Featured Resource

DEI at ULI

ULI is dedicated to improving the environments in which all people live, work, and play. In line with this mission, ULI has developed a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategy that recognizes DEI as a fundamental force for creating thriving communities for the future. The Hub is aligned with ULI’s DEI work, which you can learn more about here.

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Glossary

Antiracism: active, intentional actions toward racial justice and against all forms of racism.

Belonging: the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group. (Cornell)

BIPOC: acronym for Black, indigenous, and people of color.

Diversity: intentional representation of different minorities or underrepresented populations with considerations of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status. (PNC)

Equality: ensuring that every individual has an equal opportunity to make the most of their lives and talents, and believing that no one should have poorer life chances because of where, what or whom they were born, what they believe, or whether they have a disability. (Equality and Human Rights Commission)

Equitable development: an approach to creating healthy, vibrant, communities of opportunity. Equitable outcomes come about when smart, intentional strategies are put in place to ensure that everyone can participate in and benefit from decisions that shape their neighborhoods and regions. (PolicyLink)

Equitable processes: broadly, processes that define workflow or approaches with an equity lens. Processes are broad and industry-specific. In the real estate industry, they range from customer-facing ones such as the real estate development process to internal business ones such as hiring and communications. (Juanita Hardy)

Equity: just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential (PolicyLink)

There are many types of equity. Definitions from the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) include procedural equity (inclusive, accessible, authentic engagement and representation in processes to develop or implement programs or policies) and distributional equity (fair distribution of benefits and burdens across all segments of a community, prioritizing those with highest need, as a result of programs and policies).

Equity lens: consideration of equity dimensions of involvement, process, values and assumptions, and outcomes, from a perspective that highlights how practices hold potential to shift power toward inclusion and equity. (Center for Nonprofit Advancement)

Inclusion: authentically bringing traditionally excluded individual and/or groups into processes, activities and decision/policy making in a way that shares power. (Racial Equity Tools)

Intersectionality: the complex and synergistic ways in which different aspects of identity combine and overlap.

Justice: the elimination of barriers that create the need for equity-focused interventions. (Combination of several definitions)

Marginalized: groups and communities that experience discrimination and exclusion (social, political and economic) because of unequal power relationships across economic, political, social and cultural dimensions. (National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health). This report uses marginalize as a verb to describe the act of discriminating against or excluding people within unequal power relationships.

Privilege: unearned social power accorded by the formal and informal institutions of society to all members of a dominant group (e.g., white privilege, male privilege). Privilege is usually invisible to those who have it because they are taught not to see it, but it nevertheless puts them at an advantage over those who do not have it. (Colours of Resistance Archive, “Privilege” via Racial Equity Tools)

Racial equity: the condition that would be achieved if one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares. When we use the term in this report, we are thinking about racial equity as one part of racial justice, and thus we also include work to address root causes of inequities, not just their manifestation. This includes elimination of policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce differential outcomes by race or that fail to eliminate them. (Racial Equity Tools)

Alternative definition: transforming the behaviors, institutions and systems that disproportionately harm people of color. Racial equity means increasing access to power, redistributing and providing additional resources, and eliminating barriers to opportunity in order to empower low-income communities of color to thrive and reach full potential. (Greenlining Institute)

Racism: both individual acts of prejudice and discrimination and systemic and structural factors leading to inequitable outcomes on the basis of race.

Social equity: impartiality, fairness and justice for all people. (United Way of the National Capital Area). Distinct from racial equity, it refers to all people; in addition to race, it includes gender, ethnicity, age, and other factors.

Structural racism: a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist. (Aspen Institute)

Systemic racism: in many ways synonymous with structural racism. If there is a difference between the terms, it can be said to exist in the fact that a structural racism analysis pays more attention to the historical, cultural, and social psychological aspects of our currently racialized society. (Aspen Institute)

Underserved: people and communities who were historically and are systemically provided with inadequate services, infrastructure, and other essentials, denied opportunity and investment, and often discriminated against. This report uses underserved rather than other commonly used terms, such as disadvantaged, to highlight unjust policies and practices. Other terms can inaccurately imply differences in community characteristics. (Combination of several definitions)

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Criteria for Inclusion

The Hub includes a combination of educational materials on social equity and resources for implementing best practices. Each resource is also geared toward a specific audience within real estate and tagged with the topic(s) it covers. To be included in the Hub:

• Each resource must be designed for a real estate audience and focused on social equity.
• Each resource must either be educational or provide practicable guidance.
• Each resource must advance knowledge or action at one or more of these scales: personal, company, industry, or policy.

The Hub primarily features resources developed by the Urban Land Institute to address gaps in existing resources for real estate professionals, or by ULI in partnership with other organizations doing aligned work. Resource lists also direct members to relevant resources that already exist outside of ULI.

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