The winners of the ULI Americas Awards for Excellence become finalists for the 2024 ULI Global Awards for Excellence, competing against projects from the Europe and Asia Pacific regions. The awards are open to projects and programs in the ULI Americas region that are substantially complete, financially viable, and in stable operation. The program evaluates submissions on overall excellence, including achievements in marketplace acceptance, design, planning, technology, amenities, economic impact, management, community engagement, innovation, and sustainability, among others.

Chicago has become one of the many major cities nationwide whose downtown office market has been negatively affected by the pandemic and the associated increase in remote work. To boost development in its downtown core, the city of Chicago recently announced that it will offer $150 million in subsidies to real estate developers. The move will help develop more than 1,000 apartments in four separate adaptive-use developments.

How we use words is important. Words can describe both racial inequities and the efforts to remedy them. As the real estate industry continues the work to dismantle systemic racism, it’s critical to be intentional about language.

Turning obsolete office buildings into apartments can be complicated and tricky—but daring developers and ingenious architects are showing a way to help solve housing shortages.

Despite challenges, there is momentum in commercial real estate for capital to be raised and invested in underserved communities across the nation, according to a panel of Dallas/Fort Worth developers at the Fall Meeting in Dallas. The primary example they used to illustrate success is the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth.

The Dallas/Fort Worth metro area is rising on powerful growth that will lift it past Chicago to become the third-largest metropolitan statistical area in the nation, experts said during a session at the ULI Fall Meeting in Dallas.

In a period short on opportunities and long on challenges, design matters even more. Good design principles are always worth employing, whatever the development climate, but three key design aspects pertain in particular: alliance, resilience, and quality.

Experts speak about the near-term prospects for converting office buildings into multifamily housing, best practices for evaluating conversion potential, innovative ways the public sector can support these projects, and other related trends.

The natural reaction to hearing that a product or material has been made with the assistance of modern slavery is to flinch in horror and perhaps disbelief. Unfortunately, the construction industry is ranked second—just behind domestic service—as a problematic industry in terms of its risk of relying on forced labor, according to the 2022 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, Forced Labour and Forced Marriage report from the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

The U.S. economy did very well in 2024, said Barbara Denham, lead economist for Oxford Economics, and the forecast for the coming year is more of the same—both in New York City and across North America. However, in presenting Oxford’s favorable economic forecast for 2025 at a ULI New York event last month, Denham also noted many caveats ahead of the incoming U.S. administration.

The ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing has announced two winners for this year’s Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award, as well as two winners for the Terwilliger Center Award for Innovation in Attainable Housing.

Obsolete buildings will constitute up to 50 percent of all new housing in cities

ULI San Francisco recently hosted a panel revisiting the recommendations made by ULI Advisory Servies panelists to revive the downtown and highlighting the progress that has been made.

Berkeley, California, is emerging as a hub for life sciences and technology firms, with new developments opening in the West Berkeley neighborhood. In June, ULI San Francisco hosted a walking tour through two campuses targeting life sciences research and development tenants at the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay: theLAB Berkeley and Berkeley Commons.

Companies including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, and IKEA are rolling out small-format stores around the country, often in suburban areas, as they try other ways to connect with their customers.

In the heart of Toronto, a revolution is unfolding underground. Beneath the bustling streets and towering skyscrapers, a network of pipes is tackling the climate crisis. The story of Toronto’s Deep Lake Water Cooling system and its potential to reshape the approach to sustainable development was told during a session at the ULI Spring Meeting in Toronto.

At a 2023 ULI Spring Meeting panel titled “View from the Top,” Tsering Yangki, executive vice president at Dream Unlimited, one of Canada’s leading real estate companies, with over $23 billion in assets across North America and Europe, spoke with WLI chair Ellen Klasson, managing director at RCLCO.

As the world struggles to deal with the threat posed by climate change, Toronto provides a template for how cities can dramatically reduce emissions at an urban scale, in a way that is sustainable from a business standpoint, according to panelists at the 2023 ULI Spring Meeting in Toronto.

Preserve will enable the consistent assessment and measurement of climate transition impacts in real estate investment models.

A team from ESSEC Business School in France has been named the winner in this year’s prestigious ULI Hines Student Competition – Europe. The results were announced by ULI and Hines, the global real estate investor, developer, and property manager, following the final of the fifth annual pan-European competition for integrated and multidisciplinary urban regeneration.

Despite the monetary headwinds and continued economic uncertainty around the world, there is a strong belief that the global real estate industry is at a “pivot point,” with improving prospects ahead for renewed investment activity, according to the latest Emerging Trends in Real Estate^® Global Outlook 2024 from PwC and the Urban Land Institute.

According to the latest Emerging Trends in Real Estate® Europe report from PwC and ULI, 75 percent of real estate leaders agree current valuations “do not accurately reflect” all the challenges and opportunities in real estate, as a wedge continues to be driven between market price expectations and book valuations.

Although residential fell more in the first quarter of 2023, office remains Europe’s most scarred commercial real estate sector, according to advisory firm Green Street. Government mandates around sustainability are also tightening, and Cushman & Wakefield says 76 percent of European office space could be obsolete by 2030 unless landlords start investing now.

The mayor of Paris is embracing the ville du quart d’heure—translated as 15-minute city—the first time that a leading politician in France’s largest city had backed the idea, particularly as a reelection strategy.

Twelve developments from across Asia have been selected as winners of the 2024 ULI Asia Pacific Awards for Excellence, one of the real estate industry’s most prestigious honors. Announced at the 2024 ULI Asia Pacific Summit held in May in Tokyo, this year’s award winners include projects in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines. These winners will automatically qualify as nominees for the 2024 ULI Global Awards for Excellence, where they will compete against projects from North America and Europe.

With investors across the Asia Pacific continuing to avoid mainstream asset classes as they seek out higher returns and more reliable income streams, attention has turned increasingly to “living assets”—a broadly defined concept that includes the multifamily, senior living, and student housing sectors.

The 2024 Asia Pacific Home Attainability Index by ULI offers a comprehensive overview of housing attainability across the Asia Pacific region. In this third edition, the report includes data from three additional cities—Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Perth—expanding its coverage to 48 cities in 11 countries, namely, Australia, China (including Hong Kong SAR), India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

As the world’s population continues to grow, there will be a need for increased urbanization to accommodate more people. The question is how and when should urban planners decide to regenerate, when to expand and when to create new cities, for sustainable growth and development of future cities, since each approach comes with its benefits and its drawbacks.

Curating and creating great spaces is at the heart of what industry players in the built environment sector do every day. Placemaking is the “art and science” of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Set against an urban landscape of concrete, steel, and glass in Tanjong Pagar, Singapore’s central business district, Oasia Hotel Downtown (OHD) stands out with its red silhouette clad in lush greenery. An integrated hotel/office development comprising a 27-story, 314-room business hotel and 100 new-age offices, OHD responds to the government’s vision for the precinct earmarked as the island’s next waterfront city with a mix of business, commercial, and residential activities.