ULI Targets Bad Planning : Public Concern Brings on Education Program

There’s been a trend under way toward more excellence in design.

Extensive computer data bank helps to solve cities’ problems.

Somewhere between “cad,” “bounder” and “blankety-blank” lies the word developer.

“There’s no doubt about it,” William F. Caldwell, the newly elected president of the Urban Land Institute said wearily between sessions here at the ULI’s semi-annual meeting, “the word has a bad connotation. The public’s perception of us is that all we care about is digging up streets.”

Just exactly when bad land-use planning--or the absence of planning altogether--began raising the public’s hackles is lost in the dusty corridors of time, but it is perhaps significant that it was in 1936 that professionals in the field began feeling the backlash sufficiently to create the Urban Land Institute.

A mixed-discipline organization made up of developers, planners, engineers, architects, lawyers, financial institutions, public officials and academicians, the ULI--through research and education--is dedicated to defusing criticism of land usage through a very simple stratagem: eliminate bad land planning as much as possible

“It’s really hard to pin a bad land-usage (label) on any single element,” Caldwell said. “Usually, it’s a combination, and while a bad building design may be the most obvious flaw, it tends to rub off on the entire industry, not just the architect involved.”

Although at age 49, mature by the standards of most professional organizations, ULI has remained relatively small, and has, by design, kept a low profile until recently. Its decision to “go public” more visibly, one associate member attending the fall conference said, “is a reflection that the stigma surrounding ‘developer’ is still very much in place even though, largely through the influence of the ULI, there’s a lot more attention being paid to good land planning than ever before.”

“For the last five to 10 years,” according to Caldwell, who heads up Caldwell American Investments in Troy, Mich., “there’s been a definite trend under way toward more excellence in design--lenders are willing to give more money for good architecture and good overall planning even though it costs more.

“That’s not the way it used to be. If you had a 100% location and a good tenant, you put up your glass box--the ‘refrigerator look,’ we called it--and who gave a damn?” Caldwell added.

Where “developer” first began to attract negative publicity was in the big post-World War II baby and housing booms, Caldwell speculated, when inexpensive housing developments exploded across the country--cookie-cutter tract houses all too often laid out with little or no regard for orderly traffic flow, greenbelts or other aesthetic considerations.

And, in urban areas, critics bemoaned the similar explosion of look-alike high-rises characterized by one developer at this mid-October meeting as “looking like ice-cube trays standing on end.”

Despite the overall improvement in land planning in the last five to 10 years, “what concerns us right now,” Caldwell said, “is that there are new players in the marketplace--the S&Ls;, for instance--and too much money around in the capital markets looking for a home in real estate. These players have little experience . . . even less expertise, and they’re building simply because money is being provided to them.

“That inexperience is contributing to the overbuilding--the tremendous inventories--that we’re seeing today, and both Los Angeles and Phoenix are good examples of it.”

But, on a cheerier note, Caldwell added, both Phoenix and Los Angeles are also cities where “some good players are getting involved, too, and in Los Angeles, Bunker Hill is an excellent example of a well-planned joint venture involving the developers, the financial institutions, and the city establishing the standards.”

The thorny side of trying to turn any ugly duckling city into a swan, Caldwell conceded, is that virtually every city in the country--Washington, perhaps being the major exception--grew up willy-nilly long before anyone paid even lip service to planning.

“The city, for openers,” he continued, “has to realize that it has a problem and be willing to face it--because it’s the city and perhaps the state, after all, that has to finance the infrastructure to accomplish anything.”

In terms of specific advice, however, any city can draw upon ULI’s research and educational facilities in a number of ways, Caldwell said.

“If a city asks us for help, we’ve got a panel service where eight to 10 of our members will donate their time and come into the host city for five days and six nights, study the problem and at the end of that time, file a report on their recommendations. The focus may be one of design or marketing or financing.

“The expenses will cost the city anywhere from $60,000 to $75,000. We do this about a dozen times a year. That’s one way.

“Another service involves our extensive computer data bank where the city will outline in detail its problems, and by drawing on the data bank, we can provide them with case histories of other cities with similar problems.

“And then, about every other semiannual meeting, we have a session we call ‘Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned,’ where we get the developer or the city or whoever, to let down their hair, be truthful and tell us where, specifically, they went wrong on a project and how they would improve, or prevent it in the future.”

Additionally--and also largely unheralded--are the two- and three-day seminars ULI sponsors around the country to address special problems. “Maybe you’ve got a city planning a river-front or a lake-front development. And so we’ll bring in a developer or a city planner who has already done it.

Education, Research

“We just had a two-day seminar in San Francisco on inner-city financing, had an attendance of about 300 and had several mayors there who discussed various ways they had done it.”

The decision by ULI to put its major emphasis on education and research evolved about 15 years ago, Caldwell added, and of the organization’s annual budget of about $10 million, roughly $1 million each is spent on these two activities.

“The million we spend on research gets back to our membership and to public officials mainly through our publications,” Caldwell said. But the bulk of the million spent on education is more direct.

“We’ve gone in with scholarships at the graduate school level,” he added, “and right now we’re involved with 10 graduate schools and hand out 14 scholarships a year. We decided that we were going to have to get inside the heads of those young people coming into our field.”

Limit on Memberships

And youngsters, generally, are very much on the mind of the ULI’s president, who came into his post last July--there’s a lack of them.

“The trouble is that we’ve got a limit on the number of full members, 1,800, although we’ve got associate members who can’t participate in all of our activities, but who get reduced fees, get our publications and can attend meetings,” Caldwell said.

“Also, we limit developers to 55% of the membership. Planners, engineers, architects and the like are limited to 20% and financial institutions make up another 15%. The only category, 10%, where we have any openings is the one reserved for public officials and academicians--we have trouble filling it.

“The trouble is that we’ve got a waiting list now of about 400 would-be-members, most of them developers. We don’t want to get too big because we’re an educational organization in the land use profession, but we’ve got a lot of the older members, like myself, who have been around awhile, and we’re keeping a lot of the young people out whom we really need.”

Word’s Low Esteem

But while the ULI frets over the scarcity of new blood, its primary concern remains the low esteem that the word “developer” continues to have--even as the institute bends over backward to emphasize that it is not exclusively a fraternity of developers but a mix of disciplines interested in land utilization.

Still and all, a random sampling of the ULI’s membership clearly established that the public’s perception of developers--and their track record since World War II--is not only behind the sporadic outbursts of “no growth” sentiment around the country, but it has also made the real estate developer fair game for a never-ending schedule of local fees to pay for everything from mass transit to environmental projects deemed “socially desirable.”

And which, in large measure, ULI members emphasize, is affecting both the affordability of housing and raising the costs to consumers of a wide range of goods and services to offset soaring office and plant costs.