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227 Over the past two centuries the field of historic preservation has become its own distinct discipline with links to both older disciplines of history, architecture, and cultural studies and newer fields such as real estate, economics, and conservation, making preservation an endeavor that embraces a multidisciplinary approach. Preservation curricula have long offered single courses in related fields to broaden the horizons of preservation students, yet a consistent curricula dilemma has been balancing the need to provide preservation-focused skill sets (i.e., preservation theory, historic style identification, preservation law, historic building materials, etc.) with rudimentary exposure to the variety of realms within which preservation resides (i.e., real estate development, public policy, land use planning, landscape architecture, etc.). The intent of this chapter is to study one of preservation’s related disciplines—real estate development—and a perceived curricula gap that indicates for graduate students interested in adaptive reuse of historic properties and historic tax incentives that there is little historic preservation training currently offered in those programs. Prior to delving into the study results, it is first necessary to understand the evolution of real estate development graduate programs of study and a recent real estate practicum case study that directly led to this survey. Evolution of Real Estate Development as a Graduate Program of Study Creation of cities has occurred worldwide for millennia with entrepreneurs long playing a critical role in U.S. development. Although formal real estate courses were taught as early as the 1890s at Harvard and Columbia Universities, they lacked a structured content to create proficient real estate development professionals. As a result, there was an inconsistent familiarity with laws, customs, and pricing that often led to outright Robert Benedict and Cari Goetcheus 15The Critical Role of Preservation in Graduate Real Estate Curricula 228 P R E S E R V A T I O N E D U C A T I O N fraud and lack of confidence with brokers and developers. In response to the lack of industry standards, unbridled developments, and odd, sometimes incompatible, juxtapositions of land uses in larger cities, by the 1920s a regulatory environment had arisen. As such, real estate practitioners began to be required to attain broad education and training. Hence, by 1925 the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Ely created a program in public land utility economics that eventually became a graduate program in real estate development. Under the leadership of the academic visionary James Graaskamp in the 1960s, the program became nationally renowned for its multifaceted ethical approach to real estate development. In addition to an increased focus on ethical standards, the University of Wisconsin graduate program in real estate also emphasized valuation and real estate finance core courses that ultimately influenced the foundation for the industry. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Cornell University, and the University of Southern California soon followed suite with real estate graduate programs in the 1960s and 1970s. The trend broadened in the 1980s, 1990s, and the early 2000s with the emergence of development-oriented curricula via new programs at Texas A&M University, Johns Hopkins University, Clemson University, Arizona State University, and the University of Maryland. As the advantages of embodied energy began to be appreciated in the 1970s, and the intelligent reuse of historic buildings was brought to the forefront, a 1980 seminal study by Richard G. Stein and Partners touted rehabilitation as an environmentally sensitive response to new construction. Developers and preservationists discovered a mutual interest that influenced then emerging graduate programs in both disciplines. The use of historic tax incentives during the 1980s and subsequent decades also increased the awareness and viability of adaptive reuse development strategies. Graduate real estate courses, in such subjects as public-private partnerships and development process, began integrating aspects of the historic tax credit program into their syllabi, thereby raising student interest. The expanding economy of the 1980s and 1990s demanded additional real estate professionals. Although many large real estate companies continued to mine master of business administration (mba) programs for employees, those programs were traditional with an orientation toward finance issues and few courses in real estate. The increased complexity of the real estate industry, resulting from market segmentation and economic volatility coupled with a more-focused demand from practitioners, created a need for graduates with specialized real estate degrees and a broader skill set—hence the emergence of the master of real estate development degree. The increase in real estate development...

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