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J.C. Nichols Forum: The Emergence of 18-Hour Cities
October 7, 2016
About the Event
On September 28 and 29, ULI hosted the J.C. Nichols Forum in Kansas City at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art . The event explored the opportunities and challenges in middle-tier cities and celebrated the legacy of legendary commercial and residential real estate developer J.C. Nichols, his body of work, and the ULI Nichols Prize program. The forum brought together J.C. Nichols Prize laureates, mayors from around the United States, and thought leaders from a range of disciplines.
In a series of panel discussions, participants delved into the strengths of and obstacles facing middle-tier cities. The forum provided an opportunity to hear from leading voices in the areas of city building, civic engagement, and urban policy and to draw from the experience and insights of Nichols Prize laureates, as well as local and national innovators. For more information about the ULI Nichols Prize program, visit uli.org/nicholsprize.
Schedule at a Glance
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 (2:00 to 4:00 p.m. CDT)
- 2:00–4:00 p.m. Tour of Kansas City Development Past and Present
ULI Kansas City led a tour that explored Kansas City development past and present. The tour traveled from the River Market to Country Club Plaza, along Kansas City’s new streetcar route from the Power and Light District, the Crossroads through to Crown Center; through 18th and Vine and Beacon Hill, the cultural district surrounding the Art Institute, Kemper and Nelson Gallery; and into the timeless J.C. Nichols neighborhoods that surround Country Club Plaza on both sides of the state line. Over $5 billion in public and private money has been invested in this area in the past five years, triggering an urban renaissance of mixed-use development.
Thursday, September 29, 2016 (8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. CDT)
- 8:00–9:00 a.m. Breakfast and Registration
- 9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Welcome and Introductions; Mayors Roundtable Discussion; Policies, Practices, and Lessons Learned with Nichols Laureates
- 12:30–1:30 p.m. Lunch
- 1:45–4:00 p.m. Connected Citizens: Leveraging Technology for Change; Closing Remarks
- 4:30–7:30 p.m. Growing Up – Becoming an 18-Hour City! ULI Kansas City Signature Event
See Who Attended
Looking for people from specific companies or a particular location? You can sort the attendee list by clicking on the column headings.
ULI would like to thank the following for their partnership with the J.C. Nichols Forum:
- Miller Nichols Charitable Foundation
- Highwood Properties
- ULI Kansas City
Event Videos
About the 2016 ULI J.C. Nichols Forum
U.S. Mayors on Innovations in Middle-Tier Cities
ULI J.C. Nichols Laureates on Urban Innovation
Leveraging Technology for Change in Cities
Paul Goldberger and Jonathan Kemper on Middle-Tier Cities
Paul Goldberger on Middle-Tier Cities
Speaker Biographies
Richard D. Baron, Cofounder and Chairman, McCormack Baron Salazar
Richard Baron is cofounder and chairman of McCormack Baron Salazar, a real estate development company focusing on revitalizing urban areas throughout the United States, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. The firm, founded in 1973, has developed 182 communities that have resulted in 19,703 residential units and 1.4 million square feet of retail/commercial space with development costs exceeding $3.5 billion.
McCormack Baron Salazar has focused on redeveloping blighted areas and neighborhoods of concentrated poverty into economically integrated communities. The firm was involved in the national HOPE VI Demonstration Program creating mixed-income communities in 19 cities. More recently, McCormack Baron Salazar projects have been awarded seven Choice Neighborhood Implementation Grants in San Francisco, Sacramento, Columbus, New Orleans, San Antonio, Memphis, and Pittsburgh. The firm has also received allocations of $220 million worth of New Markets Tax Credits, which have been used for economic development in its redevelopment areas. McCormack Baron Management Services, the firm’s property management subsidiary, currently manages more than 30,000 units nationwide.
In addition to his leadership of McCormack Baron Salazar, Baron was the cofounder and cochairman of the Vashon Education Compact, a partnership of the St. Louis Public Schools and major corporations, and he is the founder and developer of the Center of Creative Arts (COCA), in University City, Missouri, which serves more than 40,000 students annually.
In October 2004, Baron received the Urban Land Institute J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development
Baron is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of California–Berkeley and a juris doctorate from the University of Michigan. He has been awarded honorary degrees from Oberlin College and St. Louis University.
Peter Calthorpe, Principal, Calthorpe Associates
In 1983, Peter Calthorpe founded the award-winning firm of Calthorpe Associates devoted to sustainable urban design and planning globally. Metropolis magazine claims: “The titles of Peter Calthorpe’s books trace the recent history of urban design in its most vital and prescient manifestations, starting in 1986 with Sustainable Communities followed by The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl and most recently Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” In the early 1990s, he developed the concept of transit-oriented development described in his book The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream—an idea that is now the foundation of many regional policies and city plans around the world. Peter Calthorpe is one of the founders and the first board president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. For his contribution to redefining the models of urban and suburban growth, Calthorpe was named one of 25 “innovators on the cutting edge” by Newsweek magazine and was awarded ULI’s prestigious J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development in 2006.
Internationally, his work in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East has demonstrated that community design with a focus on environmental sustainability and human scale can be adapted around the globe. His current work throughout China is focused on developing standards and examples of low-carbon cities in Beijing, Chongqing, Kunming, Zhuhai, Jinan, and other major cities. This experience led to the publication of TOD in China: A Manual of Land-use and Transportation for Low Carbon Cities. Through design, innovation, publications, and realized projects, Peter Calthorpe’s 30-year practice has helped solidify a global trend toward the key principles of new urbanism: that successful places—whether neighborhoods, towns, urban districts, or metropolitan regions—must be diverse in uses and users, must be scaled to pedestrian and human interaction, and must be environmentally sustainable.
Calvin Gladney, Managing Partner, Mosaic Urban Partners
Calvin Gladney is a trusted adviser to cities and nonprofits seeking to sustainably regenerate urban communities. He is also a nationally recognized public speaker on the revitalization of cities and urban neighborhoods.
Over the past three years, Gladney has served as a strategic adviser on projects with estimated development costs exceeding $1 billion and totaling more than 5 million square feet of planned development. He has worked on urban revitalization projects throughout the United States including projects in Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Boston, Denver, Detroit, the District of Columbia, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Memphis, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Prior to founding Mosaic, Gladney served as vice president of the Anacostia Waterfront Corp. (AWC), a D.C. quasi-public real estate corporation where he assisted the CEO with the management of the corporation and was the project manager for a master-planned, mixed-use redevelopment of 67 acres of city land. Gladney also previously served as the general counsel and transactions manager at Bridge Housing Corporation, a private developer in San Francisco. At Bridge, Gladney was the lead businessman in the investment of $60 million of CalPERS equity in multiple real estate development deals. He also provided strategic advice on the development or management of more than 2,700 apartments throughout California.
Gladney graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, received his BS from Cornell
University, and is a LEED Accredited Professional. He is a trustee of the Urban Land Institute and a member of ULI’s executive committee for the Americas. He is also a member of ULI’s national Public/Private Partnership Council (Blue Flight). Gladney serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Masters in Real Estate Program, where he teaches a class on real estate entrepreneurship. Gladney can reach him on Twitter and on Instagram @mosaicurban, or on his blog at www.publicprivatepassion.com.
Paul Goldberger, Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair, and Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture, the New School
Paul Goldberger, whom the Huffington Post has called “the leading figure in architecture criticism,” is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. From 1997 through 2011, he served as the architecture critic for The New Yorker, where he wrote the magazine’s celebrated “Sky Line” column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City. He was formerly the dean of the Parsons School of Design, a division of The New School. He is the author of several books, most recently a full-length biography of the architect Frank Gehry, titled Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015.
He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism. In 2012, he received the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in recognition of the influence his writing has had on the public’s understanding of architecture. In 2016, Architizer named him the “Architecture Advocate of the Year.” In addition to the Gehry biography, Goldberger is the author of Why Architecture Matters, published by Yale University Press; Building Up and Tearing Down, a collection of his articles from The New Yorker, published by Monacelli Press; and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, published by Taschen.
Goldberger lectures widely around the United States on architecture, design, historic preservation, and cities, and has served as an adviser to museums, schools, and corporations around the world on the process of selecting an architect, including advising the Obama Foundation on the selection of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners to lead the design team for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. A graduate of Yale University, Goldberger has been the recipient of five honorary doctoral degrees.
Goldberger is a trustee of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and the Urban Design Forum, and is a trustee emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. He also serves as chairman of the advisory council for The Glass House, a historic property of the National Trust. He resides in New York City with his wife, Susan Solomon. They are the parents of three sons.
Bart Harvey, Former Chairman and CEO, Enterprise Community Partners
Bart Harvey is a director of Fannie Mae, conservator and chair of the Calvert Social Investment Foundation, and a director/trustee of other organizations since his retirement from Enterprise Community Partners and Enterprise Community Investment in 2008.
Harvey joined Enterprise soon after its founding in June 1984 and succeeded James Rouse as chairman and CEO in October 1993. Enterprise is a leading provider of capital and expertise for affordable housing and community development. Under Harvey’s tenure, Enterprise worked with partners—developers, investors, government, and primarily community-based nonprofits—and raised and invested over $9 billion in equity, grants, and loans and produced more than 240,000 homes for low-income households while also improving surrounding neighborhoods in other ways.
In 2004, Harvey led the Green Communities initiative, a $555 million demonstration that produced more than 9,000 affordable homes that promote health, conserve energy and natural resources, and promote easy access to jobs, schools, and services.
Harvey was appointed by Congress to the Millennium Housing Commission from 2000 to 2002 and has been a director of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta as well as numerous other housing and civic boards. He was chosen as the 2008 recipient of the Urban Land Institute J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development as well as the National Housing Conference’s 2008 Housing Person of the Year.
Before joining Enterprise, Harvey worked for ten years in domestic and international positions for investment bank Dean Witter Reynolds (now Morgan Stanley), leaving as managing director of corporate finance. He has an MBA and a BA from Harvard University and lives in Baltimore with his wife and three children.
Gerald D. Hines, Founder and Chairman, Hines
Gerald Hines founded his namesake firm in Houston in 1957. Since then, Hines has steadily grown into a global powerhouse in real estate investment, development, and management. As a co-owner, along with his son Jeffrey, he sits on the firm’s executive committee, participates in new business and investor relationships, and advises the firm’s regions on architectural excellence.
Hines graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering and later received an honorary doctorate from the school. He is a frequent guest lecturer at major universities and a sought-after speaker at industry events. Hines is a recipient of the J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development and an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Among his proudest accomplishments are the support of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston and the establishment of the ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition.
Jonathan Kemper, Chairman, Commerce Bank Kansas City
Jonathan Kemper is chairman and chief executive officer of Commerce Bank (Kansas City), a commercial bank with deposits of $4.8 billion.
Prior to his return to Kansas City, he held various positions in the financial industry in New York and Chicago, including Citicorp, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and M.A. Schapiro and Company.
As chairman of Commerce Bank, he oversees management of the commercial and retail banking groups, and is a member of the Senior Loan Committee. He is responsible for the regional strategic planning and market development.
Kemper is involved in several community and business organizations in addition to his responsibilities at the Commerce Bank. He is on the board of the following: the Chamber of Commerce; the Downtown Council, member of the executive committee and formerly cochairman; the Kansas City Design Center; the Citizens Association; Tower Properties, a Kansas City real estate development and management company; and president of the board of the Kansas City Public Library. He is the named cotrustee, along with Commerce Bank, for the William T. Kemper Foundation. In addition, Kemper is on the national board of the Smithsonian Institute.
Kemper is a native of Kansas City, attending the Kansas City, Missouri, public schools and Pembroke Hill School. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Harvard College, where he graduated in 1975. He is also a 1979 graduate of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business, with a master’s in business administration.
Kemper lives in Kansas City, Missouri. He is married and has one daughter and two sons. He enjoys classical music and jazz, is a regional history enthusiast, and has a personal interest in architecture and urban design.
Rachel Hack Merlo, Community Impact Manager, Google Fiber
Rachel Merlo’s passion lies in making Kansas City better every day.
Merlo is the community impact manager for Google in Kansas City, where she manages community affairs and initiatives in the company’s first Google Fiber city. In addition to leading initiatives related to digital inclusion, entrepreneurial community engagement, and STEM education, she serves as a primary point of contact for several city partners involved in the deployment across the metro area.
Merlo serves on the boards of directors of Central Exchange, Visit KC, the Kansas City Startup Foundation, and the Women’s Center at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, which she chairs in the 2015–2016 term. She is also a graduate of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s Centurions class of 2016.
Merlo was an honoree in the 2016 class of 40 Under 40 and the 2016 Emerging Volunteer of the Year award from Nonprofit Connect. She was recognized in 2012 by KC Business Magazine as a Rising Star among Kansas City leaders under the age of 40, then again in 2014 as an Influential Women honoree, celebrating local women in the creative, entrepreneurial, and nonprofit communities. She was named to the 2015 Kansas City Techweek 100, which identifies community leaders who have made a significant impact on the technology and innovation ecosystem. Merlo was also recognized as a 2013 Verizon Nueva Latina Estrella Community Service Award winner, recognizing emerging professional leaders who embrace diversity, integrity, and creativity while achieving success.
Merlo is a proud lifelong Kansas Citian who lives with her husband and dog in the Brookside area.
Patrick L. Phillips, Global Chief Executive Officer, Urban Land Institute
Established in 1936, ULI is a global nonprofit research and education organization with more than 38,000 members representing all aspects of land use and development disciplines. Its mission is to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide.
Since assuming the chief executive position in 2009, Phillips has overseen an expansion of ULI’s global reach, particularly throughout Asia, guiding the Institute’s focus on creating thriving communities in rapidly urbanizing countries. Under his leadership, ULI’s program of work has grown steadily to encompass a variety of economic, demographic, societal, and environmental issues that are reshaping urban development worldwide in the 21st century. To reinforce the Institute’s delivery of high-quality services for members around the globe, Phillips guided the restructuring of ULI’s district and national council system and worked with ULI’s volunteer leadership to overhaul the Institute’s governance.
Phillips has a career in the economic analysis of real estate and land use that spans more than 20 years. Prior to his service at ULI, he was president and chief executive officer of ERA AECOM (formerly Economics Research Associates). In that role, he coordinated all aspects of ERA’s organization, strategy, business development, and service delivery. His own consulting practice focused specifically on the intersection of private investment and public policy. Phillips is a frequent speaker on urban development issues and is the author or coauthor of eight books and numerous articles.
Tyrone Poole, Founder, NoAppFee
Tyrone Poole, founder of NoAppFee, did not develop his concept in a sleek Silicon Valley incubator. He developed it in a Portland, Oregon, homeless shelter, as a resident. Nine years ago, while training to become a fireman, Poole suffered a serious leg injury that put him in a hospital bed for nine months and on crutches for nearly a year. By the time he was released, he had lost everything. He was evicted, his car had been repossessed, and he had incurred over $20,000 in medical debt. After months of couch surfing, he checked in to the YWCA homeless shelter. This is where NoAppFee was founded. He worked as a housing advocate for the shelter, while being a resident, to find low-income and homeless families places to live. Using what he had learned at the YWCA, Poole worked with a team to develop a technology that can house families within a single day. By filling out a single application through NoAppFee.com, renters are instantly screened against thousands of vacancies simultaneously and are shown exactly where they qualify as well as where they aren’t. Poole is starting to partner with cities across the country to address the growing housing crisis.
Joe Reardon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce
Joe Reardon, former mayor and CEO of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, is president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, the area’s oldest and only regional chamber of commerce.
During his two terms as mayor/CEO, Reardon led the successful effort to bring Google high‐speed fiber to his community in a competition that included more than 1,100 cities across the nation. Prior to his appointment as president/CEO of the chamber of commerce, he served as president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. In this role,
Reardon developed a regional transit system by negotiating and implementing strategic partnerships to manage service in Johnson County and Independence; Successfully negotiated and entered into a cooperative agreement with Jackson County to acquire the 17‐mile Rock Island Rail Corridor for future public and transit use; and Developed the first-of-its-kind public/private partnership to deploy Bridj, an app‐based microtransit system in Kansas City.
As an adjunct professor at Rockhurst University, Reardon developed and taught an MBA-level class on regionalism, an interdisciplinary course focused on the political and economic aspects of metro areas, with Kansas City as a case study. A lawyer by training, he also served as a partner at McAnany, Van Cleave & Phillips, with a practice focused on economic development, public/private partnerships, and digital infrastructure projects.
Reardon received his law degree at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and earned a bachelor of arts in political science from Rockhurst University.
Honorable Joseph P. Riley Jr., Former Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, ULI Distinguished Visiting Fellow
The Honorable Joseph P. Riley Jr., the longest-serving mayor of a major U.S. city, was the first recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development, which recognizes a person whose career demonstrates a commitment to the highest standards of community building. Riley was awarded the prize in 2000 to honor his significant contribution to Charleston’s renaissance and his national leadership on urban design and community revitalization issues.
In the decades following Riley’s election as Charleston’s mayor in 1975, the city achieved a substantial decrease in crime, revitalized its historic downtown district, created a highly successful waterfront park, increased its supply of affordable housing, and experienced dramatic growth in its Spoleto Festival U.S.A., a world-class arts festival held each spring. Each of these achievements was made possible through the use of innovative public/private partnerships cultivated by the mayor.
A former president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Riley is nationally renowned as an expert on urban design and livability issues. He was a founder of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design and has provided visionary advice and counsel on urban design and development issues to hundreds of mayors across the United States.
Since stepping down as mayor on January 8, 2016, Riley has returned to his alma mater, the Citadel. There he is the first occupant of the newly created Joseph P. Riley Jr. Chair of American Government and Public Policy in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. From this, his primary, post-mayoral position, Riley will be teaching, completing an oral history, writing his memoirs, providing support to organizations involved with urban planning and design, and assisting with the completion of the International African American Museum to be built in Charleston.
Honorable Madeline Rogero, Mayor, City of Knoxville, Tennessee
Madeline Rogero was elected the 68th mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and took office in December 2011. The first woman to hold the office, she was reelected and began her second term in December 2015.
Rogero is dedicated to promoting a vibrant local economy, strong neighborhoods, a high quality of life, a thriving downtown, and a greener Knoxville. She believes that the city’s strength comes from the diversity of its people and the beauty of its natural resources.
Her career includes serving as the city’s community development director, Knox County commissioner, a nonprofit executive, an urban and regional planner, a community volunteer, and a neighborhood champion. She is a former consultant to Capital One and America’s Promise, and a former executive director of Dolly Parton’s Dollywood Foundation and Knoxville’s Promise–the Alliance for Youth.
Rogero serves as cochair of the advisory board of the Smart Growth America Local Leaders Council, and is a member of the advisory board for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. She served on President Obama’s State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience and also on Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam’s Task Force on Aging.
She has a BA in political science from Furman University and a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Tennessee.
Peter Walker, Founder and Senior Partner, PWP Landscape Architecture
Peter Walker has exerted significant influence on the field of landscape architecture over a five-decade career. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Walker has designed hundreds of projects, taught, lectured, written, and served as an adviser to numerous public agencies. The scope of his concerns is expansive—from the design of small gardens to the planning of cities—with a particular emphasis on corporate headquarters, plazas, cultural gardens, academic campuses, and urban regeneration projects.
Cofounder of the firm Sasaki, Walker and Associates (established in 1957), Walker opened its West Coast office, which became the SWA Group in 1976. As principal, consulting principal, and chairman of the board, he helped to shape the SWA Group as a multidisciplinary office with an international reputation for excellence in environmental design. In 1983, he formed Peter Walker and Partners, now known as PWP Landscape Architecture.
Walker has served as consultant and adviser to numerous public agencies and institutions: the Sydney 2000 Olympic Coordination Authority; the Redevelopment Agency of San Francisco; the Port Authority of San Diego; Stanford University; the University of California; the University of Washington; and the American Academy in Rome. He played an essential role in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University as both the chairman of the Landscape Architecture Department and the acting director of the Urban Design Program. He was head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1997 to 1999. A fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Institute for Urban Design, Walker has been granted the Honor Award of the American Institute of Architects, Harvard’s Centennial Medal, the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Medal, the ASLA Medal, and the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Gold Medal. He is codesigner with Michael Arad of the National September 11th Memorial.
Rick Usher, Assistant City Manager for Entrepreneurship & Small Business, City of Kansas City
Rick Usher is the assistant city manager for Small Business & Entrepreneurship for the city of Kansas City, Missouri. In his 31 years with the city, Usher has worked his way up through Public Works, Codes Administration, City Planning & Development, and now the City Manager’s Office.
In 2010, he helped facilitate the city’s response to the Google Fiber initiative and in 2011, he assisted in the negotiation with Google Fiber to bring the project to Kansas City. He is now working to drive use of high-speed broadband and defining the path across the digital divide to economic mobility and entrepreneurship.
Usher has developed and implemented a number of programs to expedite economic development in the city. Most recently, the Private Development Permit Expediting Program in the KCStreetcar TDD has been successful in serving over $1.7 billion in private development.
Usher is a graduate of Louisiana Tech University.
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