An excerpt from Building Equitable Cities: How to Drive Economic Mobility and Regional Growthby Henry Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Cisneros cowrote the new ULI book with Janis Bowdler and Jeffrey Lubell.

NBA champion and dedicated urban developer Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. is targeting a new prize—infrastructure. “If you look at infrastructure in America, it’s old,” he told the audience at the 2017 ULI Fall Meeting.

For more than a decade, the brick “two-flat” on the 900 block of North Drake Avenue on Chicago’s West Side had been vacant. But by the time the school year begins this fall, the West Humboldt Park home will have a new occupant. A major reason for this property’s happy ending is the involvement of a land bank that acquired the building and wiped out its back taxes and encumbrances, making it easier for someone to purchase the property and improve it.

The mayors of Grand Rapids, Michigan; Anchorage, Alaska; and San Jose, California, spoke at a forum presented by the Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use in Seattle discussing their solutions for the issues of revitalization, equity, and resilience in cities.

Former Indianapolis Mayor William H. Hudnut III, who served as a ULI senior resident fellow and the ULI/Joseph C. Canizaro Chair for Public Policy from 1996 to 2009, passed away on December 18 after a lengthy illness. He was 84.

With no end in sight to the boom in urban and close-in suburban multifamily housing construction, developers are eager for ways to save money on ever-increasing land and construction costs. Experts speaking at the 2016 ULI Fall Meeting said that reducing parking requirements and increasing use wood-frame construction for buildings up to five stories could help keep costs in check.

Despite the record harsh winter of 2014–2015 that dumped 111 inches (281 cm) of snow on the city of Boston and the not-so-distant (2012) memory of the near-hit of Hurricane Sandy, instituting measures to safeguard against the effects of climate change and rising seas will not be an easy sell with the region’s utilities, property owners, government agencies, or general public.

Those attending the ULI Fall Meeting in San Francisco last week heard Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state, deliver a resounding call for the United States to do nothing less than create a new world order.

Women in the real estate and land use industries have strong ambitions to lead companies and are willing to make multiple moves or start their own companies in order to advance their careers, according to a panel discussion of a report developed by the ULI Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI); the discussion took place at the 2015 ULI Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

The latest issue of Urban Landis now available for download via the app. If you have not downloaded it before, you can do so now at no charge. The cover package for this issue is titled “Crafting Authenticity: Designing retail spaces that consumers embrace.”