Urban Planning and Development Essential to Our Survival

It occurred to me years ago, in my Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Colorado Denver that real estate development and urban planning are two of the top ten – if not the top two – most important factors contributing to the future success or failure of the evolution of human civilization.  While continuing advances in scientific discovery, public health, energy production and information technology (among countless others) are undoubtedly of critical importance to the health and possibly  the survival of our species, it is in my mind the individual’s day-to-day experience and interaction with others within the local physical environment – urban, rural, and everywhere in between – that determines the success of all these other areas of human thought and development.

The relatively recent advancements in urban planning theory, promulgated (arguably) first by the Congress for the New Urbanism, represent a concerted effort to pull back from the last fifty plus years of building where and how it was “easiest” to build, and to start looking more holistically at the where and how we “should” be building. As the new theory goes, we now try to consider a host of factors that go into our planning and development decisions: local infrastructure concerns, the global environment, walkability, regional connectivity, sustainable building practices, mass transit…the list goes on.  In fact, these are the subjects of ongoing debate and discussion (as well as the ever-present “what to do in our challenging real estate and housing market” conversation) in the current professional conferences, such as the Urban Land Institute’s upcoming Place Making conference in Denver, Colorado.

While this evolution in theory and practice is all well and good – indeed, we may not have been able to survive without it – it has presented quite a problem for the fundamental logistics of planning and development.  As we have all become “enlightened” as citizens and professionals, so too have our local public officials; lagging as all of our American political infrastructure does, behind evolving public opinion. As a result, municipal planning – and more specifically the local building review and permitting process – has become an increasingly arduous process for the local development applicant.  The process now takes months to navigate, and now requires a whole team of technical specialists to get through the lengthening list of technical reviews: preliminary review, zoning approval, local neighborhood planning, environmental impact, landscape review, architectural committees, historic preservation…this list goes on as well.

These new requirements, while mostly well-intended, cost the applicant thousands more dollars to navigate, and have made even good development ideas economically infeasible to pursue. But, they are not going away anytime soon.  These changes represent a fundamental shift in the real estate development process, and the development industry will have to evolve to meet these new standards.

This is why I built REDNP®. It is my goal to facilitate and simplify the complex process of effectively integrating multiple project participants – such as the multiple participants on a real estate development project – on one easy to use custom project platform, so people can focus on the complex tasks we all face, rather than on mundane logistical issues, like where they stored that document you emailed them last week.