Texas
Texas
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.
In the heart of the Texas Triangle, an ambitious new vision is taking shape: Sandow Lakes, a 33,000-acre (13,355 ha) master-planned community in Milam County. The project’s first phase, known as The Switch, is already underway. Spanning 3,300 acres (1,335 ha), The Switch is an advanced manufacturing and logistics campus under development by Xebec. This supersite is poised to play a vital role in strengthening domestic supply chains by supporting the reshoring of critical manufacturing operations.
In 2015, Austin, Texas’ mayor at the time, Steve Adler, brought together business leaders, real estate professionals, and housing experts to take on the crisis in affordable rental housing and the risks it posed to the city’s workforce stability and economic sustainability. With insights and research from a ULI Technical Advisory Panel and ULI’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, the Austin Housing Conservancy fund was born, offering a revolutionary approach to preserving workforce housing. Now known as the Texas Housing Conservancy, the fund became the nation’s first to combine a nonprofit investment manager, Affordable Central Texas, with an open-end private equity fund.
As practitioners in the industry, we can all too easily reduce our thoughts about housing to the practical machinations of our work. Decisions are often made to serve regulatory agencies and capital providers, and to find the cheapest and fastest path to completion. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that our job is to create places that serve real-life human needs.
“ULI members in San Antonio understand the precariousness of their city’s housing crisis,” says Javier Paredes, principal at StudioMassivo and ULI San Antonio member leader. “They [also] recognize the power of aligning housing with transit to create greater housing stability.” In response to San Antonio’s housing crisis, ULI San Antonio members and staff applied to participate in a local technical assistance grant program from ULI’s Homeless to Housed (H2H) initiative.
