Few professionals who influence metropolitan planning understand the complexity of real estate development. This certificate offers graduate students in a range of fields the opportunity to integrate their discipline with broad knowledge about shaping substantially better built environments. The program is also a stand-alone certificate for those full-time and part-time students who want to focus only on real estate. Real estate development 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. And as recent experience has shown, the collapse of a real estate bubble can cause a severe recession. Most real estate development of the last half-century has taken the form of standard products built in a low-density, sprawling fashion. These standard product types are generally exclusively served by automobiles, and their form is largely determined by parking and access by car. Most zoning ordinances in the United States mandate this form of development. The actors in the real estate industry, including developers, bankers, investors, and consultants, have all been trained in this type of development. However, it has spawned many unintended, negative social, economic, fiscal, and environmental consequences. The University of Michigan real estate program is committed to a different way, a progressive approach to developing real estate and the built environment in the U.S. and worldwide. The focus of the U-M program is on creating places that offer alternatives to auto-oriented development and that reduce environmental impact, enhance choices for people of all incomes, and have many uses within walking distance of one another. 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 feel proud of our role in creating.
