Participate in a fast-paced, interactive UrbanPlan Lightning Round with fellow industry professionals to experience one of ULI's key impact programs for introducing the complexities of real estate development and empowering participants to play an active role in shaping better communities through the built environment.

This session will share leading research by this year's ULI/Kohn Fellow on the commercial business case for developers and owners to pursue adaptive use for buildings, preserving their historic and cultural value in downtowns while achieving strong sustainability outcomes.

Have you ever wondered what real estate attorneys do on a day-to-day basis to support real estate development? Real estate attorneys serve as legal advisors and advocates for their clients, helping them navigate the complexities of real estate development and risk management, and helping projects get across the finish line. This session will highlight the key themes in ULI Learning's new course from the attorneys who lead it.

Avivo Village provides transitional homeless housing in a reuse of a 48,600-square-foot distribution building. Low-barrier entry requirements and its downtown location make Avivo accessible to homeless people who may not be accepted elsewhere. To better serve the residents' needs, the team used trauma-informed design and an extensive engagement process. As a result, the interior of the building has open corridors with natural light and individual units, giving its residents a sense of community and safety. Comprehensive support services offer health care and prepare residents for the transition to permanent housing. Community leadership played a crucial role in modernizing zoning regulations and building codes to permit Avivo and protect the safety of the residents.

ULI has selected Rick Reinhard, principal of Niagara Consulting Group, as the recipient of the 2023–2024 ULI Apgar Thought Leader Award, which recognizes the authors of outstanding works written for Urban Land magazine. Reinhard was recognized for his article "Affordable Housing: YIGBY ('Yes in God's Backyard') Movement Seeks to Counter NIMBY Movement," from the Winter 2024 issue of Urban Land. Reinhard acknowledges the barriers to repurposing faith properties for housing, including the emotional ties communities have to their religious institutions, physical constraints of adaptive use, and regulatory obstacles. He provides examples of the successful adoption of the YIGBY movement, along with steps to increase opportunities for religious institutions, housing advocates, and real estate developers.

Join ULI Boston/New England and the Terwilliger Center for Housing to play a new game exploring the tradeoffs of housing development. This game was developed in partnership with Stantec and Play the City, is in pilot phase and will be deployed in community settings- your experience and feedback will help shape the final product! 

 

"Homeward" is an engaging and thought-provoking board game that brings players face-to-face with the challenges of addressing America’s home shortage while building vibrant, sustainable communities. Players form competing teams, each with unique goals and perspectives. Together, they navigate the intricate web of housing production, balancing density, affordability, open space, and environmental impact to create thriving neighborhoods. 

 

Through strategic decision-making and collaboration—or conflict—players must weigh trade-offs as they create homes for their town. Will your team succeed in crafting a balanced, forward-thinking community, or will competing priorities lead to gridlock? "Homeward" invites you to explore the complex interconnectedness of housing and community building in a dynamic, immersive way.

Connect with real estate leaders, not-for-profit housers, and service providers to collectively define how ULI members—from developers to finance professionals—can accelerate the production and preservation of deeply affordable housing connected to meaningful supportive services. Participant input will shape ULI’s forthcoming publication, "10 Principles for Addressing Homelessness: A Guide for Commercial Real Estate and Finance," launching at ULI's 2025 Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

ULI Net Zero Imperative (NZI) participants and panelists from past and current cohorts are invited to join an off-site happy hour meetup to network and connect with fellow decarbonization leaders during the conference. Location to be shared in a separate invitation.

Interested in joining other engaging members in great dinner and conversation? NEXT Americas invites mid-career members to join them for a night on the town. There will be the opportunity to choose from 5 different restaurants and discussion topics. There will be limited seats, and separate registration is required.

Members of the ULI Art in Place global cohort and friends of the ULI Creative Placemaking program will gather for an informal breakfast and meet with local leaders on connecting artists, creatives, and real estate decision-makers. This is an invitation-only event.

This interactive session gives members an opportunity to participate in a real-time mini Advisory Services panel and have instant impact for a local Denver panel sponsor. The session will begin with a brief presentation by the panel sponsor. Members will then be presented with one question pertaining to the land use challenge. With facilitation by ULI Advisory Services program staff, members will briefly deliberate and offer a set of recommendations, recorded in real time, in response to the question. The session will conclude with a brief summary of the recommendations and panel sponsor feedback.

UrbanPlan champion Jessica Durham shares strategies and opportunities for leveraging UrbanPlan workshops for Continuing Education credits with affiliate organizations such as AIA, AICP, NAR, and local legal bar associations.

ULI District and National Councils are key drivers of ULI’s impactful programming and host dozens of events focused on sustainability, resilience, health, and social equity each year. The ULI Lewis Center for Sustainability in Real Estate supports Council programming in a variety of ways – with compelling content and reports, speaker suggestions, financial support, cohort programs and more. Join the Lewis Center and other Council leaders to learn about opportunities to advance ULI’s mission and priorities with impactful programming at the local level. A simple lunch will be served. This program is open to all current and potential District and National Council leaders; advanced registration is requested. Please reach out to [email protected] to learn more.

This session will compare the two commonly used tools for financial modeling: Excel and ARGUS. While Excel offers flexibility, customization, and broad applicability across various financial analyses, ARGUS is specifically designed for real estate financial modeling, providing standardized workflows for valuation, lease analysis, and cash flow projections. The session will explore the strengths, limitations, and best use cases for each to determine which tool is more suitable for different financial modeling needs.

Learn more about the impacts and progress made by the more than 20 global communities who have participated in ULI Net Zero Imperative program to accelerate the decarbonization of their built environment.

The WLI Americas Entrepreneurs Cohort will meet with their Mentors lunch to review their business plans as well as learn valuable leadership skills development from a leading industry expert.

A growing number of real estate firms are successfully converting market-rate properties to deeply affordable housing. Learn how teams are closing the affordability gap and partnering with local providers to offer meaningful on-site supportive services to residents. Presented by ULI's Homeless to Housed Initiative.

More than 30 percent of the world's energy is consumed by buildings, and windows are the single largest source of energy loss in the built environment. To counter this, LuxWall has developed technologies to manufacture vacuum-insulating glass that performs like a wall. LuxWall Enthermal transparent insulation is five times more insulating than double-paned glass, reduces the energy loss of buildings by up to 45 percent, and improves occupant comfort. Enthermal is ideal for retrofitting buildings as its thin profile allows it to be easily installed in existing window frames, reducing reglazing costs by up to 50 percent for end users. In addition, the payback for most projects is three times faster than other available glass products.

An abandoned art-deco era Coca-Cola bottling plant in Indianapolis has been redeveloped into a thriving 12-acre mixed-use development, re-energizing the edge of the city. The project respects the site's history by restoring existing buildings to maintain their original features, while also embracing innovation by seamlessly integrating new buildings. A food market, boutique hotel, retail, and office space create opportunities for residents and have been a destination for tourists. An internal grid provides a welcoming pedestrian streetscape, connects the project elements, links to the surrounding neighborhood, and anticipates future development phases. Bottleworks District exemplifies opportunities at mid-market levels through thoughtful design and market success.?

This is an invite-only kickoff event for members of the California-Nevada Technical Assistance Leadership Exchange. Lunch provided.

Lindsey Scannapieco (ULI Philadelphia Transformational Leader Award winner 2023), presents a session on leaning into the attributes of a closed historic school to create a vibrant, community-centered, mixed-use development in Philadelphia. The presentation will share the case study of the Bok Building (ULI America Special Mention 2023), which today is home to over 200 small businesses and attracts 250,000 visitors per year. The presentation will showcase an approach that embraces the existing building condition and finds resiliency in small, diverse tenant types.

This first-of-its-kind facility, the John Parvensky Stout Street Recuperative Care Center and Renaissance Legacy Lofts, provides homeless individuals with supportive services, medical care, and transitional and permanent supportive housing in a holistic space for healing, growth, and community connection. Come learn about the innovative design strategies, unique services, and creative funding sources for this award-winning development.

In November 2023, ULI held its first utility and real estate developer convening with Xcel Energy based in Denver. The discussion was illuminating, finding that it is vital for real estate to source green power from utilities and collaboration is key for opportunities such as grid resilience, battery storage, and partnerships with policymakers, to name a few. Now, over a year later, ULI explores progress and opportunities in this follow-up short session , highlighting the perspectives of both Xcel and Denver-based developers.

Ten years ago, ULI released the Building Healthy Places Toolkit—which provides developers, owners, property managers, designers, investors, and others involved in real estate decision-making with strategies to create healthier buildings and communities. Join this session to explore how the field has evolved over the past decade and to learn how to enhance and preserve value by meeting growing demand for health-promoting places.

Refrigerants can be found in nearly every commercial and industrial building and the vast majority of residential buildings globally. Despite being the fastest-growing greenhouse gas globally, the impact of refrigerants is often underestimated or completely overlooked by building owners. Developers must begin to address refrigerants or run the significant risk of increasing or even accelerating (through the introduction of heat pumps) their impact, while decreasing other scope 1 and 2 emissions, which will likely lead to financial implications such as duplicating capital expenditure spend to achieve critical climate targets. This short session will highlight the importance of addressing refrigerants and a data-driven means of doing so.

Featuring ULI Terwilliger Center's Home Attainability Index data, we will present the latest findings for Colorado's metro areas: how are the different regions' housing markets performing?; what are the latest homeownership and rental trends?; how deep is the affordability challenge?; and what other interesting findings did the team discover that will impact Colorado's housing and economic outlook?

Climate change has established a new normal that threatens communities and challenges the future of our built environments. Climate impacts including droughts and floods significantly affect communities where population growth continues, building tension between heightened risk and real estate demand. This session will feature best practices and case studies for incorporating water-wise and flood-resilient measures into real estate projects, which help mitigate those risks and enhance asset value simultaneously.

Lindsey Scannapieco (ULI Philadelphia Transformational Leader Award winner 2023) outlines an approach for how to tackle large (100,000 sq. ft.) projects through an iterative development approach. Concepts covered will include outside to inside, building the tenant you want, easy wins, trust building, the value of a big binder, patience, and many twists and turns along the way. Using the Bok Building as a case study, the presentation will walk through a thesis for a step-by-step approach to tackle buildings of scale. Although best applied to adaptive use projects, the steps outlined can apply to any project of scale.