Active Transportation and Real Estate: The Next Frontier explores the interconnections among walking, bicycling, and real estate development. It showcases the growing synergies between real estate development and bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure investments.

Across the globe, developers are seizing a competitive advantage by leveraging growing interest in biking and walking among residents and tenants. And municipalities are promoting health, equity, and sustainability by investing in active transportation infrastructure projects, such as trails and greenways – investments which can create real estate value and promote economic developments.

How can a focus on food within real estate projects translate into enhancements to health, environmental sustainability, and the bottom line?

Cultivating Development explores the mutually beneficial relationship between food-based amenities—such as working farms, community gardens, food halls, restaurants, and grocery stores—and real estate. It highlights how the growing interest in and awareness of fresh, local food is spurring innovation in development projects.

Inspired by a growing body of evidence that developments centered on working farms can have a positive effect on human health, environmental sustainability, and real estate performance, Agrihoods: Cultivating Best Practices identifies strategies to aid developers and their partners in planning, creating, and operating single-family, multifamily, or mixed-use communities built with a working farm as a focus.

The Building Healthy Corridors report explores strategies for transforming commercial corridors—found in nearly every community across the United States—into places that support the health of the people who live, work, and travel along them. It is the result of a two-year project that involved partnerships with four communities in the United States that are working to improve a specific corridor in ways that positively affect health.

Envisioning Healthy Corridors describes the experiences of and lessons learned from the four demonstration corridors that participated in the second phase of ULI’s Healthy Corridors project and provides a set of common recommendations from both phases of the project that can be implemented to improve health along commercial corridors.

The Blind Spots report by the Urban Land Institute and Smart Growth America examines unhealthy corridors, including their prevalence and location, the conditions they share, and the impact they have on people’s lives. It also explores the land use and transportation decisions that give rise to and perpetuate their existence, as well as opportunities to use policy and practice levers to shape them into something better. The appendix to the report can be accessed here.

ULI’s Building Healthy Places Toolkit: Strategies for Enhancing Health in the Built Environment outlines evidence-supported opportunities for enhancing health outcomes in real estate developments.

Developers, owners, property managers, designers, investors, and others involved in real estate decision making can use the report’s recommendations and strategies to create places that contribute to healthier people and communities, and to enhance and preserve value by meeting growing desires for health-promoting places.