The U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate reductions, combined with continued economic growth, supported strong commercial real estate lending activity in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to the latest research from CBRE. The CBRE Lending Momentum Index, which tracks the pace of commercial loan closings in the United States, reached a value of 263 in December 2019—virtually unchanged from its third-quarter 2019 close and up 4.2 percent from a year earlier.

Talk of a true urban “transformation” tends to carry more weight when it comes from a former police chief-turned-mayor speaking at a reinvented former trolley warehouse. The mayor of Tampa, Florida, Jane Castor, greeted attendees at a recent ULI Tampa Bay conference at the brick-walled Armature Works project.

One in four people in the United Kingdom will be over age 65 by 2037, and it is estimated that there will be a shortfall of almost 70,000 homes with care in the next decade. A new ULI publication offers guidance for investors, developers, and architects on how best to design, build, and operate housing with care services.

In the past three years, the California Legislature has passed more than a dozen housing reforms addressing a swath of issues, including tenant protections, rent gouging, production of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), streamlined permitting for affordable and market-rate housing, new funding sources, and more. Though the pace may seem slow, there are signs of progress and hope for more in the future, panelists said at a ULI San Francisco event.

First movers on using mass timber for both structural and design elements are seeing a growing wave of projects lining up before them. The regulatory environment is also adapting while the business model is expanding.

How can public/private partnerships succeed in a politically fractious era?

Panelists talked about how the San Antonio region is faring versus other cities in Texas in attracting talented workers and corporate office tenants and where it can improve compared with cities of a similar size.

Members of ULI’s Technology and Real Estate Council discuss the value of property technologies for real estate developers and investors—technologies that offer the most for building tenants, ways of sorting out the hype surrounding property technologies, promising technologies still in the process of being realized, and other related trends.

Members of ULI Europe’s Technology and Real Estate Product Council discuss the new council’s areas of focus, approaches to evaluating and implementing new technologies, ways to improve understanding between technology startups and the real estate industry, promising current and future technologies, and related trends.

The 125-year-old parks system in Kansas City, Missouri, is a source of much civic pride. But the system also played a role in creating divisions in the community. A century later, these effects still reverberate in the parks system as development trends, zoning policies, and financial challenges have perpetuated inequity, according to panelists speaking at a ULI Advisory Services presentation in Kansas City, Missouri.