A new ULI report describes a variety of public financing tools for cities seeking to reinvent themselves and attract greater private investment. The report, however, is not about any one specific financing tool or taxing mechanism, but about the leadership, strategic vision, and political will necessary to create a plan for reinvention and execute it. Expert panelists discussed how these challenges played out in Pittsburgh; Greenville, South Carolina; and Cincinnati at the recent ULI Housing Opportunity Conference in Boston.
As financing for real estate development tightens, institutional equity investors are becoming more selective in their funding, and developers are exploring new market segments such as the over-70 sector, said panelists speaking at the 2016 ULI Spring Meeting.
Joseph W. O’Connor, 70, of North Palm Beach, Florida, passed away at home in February surrounded by family and friends following a courageous ten-month battle with cancer. O’Connor founded Copley Real Estate Advisors, one of the largest and most successful real estate investment firms in the United States. He was cochair of AEW Capital Management and chairman of the Urban Land Institute from 2001 to 2003, in addition to being a ULI Foundation governor and trustee.
The $1 billion in National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) grants recently awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is a critical step in helping states and communities across the nation become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, according to ULI. In addition, the grant proposals and winning applications have highlighted the important connections between urban design and development and improving community resilience.
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