I'm excited to learn that the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design has just launched a new master's program that is intended to fill the gap in education between design and real estate development. It's called the Master of Science in Design with a concentration in Property Development and Design (or MSD-PDD).

From the sounds of it, it's an expansion of the certificate program in real estate development that I did while I was there. Good. It's also something that I've been advocating for at the University of Toronto for over a decade. We need more bilingual city-building professionals who understand both design and real estate development.

My initial comment is that I hope they're really drawing on and leveraging the resources of the Wharton School. That's what will really make this program stand out against many similar programs. When I was there, I remember them having two different real estate finance classes: one for MBAs and one for designers (which had been made deliberately easier).

I thought this was bullshit, so I met with the program coordinator and requested to be admitted to the MBA one. He strongly advised against it and said that it's, you know, really hard. But that only made me want to take it even more. I ended up getting an A.

So my piece of unsolicited advice for this nascent program is: don't baby the designers when it comes to business and finance. Because the market certainly won't.

Sam Zell, the billionaire real estate investor, died this week at the age of 81. That seems young to me. Or maybe I’m just being overly optimistic about life expectancy. This is around the US average.

Whatever the case, if you work in real estate, you likely know/knew of Sam. In my case, he spent a lot of time at Penn after he permanently endowed the real estate center (under both his name and his late business partner’s name).

I used to go and listen to him speak at least twice a year, and I would hang off his every word as a young student of real estate. “So wait, how does this all work?”

It was also at this time that he sold Equity Office to Blackstone for $39 billion (back in 2007, it was the largest private equity deal in history). Sam’s explanation for doing this deal was that Blackstone offered him more than what he thought the portfolio was worth, so he sold it. He took no credit for good market timing.

If you’ve ever heard Sam speak, you know that he’s incredibly direct. Generally, he also didn’t seem to give a fuck, and was happy being the only person in a Hawaiian shirt among a sea of blue and black suits.

In fact, he’s largely the reason that, as students, we used to all joke that the richer the speaker, the more funny and honest they would be. “Come on, let’s go to this one. She’s rich.” I guess this is just what happens when you no longer have anything to prove.

But none of this is to say that he didn’t care. He cared a great deal about the school and about helping young students. And for that, I say: thank you Sam. Thank you for being generous with your time.

There's a lot of debate within urbanist circles about whether or not supply alone can solve or at least mitigate housing affordability concerns. Richard Florida and others will say that, while beneficial, increasing supply isn't the be all end all. We need to be building affordable housing.

Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and others have, on the other hand, argued that middle-income housing is a supply problem and that low-income housing is quite simply a demand-side problem, which could be solved through things like a housing voucher program.

In other words, the cost of housing isn't necessarily the problem, it's the low income levels. One of the benefits of supplementing people's incomes is that it empowers mobility. People can then move to where there are jobs, as opposed to being tied to a specific neighborhood or city.

But this debate is arguably just about the extent of the supply benefits. Intuitively, it makes sense to try and match new housing supply with demand and economic growth. But how far can that take us, particularly in high demand and high productivity cities?

Glaeser (Harvard) and Gyourko (Penn) have a relatively recent paper out called, The Economic Implications of Housing Supply, which looks at, among other things, the "implicit tax" imposed on development as a result of land use restrictions and other supply constraints.

Here are two excerpts:

We will argue that the rise in housing wealth is concentrated in the major coastal markets that have high prices relative to minimum production costs, and it is concentrated among the richest members of the older cohorts—that is, on those who already owned homes several decades ago, before binding constraints on new housing construction were imposed.

But in a democratic system where the rules for building and land use are largely determined by existing homeowners, development projects face a considerable disadvantage, especially since many of the potential beneficiaries of a new project do not have a place to live in the jurisdiction when possibilities for reducing regulation and expanding the supply of housing are debated.

If you're interested in this topic (and sufficiently nerdy), you can download a PDF copy of the paper here.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash