Urban Economics and Market Analysis

This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in, and managing cities and their built environments. Urban economics incorporates the concept of space into canonical economic models and provides a lens for analyzing and describing the nature and organization of economic activity in urban settings. We will explore questions around why cities exist in the first place, what determines their growth, and what features contribute to their economic advantages as well as their unique problems. Why do some cities grow faster than others? Can cities ever get too dense or large? We will draw from typical urban economic models and frameworks but will also discuss and test their limits when applying them to complex urban systems. For example, how well do these models address issues of segregation and informality in cities? The course will draw from research and scholarship in the field of urban economics, as well as actual cases, policy applications and guest lecturers employing these concepts in the field.

The course also explores urban economics and market analysis as they intersect with real estate practice.  Students learn, in a hands-on way, how to employ urban economics concepts and frameworks, including location theory, the interaction between local and global spatial dynamics, demographic trends, and regional economic forecasting, for data-driven market analyses useful for real estate and urban development practice more broadly. Students who take this class will be able to use economic frameworks and methods to design, evaluate and implement planning and policy interventions as well as understand the role of real estate markets in a range of urban settings. This course assumes no previous coursework in economics and will require some, but not extensive, math and graphing. This course satisfies the Economic Methods requirement for urban planning students, is required for Master in Real Estate students, and is open to cross-registrant students from other schools (including MIT). MRE students may pursue a waiver of this requirement by successfully passing a waiver examination administered during orientation week.

Note: MRE students can place out of this course.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. The course will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 7th and will meet regularly thereafter.

First Semester Architecture Core: PROJECT

PROJECT is the first core studio of the four-semester sequence of the MArch I program. With a multiplicity of references, PROJECT may refer to fundamental modes of architectural representation, the mapping of the subject in the larger objective context, or a conceptual foray into territory unknown. 

A series of focused and intense design exercises requires students to investigate fundamental disciplinary issues of architectural thought, practice, and representation. As the introductory studio in the first professional degree program, the curriculum addresses the varied educational backgrounds of incoming MArch I candidates. Specifically, students are encouraged to leverage their varied expertise in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines to find provocative and perhaps unexpected motivations of architectural form. Techniques of representation and iterative development across various mediums will be required. 

Prerequisites: Enrollment in MArch I program.

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Affordable Housing and Community Development

This course is intended for students interested in the affordable housing crisis. Can governments alone solve this problem or are public-private approaches an answer?  The course explores how affordable housing is created, preserved, and managed, as well as how community development strategies incorporate and extend beyond the provision of affordable housing. Specific methods to sponsor, permit, finance, design, construct, manage, and preserve affordable housing are presented, including use of public subsidies and regulatory mandates.

MRE students who want to take this course should enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery and will be automatically enrolled.

It Takes A Village [Module 1]

“It takes a village” to develop a real estate project is more than just a clever catch-phrase. In any city around the world, assembling and working with the people who can make or break a real estate project, especially the ones that look perfect on paper, is a crucial tactical and strategic skill. From advocacy groups, to the public at large, to community groups, to electeds, fostering thoughtful relationships with these individuals and groups is critical to the success of any real estate project. Using real world examples that highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement, this course will focus on teaching students how bringing people along can be the key to getting hard projects done.

MRE students who want to take this course should enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery and will be automatically enrolled.

 

Race and Real Estate [Module 2]

This course examines historical and contemporary real estate practices that have negatively affected racial minorities in the United States and internationally. The course reviews the history of land ownership and housing in the United States as shaped by the legacy of slavery and subsequent discriminatory practices such as deed restrictions, redlining, predatory lending, and steering. These practices have negatively affected trajectories of intergenerational wealth as well as social outcomes in public health, education, and political power. The course also looks at the participation of underrepresented minorities in today’s real estate profession and efforts to create greater inclusion. While the course principally focuses on race and real estate in the United States, it also looks at race and real estate in the international context as well as gender, class, ethnicity, and religion in the United States and internationally. Classes include lectures, discussions of readings, presentations by guests, and student presentations. Students will be evaluated on their participation in class, group presentation, and a final paper.

MRE students who want to take this course should enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery and will be automatically enrolled.

Transportation Economics and Finance

We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and scooters. The amount and type of available infrastructure that is available to urban travelers depends very much on who is willing to pay for it and how.

Upon completion of this course, you will be prepared to evaluate alternative methods of funding the construction, purchase, and maintenance of transportation infrastructure in terms of feasibility and fairness. You will also be prepared to use financing and pricing as tools to shape the development of transportation networks and to facilitate sustainable travel.

Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities

The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries. The presentation and analysis of global cases on land value capture, community land trusts, and land readjustment, among other land policy and financing tools, will demonstrate why and how land markets and creative land policy approaches are relevant to planners, urban designers, and risk managers, especially as they pursue sustainable, equitable urban development goals. The course identifies the relationship between planning regulations, property rights, infrastructure investments, and land value increments and the synergies that can be created at the local level to sustain municipal finances and the investments needed to battle climate change and informality, among other transcendental policy issues.

The course delves into the technical and political debates unleashed in communities seeking to attain a greater balance between those who bear the costs of urbanization and those who benefit from it, especially as those costs and benefits are manifested in land values, housing affordability, access to economic opportunities, and exposure to environmental risks. Each section of the course asks questions about the possibilities and limits of land policy and land-based financing to achieving just, equitable, and generative urban aims. In the process, the readings and discussions offer a closer examination of the role government, the private sector and organized sectors of civil society play in shaping urban outcomes and quality of life through the effective use, taxation, and stewardship of land. The second half of the class will focus primarily on management and implementation issues that emerge from cities that have rolled out innovative land policy and financing tools, especially those that support land value capture.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Urban Ethnographies

Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention to the values of an international middle class rather than to local experience. In this course, we will read some urban ethnography inspecting the interactions among local people, planners, anthropologists, architects, and builders in order to think against the grain, especially in cases where disputes over whose heritage is at stake dominate the discourse. We will also examine the role of conflict in shaping urban space and ask whether attempts to smooth it over are necessarily to the benefit of local populations, especially where internal factionalism and political dissent are at stake. Finally, we will also examine the role of urban space in shaping people’s subjectivities and ask what that role tells us about governmental structures and the way they affect ordinary people’s lives.

The first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Housing and Urbanization in the United States

This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes a) give rise to certain policy and planning challenges and b) should shape how practitioners respond to these challenges. A major theme of the course is that consequences of previous policy and planning interventions have had lasting effects.  These are reflected today in continued residential segregation by race and income, the persistence of barriers to affordable and healthy housing, and gaps in homeownership rates and housing wealth by race and ethnicity. The theme of structural racism as shaping access to housing over US history will be examined at some length.

The course first lays out a framework for understanding the roles housing plays in individuals’ lives, neighborhoods, and the metropolis. Class sessions examine the unique attributes and roles of housing, including the role of homes as constitutive of the private and domestic realms, housing as an icon and encoder of social status, and housing as a commodity. This section of the course also explores housing as a driver of urbanization and shaper of neighborhoods, as well as theories of neighborhood change.

The next four sessions of the course focus on government interventions into housing in the United States from the beginning of urbanization up to the 1960s. Classes cover early efforts to eradicate slums and improve housing for the poor; systematic efforts to enforce segregation by race in the early 20th century including the practice of redlining; federal involvement in homeownership and suburbanization, ; the policy motivations and design of early public housing and urban renewal programs; and local interventions to regulate the development of housing and access to it, particularly in suburbs.

The third section of the course focuses on a second wave of interventions arising in the 1960s in response to unanticipated consequences of earlier interventions, including public housing and urban renewal, as well as responses to demographic and economic shifts and the Civil Rights and citizen participation movements. This section of the course examines policy interventions aimed at affordability, including rental subsidy programs, fair housing law, and community development programs, and reflects new ideas about who should be in charge of revitalization plans and where federal assistance should be targeted.

The final section of the class takes us to the present, examining more recent trends shaping housing and planning and policy interventions. Sessions will focus on the housing and foreclosure crisis and its aftermath; recent trends in and responses to concentrated poverty and segregation by race and income; and gentrification. We will also take an in-depth look at the current housing situations of low-income households and housing’s relationship to poverty and health. Final classes will look at the implications of the ongoing affordability crisis for future housing supply, as well as demographic shifts and climate change that are forcing planners and policymakers to reevaluate the design of our housing stock and its location. Given the slow departure from the housing sphere by the federal government, these sessions will necessarily focus more on local responses to housing issues.

Real Estate, Society, Environment

This course examines the emerging context for real estate practice worldwide that measures success not solely by the financial bottom line but also by achievement of beneficial spatial, social, and environmental outcomes. Real estate developers, investors, owners, lenders, and public agencies globally are applying “environmental, social, and governance” metrics (ESG) to their investment and development decisions, even as some observers are skeptical about how effective or genuine this move is. Students will learn how transnational, national, and local legal mandates and market-driven preferences for sustainable and inclusive real estate can be viewed as positive, generative opportunities rather than constraints to be overcome. Understanding and operationalizing social and environmental principles can lead to a more successful and meaningful real estate practice whether originating in private for-profit, private not-for-profit, or public sectors.

Although this is a limited enrollment course, MRE students should enroll directly during the open enrollment period and not enter the Limited Enrollment Course Lottery.

 

TThe first day of GSD classes, Tuesday, September 5th, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets only on Tuesdays, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 12th. It will meet regularly thereafter.