“Communities everywhere are feeling the effects of a changing climate, and those risks connect directly to housing, mobility, and shifting demographics,” Victoria Oestreich, director of the Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Advisory Services Program, said in an email.
The ULI is embarking on a new regional resiliency effort to develop sustainable land use and building practices, by partnering with seven public agencies across California and Nevada on a 12-month program as part of the California-Nevada Technical Assistance Leadership Exchange.
“The cities and partners in this program are showing real leadership by planning ahead instead of waiting until the problems get bigger,” Oestreich said.
The ULI will offer its expertise to leaders in Sacramento, San Jose, Needles, Long Beach and San Diego in California; and with Nevada State University, where it is planning a 400-acre mixed-use “innovation district” in Henderson.
“ULI has a deep bench of member and staff expertise on resilience — from climate adaptation to housing to infrastructure,” Oestreich said. “For this program, we’ll be drawing on that knowledge and on our broader network of partners to help local sponsors think through the challenges and opportunities they’ve identified.”
In California, planning officials with the city of Sacramento will partner with Sacramento County to develop strategies and policies to both address extreme heat as well as expand housing.
The ULI team will arrive in California’s capital city next week to begin the process of interviewing a wide range of stakeholders such as developers, community groups, elected officials and others “to try to get a really strong sense of some of the local context,” Laura Tuller, associate planner in the planning division at the Sacramento Community Development Department, said. The team will then draft recommendations, with a more detailed report to come in January.
“And we really see that as a step in our process,” she said. “And then they’re going to come up with recommendations which we hope we can use to build on our policy direction, and really get into the details of how we move forward.”
The planning process will help the city further develop its design guidelines and development standards to incorporate some of the findings. The collaboration will look at establishing best practices for extreme heat mitigation, exploring some of the various regulatory structures to strike the balance between developing new building standards for extreme heat while working to expand housing options for residents in the city and county.
“We want strike the right balance there, so not making requirements sort of too onerous,” Tuller said.
Another area to explore is how to ensure a thriving and growing tree canopy exists not only in newly developed areas of the city and county, but other established areas of the city that may be economically depressed. Sacramento, known as the “city of trees,” has an urban tree canopy that is largely man-made, as the city of some 535,800 residents exists in an area that is not naturally forested.
The ULI team will also work with leaders in Needles, a small city in southern California’s Mojave Desert, to focus on heat mitigation and the development of infrastructure designed for a region which recorded 142 days above 100 degrees in 2024, and 104 days above 100 degrees so far this year, according to Extreme Weather Watch. (The hottest temperature on record in Needles is 125 degrees, recorded June 20, 2017.)
In Long Beach, the Technical Assistance Leadership Exchange will explore resilient building retrofits, while San Jose will lean on ULI expertise to develop implementation strategies for the city’s Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan (CARP). San Diego will work with ULI to address its housing shortage, particularly in what’s known as the “missing middle,” which generally refers to medium-density, multifamily housing developments.
Communities of all sizes, and in many parts of the country, are dealing with extreme weather events and other effects of human-caused climate change, experts say.
Extreme weather is no longer a rare occurrence, Tuller said. “It’s becoming really part of our daily lives, in Sacramento and across California.” A trend in cities, she said, is to shift away from preparing for emergency response, toward “more proactive ways of thinking about these issues.”
“Buildings last for a long time,” she said. “Our built environment [will] last for a long time, we hope. And so really thinking about what we can do now to have our next generation of buildings be really resilient to the climate that we’re going to have later in the century.”
