Designer Developer
Design and finance can both be understood as universal languages. Although architects, landscape architects, and planners are trained to produce and interpret design, it is becoming more and more necessary for them also to be conversant and sometimes fluent in finance to implement innovative design proposals. As building complexity and the sophistication of building needs, construction methods, and finance have increased, architects have progressively taken on less risk and abandoned more agency. This seminar will explore the designer-as-developer model: the potential to carve out more agency for designers in construction and development, and how design generates added value in real estate development.
The seminar will begin with lectures on the designer-as-developer model and discuss how the value of design can be quantified in the real estate development industry. The course will cover project and construction management, construction pricing, permitting and approval procedures, and basic financial structures for designer-developer projects. Lectures and tutorials will be given on basic financial modeling as required to complete the final project for the course. The seminar will review these topics through discussions based on real-world case studies. The seminar will incorporate case studies that examine how designer-developer projects were able to further design innovation while maintaining a handle on feasibility. Practitioners who have leveraged their background in design while working in the fields of Real Estate Development, Real Estate Investment, and Community Development will be invited to speak as guest lecturers to share their real-world experience as a designer-developer. Guest lecturers will include Alloy, Catalyst Urban Development, JP Morgan Chase, LA Más, Duval Companies, and Placetailor.
Designers often value design innovation and public impact, while most clients heavily weigh feasibility, schedule, and financial returns. By acting as both the designer and client, students will learn how to understand the values and risks of building in the 21st century. We will focus on a designer’s ability to imagine and bring progressive building ideas to market and discuss effective project and construction management. To reinforce the material discussed in class, students will be tasked with completing two assignments throughout the course. In the Case Study Assignment, students will be asked to identify and research a designer-developer project and present the deal points to the class. For the Group Project Proposal, using knowledge gained throughout the course, students will be expected to put forward a proposal for the designer-development initiated project. The final project may be of any scale or location, but must represent financial viability, have a design agenda, and identify potential risks and proposed mitigations in the process of bringing the project to market.
This seminar is aimed at equipping students with the knowledge and confidence to develop their own mission-aligned projects, whether they are market-rate projects or community benefit developments. Students will be exposed to the myriad considerations and processes that enable a building to be designed, approved, and built. They will learn to align their entrepreneurial aspirations with the pursuit of creating work that benefits a greater public. Design and finance are seldom discussed together due to the perception that they belong to two different phases of development. However, for developers, design is a powerful tool when underwriting a potential project. For designers, acknowledging the financial constraints and understanding precedents for economic opportunity can provide a sustainable foundation for design innovation.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Modern Housing and Urban Districts: Concepts, Cases and Comparisons
This seminar course deals with 'modern housing' covering a period primarily from the 1900s to the present. It engages with 'urban districts' in so far as housing projects under discussion contribute to the making of these districts, and are in turn shaped by the districts in which they are placed. Cases will be drawn from different contexts, with emphasis on Europe, North America, and East Asia, although also including examples from the Americas, South and Southeast Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania.
The course begins with discussions of several broad topics germane to the issue and design of contemporary housing, including ideas of community and what constitutes a dwelling community across the span of historical time and cultural perspectives; territories and types dealing with underlying urban conditions that play host to the housing; and interiors and other landscapes that chart the diversity of contemporary living, including expressive and representation issues concerning place-specific and inherently situated aspects of dwelling, alongside the dynamic, perennially future-oriented dimensions of living.
These broad topical discussions will be followed by case studies, roughly categorized by the characteristics of architectural projects and underlying urban conditions. In each category, two contemporary examples will provide the primary focus, while precedents and other contemporaneous projects will be introduced to flesh out historical circumstances and lineages of development. These categories will include: 1) urban block shapers, 2) superblock configurations, 3) tall towers, 4) big buildings, 5) mat buildings, 6) housing and landscapes, 7) infrastructural engagements, 8) infill and puntal interventions, 9) housing special populations, and 10) rapid and incremental housing. The concluding discussion will examine various dimensions across projects and urban conditions, in part to identify opportunities and limitations for housing design, but also to set contemporary housing aside from modern and pre-modern housing in prior eras.
In Spring 2022, the first two classes will be online, with 1) a pre-recorded lecture to be viewed asynchronously, and 2) a live discussion on zoom during class time. From the third week onwards, each class will include 1) a pre-recorded lecture to be viewed asynchronously, 2) an in-class summary of the lecture, 3) student presentation of the case projects, and 4) a discussion focused on the weekly theme and reading. Beyond weekly participation and contribution to in-class discussions, the main deliverable of the course is the research, analysis, and presentation of case study projects. Students will be paired and assigned the cases at the beginning of the semester. The presenting students will meet with the instructor one and two weeks before the presentation date. Short readings may also be assigned to facilitate weekly discussions.
Up to five seats will be held for MDes students.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Urban Design for Planners
This course introduces physical planners to the approaches, techniques and tools of urban design necessary to structure the spatial and dimensional relationships of the built environment. Through an individual, Boston-based project, students will give spatial definition and form to an urban district through the elaboration of streets, blocks, building morphologies, open space networks and/or design guidelines. This course complements the first year Core Urban Planning Studios at the GSD by concentrating on the design of urban spaces – informed by, but independent of – the demands of quantitative analysis, decision-making frameworks, economic forecasting or the specifics of implementation.
Students will learn urban design strategies for integrating form and program into a framework for research, collaboration, and communication. Students will gain familiarity with the technical tools and representational techniques essential for planners to effectively portray urban redevelopment scenarios.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Climate Justice
Recent discourse around climate change—including debates about the Anthropocene, Green New Deal legislation, the dire warnings of the IPCC, to name a few—increasingly make evident that climate change is much more than a technological problem of carbon mitigation. Taking recent geological and climatic changes as symptoms of deeper structural challenges, this class will address climate change as fundamentally a problem of social and environmental injustice. The class will argue for the necessity of studying theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence along with climate science, policy, and international diplomacy. In our search for climate justice, the class will trace various forms of climate activism within the history of environmental movements, explore non-Western forms of knowledge as key critiques and logics of action, and evaluate concrete suggestions for radical reform. We will discuss how climate justice as a framework of concern is both universal and specific, and we will critically engage ideas of justice at different scales, from the local to the global, with careful attention to context. We will ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Travel Behavior and Forecasting
All planning is based on planners’ beliefs about the future. In many cases, the most important (and most uncertain) aspects of the future relate to the behavior of the people for whom we are planning. For transportation planners, the effectiveness of our plans depend on how individuals and households will change their travel habits in response to them. How can we predict these kinds of changes, and what is the purpose of such predictions? Throughout the course, we will grapple with the question of whether a planner’s role is to accommodate future behavior or to influence it.
In this course, you will learn how characteristics of the built environment (including housing density, jobs-housing balance, and the availability of transportation infrastructure) and demographic and life-cycle characteristics (including gender, race, income, and family formation) influence decisions of individuals and households about where and when to travel and by which transportation mode. You will also conduct your own analysis of these relationships for a specific region and apply what you learn to forecasting the demand for transportation infrastructure for a variety of possible futures.
Prerequisite GSD 5215 or equvalent knowlege of quantitative analysis.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Environment, Economics, and Enterprise
This course focuses on the intersection between environmental and social opportunities in the built environment and the economic impact they have on the commercial enterprise ecosystem. It is taught through interdisciplinary exercises, HBS-style case studies, and discussions involving architectural design, environmental technology, urban economics and commercial real estate practices.
How can one optimize the benefits of environmental or social sustainability while generating a higher return on investment in buildings, infrastructure or other forms of real estate?
Where are the opportunities for real estate initiatives that are highly functional, healthy, aesthetically pleasing and financially rewarding?
The challenge to designers, developers, entrepreneurs, consultants, and other professionals lies in finding and communicating these synergies. This cross-disciplinary course will give students an approach to problem solving to help them contribute to thoughtful, high-impact decisions about design, construction, and enterprise formation that are environmentally, socially, and economically impactful.
The course will cover various elements including:
1. Architectural design for sustainability
2. Financial and social quantification of economic impact and risks,
3. Capitalization of sustainable projects including public and private equity, public and private debt, and social sponsors,
4. Financial evaluation and pro forma analysis
At the end of the course students will be able to:
a. identify sustainability opportunities for projects or potentially new businesses. Identify sustainable/economic win-win solutions
b. develop, with rigor, the advanced sustainable design programs to enhance performance of a particular project or enterprise
c. model the environmental and economic impact of each proposed initiative independently as well as the cumulative initiatives taken together on a “systems basis”
d. translate enhanced design and idea conception into a project's or business’s financial pro forma, and communicate the financial impact clearly to market makers
e. complete accurate cost benefit economic analysis, with realistic assumptions on ability to finance and ability (if any) to obtain premium value on exit
f. analyze market demand for projects or appropriate businesses with and without enhanced sustainable design
g. explain their ideas in the language of decision-makers, from community groups to financial investors
Class Structure: Please visit my.Harvard to see the full note on the class format.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
U. S. Housing Markets, Problems, and Policies
This course examines the operation of U.S. housing markets, the principal housing problems facing the nation, and policy approaches to address them within the existing political, regulatory and market context. The course is structured around five central housing problems that are the focus of US housing policy: the challenge of producing housing affordable for lower-income households generally; approaches to subsidizing rental housing for low- and moderate-income households; the challenges facing low-income households and people of color in attaining homeownership; the high degree of residential segregation by race/ethnicity and income and associated differential access to public and private resources that results; and how housing policy can support broader efforts at community revitalization. Each section of the course will develop a detailed understanding of the nature of the problem, how the operation of housing markets either produce or fail to address the problem, introduce the principal federal, state and local policy approaches available to address the problem, and wrestle with critical policy questions that arise in choosing how best to address the problem. The goal of the course is to build both a foundation of knowledge and a critical perspective needed to diagnose the genesis of the nation’s housing problems, to identify the potential policy levers for addressing these failures, and to assess the relative merits of alternative approaches. Synchronous class sessions will be a mixture of short lectures and large and small group class discussions focusing on the assigned readings. Each synchronous class will be supplemented by short asynchronous lectures as well. The course will include frequent guests to provide a range of perspectives on the topics covered, including those from the public and nonprofit sectors, researchers, developers, and the communities served. Students will be expected to come to synchronous classes prepared to be fully engaged participants in the discussions. Over the course of the semester, students will be required to prepare periodic reviews of assigned readings and prepare questions for guests which will be shared on Canvas. The principal assignments for the class will be a mid-term paper analyzing a housing challenge in a jurisdiction of the student’s choosing and a final paper assessing policy options for addressing the challenge and proposing a course of action. The course is intended for graduate students with an interest in US housing policy, although no previous background in housing policy or disciplinary training is required.
This course is jointly listed with HKS as SUP 670.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Building and Leading Real Estate Enterprises and Entrepreneurship
This course focuses on how you conceive, build and lead successful real estate companies. By virtue of the industry in which they compete, real estate companies are almost always founded and developed by entrepreneurs. A few grow to become category killers; others are able to compete in a crowded and competitive landscape. Many, however, are eventually closed down; sometimes due to changing market forces, sometimes due to lack of good corporate strategy or execution, and sometimes due to the founder neglecting to institutionalize a lasting organization to succeed him or her.
Taught through a combination of lectures, cases and analytical problems, this course examines (primarily through the lens of real estate investment and development companies), the critical ingredients required to grow and lead long-term competitive enterprises. The course will begin with an examination of how to optimize the performance of real properties and then migrate to the design and development of successful companies that own or service properties.
At the end of this course, students should gain a deeper appreciation of how owners think and act when they oversee their companies. They will specifically be introduced to how to develop a robust strategy, capital plan, corporate culture and execution capability that are part of every great real estate company. Students taking this course should also be able to construct the elements of a simple business plan for a startup. Students are also encouraged to think about how they may launch their own real estate enterprise during the course, and to make active use of other Harvard resources, including Harvard clubs and facilities like the I-lab, as they think through their entrepreneurial opportunities.
Paired Course: Although not mandatory, this course is meant to be taken in conjunction with GSD 5275, which meets the first half of the semester; it is also 2 credits and meets at the same time as 5276. GSD 5276 will build on many of the questions and concepts that 5275 postulates.
Note: Most GSD faculty teaching elective courses will offer online live information sessions January 12th- January 14th. Please visit the Course Information Schedule for more information.
Advanced Real Estate Finance
This course builds on GSD 5204 and comparable introductory real estate courses offered by other schools at Harvard. This year’s course covers five main topics: (1) Advanced Financial Analysis and Deal Structuring for Acquisitions (including waterfalls), (2) Advanced Financial Analysis and Structuring for Land and Development Projects, (3) Debt Financing and Debt Investments, (4) Real Estate Market Cycles and Portfolio Structuring, (5) Management and recovery of Assets in a Distressed Environment
The objective of the course is to give students in-depth financial analytical skills for project acquisitions and development, real estate financing, and portfolio management. Using case studies and lectures, the course focuses on advanced real estate topics for all major real estate product-types including apartments, office, retail, industrial, single-family, and land development. A major emphasis in the class is to build students’ financial modeling skills and their knowledge of advanced industry practices. Many cases will require students to apply a full range of acquisition, development, investment, disposition, financing, and management decisions at the property level. Key decision-making for all phases of the development process including site selection, design, financing, construction, leasing, operations, and sales are stressed throughout the first half of the course. Other strategic requirements for completing successful projects such as acquisition due diligence, debt and equity structuring, market cycle timing, and asset recovery in a distressed environment are covered during the other half.
Paired Course: Although not mandatory, this course is meant to be taken in conjunction with GSD 5276, which takes place in the second half of the semester; it is also 2 credits and meets at the same time as 5275. GSD 5276 will build on many of the questions and concepts that 5275 postulates.
This course will be taught online through Friday, February 4th.
Public and Private Development
Cities are developed by a complex blend of public and private actors and actions. This course employs a combination of lectures, discussions, readings, case studies, and individual and group exercises to help students understand, evaluate, and implement public and private development. The course commences with instruction about core analytic methods, emphasizing real estate financial analysis while also addressing modified cost-benefit, economic impact, and fiscal impact analyses. Early classes also explore legal, institutional, administrative, political, and ethical contextual frameworks. Together, the analytic methods and contextual frameworks allow for elaboration of decision rules about thoughtful balances in the deployment of public and private resources. The remainder of the course covers specific implementation tools including, among others, public subsidies, public land disposition through sale or lease, public land acquisition through eminent domain, value capture mechanisms, community benefits agreements, and business improvement districts. The goal of the course is to foster reflective practitioners, whether planners, designers, developers, public policymakers, or advocates, who think critically and pragmatically as they navigate the trade-offs inherent in public-private city building. Note that most of the implementation tools and examples explored in the course are drawn from United States practice, but international tools and examples are introduced from time to time to demonstrate the range of variation.
Jointly Offered Course: HKS SUP-668
In Spring 2022, enrollment in this course is limited to only those students who are required to take it to meet their degree requirements.
This course will be taught in person beginning the week of January 24th.