Ten communities bring contemporary design approaches to housing for seniors.

How did Reston Town Center, set some 20 miles (32 km) from the nation’s capital in the leafy suburbs of Northern Virginia, generate premium real estate values and become desirable enough to compete for the best tenants? It is a story dating back more than 30 years, the product of critical decisions made by a host of real estate professionals, public officials, planners, and designers.

The city of Chicago is celebrating the adoption of an extensive overhaul of its building code that has been decades in the making. The new code means some big changes ahead for the city. For ULI Chicago’s Building Reuse Initiative, it also represents a significant step forward in its work to clear a path for more building reuse throughout the city.

Since the 1980s, the Dallas suburb of Plano has attracted some of the country’s biggest corporate headquarters and established itself as a hub for major employers. But how did Plano revamp to meet the goals of a changing economy and a changing community? The city made a pivot that has been echoed in growing cities around the country: a major shift toward investing in parks and activating green space.

A team of ULI experts visited Fort Worth in September 2024 to develop anti-displacement strategies for the city’s historic, majority Hispanic Northside neighborhood, which faces mounting pressure from two nearby megadevelopments, as well as broader metropolitan growth trends that drove up the area’s property values 60 percent from 2016 to 2021.

From resilient parks to bold adaptive reuse, this year’s winners redefine urban innovation and community impact across the Americas

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.

Los Angeles attorney George Fatheree III—who made national headlines for aiding members of the Bruce family in the return of beachfront property that was taken from their ancestors, nearly a century ago, through eminent domain—is embarking on a new venture, his own social impact fintech, ORO Impact.

Ten projects deliver compact residential spaces that offer more affordable city living options, foster community, and minimize environmental impacts.

This was the resounding conclusion from two Homeless to Housed (H2H)-hosted programs during Urban Land Institute (ULI) springtime meetings. Furthermore, former Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton echoed this call to action in her ULI Spring Meeting plenary presentation during which she advocated for New York City to create more affordable housing immediately to sustain its vitality as a world-class city for all people.

The third and final capital markets panel held during ULI’s Spring Meeting, in New York City in early March, focused on borrower experiences. Kyle Bolden, senior audit partner in the Real Estate Hospitality & Construction practice of Ernst & Young, moderated a panel on raising equity amid ongoing market uncertainty. The panelists were Brian Mutchler, managing director of Harrison Street; Jerome Nichols, president of Standard Real Estate Investments; and Jeff Rosen, a principal of Mag Partners.

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.

Two ULI members, working with ULI Terwilliger Center staff, have written an essay on the developer’s role in cultivating inclusive, equitable mixed-income communities.

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.

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

Rather than being siloed as strictly transportation initiatives, urban mobility projects and policies are increasingly being viewed in part as economic investment. London is a prime example of this approach, said experts speaking at the ULI Netherlands Conference in May.

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.

Jon Lovell, cofounder of Hillbreak, a consulting firm in the United Kingdom, discusses his recent paper L’Accord de Paris: A Potential Game-Changer for the Global Real Estate Industry, published by ULI.

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.

According to the second annual C Change Survey, 93 percent of respondents report incorporating transition risks into their real estate investment decisions, indicating the industry’s growing awareness and commitment to integrate climate-related financial risks into decision-making processes.

Hong Kong is famous for its hospitality industry, but the sector has been under fire for the past three years. Even so, the hotel and food and beverage (F&B) industries have shown resilience and adaptability said panelists during a ULI Hong Kong conference in September.

The Hong Kong government’s recent decision to embrace a new tendering process for the sale of a prime parcel of waterfront land adjoining the Central business district marks a welcome departure from longstanding policy. In the past, such tenders were invariably awarded to the highest bidder without regard to the quality of the proposed development. Now, however, use of a “two-envelope” approach to sell the plot, known as Site 3, means that design also becomes part of the equation.

Communities around the world are racing to control the spread of the novel coronavirus and the disease that it causes, COVID-19. Increasingly, that means implementing aggressive social distancing measures, which can inhibit the spread of the virus and flatten the transmission curve. Given what is known about the virus so far, using building strategies to help slow the spread of the disease makes sense to help protect those who must work in an office or commercial setting and in multifamily settings.

Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority has transformed Marina Bay into mixed-use urban neighborhood. public open space, and source of drinking water for the country’s 5.4 million residents.

A new report draws upon Singapore’s successful urbanization experience. Despite its population density, the city-state has consistently ranked favorably in various surveys measuring the livability and sustainability of cities around the globe.

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.