Each year, ULI hosts several policy forums on such topics as smart growth, housing, transportation, and urban development. These forums are an opportunity for experts from the private, nonprofit, and public sectors to discuss important land use and real estate issues and to recommend steps for ULI, policy makers, and practitioners.

Recently Published

The New California Dream: How Demographic and Economic Changes May Shape the Housing Market
The New California Dream: How Demographic and Economic Changes May Shape the Housing Market, authored by ULI member and urban planner Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, analyzes housing demand in the state through 2035. According to the report, Californians’ housing preferences are changing rapidly—highlighting the need to revisit the long-term mix of available housing choices. Without modifications in planning assumptions, investments in public transit and reform of land use regulations, there is the potential that a dramatic mismatch will emerge between housing supply and demand over the next two decades.

Ten Principles for a Sustainable Approach to New Development
Ten Principles for a Sustainable Approach to New Development examines how to better connect Hong Kong’s large-scale developments to street life. According to the report, the massive scale of the podium-style developments have increasingly lost their functional relationship to the urban street grid, often resulting in the isolation of land uses.

Generation Y: America’s New Housing Wave
Generation Y: America’s New Housing Wave suggests that the echo boomer generation, or Gen Y, holds a high view of the American Dream – despite the housing market collapse -- with the majority of respondents expecting to own homes within five years. At nearly 78 million, Gen Y, aged 15- to 32-years old, is now the largest generation in the U.S.—comprising 25 percent of the population—which means it will have enormous influence on the real estate industry and the economy in general. This report highlights the results of a nationwide survey, conducted during the summer of 2010, and draws on the responses from 1241 Gen Yers categorized by ethnicity, income and level of education.

Infrastructure 2011: A Strategic Priority
Infrastructure 2011 assesses the state of infrastructure in the United States and around the world, examines what the next few years are likely to hold, and provides recommendations for moving forward on the infrastructure investments and strategies that are needed for regions and countries to continue to prosper and grow. Despite increased rhetoric about the importance of infrastructure, states and metropolitan areas are struggling to find funds to make basic repairs on aging systems and to build the new transit and road networks needed to position themselves for future growth.

Building on Innovation: The Significance of Anchor Institutions in a New Era of City Building
Building on Innovation, authored by ULI Senior Resident Fellow for Urban Development Tom Murphy, maintains that in the current environment of extremely limited public funds, being competitive means being able to create new economic engines, new marketplace synergies, and new corporate enterprise offshoots. The difference between the winners and losers, Murphy says, is a shared goal by both the public and private sector to create a climate for progress. “The technology and information economy has created a tempo of quick-speed change and public-private community interdependencies so great that they have generated a new paradigm of local economic development and city building,” Murphy says.

Resilient Cities: Surviving in a New World
Resilient Cities is based on the conclusions of a workshop sponsored by the ULI Urban Investment Network, an initiative of the Institute’s operations in Europe. It looks at the principles of resilient cities as well as the issues and solutions related to building resilience in European cities. According to the report, resilience should be a main goal for all cities, since international institutions and the private sector are attracted to cities that are better prepared to handle uncertain times.

ULI Senior Resident Fellows Update: Finding Certainty in Uncertain Times
This report is a collection of commentaries from ULI’s five senior resident fellows Stephen Blank, Edward McMahon, John McIlwain, Thomas Murphy and Michael Horst, examines trends in population growth, consumer housing preferences, employment, real estate finance, environmental conservation, energy efficiency, venture capital investment and public leadership. These factors are converging to shape a new era of urban economics within which cities and urban regions will have to compete in order to be successful in the 21st century.

Climate Change, Land Use, and Energy 2010: New Tools. New Rules
The 2010 CLUE report explores an issue that has risen to become one of the most immediate challenges for sustainable development: investing in energy efficiency improvements in existing real estate. New regulations and finance tools are emerging which seek to capture value associated with energy efficiency in commercial buildings. This report includes stories from the “retrofitting” trenches, prevailing attitudes, and case studies that provide a benchmark for how energy efficiency is valued in real estate transactions today. Emerging energy and climate change policies are identified at all levels of government which taken together are forming a new backdrop for real estate investment.

Priced Out: Persistence of the Workforce Housing Gap in the Boston Metro Area
This report examines the availability of for-sale and rental housing near six major employment hubs in the Boston area, specifically in terms of housing that is affordable to workforce households, or those with incomes ranging from 60 percent to 100 percent of the area median income (AMI). Approximately 23 percent – or more than 600,000 households fall in this income range. The analysis was based on proximity of workforce housing within a 30- to 45-minute in-traffic commute of the employment centers of downtown Boston, Route 128 North, Route 128 West, Framingham, Route 128 South, and Route 3 North.

SB 375 Impact Analysis Report
This report examines the potential effects of California Senate Bill 375 on the economic future for the state and the quality of life for its residents. In particular, the report analyzes the law’s mandate for a new regional land use plan, Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS), which calls for more coordinated and efficient development patterns that can accommodate all types of land uses. The law requires regional transportation plans (RTPs) to include such strategies to encourage better alignment of land use, transportation, and housing planning.

Testimony by Maureen McAvey, Executive Vice President of ULI  
Maureen testified May 20, 2010 regarding security requirements for federal buildings. She spoke before the U.S. House of Representatives, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management. Her statement was titled, “Too Much for Too Little: Finding the Cost-risk Balance for Protecting Federal Employees in Leased Facilities.”

Infrastructure 2010: Investment Imperative
Infrastructure 2010 challenges the United States to treat infrastructure like the investment that it is, by developing a targeted, long-term, and integrated infrastructure strategy. The report puts the spotlight on water infrastructure, examining aging pipes, population pressures, and management challenges across 14 metropolitan areas.

The Boston Regional Challenge
This report analyzes the combined costs of housing and transportation for neighborhoods, cities, and towns throughout a Boston regional study. Our analysis finds that the typical household in the study area spends upwards of $22,000 annually on housing, which represents roughly 35 percent of the median household income ($68,036). With transportation costs for the typical household reaching nearly $12,000 annually, the combined costs of housing and transportation account for roughly 54 percent of the typical household’s income.

Priced Out: Persistence of the Workforce Housing Gap in the San Francisco Bay Area
Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area is persistently and pervasively unaffordable despite the recent economic and housing market downturn.  If current trends are any indication, housing production between 2009 and 2025 will leave unmet demand for at least 6,000 for-sale housing units appropriate for workforce households.

Climate Change, Land Use, and Energy (CLUE) 2009: Investment Niche or Necessity? 
This report concentrates on the real estate investment community’s outlook, preferences, and business practices associated with climate change, land use, and energy. This publication has been researched through a ULI member survey, a dedicated ULI conference, and a review of the existing literature.

Maximizing the Neighborhood Stabilization Program Opportunity: Six Guiding Tenets for Implementation
The ninth annual ULI Shaw Forum, co-hosted by the ULI Rose Center & the ULI Terwilliger Center, and generously supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the late Charlie Shaw, took place on October 14, 2009.  More than 25 hand-selected public and private sector leaders from across the country gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to kick off the forum, entitled Maximizing the Neighborhood Stabilization Program Opportunity.

Transportation for a New Era: Growing More Sustainable Communities
Transportation for a New Era: Growing More Sustainable Communities identifies recommendations intended to guide transportation policy and programs at the federal level. By refocusing the federal program, making the reforms we need, and facilitating the participation of the private sector, transportation policy can set the stage for a brighter future for all Americans.

Bay Area Burden: Examining the Costs and Impacts of Housing and Transportation on Bay Area Residents, Their Neighborhoods, and the Environment
Bay Area Burden provides a comprehensive analysis of the "cost of place" in nine counties located throughout the San Francisco region by examining the costs and impacts of housing and transportation on Bay Area residents, their neighborhoods, and the environment.

Infrastructure 2009: Pivot Point
Infrastructure 2009: Pivot Point warns that short-term stimulus funding for various road, transit, rail, and water projects offers no substitute for a concerted long-range U.S. effort to maintain national prosperity in a rapidly evolving and more competitive global marketplace. The report recommends a total revamping of how the country plans, funds, and implements infrastructure programs.

Marketing, Managing, and Maintaining Mixed-Income Communities
Community Catalyst Report Number 8—The 2008 Shaw Forum engaged participants to describe the components for success in managing and maintaining mixed-income housing. The discussion tended to be oriented toward mixed-income rental units, with less discussion about matters specific to owner-occupied mixed-income housing.

Climate, Land Use, and Energy (CLUE) Advisory Group Findings Report 
At the 2007 ULI Fall Meeting in Las Vegas, the Trustees directed Chairman Todd Mansfield to form an Advisory Group to study and advise on the issues of climate change and energy and how ULI as an organization might best engage in these issues. The Climate, Land Use and Energy (CLUE) Advisory Group is made up of a diverse body of ULI members who span the fields of finance, investment, development, design and the insurance industries.