Mike Maguire’s 2016 ULI Fall Meeting Blog
I’m appreciative of the opportunity to attend ULI’s Fall Meeting 2016 both for my experience of the conference itself, but also the opportunity my city was able to leverage with my being in the Dallas area. This is not my first time attending Fall Meeting but attended hoping to spark some thinking about a 200-acre mixed use redevelopment in my suburban community anchored by a professional sports practice facility. I did not participate in a product council but attended meeting sessions on a range of topics from urban development if different suburban types and the future of parking to entertainment and food entrepreneur incubation to ignite economic redevelopment. I also attended a real estate development “Shark Tank.”
Each session helped me better understand and to some extent sympathize more with the challenges of development. The “Shark Tank,” experience was, as elected official, a very different and foreign view of the development process. While I did not fully follow the decision making terms it helped me be understand more about what goes into a proposal long before I see in in City Hall. One panel about building the city into suburbs was interesting not just for the discussion of different types of suburbs, but some of the challenges of local control that were discussed. As panel presenters discussed demographic changes and patterns of development, the commentary was a useful reminder of how limited public policy decision makers’ views can be and how much it can limit their vision for community development.
Being in Dallas for the Fall Meeting also allowed me to leverage a side visit to Frisco, TX where I joined some members of our city staff. The city of Frisco hosts a number of sports teams including the Dallas Cowboys. Among the take always from the Frisco visit, and a topic of discussion at the Fall Meeting, was the interaction of parking and development. I return from both wanting to rethink our parking philosophy in our community’s redevelopment specifically, in broader sense throughout our community.
It’s hard to capture all of the takeaways from any conference. What I appreciated about the Rose Center’s Scholarship to the ULI Fall Meeting is that it provided an opportunity I would not have through the City to see the development from the developer’s side of the table and to balance the perspective I might generally get the next month from the National League of Cities’ City Summit.
