Foundations of Distressed Debt and Turnarounds: Tactics of Law, Finance and Negotiation [Module 1]

Virtually every career will encounter unanticipated outcomes. 

This half-semester course presents a curriculum of commercial real estate restructurings and distressed debt that involve risk analysis, legal considerations, and negotiation from the considered perspectives of owners, investors, lenders, tenants, employees, employees, policymakers, and society. The module utilizes real-world case studies that require a synthesis of structuring, valuation, and financial analysis.       

The course is designed for graduate-level students with a variety of backgrounds who demonstrate a curiosity in learning how to create value from otherwise fractured situations.  
 

MRE students who enter this course in Limited Enrollment Course Lottery will be automatically enrolled.

Public Finance for Planners: Creating Equitable & Sustainable Communities

Infrastructure challenges are significant and rising. To meet these challenges, urban planners will need to acquire foundational knowledge and skills in the public finance discipline and gain a basic awareness of how such tools and levers are used by city leaders to raise money to fund infrastructure, neighborhood redevelopment plans, and other new capital projects. This course will introduce students to the spectrum of public finance strategies and approaches that are available to cities, states and localities and will elevate how each strategy can be considered in the development of urban planning strategies to enhance an urban planners work and position projects to achieve strong equity, sustainability, and other place-based outcomes. The goal of the course will be to educate students on tactical ways that public finance principles can be integrated into the urban planning process. To that end, students will learn how to make choices that position an urban planning project for stronger funding, for stronger economic development outcomes and to achieve growth that is inclusive.  The course will combine various pedagogical methods that include lecture, discussion, and exercises that challenge students to consider their role as advisors to leaders in a city. Throughout the semester, students will learn how to evaluate the impact of alternative resource mobilization and public finance avenues that an urban planner may encounter by examining real projects. No prior course work or experience in public finance or economic development is necessary for students to succeed in the course, as the course will provide students with the necessary foundation to understand core concepts in the domains of public finance and economic development that will be covered.

Measuring the Good Life: Evolving Ideas and New Metrics

This course examines evolving ideas of the good life and the metrics we use to measure it–as the central goal of design and shaper of its practice, particularly in housing and urban districts. It traces the shift from “thick” to “thin” metrics in the process of modernization–a transition where direct experiences were traded for precise but monodimensional data points. By re-examining historical and contemporary cases, we aim to recover the thickness of metrics, balancing and expanding existing measures to better model present and near-future challenges–and, in the sense that what we measure is what we change, to better inform designers and amplify their agency to make real-world impact.

Following introductions to i) evolving ideas of the good life and ii) the problems of metrics and measurement in design, the course is organized around six broad ways of thinking about and measuring the good life: 1) Civic Abundance, 2) Ecological Embodiments, 3) The Social Fabric, 4) Pathways to Fulfillment, 5) Vitality and Repose, and 6) The Generational Pact. Each surveys examples from a range of historical periods and cultural contexts, identifying patterns and distinctions amidst recurring themes and contending with how local insights translate globally. Weekly sessions combine lectures, extended conversations with guest speakers, and review of ongoing student projects.

The main deliverable is an original metric of the good life, developed through four stages and presented at each stage as a visual manifesto formatted as a 10-15 slide social media think-piece, engaging critically with how contemporary platforms compress metrics today, often turning them into simplified proxies for complex realities. The sequence begins with 1) research into a specific metric category and proposal of original concepts, followed by 2) immersive fieldwork to ground the metric in direct observation, and 3) an expert interview to deepen the inquiry. Finally, projects are 4) tested with normative and extreme cases and developed into a “patent-style” diagram and document–instructing users on how the metric is defined, measured, and interpreted–establishing its value as a better way of framing and measuring design outcomes today.

Project Management, Construction Management, New Technologies

This course focuses on three crucial aspects of real estate practice: project management, construction management, and new technologies.

The project management portion will cover the skills needed to manage the many disciplines and concurrent tasks that take place from start of a development project to finish. The class will explore multiple project management styles that can each produce successful or less successful outcomes.  Examples will be drawn from industry.  

The construction management portion will address how owners, developers, owner’s representatives and/or property managers can best manage the construction process. A visit to a major development project will serve as a live case study.  

New technologies will explore recent technologies being utilized in the real estate environment including prop tech, smart buildings, artificial intelligence, construction management software, robotics. The course will ask the fundamental question: when and how is it better to use new technologies and what are the risks associated with such use. How can real estate catch-up to other industries that use AI and other software to support better outcomes?

 

Enrollment in this course is limited to students in the GSD Master in Real Estate program. The course meets January 5 through January 23 from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. daily in Gund 111. There is no class on January 19, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Real Estate Law

Real estate is not only the largest asset class in the global economy, but also one of the most heavily regulated sectors. The Real Estate Law course reviews the varied roles that lawyers play in commercial real estate, including negotiating and structuring transactions, navigating regulations across the real estate lifecycle, and resolving real estate-related disputes. Through background readings and transactional documents, the course in turn explores the legal dimensions of the acquisition, development, operation, and disposition of commercial real estate projects. And throughout, the course considers broader regulatory and policy ecosystems surrounding real estate markets in the United States and internationally.

Advanced Real Estate Finance, Development, and Management

5205 COURSE DESCRIPTION:

5205, Advanced Real Estate Finance Development and Management is an important course for students going into real estate acquisitions, development, asset management, investments, or private equity. This year’s course is divided into two major sections.

Section 1 focuses on individual properties or projects and covers five major topics: (1) advanced analysis and management of development projects, (2) advanced analysis and management of acquisitions (including complex waterfalls and investor after-tax capital accounts), (3) the asset’s capital stack, distress, and “special situations”, (4) management and recovery of an asset in a distressed environment, (5) the real estate underwriting process, investment committee package and stochastic return analyses.

Section 2 focuses on critical concepts and skills required to build performing real estate portfolios and successful real estate companies. Section 2 covers up to seven additional topics: (6) real estate market cycles and investment/management considerations, (7) portfolio construction and techniques for optimizing long-term risk adjusted rates of return, (8) REITs and the IPO process,  (9) raising private equity capital for real estate projects, portfolios, and companies, (10) developing a financial business plan for a startup, (11) PropTech, CleanTech, and FinTech in real estate, and (12) leadership of real estate companies.

The course is fast paced, rigorous and quantitative. We will be using a combination of  case studies, lectures and problem sets to examine a multitude of important advanced real estate topics. Many of the cases require students to apply a full range of real estate skills and learnings to evaluate the appropriate strategic opportunities. They also require one to work outside of their comfort zone in tackling complex problems. We may occasionally host guest lecturers who are experts in their respective fields.

This course is required and intended for GSD MRE students. Non-MRE students who successfully complete GSD 5204 with high grades, may apply to take 5205 with the instructor’s pre-approval in my.harvard. This course builds on 5204 and assumes students can adeptly analyze and model real estate financial pro formas, including levered investor returns, project waterfalls, and investor taxes for all major real estate asset categories.

Public and Private Development

Cities are developed by a complex blend of public and private actors and actions. Using lectures, discussions, guest case studies, individual and team exercises, and readings, this course introduces students to the analytic methods, contextual frameworks, and implementation techniques needed by private for-profit, private not-for-profit, and public actors to understand, evaluate, and carry out development in cities. The course commences with instruction about core analytic methods, stressing real estate financial analysis while also addressing modified cost-benefit, economic impact, and fiscal impact analyses. Early classes additionally examine legal, institutional, political, and ethical frameworks equally essential to navigating public and private development. Together, the analytic methods and contextual frameworks form the basis for decision rules about appropriate tradeoffs and deployments of public and private resources as well as the choice of implementation techniques for pursuing urban development. Implementation techniques covered in the course include public subsidies, public land disposition through sale or lease. public land acquisition through eminent domain, public and private provision of physical infrastructure, inclusionary zoning, linkage, exactions, incentive zoning, community benefits agreements, business improvement districts, and “friends” groups. Although most of the implementation tools and examples explored in the course are drawn from United States practice, international tools and examples are introduced from time to time to demonstrate the range of variation. Critical viewpoints about the very model of public and private development will be regularly discussed.

Environmental Histories: Ancient Practices and Modern Problems

This course investigates the environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean world through a diverse array of archives–including cultural materials such as paintings, mosaics, excavated landscapes, and textual records; natural proxies like ice cores, ocean sediments, and dendrochronological data; and archaeobotanical and faunal evidence, such as ancient fish populations that inform us about past marine ecologies. By juxtaposing human and environmental archives, students will critically analyze how ancient societies perceived, interacted with, and were shaped by their environments. The course engages with ongoing scholarly debates about the potential for ancient modes of resource management, agricultural practice, and ecological adaptation to inform resilient solutions to today’s environmental crises. It further interrogates the methodological and interpretive challenges of translating ancient practice into modern application, asking what is at stake in forging environmental bridges between past and present. Through case studies, interdisciplinary readings, and hands-on analysis of select archives, students will develop skills to assess both the promise and the limits of learning from the environmental past.

Monuments, Monumentality, and Meaning

This lecture course explores monumentality through a close historical and theoretical examination of what a monument has been thought to be, what monumentality has meant, and how monuments have succeeded or failed to embody their intended meanings. The course material extends chronologically from pre-history to the present but remains within the cultural heritage of the Western tradition and is, in fact, a course about that intellectual and artistic tradition with examples ranging from Stonehenge and Archaic Greek Kouroi to Breuer’s proposed service to war memorial on Cambridge Common (1945). In-depth case studies will display the variety of monuments and monumentality exemplifying the hermeneutic breadth of these concepts in the Western tradition of art, architecture, and urbanism. The course proposes a fresh look at projects which have been marginalized in academic scholarship and offers viewpoint diversity to other architectural history courses at the GSD.

All monuments are about memory but the significance of many, perhaps all, is not stable or fixed but evolves over time. Case studies will highlight how monuments are used in the creation of political and cultural identities. Always awe-inspiring and therefore close to wonder, monuments serve as a powerful idiom which, as historical examples such as Milan’s Castello Sforzesco to Hitler’s Germania show, can be abused. Urban projects will be considered through the lenses of monumentality and memory. Particular attention is given to American architecture and urbanism from the design of Washington D.C. to Rockefeller Center in New York. Some, such as the Seven Wonders of the World, fall into a separate class of monuments, lauded especially for their engineering and technology, while others, such as many UNESCO heritage sites, represent the culture that produced them. We will look to religious buildings and martyria (buildings or shrines over the tombs of martyrs), such as St. Peter’s in Rome, Richardson’s Trinity Church, Boston, and Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, places of worship, which could be considered an explicit act of memory in a public place. The time seems right for a re-evaluation of the many nineteenth and twentieth-century monuments, monumental buildings, and urban communities done in historicizing styles, which are considered by Modernists as either inauthentic, authoritarian, or both. Throughout the course we will remain mindful of the Modernist rejection of the American examples, asking whether it is true.
 

The Architect as Producer: Theory as Liberatory Practice

The past few years have brought the necessity of theory as liberatory practice to the foreground of discussions on architecture. The interconnected crises of war, enforced migrations, global warming, and structural inequality have put pressure on how we understand what architecture is and does. These events have highlighted the role of architecture in the rise of land dispossession, material extraction, labor struggle, and conflicting epistemologies. Thinking with bell hooks, the course reframes architectural theory a liberatory practice. Thinking with Manfredo Tafuri, with respond to these challenges by rethinking architecture’s position within the relations of production.

In this course we examine contemporary spatial thinking that responds to these challenges and seeks to address them through four interrelated topics: lands, materials, labors, and knowledges. We start by questioning where architecture happens, the land we stand on, the ways in which lands are transformed into real estate, and the role architects play in this process. We then move on to the materials, resources, and objects that architecture is made of, as well as the processes of extraction they are imbricated in. We address the bodies that participate in the making and maintenance of architecture, from building labor to the role of the architect as worker. We conclude by reflecting on the motivations that animate the discipline and its teaching, and the ways in which it is being unlearned and reimagined.

Students will be evaluated on class participation, discussion facilitation, short writing assignments, and a research project. This course is planned as a “lecture” with many small group activities and other alternative pedagogies. It qualifies as a BTC Distributional Elective.