Chicago’s Aqua Tower is an 82-story concrete structure with more than 1.9 million square feet (176,500 sq m); tenth-tallest building in Chicago. Rated LEED-NC (for new construction) under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program of the U.S. Green Building Council. Construction cost is estimated at $300 million per GreenSource magazine.

Ideally, mixed-use projects achieve some kind of symbiosis among their elements, creating a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. All completed in the past five years, the following ten projects represent innovative takes on combining product types.

As cities become denser, the cost of high-density parking begins to pencil out for developers—which is when the development of parking that automatically stores and retrieves cars becomes attractive.

In 2025, the country’s industrial market is experiencing a rebalancing in the wake of surging demand and record new supply that marked the early pandemic years. New opportunities in fast-growing markets are emerging, and demand drivers are shifting. New space demand will grow the most, especially for small-bay industrial assets, according to a Q3 2025 report from the business advisory and accounting firm Plante Moran.

Around the turn of the 21st century, downtown Kansas City, Missouri, faced challenges familiar to many American cities: abandoned buildings and surface parking lots filled 10 core blocks despite multiple redevelopment attempts dating to the 1960s. The downtown residential population was sparse, and some 60,000 downtown office workers made haste for the suburbs at 5 o’clock each weekday.

Drawing on insights from more than 1,700 leading real estate investors, developers, lenders and advisors across the U.S. and Canada, the report identifies key opportunities, risks and market shifts that will shape the industry in the coming year.

To be successful and sustainable, fighting homelessness in Los Angeles requires crisis intervention on two fronts: First, we must build more permanent housing and much more of it needs to be affordable. Second, we must build more transitional shelter of every type—more quickly and much, much more affordably. But shelter is not enough.

Affordable housing in California has become increasingly difficult to develop in recent years in a state where there is a significant lack of it. Two developers speak to the barriers to development in Southern California.

The ULI/Allen Matkins Capital Markets Roundtable, now in its eighth year, brings together investors, developers, lenders, managers, and intermediaries to share insights and perspectives on the current and future outlook for real estate capital markets. topics discussed included which sectors of the market are strong, which should be avoided; and what the thoughts and strategies of some major players in real estate financing and investing are for the coming year.

In a general session at the 2024 ULI Spring Meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke with Ralph Rosenberg, a partner and global head of real estate with KKR. Clinton, who now teaches at Columbia University, focused her remarks on what she said are the three major conflicts affecting the global economy.

Experts say the real estate market in our cities is responding to the dramatic changes caused by COVID with a “flight to quality.” This headline suggests optimism that a safe harbor still exists out there as does the fear that we all need to act fast and run (for our lives) before things get bad. It reflects a winnowing to the essential characteristics that can ensure the best overall return and insulate us from the changing winds in the economy.

The Manhattan office market is beginning to make a comeback, but much has changed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The persistence of hybrid and remote work have changed the equation for commercial rentals, both in terms of landlord-tenant relationships and the quality of office product on offer.

ULI MEMBER–ONLY CONTENT: The Port of San Francisco’s 20-year, multibillion-dollar vision for the waterfront is designed to be adaptable to rising sea levels far into the future.

Registration is open for the 2020 ULI Virtual Fall Meeting, being held October 13–15. An ambitious program is being offered, including tours and networking opportunities that will be facilitated online.

Public subsidies, persistence, and innovative design decisions helped create homes for some of the poorest residents of San Francisco.

Infrastructure Ontario’s Provincial Affordable Housing Lands Program aims to create a mix of market-rate housing and permanent, sustainable, affordable housing on surplus land in greater Toronto. For its first effort, the agency chose Dream Asset Management, Kilmer Group, and Tricon Residential to develop a mixed-use community with 2,500 apartments on a former brownfield industrial site.

Across North America, cities are confronting a housing crisis that demands urgent, innovative responses. In Toronto, the launch of the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) in April 2020 marked a pivotal moment—an accelerated effort at the height of the pandemic to deliver safe, stable housing. Since then, unprecedented investments have been made in communities across Ontario to address housing insecurity, reshaping the province’s residential landscape.

Canada’s real estate market is in the midst of a pivotal shift as the Bank of Canada (BoC) rolls back what has been “higher for longer” interest rates. Yet despite welcome relief on financing costs, real estate leaders are still moving somewhat cautiously amid uncertainty and fluid market dynamics.

Ten built environment projects from eight countries across the EMEA region have been announced as the finalists in the sixth annual ULI Europe Awards for Excellence, which recognize exemplary projects and programs in the private, public, and non-profit sectors. This year’s finalists comprise cutting edge refurbishment, restoration and new build projects, and include residential, healthcare, mixed use, education, community, laboratory, and office projects from Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Spain.

Following a masterplan adopted by British Land, the AustralianSuper pension fund, and the Southwark Council, developers are now seven years into a 15-year project to transform a 53-acre (21.44 hectares) parcel of industrial land and a former quay into a community that will include as many as 3,000 new homes, office, retail, leisure, and entertainment space.

In the heart of London’s Covent Garden neighborhood, a complex of five Victorian-era structures—previously home to a seed merchant company, a brass and iron foundry, and a Nonconformist chapel, among other uses—have been restored and adapted into a single, cohesive office building with ground-floor retail and dining space. The three-year restoration preserved the property’s industrial heritage, yet it provides enough flexibility to meet the needs of today’s workforce.

With society and the real estate industry significantly behind on achieving the targets set in the Paris Agreement, and worsening affordability in Europe’s housing, ULI Europe’s C Change for Housing program has launched a landmark interactive systems map and companion report to help the real estate industry identify, co-create, and scale the solutions needed to decarbonize existing and future affordable housing.

Although ready to commence a new real estate cycle, real estate leaders globally are braced for another challenging year of uncertainty, with lingering inflation, largely driven by factors including geopolitical instability, and persistently higher interest rates in some regions, potentially delaying a hoped-for recovery in capital markets and occupancy metrics. This is according to the Emerging Trends in Real Estate^® Global Outlook 2025 from PwC and ULI, which provides an important gauge of global sentiment for investment and development prospects, amalgamating and updating three regional reports which canvassed thousands of real estate leaders across Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific.

The outlook for the European real estate market is cautiously optimistic despite growing geopolitical uncertainty and concerns about economic growth, with London, Madrid, and Paris emerging as the standout performers, according to a new report by PwC and the Institute.

At the 2025 ULI Asia Pacific Summit—May 26–29, in Hong Kong—a panel of Asian economic and geopolitical experts addressed one of today’s most immediate global concerns: the implications of U.S.–China economic decoupling and the broader geopolitical shifts reshaping global trade and investment.

Fourteen developments from across Asia have been named winners of the 2025 ULI Asia Pacific Awards for Excellence, one of the real estate industry’s most prestigious honors. Announced at the 2025 ULI Asia Pacific Summit held in May in Hong Kong, this year’s award winners include projects in Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, the Philippines, and Singapore.

The creation of public space from unused, underused, or unequally shared linear spaces in urban areas has been happening for a long time. Major reference points in the architectural and planning worlds are Boston’s Emerald Necklace, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1878–1896); Freeway Park in Seattle (1972-1976); the Baltimore Inner Harbor (1963–1983); the Promenade Plantée in Paris (1987-1994); and the High Line in New York (2005–2019).

The 2026 Emerging Trends in Real Estate® Asia Pacific report, published jointly by ULI and PwC found a mood of cautious optimism among real estate professionals; however, respondents described considerable disparities in markets and sectors across the region. Tokyo was ranked as the top city for investment in the Emerging Trends survey, top of the table for the third consecutive year, followed by Singapore, Sydney, Osaka, and Seoul.

A seminar organized by the ULI Singapore NEXT Committee presented attendees with the little-known concept of real estate “tokenization,” or fractional investing/trading, as a potential bridge between private investors and direct ownership. Although not new, tokenization in real estate is a niche market, particularly in Asia Pacific, with Singapore hosting a small number of the specialized digital platforms.

Once the site of an abandoned quarry, Singapore’s Rifle Range Nature Park now serves as a buffer zone protecting one of the island nation’s last primary rainforests, Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, from encroaching development and human activity. Located to the reserve’s south, Rifle Range is Singapore’s first net-positive energy nature park, harvesting more energy than its annual operational requirements.