Each team of students must first identify a vacant or significantly under-utilized commercial property. Properties that are currently for sale or those that have been for sale in the past year will be particularly useful as targets for the case because offering memorandums will be available for these sites.
Alternatively, students may identify an appropriate property and determine if ownership would be willing to assist in providing building specific information to assist in the preparation of the case study. Once a site has been chosen each team must propose a use or uses for the site that includes at least one component that is socially impactful or environmentally impactful.
Projects presented by the four finalist teams in the 2017 competition included a retail mall in Elizabeth New Jersey that brought a grocery store and related retail uses to a "food desert" (Rutgers University), a mixed-use project to transform a 6.5 acre former industrial site along the north branch of the Chicago River (Cornell University), a mixed-use redevelopment of South Miami's City Hall property (Florida International University) and "Havana Next," a small-scale apartment development project adjacent to a new Cuban Cultural Center in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood (University of Miami).
more about the 2017 competition