University of Maryland proposes a "socially conscious" real estate program
According to The Diamondback, the student newspaper ("A proposed UMD real estate major aims for a socially conscious approach to development"). From the article:
Most real estate development education is focused just on the business, finance and investment side, and when one gets out into the industry, one finds that there’s really a lot more to real estate than just the finance part,” said Donald Linebaugh, interim dean of the architecture, planning and preservation school.Good luck.
To address real estate’s many disciplines, students within the major must take nine elective credits unrelated to finance. The courses will cover a variety of subjects, including politics, communication and public policy.
Students will graduate with an understanding of historic preservation and urban planning — two areas that can clash with real estate development in large cities like Washington, D.C., Linebaugh said.
Teaching students to consider the impact of development at the community level, Linebaugh said, would help ease tensions between developers and urban planners. In addition, he said the approach would fulfill the school’s “quadruple bottom line”: building developments that are well-financed, socially and environmentally responsible and artfully designed.
“To be done in a way that improves communities, that makes better places,” Linebaugh said, “real estate really needs to be an integrated practice.”
cf. "The Need for Alternatives to the Nineteen Standard Real Estate Product Types," Christopher Leinberger, Places Journal 17:2 (2005)
As Leinberger said in an interview:
“Financiers like to finance commodities...”
I joke that the more I learn about real estate development the more I become an intellectual Marxist. But while Marxism, in its focus on "capital" is great at understanding why things work the way they do, it's not so great for coming up with "solutions" in the context of capitalism.
A socially responsible real estate degree might include a couple of classes and more case studies on social housing, urban revitalization, preservation tax credits, and on housing in Singapore and Vienna, but it's not likely to change the fact that the financing and production system for real estate is global, and that certain neighborhoods, districts, and cities are integrated into that global system, and are impacted in ways that local policy, practice and actors have a difficult time countering.
For example, I just wrote about this in the context of the Parkdale neighborhood of Toronto (""Real estate capital reproduction of space" in the Parkdale neighborhood of Toronto") and LA's Filipinotown ("Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles, as another example of real estate capital-driven arbitrage") and in the past about DC ("Exogenous market forces impact DC's housing market"), San Francisco ("Applying the super-gentrification thesis to San Francisco, Santa Monica, and other cities experiencing hyper-demand"), and culture spaces ("Dateline Los Angeles: BTMFBA & Transformational Projects Action Planning & arts-related community development corporations as an implementation mechanism to own property") among others.
Also see:
-- "Meet Wall Street's Rent Collector," Wall Street Journal
-- "Centuries-old Grosvenor Group deepens West Coast CRE roots," Real Estate News Exchange
-- "The 19 Building Types That Caused the Recession," CityLab
Labels: capital, capitalism, global cities, real estate development
posted by Richard Layman @ 5:30 PM&Permanent Link
20 Comments:
Students need degrees they can actually get jobs with. When Sallie Mae comes knockin' she's going to want her money. There might be a few jobs this degree can be applied to but UMD has a habit of producing more degrees than there are realistic jobs.
the thing I meant to mention also was the teaching of ethics in business school. There was the issue of pervasive teaching -- incorporating of coverage of ethics in every class -- vs. specific classes, with a knock on pervasive ethics over "everything" really means nothing.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e769/86e17c8400207fa3f12c3dedf776a0e85280.pdf
Plus Yale's b school originally granted MPPM degrees, Master in Public and Private Management, although that became too hard for hiring organizations, especially the most profit oriented, to understand, and so they changed to the traditional MBA.
In any case, where there are various examples of social enterprises, social investing, etc. in business mostly it's focused, like you say, on making the big bucks, and morality-ethics plays little if any role in it.
This sounds more like a UMUC kind of program.
Very easy to envision the program; 400 years of structural racial injustice means MOAR PUBLIC HOUSING or at least setting aside 30% of new housing for "affordability"
I'd be curious to know from Mari's research how many houses in Shaw had financing or a mortgage. It wasn't common until after World War 2.
Again where markets are useful are in price setting. It is a quick and dirty way to put a value on something. Thinking "the market" will provide you a way to live in borderline insanity or magical thinking.
I also get from Mari's research that real estate taxes used to be much higher rates (1.5 or 1.85) 50 years ago.
What I really love in these discussions is we have a modern equivalent of redlining. Try getting a Fannie Mae montage rate if you are illegal immigrant. Hell, try getting that rate as a legal immigrant. Or even as someone who has 1099 income.
Not that anything is new. The Bank of America was founded to deal primarily with this problem 100 years ago.
off topic:
Not quite sure if this is what they meant by "metropolitan majority"
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/bloomberg-seizes-more-mayoral-endorsements-110675
When I was involved in H Street stuff, I talked with a older African American lady on the 800 block of L St. NE. This was around the time that Perpetual S&L was shut down (they agreed to take on another firm, and then later the Dept. of Treasury changed how goodwill could be booked and it put them under).
She said when she learned about PSL's closing she cried, because they gave her family a mortgage, I presume in the 1940s but maybe the 1950s, and how difficult it was for African-Americans to get mortgages back then.
wrt Mayor Bowser's endorsement, it was pointed out to me by someone who is much smarter than I, that this is likely a workplace exit strategy, that even if Bloomberg doesn't get elected, she can probably get a job somehow by revolving within his orbit.
Speaking of redlining, there is a great piece in _Death and Life of Great American Cities_ where in the midst of urban decay, JJ came across a thriving urban neighborhood residential and commercial district.
It was because they still had a neighborhood-based locally owned bank making loans...
WRT more public housing...
I am in a debate/discussion with a guy on the Columbia Heights list. I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but he pushes me to think more broadly about issues.
So I made some points and he responded:
(1) housing supply is constrained in the face of rip roaring demand.
Him: Yes, this is true-ish. The demand is investors for local and federal subsidy which artificially props of luxury housing prices.
(2) people with more money outbid people with less money (and note at this stage of the game, it includes underemployed white people like me, unless we already own property)
Him: Yes, a lot is this because the propping up of multi-family housing prices spills over into neighborhood zones, creating a demand from small investors who flip or convert family sized housing into mini apartments. This drives the market.
The demand at the individual level is based in part on public policy commitment to displace "the other" in order to create "exclusive new urban gentrification" areas.
The housing shortage is driven by public policy to ensure to ensure displacement.
(3) we rely on the private sector to produce the bulk of housing.
Him: The private sector has ways been the main provider of housing, the current experience is a different dynamic.
4) we aren't investing in social housing organizations and having them be the lead on social housing production.
Him: Social organizations are used to keep lower income people out of the market in order to prop up housing prices..
It's an interesting way to look at the world.
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in terms of (1), subsidies like he describes has little to do with driving housing production and demand in renewed central cities like DC.
(2) small investors converting small apartment buildings has some impact, but it's a response, not proactively leading the market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-03/amazon-s-hq2-fiasco-was-driven-by-bezos-envy-of-elon-musk
I've often made the point that Section 8 vouchers are providing a floor on rental prices -- nobody bothers to do much below 1300 for a 1BR.
Lots and lots of very poor quality rental apartments in DC -- no AC, no W/D, not renovated, terrible windows -- as the incentive to upgrade them is very limited.
And not much has changed since the white flight -- a building get a few section 8 tenants and the market rate tenants will flee.
you mentioned this in the past, it clued me into this kind of thinking about Class B, C and D apartments renting for more than their putative value.
That was one of the things I mentioned in the thread, as one of the impacts of a constrained supply.
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totally separate. There was an article in the NYT today about a special case where a home health worker who moved in with her "client" and then they commingled their lives, was able to take over the lease of the rent controlled apartment.
What the article said was that in the 1950s there were 2 million apartments under rent control. Now there are 22,000.
Holy s***.
Amazon story very interesting. An illustration of being tone deaf.
This obviously came up with their spending big $ on the recent Seattle election, where only two people they supported got elected, and one of them was supported by the left too.
The one guy who lost, who many people like more than Kshama Sawant, was still pretty close.
52.2 : 47.6
https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/11/14/most-progressive-seattle-city-council-ever-tainted-by-failure-to-elect-shaun-scott/
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although as you know, I wrote that the Amazon case was one of the rare cases of this where it's worth paying, that the ROI is big.
That being said, anyone in the biz ought to realize how difficult the political environment is in New York City, unions, City Council, etc.
And also, speaking of "the education factor" a lot of the elected officials, including AOC, didn't seem to understand that much of the incentives were what we might call "pay as you go", or paid out only as jobs are added, so they are coming out of newly created revenues, a revenue stream that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Making any money is "making the big bucks". I still remember the depression and fear and the feeling of worthlessness when trying to get a job fresh out of grad school and getting no after no after no. Knowing a huge chunk of money is coming due every month didn't help.
20+ years on, I know those student loans eventually get paid. But I am still sensitive to the university churning out specific degrees then seeing those graduates getting low paying jobs because that's what's available. Eventually, when those graduates get more work experience their degree does open doors to the higher paying jobs. But I have seen co-workers get stuck in low grade jobs. I just worry the same fate may be in store for these real estate graduates, unless they've already got a foot in the field.
charlie mentioned my research. Yeah, I need to get back to 1940 Black homeowners of Truxton Circle. Honestly, I can't really make out the land/finance documents until the 1990s. Before that it looks like there were other financing things going on that I just don't understand. Despite redlining, there was a black middle class and some working class families who were purchasing their homes. Catholic University has the papers of EL Haynes, I'll say she was Black upper class, and she was able to get loans for a variety of rental housing, including my house in the 1930s-1950s. But one must also keep in mind in urban areas renters tend to outnumber homeowners.
Do you know Sarah Schoenman (I might have the spelling wrong). She's been doing research for a long time on deed restrictions. She lives up in Petworth, has done work for CulturalTourismDC, etc.
I wonder if in that research she has also looked at mortgage instruments?
Maybe it's worth posting a query to HistoricWashington? (I'd say H-DC too, but the oddest thing, I get emails, but I can't post.)
Matthew Gilmore too...
Nope I do not know Sarah. But then again I suck at remembering names.
I am aware of the work of PrologueDC who are looking at deed restrictions. That's a Washington County (outside the L'Enfant plan Old City) thing and my area of study is south of Boundary Road/Florida Avenue. To my knowledge, there were no deed restrictions inside of Old City.
I do need to get back to looking at African American homeowners in the TC. I just need to get over data problems like people lying to the Census.
http://blog.inshaw.com/2018/09/25/black-home-owners-of-1940-haywood-thomas/
http://blog.inshaw.com/2019/10/15/black-home-owners-of-1940-lets-clean-up-some-data/
RE: Richard -- FYI.
https://on.ft.com/2v3CVWq
(Brookfield Property Management)
I've been reading a bit on chinese communism and governance, and what strikes me as an outside is how hermetic the langauge can be.
Of course our political language is just as hermetic, we're just more used to it!
The problem is when we start to this the hermetics are real -- rather than ways to talk about things we can't talk about.
And of course the hermetics are really by fancy people and automatically excludes everyone else.
RE: Mari; yes before our typical Fannie Mae mortage product there were a lot of there (HHFA, Buidling and Loan, personal loans, seller financing, etc) which would be impossible to decipher.
Sarah likely is part of Prologue DC. I have her email address. But very rarely she posts on HistoricWashington.
Were DC to reposition and rebrand the local cable channels the way I outline in my "cultural plan" concept (I was re-reading that stuff for something), it would be awesome to produce programs based on your and her work, etc. on local history.
One thing that really got me going on that idea was a program that John Muller (he's done books on Frederick Douglass, and is a librarian) did at the Shaw Library, which featured some provocative Black professors, and I was thinking that it was such a waste that only 50-60 people were there.
I wished the room had been set up with cameras like the DC City Council hearing rooms, so it could be broadcasted/rebroadcasted.
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ft blocked me sharetype=blocked
but I'll look it up via a library database. Thanks for the tip.
I always use Brookfield as an example of an international firm, but also as an example of great management of individual properties. (Suzanne used to work in one.) It's not merely "la de dah", they work at it, are really driven and metrics focused.
But speaking of language, ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/05/impeachment-was-a-health-check-for-american-democracy-it-is-not-well
In terms of national politics we've lost the common language of American identity and community improvement that transcends politics.
This guy is more hopeful:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/05/impeachment-was-a-health-check-for-american-democracy-it-is-not-well
I think hope is not out of the question, but the way the election system works, the fact that there is so much noise in the Democratic side of the primary process makes me pretty worried.
ft link worked in firefox...
... but this article isn't about Brookfield's impressiveness, but about bailing out Kushner. So obvious that it was about currying favor with the administration, which is what I thought was the case from the outset.
Never knew it was derived from the Bronfmans. (Interesting similarities to the Pritzkers.)
Interesting read. Thanks!
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