This meeting built on the January introductory call by having ULI Visiting Senior Fellow Michael Spotts present about the Equitable Investment in Infrastructure and Housing report that was co-published by the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing and ULI Curtis Infrastructure Initiative.

“We believe that a critical relationship exists between housing, the health neighborhoods an the development of core infrastructure, including but not limited to transportation, water, and sewer public space, and the structure of the built environment influences where people decide, or can afford to live, how they get to work or school and where they shop and play,” said Michael Spotts, visiting ULI senior fellow. “We hope that this framework helps raise the critical issues and events, so we can build a more sustainable and equitable future through our infrastructure investments.”

This set the stage for the majority of the call’s discussion around the challenges of identifying tools to preserve and create affordable housing, the challenge of aligning stakeholders to go in the same direction, and that infrastructure and land use decisions are inherently political so it’s sometimes difficult to navigate as a practitioner. Beyond using the infrastructure investment framework developed as part of the Shaw Forum, Michael Spotts recommended the Grounded Solutions Network as place for great resources. The 11^th Street Bridge Park’s Equity Toolkit was also recommended.

“In a city like Philadelphia, we have strong business improvement districts that play a really significant function and maintaining a lot of our public infrastructure,” said Kevin Moran, director, ULI Philadelphia “But when you rely on a sort of financing model that privileges higher income property with higher land values, what does that mean for parts of the city with lower land values?”

ULI District Council infrastructure grants address common infrastructure challenges where public/private partnerships facilitate local actions, policies, and practices to enable more equitable and resilient investments that enhance long-term real estate and community value. The selected projects focus on creating impact through the implementation of a plan of action resulting in outcomes such as shifts in policy and practice, change in community/industry prioritization, change in design/planning, and/or new infrastructure projects.

“One of the challenges we have is that there’s a huge bias toward large lot single family housing development and it’s only been in the past three to five years that we’ve even been able to get communities outside the Indianapolis core to approve significant amounts of multifamily housing and townhomes and denser housing patterns,” said Rose Scovel, principal planner I, Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization. This has created the need to look at the spatial mismatch, especially within the large economic cluster of manufacturing and logistics, about identifying transportation solutions to increase economic access that might not be able to be supported from the public side.

The next meeting in May will be focused on identifying and bringing together stakeholders and development of metrics for success.