Last month, more than 6,500 leaders from every sector of the real estate industry attended the 2019 ULI Fall Meeting in Washington D.C., the organization’s flagship event. Attendees met the people making the most important development deals of the year, learned from dealmakers who are at the forefront of transforming D.C. from government town to an innovation hub and toured groundbreaking projects.

On October 3, ULI Charlotte hosted a panel discussion at 8.2.0 with local members who attended the meeting and shared lessons learned. Moderated by Brian Nicholson, vice president of development with LMC, the panel included Alyson Craig, deputy planning director for the City of Charlotte; Erik Johnson, partner with White Point Partners; and Jared Londry, director with Cushman & Wakefield.

Some key takeaways:

• The concept of “hipsturbia,” or walkable, mixed-use developments in the suburbs that will appeal to aging millennials, was discussed at the fall meeting, and as the city prepares to settle on a preferred growth scenario for Charlotte, Craig said, it’s important that it be responsive to such trends by helping with infrastructure to encourage those types of projects. Panelists pointed to the mixed-use Waverly community in south Charlotte and the Ballantyne Reimagined project as examples.
  “In concept, it’s great, but I do have concerns about what traffic might look like in five years,” Johnson said.
• Johnson shared notes with some developers from Boulder, Colorado, which has passed some strict growth-control measures recently that could stymie future real estate investment and development. He said that while White Point Partners hasn’t run into anything that extreme locally, the Charleston market isn’t easy to navigate for developers.
  “In our experience, Charleston has been the most difficult place to do anything within a few hours’ drive of Charlotte,” he said. “It’s not always completely rational.”
• Londry met an attendee who had recently visited Charlotte for the first time and he asked her for her thoughts about the city.
  “Her response was, ‘There’s a lot of homeless people there.’ That was a bit eye-opening.” Economic mobility, of course, has been a priority for the city ever since it ranked dead last in a nationwide study several years ago.

“If we don’t face some of the challenges with this rapid growth, we could be in a very different environment,” Londry said.

Notes provided by Will Boye of Yellow Duck Marketing