2024 Winter Issue of Urban Land - 30

profound. " It extends beyond the office
worker, and [affects] where people
want to be for retail, and where people
want to live, " she said. " That, in turn,
[affects] where people want to work,
and the value of office buildings in
various submarkets. "
One major result has been a
migration of occupiers away from
single-use downtowns to mixed-use
neighborhoods with newer, highperformance
buildings and more
transportation connectivity. Hines-Pierce
noted that downtown Los Angeles has
a significantly higher vacancy rate and
lower rents compared to Century City,
just 12 miles away.
Clarence Anthony, CEO and executive
director of the National League of Cities,
said that leaders in urban areas are
already " working on figuring out how
... we reimagine those buildings. How
do we reimagine our small business
engagement? " Those leaders are also
looking at how to plan communities
differently, whether by making better
use of open space or revamping zoning
laws and permitting processes to speed
innovation. " It shouldn't take a year or
nine months to go through an approval
process. "
The Biden Administration is also
taking a more active supporting role
in the reinvention of urban centers,
according to Vincent Reina, the senior
advisor for housing and urban policy
at the White House Domestic Policy
Council.
MAURICE CONTI
How the Real Estate Industry Can Effectively
Leverage AI
RON NYREN
" i'm going to go out on a limb and
say that, in the next 20 years, we're
going to see as much change to the
way that we do our work as we have
in the last 2,000 years, " said futurist
Maurice Conti during " Future of Work,
Cities, and Mobility-and the Impact
of AI, " the closing general session
of the 2023 ULI Fall Meeting in Los
30
URBAN LAND WINTER 202 4
Angeles. Conti-who has worked with
such companies as Tesla, BMW, Ford,
Nike, Arup, and Airbus-spoke about
the rapid rise of generative artificial
intelligence (AI) systems and their
potential to affect the development
industry.
Conti told attendees that the most
important question in this time of
global uncertainty, rapid change, and
increasing complexity is not " What's
going to happen in the future? " but,
despite what's going on now, " How do
we thrive? "
" As human beings, we're actually
pretty good at dealing with this kind of
disruption, " Conti said. " We're equipped
with three things that you bring to work
Last week, for example, as part of
a larger plan to increase the housing
supply, the administration announced
that it would allocate $35 billion from
various existing programs to support
office-to-residential conversions and
transit-oriented development, including
low-interest loans, loan guarantees,
grants, and tax incentives.
In addition, " we've done a lot of work
to reduce barriers to building housing,
like restrictive zoning and land use
practices, " said Reina, who is working
for the White House while on leave
from the University of Pennsylvania,
where he is an associate professor of
urban economics and planning.
Hines-Pierce noted that only a small
portion of existing office buildings
are suitable for conversion. A recent
working paper published by the
National Bureau of Economic Research
estimated that only 11 percent of
commercial office buildings meet that
criterion, though global design firm
Gensler's study of 1,000 potential
projects puts the number at 25 percent.
Such low numbers align with the
plenitude of obsolete assets, built
from the 1970s to the 1990s, that have
large floor plates, which don't provide
sufficient access to natural light that
residential units require. Furthermore,
repurposing office buildings remains a
challenge because " once you get into
an existing asset, you don't always know
what you're going to find, versus when
you're building ground up, " Hines-Pierce
said.
Even so, finding ways to reuse
existing buildings provides a major
benefit in terms of fighting climate
change, according to Hines-Pierce.
Doing conversions rather than
teardowns and new construction
can reduce the amount of embodied
carbon, which includes emissions
generated during the manufacturing
and transportation of building materials
and the raising of a structure. Whereas
much of the effort to reduce buildings'
carbon footprint has focused upon
emissions generated from operations,
embodied carbon increasingly is
recognized as an important opportunity,
as well.
Anthony said that the American
Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion stimulus
package proposed by President Biden
and passed by Congress in early
2021, helped downtowns by enabling
city leaders to give small businesses
and companies money to help them
survive the pandemic. Additionally, the
bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed later
that year, created jobs and provided an
opportunity to rebuild such assets as
water systems, he noted.
" It actually started us to be able to
rethink work, what work looks like, and
what types of jobs and what types of
skills ... we need, " Anthony said.
PATRICK J. KIGER is a Washington, D.C.-based
journalist and author.
2024 Winter Issue of Urban Land

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of 2024 Winter Issue of Urban Land
