Practice Area Archives - Page 2 of 11

Panther Island Strategic Vision Update

October 30, 2025 / Comments Off

HR&A led a multidisciplinary team to update the vision and development an implementation roadmap for the 300+ acre Panther Island project, adjacent to Downtown Fort Worth. Working with a steering committee of public-sector and civic stakeholders, we delivered actionable recommendations that align flood control infrastructure with economic and real estate development opportunities, creating a framework for transformative public and private investment shaped by community ambitions.

Panther Island is a once-in-a-generation city-building opportunity for Fort Worth to amplify the energy of its urban core and surrounding neighborhoods, sparked by an influx of local and federal funding to build the Trinity River bypass channel. This ambitious flood control project will unlock extensive development potential. The Panther Island Steering Committee—comprising the City of Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Tarrant Regional Water District, Tarrant County College District, Downtown Fort Worth, Inc., The Real Estate Council of Greater Fort Worth, and Streams and Valleys, Inc.—recognized the need to update long-standing visions and plans, with local conditions and community perspectives having evolved since previous planning efforts. This required balancing complex infrastructure requirements with market-responsive development strategies while addressing the interests of numerous public agencies, civic partners, and community organizations.

In collaboration with Lake Flato, Salcedo Group, and K Strategies, HR&A undertook extensive plan review and site analysis, public engagement, financial analysis, and infrastructure and regulatory assessments to create a cohesive vision for Panther Island’s future. Our work offers a roadmap for a once-neglected, industrial section of the Trinity River to be transformed into a vibrant neighborhood with green spaces bustling with activity and opportunities for living, working, shopping, connecting, and playing.

The Panther Island Vision & Strategy, completed in March 2024, offers a renewed strategic vision and implementation strategy that centers on the design, planning, and big ideas for Panther Island. Encompassing streets, parcels, open spaces, buildings, water, and mobility systems, the vision proposes a district that prioritizes people. It takes into account the intricate relationship between land ownership, infrastructure, and market dynamics to outline an ambitious but realistic approach with strategies for phasing, public-private partnership, and governance. Guided by this work, public sector agencies have advanced infrastructure planning and construction, land use regulation updates, and developer engagement.

Explore:

Project Website

Vision & Strategy Summary

Strategic Vision Update

Real Estate, Economic Development, and Implementation Strategy

Press:

Updated Panther Island Strategic Vision Outlines a Generational Opportunity for Fort Worth

Fort Worth leaders reveal new roadmap for developing Panther Island. Where does it lead? — Fort Worth Report

Meet the firm guiding the future of Panther Island’s real estate strategy — Dallas Business Journal

Fort Worth Unveils Bold Riverfront Revitalization Plans for PantherIsland, Envisions Economic and Recreational Renaissance — hoodline

What will Fort Worth’s PantherIsland look like? Here’s what we know about new district — Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Fort Worth’s PantherIsland Set for Transformation, Public Parks, Housing and Economic Growth in Store — hoodline

Buffalo Bayou East Investment Framework and Master Plan

October 30, 2025 / Comments Off

HR&A worked with Buffalo Bayou Partnership to develop a comprehensive investment framework and master plan for Buffalo Bayou East, a 260-acre waterfront transformation extending Houston’s celebrated greenway network four miles east of Downtown. Our strategic planning work created the foundation for securing a historic $100 million catalyst gift from the Kinder Foundation, which will leverage an additional $210 million in public and philanthropic funding to support the first decade of development and operations.

The Buffalo Bayou Partnership sought to extend its success at the nationally recognized Buffalo Bayou Park eastward into Houston’s Second and Fifth Wards, communities that have been disconnected from their waterfront due to industrial use. HR&A created an Investment Framework Report that assessed existing conditions and established a clear vision based on principles of authenticity, connectivity, inclusiveness, and resilience. We identified specific open space and neighborhood redevelopment opportunities while developing long-term implementation strategies that would guide Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s eastward expansion and catalyze broader community revitalization.

HR&A then managed the competitive selection process that brought on Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates to lead a world-class master planning team. We guided the entire master planning process, leading analysis and strategy development across real estate, funding, community engagement, and implementation planning to ensure the final blueprint would be both visionary and achievable. The resulting master plan’s credibility and strategic foundation directly contributed to securing the Kinder Foundation’s transformative commitment, positioning Buffalo Bayou East to become Houston’s next signature urban green space while driving economic opportunity in historically underserved neighborhoods.

Explore:

A 10-Year Plan for Buffalo Bayou East

Press:

Buffalo Bayou Partnership Announces Kinder Foundation’s $100M Catalyst Gift to Accelerate Buffalo Bayou East Master Plan

What’s next for Buffalo Bayou? $10 million grant accelerates master plan’s 3 key projects

Awards and Recognition:

Buffalo Bayou East Master Plan Wins Urban Land Institute Houston Development of Distinction Award

CapMetro Equitable Transit-Oriented Development Plan

October 30, 2025 / Comments Off

HR&A co-led a multidisciplinary team developing an equitable transit-oriented development (ETOD) strategy for CapMetro’s Project Connect, spanning 100+ station areas. Working with Austin Transit Partnership and the City of Austin, we created a comprehensive policy toolkit that minimizes displacement while maximizing economic opportunities for local residents and businesses.

Confronting the challenge of gentrification and displacement in rapidly growing Austin, HR&A conducted extensive research into national ETOD best practices and analyzed local market conditions across diverse station areas. Our team assessed the specific needs of different communities along the corridor, identifying varied challenges from affordable housing preservation to small business retention. This nuanced understanding allowed us to develop tailored recommendations responsive to each area’s unique context and development pressure.

The resulting ETOD Policy Toolkit delivers 46 strategies across five critical domains: affordable housing, small business support, workforce development, mobility enhancement, and urban design. By creating a station area typology system matched to specific policy prescriptions, HR&A equipped CapMetro with an implementation framework adaptable to varied neighborhood conditions. Throughout the process, we supported robust community engagement that directly shaped our recommendations, ensuring the final strategy reflects community priorities while advancing the Project Connect vision for equitable, transit-oriented growth.

Explore:

ETOD Policy Plan

Project Connect

Press:

From TOD to ETOD: Advancing equity in Austin’s Transit-Oriented Development

Awards and Recognition:

Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat: 2024 Award of Excellence Winner: Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

American Planning Association Texas Chapter: Advancing Diversity and Social Change Award

Blue Line Corridor Vision and Implementation Strategy

April 11, 2025 / Comments Off

HR&A led an interdisciplinary team to develop a transformative vision and implementation strategy for Prince George’s County’s Blue Line Corridor, a 6-mile stretch along Central Avenue in Maryland. This comprehensive plan has already secured over $450M in state funding and bonding capacity for priority capital projects including a youth sports fieldhouse, amphitheater, central library and cultural center, market hall, and multimodal infrastructure while establishing a replicable model for place-based economic development countywide.

Working with Design Collective and Toole Design Group, HR&A crafted a 30-year development roadmap for this transit-rich corridor, served by four Blue and Silver Line Metro stations. The vision identified capital improvements and new anchor institutions and facilities to catalyze private investment in dense, transit-oriented development stations. The team coordinated across County and State agencies and WMATA to align objectives, leverage resources, identify obstacles, and recommend new legislative and financial tools to maximize economic potential.

The vision became the centerpiece of the County Executive’s 2021 State of the County address and continues to guide implementation. HR&A remains actively involved, facilitating an interagency working group, conducting feasibility studies, and advancing capital improvement projects. These efforts ensure the ambitious vision moves from concept to reality with strategic oversight.

HR&A also developed County-specific enabling legislation (Maryland House Bill 1109) to establish business improvement districts in Prince George’s County, adopted in April 2023. The Blue Line Corridor BID is being specifically designed to ensure inclusive development that benefits existing communities while attracting new investment. This innovative approach ensures that economic growth along the corridor supports both existing residents and businesses while creating vibrant, accessible places for all county residents.

Press:

Prince George’s County Breaks Ground on Civic Plaza, The First Signature Project of The Blue Line Corridor Initiative – Prince George’s Country MD

Photo: Jackie Hicks and Prince George’s County

Los Angeles Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA): Tenant Protection Study

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs selected HR&A to provide recommendations for a potential Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) policy for unincorporated areas in LA County, which aims to prevent displacement, preserve affordable housing, and increase homeownership opportunities for renters. HR&A developed a set of preliminary recommendations on program design and implementation strategies, including the required ecosystem, funding support, staffing costs, and data tracking needs.

The Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) engaged the HR&A Advisors team, which included LISC LA and Change for Good Consulting. The team facilitated workshops with County stakeholders to discuss program goals and policy priorities, as well as external stakeholders, including tenant advocates, property owners, and real estate and affordable housing industry experts, to gather information and conduct desktop research and interviews with jurisdictions with precedent programs. Incorporating these inputs along with best practices, HR&A summarized a set of preliminary recommendations on program design and implementation strategies.

The final report provides a summary of the context and needs for a potential TOPA program, along with preliminary program design and implementation recommendations on how the policy could support tenant protection, anti-displacement, and expand ownership access for L.A. County unincorporated areas.

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Read the TOPA Report

Learn more about TOPA

Saint Paul, Minnesota Anti-Displacement Strategy

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

Facing housing affordability pressures, the City of Saint Paul engaged HR&A to develop an anti-displacement and community wealth-building strategy. HR&A provided the City with tools and strategies to mitigate displacement while supporting new development.

Since 2014, Saint Paul has undergone several transit improvements and redevelopment projects, which have sparked real estate investment pressures in surrounding communities and raised concerns about housing and commercial affordability. In response to these challenges, HR&A helped the City to develop an anti-displacement and community wealth-building strategy that simultaneously addressed the City’s need for new housing development and identified tools and strategies intended to minimize displacement risk for its existing residents and small businesses. The team identified changes in demographics, housing supply, housing demand, affordability, and small business presence over the last decade to assess displacement risks and trends citywide and in various Saint Paul neighborhoods.

Through engagement with a community advisory committee consisting of representatives of local businesses, community organizations, and local developers, HR&A was able to supplement its quantitative analysis with direct insights on the current housing and business challenges faced by residents across the city. HR&A used these findings to inform its review of potential tools and strategies that the City could deploy to mitigate displacement and tested the feasibility of those tools and strategies through financial analyses of prototypical developments.

As part of this work, HR&A analyzed the potential for an inclusionary zoning policy in the city, as well as the role the new citywide rent stabilization ordinance was playing in anti-displacement efforts. HR&A provided the City with an extensive list of recommended tools, policies, and strategies that could be deployed to mitigate displacement while still supporting new development and investments within Saint Paul.

Explore

Explore HR&A’s Existing Conditions Report

Learn more about the work on St. Paul’s Anti-Displacement Plan and Community Wealth Building Technical Study website

Press

St. Paul looks for ways to curb displacement — Finance and Commerce

Photo: Mississippi River Walk – City House- Credit Visit Saint Paul

Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing and Homelessness Strategic Framework Implementation Plan

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A worked with United Way to develop an implementation plan for their initial strategic framework for a continuum of issues related to affordable housing and homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. HR&A conducted extensive stakeholder outreach and analysis to create actionable and innovative strategies to reduce housing instability and homelessness across the region.

In addition to our extensive stakeholder outreach to understand the current institutional and programmatic landscape of homelessness and housing insecurity across the county, HR&A conducted an ecosystem scan of housing and homelessness services. This assessment not only identified gaps but also estimated the costs of filling the gaps. HR&A confirmed the findings through engagement with a broad technical committee that was made up of service providers, policy makers, affordable housing developers, and individuals with lived experience.

HR&A developed a detailed set of actionable and innovative implementation targets and a funding approach that supports the plan’s three main priorities: Person-Directed Care, Prevention, and Housing Supply. Person-Directed Care will help overcome a currently fragmented system of service provision that makes it difficult for people to connect to critical services. Prevention will build on highly successful existing programs to create a robust prevention system that helps people stay in their homes and avoid experiencing homelessness. Expanding the supply of affordable housing units will make all types of housing units — from shelter beds to single-family homes for sale — available to people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. To move forward on these priorities, the plan calls for a new coalition of public, private, and nonprofit organizations to coordinate action and shift the broader policy environment.

Explore

Read the Housing and Homelessness Strategic Framework Implementation Plan

Learn more about the the plan

Westchester County’s Housing Flex Fund

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

On behalf of Westchester County’s Department of Planning, HR&A Advisors designed and implemented a new $90M fund to allocate the County’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. The Flex Fund is projected to support the development of approximately 1,500 new affordable homes across the county.

HR&A began with analyzing the County’s housing market conditions and evaluating existing affordable housing programs administered by the County, public housing authorities, local municipalities, and other public entities. HR&A conducted a series of interviews with key local and regional housing developers to understand their development pipelines and any barriers they felt obstructed the development of workforce and affordable housing development in the county. Based on a combination of these quantitative and qualitative findings, HR&A recommended the creation of a new two-year Housing Flex Fund, designed to meet the market’s short-term needs and strengthen the affordable housing system in the long-term.

In preparation for the project’s implementation phase, HR&A analyzed the financial proformas of 10 recently completed affordable housing deals and modeled 15 alternative funding scenarios to understand how the Housing Flex Fund could impact forthcoming housing deals — including Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and non-LIHTC deals alike. HR&A recommended an approval process that built on the strengths of existing funding processes while providing greater flexibility and an expedited funding timeline.

Working in close consultation with County staff, HR&A established an approval process and project scoring criteria. The scoring criteria and approval process ensure that the Housing Flex Fund will maximally achieve the County’s public policy goals. HR&A also supported the County in scoring all of the applications received and underwriting selected potential projects for investment.

Explore

Learn more about the Housing Flex Fund on Westchester County’s website

Press

Westchester County launches Housing Flex Fund —NY Real Estate Journal

Westchester $100M program expected to increase new affordable housing units — Westfair Business Journal

Amazon Housing Fund

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A is supporting program design and implementation for Amazon’s Housing Fund, a $2 billion commitment to preserve existing housing and create inclusive housing developments through below-market loans and grants to developers, public agencies, and minority-led organizations. HR&A led negotiation and underwriting efforts for over 9,000 new affordable homes in the Washington DC area and will continue to support Amazon with their additional commitment of $1.4 billion.

HR&A Advisors has been working with Amazon since 2020 to help develop and implement the Amazon Housing Fund, which was founded to help increase affordable housing opportunities in locations where Amazon has a significant presence. In cities like Washington D.C., Nashville, Austin, and Seattle, among others, we have helped Amazon address affordable housing shortages via subsidized loans, grants, and partnerships with local governments and nonprofits. Since helping design and then launch the program in January 2021, we have supported Amazon’s efforts to preserve 21,000+ homes and have underwritten and closed over $1B in housing transactions for the public sector and impact investors. A key tenant of the AHEF is also to provide access to capital for minority-led developers, resulting in 62% of these transactions supporting BIPOC-led developers. 

To develop a large-scale portfolio investment strategy for housing affordability, HR&A created an affordable housing finance summary of potential investment strategies, conducted a landscape analysis of peer investments in housing, worked with Amazon to refine investment goals and priorities, and developed a clear and concise financial framework to evaluate potential investment options. HR&A conducted an initial market scan in target geographies, assessed the housing need in those geographies to evaluate programmatic components, and conducted high-level financial analysis to test investment portfolio scenarios.

After the first phase leveraging Amazon’s initial $2 billion investment to preserve 21,000+ homes and positively impact 46,000+ residents, Amazon committed an additional $1.4 billion for a second phase.

Explore

Check out the Amazon Housing Equity Fund’s website

Learn about Amazon’s second round of $1.4 billion in funding

2024 Amazon Housing Equity Fund Impact Report

Press

Q&A with Senthil Sankaran, Managing Principal, Amazon Housing Equity Fund — UrbanLand Magazine

Amazon Promised to Deliver Affordable Housing. How’s It Doing? — Bloomberg

Everything you need to know about Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund—a $3.6 billion commitment to help people access affordable housing — Amazon

Op-Ed: A Simple Housing Fix for Wake County —  INDYweek

Florida Apartment Association Housing Scarcity Dashboard

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A developed an interactive dashboard for the Florida Apartment Association to track Florida’s rapidly growing housing needs at the county and metro-area level and showcases cost drivers and benefits of incentive tools to highlight housing gaps for lower-income renters.

Visualizing the housing landscape across a state can be difficult — there are many factors that shape the housing ecosystem, and many are highly technical and often challenging to understand. The Housing Scarcity Dashboard helps demystify the technical factors that shape the housing landscape across Florida by integrating data and estimates from the Census Bureau, the Florida Office of Economic & Demographic Research, and other sources of high-quality demographic and real estate information into an easy-to-understand interactive heat maps and graphics.

In addition to current housing needs across income brackets, the tool also displays the projected future housing supply gap, emphasizing the detrimental ongoing impacts — especially for lower-income renters — that statewide housing shortages will have if left unchecked.

Explore

Explore the Dashboard

Press

Florida Apartment Association launches website detailing housing scarcity across Florida — Florida Politics