 Great thank you and thank you for having me this morning. It's a great topic It's one I've been interested in for my entire professional career actually and for those of you who are incoming students to The program who have now been here for a couple of months Putting this getting a little perspective on public-private partnerships when I started my career With an interest in getting into real estate development and trying to figure out how to create a path forward the only Professional opportunity at that time was to get an MBA a very general degree for real estate really wasn't fitting So when the Columbia program was created in the mid 1980s, it was addressing a real need the increasingly sophisticated Development process and at that time it was becoming an accepted investment asset class like other asset classes And it called for a professional approach to analysis and analytics that sort of thing Well at the same time as real estate was becoming more professionalized in that sense It was becoming more complicated in terms of the product types And we are seeing this growth over the past 30 years in mixed-use development in mixed-income housing in infill development and And that increasingly sophisticated type of real estate product requires an increasingly complicated approach to development which we're going to talk about this morning and hear about how to go about that so a previous generation of developers were able to be successful by focusing on a single property type and Sort of building in isolation but we've now come to understand that real estate is really very much about context and It sort of works two ways on the one hand real estate is an interesting Type of business because you're building a product. You're satisfying a consumer demand But at the same time you're creating the context that people live their daily public lives in you're creating the environment of the public sphere But the converse of that of course is that context creates value for real estate? I mean real estate might be a great product But it's not worth very much if it doesn't have neighbors that have amenities retail other uses access to mass transit Quality of life kinds of amenities parks and open space cultural facilities Educational facilities all these things are the context that creates value so Real estate today really is very much about working in a context We've we've moved from the period when Single-use isolated projects were the norm to today the norm is we're working in an urban environment And so because of that and because the fact that you're affecting the environment The issues rise to the surface much more readily in terms of the interests of your neighbors There's a range of competing interests for development Of course because the design the density the uses all these things are a matter of great interest to the to the public and to your neighbors And so that expresses itself in a political Format and it makes development just that much more difficult and complicated And in order to address these kinds of issues you really need to be in the mode of Collaboration and consultation as patrice talked about it's really become part of the toolkit of development You can't exist in isolation anymore and so the sophisticated kinds of Leadership that is unable to engage a community is really critical for real estate development today and I think that generally the public is aware of The leadership role that private developers play because that's very much in in the papers You know the compelling stories that they have to tell about how important their product is and that sort of thing and how they gather them The resources and and we we celebrate that and we should and many of you you know See that as the path forward on the private side But what is I think less well appreciated is the fact that there are public entrepreneurs out there who? Fulfill essentially the same function they could be in government neighborhood organizations Volunteer citizen groups they come from a vast range of types of entities and and organizations They also create a vision of how a how a neighborhood can change. What should be built there? And this vision typically advances a set of public goals not just one goal, but several goals It typically job creation is one that's often talked about but open space transit improvements How to it how to integrate cultural institutions and and so today of course we're fortunate to hear two projects that do exactly that that advance a broad range of public goals so public-private partnerships in is a format that can advance these public goals and You can advance them of course more readily by enlisting the power of the market The marketplace is what drives real estate and so there's a there's a power to move things forward with that But it doesn't necessarily fall to the private developer to harness that power They need to they need to earn a return. They've got investment capital They've got their own time and resources they're investing they need to earn the money back And so the public elements that comprise this Public-private partnership of this vision that is of how a neighborhood in a city can change Can't necessarily be easily underwritten privately so you need to look to other resources and so these public goals often require public resources to match up with them and what developers often think about is You know subsidy, you know, how many dollars can I get and you see that in housing in other areas But public resources are much broader than that. It could be land It could be Complementary infrastructure investment that's coordinated We do a lot of that at the MTA where we try and work with developers to coordinate their developments with a new subway entrance or other public improvements It could also be how do you shape the regulatory powers of government? Zoning is critical and the Highline story of course is one that really Is very much integrated with the whole notion of creating a zoning district that shapes the The uses nearby but also at the same time addresses some very fundamental concerns about how do you put a public? Structure through private property. You can't take the private property because that's unconstitutional So how do you address that and so zoning is a tool to advance those purposes as well So to ensure that these resources get committed requires that the public entrepreneur convince public leaders constituency groups and others that the broader public purpose is being served by this vision and and helping to Marshall the resources that are necessary This is not an easy job qualifying for public resources is difficult time consuming Of course need political support, but there's a lot of just nitty-gritty stuff statutory issues. How do you comply with certain? Requirements that are mandated by one program or another sometimes they don't match up One program might require you to do one thing another something else How do you how do you deal with these? How do you balance these things? That's really the role of the public entrepreneur to help create that Unified approach where the things think that where the different resources get balanced But the I think that you can say that that public-private partnerships are actually similar to private Development in terms of the elements of success First of all you have to have market demand There as I said that really is what drives real estate But you also need to have good design and I know many here will appreciate that but it's it's really fundamental How do you design for the uses that are part of this project the functional needs of these uses and balance that with the the needs of the context with the Uses that are there the traditions of the community histories the goals of the community that sort of thing the adjacent Public spaces and other attributes that you have and of course the entrepreneurial Resources necessary to secure the the the the resources the and to move the project forward So public-private partnerships are complicated a lot of players a lot of conflicting goals have to be reconciled and subject to public scrutiny You live in a fishbowl and So they're they're difficult and they're daunting, but the payoff of this complexity Is huge a successful project can create enormous public value and so today we're going to hear about two projects that are really transformational You know starting from a vision of an area a vision of a neighborhood a vision of a public space in the case of the Highline and Created essentially a new context for these neighborhoods responding to the old context responding to the the resources the Opportunities that are there and then shaping something new and creating really two new iconic Neighborhoods, I think it's safe to say that Chelsea is probably one of the highest value neighborhoods in New York City today Which you know 20 years ago would have been a laughable thought and downtown Brooklyn is now kind of you know The hip center of the United States again 20 years ago. Who would have thought of that? so The you'll hear the case studies this morning and you'll learn about how they created these projects how they responded to the opportunities the needs of the context How they engage the stakeholders? Including the residents other cultural institutions good government groups create. How do you create a shared? vision Balance all these competing needs all these competing goals and then how do you match the resources the public resources the private resources? so that you can really ensure success and to the students at the in the real estate program hopefully these Studies these these these projects today will really fire up your imagination and really create for you a sense of the challenges the Opportunities that lie out there and really give you some some as well some good tools and insights into how you get these Things done so look forward to hearing from the panelists this morning and thank you again for having me