ULI’s 2017 Fall Meeting began on an inspirational note with a gala hosted by the ULI Foundation to honor longtime leading member Roy Hilton March. The October 23 event in Los Angeles drew more than 500 attendees and raised more than $500,000 for the Institute’s signature offering, the Advisory Services Panel program.
A portion of the funds will be used to conduct an advisory panel in Los Angeles that will focus on mitigating homelessness in the city. ULI Global Chairman Tom Toomey announced the panel at the gala, noting that Los Angeles has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the United States. “If ULI can figure out a solution that helps L.A., it’s a good bet that what is learned here can be applied to other areas as well,” he said. “Homelessness is a social issue and a real estate issue. What ULI brings to this issue is our range of industry expertise, our openness to ideas, and our ability to bring together stakeholders with different interests. We initiate the dialogue that results in real action and real change.”
March, chief executive officer of Eastdil Secured, told attendees that he sees in ULI a way to advance his passion for helping society’s most disadvantaged people. “As a society, we will be judged by the people on the margin, and these people [the homeless] are certainly on the margin. Homelessness is one of the greatest unnatural disasters, and it is our responsibility to deal with it,” March said. Exploring immediate and long-term solutions—particularly those related to access to affordable housing—is “perfectly suited” to the advancement of the Institute’s mission, he noted.
For 70 years, more than 700 ULI panels have addressed a broad range of complex urban development problems in communities around the world, consistently delivering “pragmatic, unbiased, and nonpartisan” solutions, noted gala speaker and ULI Foundation chair Stephen Quazzo. “ULI’s advisory panels call things as they see them. This candid, independent advice typically results in a new way of thinking among stakeholders about what is best for their communities.”
Shifting the funding model from one based mainly on support from sponsors to one based on philanthropy is part of an effort to expand the program to more communities and include more members as panelists, Quazzo said. “This emphasis on philanthropic support will allow ULI to be more proactive and choose panel assignments, rather than just respond to requests for help. With the Foundation’s support, Advisory Services has great potential to help ULI lead the future of global urban development.”
The panel, which will take place in December 2017, will be cochaired by Leigh Ferguson, economic development director for the downtown district of New Orleans; and Rafael Cestero, chief executive officer of the Community Preservation Corporation, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit affordable housing finance companies. The panel will address a variety of real estate and land use issues at the heart of Los Angeles’s homelessness problem, with a specific focus on Skid Row, near downtown. The panel will also address broader issues such as the connection between homelessness and the inadequate supply of affordable housing in Los Angeles; the potential for architecture and urban design, including improvements to infrastructure and the public realm, to enhance efforts to alleviate homelessness; and stakeholder issues inherent in any efforts to deconcentrate homelessness and disperse homeless housing and facilities more widely throughout the city.
