Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development
Director's Message
The built environment (real estate and infrastructure) is the largest asset class in the U.S. economy, comprising 35% of the country's wealth. The built environment is also responsible for over 70% of the energy usage and CO2 emissions, making it the greatest contributor to climate change.
Real estate shapes our physical environment and, to a large extent, determines how we all live, work, and play. It also directly or indirectly affects energy consumption, global climate change, social relations and equity, public finance, foreign policy, capital markets, and personal and corporate wealth creation. Long a consumer of locally generated finance, it became the newest global financial asset class in the 1990s, joining stocks, bonds, and cash. There is also a downside to the role real estate plays; two of the last three recessions have been primarily caused by a downturn in real estate.
As a result of the increased interest of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve in this new asset class, real estate has become commodified and narrowly defined as a series of standard product types. This commodification of the industry is thought to have been necessary to facilitate its trading in the large volumes financial markets require. Most of these standard products tend to be built in a low-density, sprawling fashion. These standard product types are generally exclusively served by automobile, and their form is largely determined by parking and access by the car, described as "drivable sub-urban." Most zoning ordinances in the United States legally mandate this form of development. The real estate industry, including developers, bankers, investors, and consultants, has all been trained in drivable sub-urban. This low-density development is, for some, the very meaning of the current American Dream. However, it has been shown to spawn many unintended negative social, economic, fiscal, and environmental consequences.
The University of Michigan real estate program is committed to the new American Dream: a progressive approach to developing real estate and the built environment in the U.S. and world-wide.
The University of Michigan program certainly recognizes the demand for drivable sub-urban development, the predominate approach to development over the past half century. However, the market pendulum has begun to swing back toward the other alternative, "walkable urbanism." The focus of the UM program is creating places that have many uses within walking distance of one another, the definition of walkable urbanism. The Michigan real estate program teaches students about building sustainable places that minimize the ecological footprint of the built environment. We explore how to build a sense of place that also encourages housing for all income levels while creating long-term wealth to motivate investors to care about the quality of the built environment. Ultimately, the program encourages building places that we can, at many levels, feel proud of our role in creating.
Christopher B. Leinberger
Professor of Practice
Director of the Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development
Taubman College at the University of Michigan
