Real Conversations, Real Estate

Redeveloping public housing can improve surrounding neighborhoods, but those benefits are not always shared equally.

Lizhong Liu (RAND) joins Richard K. Green (USC Lusk Center for Real Estate) to discuss how housing shapes access to opportunity and how redevelopment can extend that opportunity beyond the public housing site itself. Drawing on national research and examples including Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes and Los Angeles’ Jordan Downs, Liu highlights measurable neighborhood gains alongside the high costs, displacement, and other difficult tradeoffs that can come with redevelopment.

Highlights include:

• How public housing deteriorated in the US and how the HOPE VI program sought to improve both the properties and their surrounding neighborhoods
• Evidence that HOPE VI neighborhoods experienced increases in average resident income, housing value, and rents
• Why some redevelopment projects can cost millions of dollars per unit and who defines what’s “worth it”
• The displacement problem: fewer than 30% of original residents typically returned after redevelopment, a shortcoming the newer Choice Neighborhoods Initiative is designed to address

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Valuing real estate increasingly means forecasting industries that may look very different a decade from now.

Cynthia Nelson (FTI Consulting) joins Richard K. Green (USC Lusk Center for Real Estate) to discuss the forces reshaping commercial real estate, from distressed debt and refinancing challenges to the future of entertainment production, data centers, and California's economy. Drawing on her experience in restructuring, Nelson explains how investors, lenders, and owners find solutions when markets shift faster than expectations.

Highlights include:

• Revisiting the aftermath of Southern California's aerospace downturn in the 1990s
• How workouts and restructurings help lenders and borrowers find common ground
• Why some multifamily properties face refinancing challenges despite strong occupancy
• California's extraordinary investment potential, despite its affordability and governance challenges
• Where investors are beginning to see opportunity in distressed office assets and commercial real estate debt

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Water is increasingly behaving in ways that defy our plans. How should cities prepare when the risks keep changing?

Roni Deitz (Arcadis) joins Richard K. Green (USC Lusk Center for Real Estate) to explore how water is reshaping real estate, infrastructure, and long-term investment. Starting with recent storms like Hurricane Helene and their devastating impacts, the conversation expands to examine a new reality: the baseline assumptions guiding water and development may no longer hold.

Highlights include:

• Why mapped flood risk often misses the reality of risk over time
• The limits of engineering, and why aligned land use decisions are necessary for resilience
• What “one water” thinking looks like in practice, from stormwater to wastewater
• How cities like New York are aligning policy, finance, and infrastructure in flood-prone areas
• How integrating policy and practice can make cities more stable and investible

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