As the new appointees at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development settle into their roles, they face challenges both old and new. Ethan Handelman, the new deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s Office of Multifamily Housing Programs, addressed the 2021 ULI Housing Opportunity Conference in March.

At ULI South Carolina’s Capital Markets Conference, panelists outlined strategies that are leveraging the strengths of the private sector to create and preserve affordable housing in areas experiencing rapid growth.

As one of the fastest growing and most populous metropolitan areas in the United States, the Phoenix metro area has seen some 40,000 apartments built since 2010, with demand and prices continuing to rise. Panelists speaking at the ULI Arizona Trends Day in Phoenix provided a glimpse of how different product types are filling needs for the housing-strapped region.

Avenue Place/Avenue Terrace in Houston; Clybourn 1200 in Chicago; Keauhou Lane in Honolulu; Conway Center in Washington, D.C.; and Harbor Place Residences in Haverhill, Massachusetts, were announced as winners of the 2018 Jack Kemp Excellence in Affordable and Workforce Housing Award. The State of New York Mortgage Finance Agency and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority are joint winners of the 2018 Robert C. Larson Housing Policy Leadership Award.

Could ownership of 250- to 400-square-foot (23 to 37 sq m) homes help low-income people acquire an asset and begin to accrue wealth? Panelists at the 2018 ULI Spring Meeting said it is certainly an idea worth trying.

At the ULI Europe 2017 conference in Paris, Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology and director of the Oxford University Institute of Population Ageing, shared a series of startling facts about demographics as they relate to the built environment. By 2050, just 5 percent of the world’s working-age population will live in western Europe, whereas Asia and Africa will see huge increases in their share of that demographic. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular could become perhaps the most important region for construction and related industries.

Sustained, moderate strength in some of this month’s economic data creates a creditable sense of well-being, while see-sawing continues in the Barometer capital markets data and the weak housing data stay very weak. Overall, 51 percent of key indicators in the Barometer were worse when compared with one year ago, 44 percent were better, and 5 percent were unchanged. Read more about the economy, real estate capital markets, housing, and commercial/multifamily investment property.