Established in 1989 through two legislative programs, the WCRER compiles real estate sale transaction data, rental market statistics, and development metrics throughout the State of Washington. From this, the WCRER also develops affordable housing metrics for the state with data published in quarterly Washington State Housing Market Reports, a twice yearly Washington State Apartment Market Report, and the Washington Housing Market Data Toolkit. The WCRER also provides bespoke data driven research, educational outreach programs, and policy guidance to professional organizations consistent with its public service mandate.
The Washington Center for Real Estate Research (WCRER) was initially established by the Board of Regents at Washington State University (WSU) to provide a bridge between academic study and research on real estate topics and the professional real estate industries. It served that mission at WSU until merging with the Runstad Center at the beginning of 2012. WCRER works with faculty to ensure their rigorous research is accessible and easily usable by industry participants, the media and the general public, regardless of their statistical sophistication.
WCRER aims to provide credible research, value-added information, education services and project-oriented research to real estate licensees, real estate consumers, real estate service providers, institutional customers, public agencies, and communities in Washington state and the Pacific Northwest region.
The Washington Center for Real Estate Research is a key provider of real estate research and data across the State of Washington. The Center is primarily funded by the State, hence its central role in the provision of quality and robust data and market reports. Among its core activities are the Quarterly Washington State Housing Market Report and the semi-annual Apartment Market Survey for the State Department of Licensing.
The Center is active across a range of other research projects and works closely with stakeholders both across the University of Washington with the public and private sectors.
The Center for Asian Urbanism was established to promote and undertake interdisciplinary and collaborative research of urban conditions and processes in Asia and the “Global Pacific”, for example, the relevance of cities and city-regions in Asia to each other, to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., and to the world at large.
The Center integrates research and action-oriented activities in the field to develop new knowledge and inform policy, decision-making and professional development. It provides a platform locally and internationally for critical discussion of urban issues in Asia and beyond.
The Center serves as a platform to explore the intersection of architecture, construction, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning. It is also the goal of the collaborative to establish the University of Washington as a national and international leader in the field of urban research in Asia. The College, together with other units at the University of Washington, including especially the Jackson School of International Studies, the Asian Law Center and the Foster School of Business’s Global Business Center, currently has one of the strongest concentrations of scholars on Asian cities and urbanization in the United States.
The Urban@UW initiative brings together labs that study urban issues from across the University of Washington. Urban@UW works with scholars, policymakers, and community stakeholders in order to strengthen the connection between research and solutions to urban issues through cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborative research. Key functions of Urban@UW include amplifying public awareness of ongoing projects, connecting researchers with outside constituencies, providing staff and administrative support services, and providing pilot funding and fundraising assistance. Multiple BE labs are involved, including the Northwest…
The University of Washington Data Collaborative (UWDC) is now offering services to researchers across campus, including BE researchers Gregg Colburn at the Runstad Department of Real Estate and the Urban Form Lab. Housed at the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology, UWDC provides infrastructure to access restricted data in a secure and sophisticated computing environment. Data sets available to researchers cover health records, polling data, business and consumer data, and real estate data. Researchers interested in accessing these data…
Kate Simonen joins the NORI podcast to share the ins and outs of life cycle assessments, or LCAs. Kate Simonen is a carbon accounting expert and professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. As a licensed architect and structural engineer, she has an extensive background in high-performance building systems, seismic design and retrofitting, and net-zero energy construction. Kate’s research is focused on environmental life cycle assessment and innovative construction materials and methods. She is also the founding…
The spoken word has much in common with the built environment. Both pervade our lives without asking us to interrogate their origins or intentions—but, generously, they reward us if we make the time to do so. Vikram Prakash‘s podcast, ArchitectureTalk, leaves us looking at the everyday space around us with greater curiosity, piqued by the weirdest and most beautiful of stuff. Read more
Heather Burpee is a Research Assistant Professor in University of Washington’s Department of Architecture and a director of the Integrated Design Lab in the Center for Integrated Design, located in the Bullitt Center. We sat down with her to discuss her work and research on high-performance buildings. What are your current research interests at the University of Washington? I am a research associate professor in the Department of Architecture, and I work in a small group called the Integrated Design Lab. We focus on ideas around high-performance buildings. What we…
Campbell’s research focuses on community and place-making at different scales and in different settings. He is particularly interested in the social aspects of place-making and the intersection of built form, social behavior, and culture. With a background in cultural sociology and theory, he is fascinated with how people and groups create meaningful places out of ordinary urban spaces, and how these meanings in turn shape social life and personal identities. He has applied these ideas to studies of neighborhood in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Russia, to investigations of historical trauma among indigenous populations, and to the creation of community in high rises and other “vertical environments”. He teaches primarily in the undergraduate program, Community, Environment, and Planning (CEP), but also works regularly with Master and Ph.D. students on thesis work and other research. He is especially interested in alternative forms of teaching, and has been nominated for or received five teaching awards at the UW. As an administrator, he has served as the CEP Director since 2010. He was a member of the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Academic Affairs administrative team from 2008-2013 where he developed campus-wide undergraduate policy and programming. He was appointed Director of the MUP program and Chair of the Department of Urban Design and Planning in summer 2014.
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner FAIA is a Professor in the Department of Architecture, where he has taught since 1988 in the areas of architectural design, urban design, historic preservation, and architectural history. He holds adjunct positions in the Departments of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design & Planning and is a member of the faculties of the CBE Preservation Certificate, Urban Design Certificate and BE Ph.D. He served as Chair of the Department of Architecture from 1996 to 2002. He served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College from 2007 to 2019. He currently serves as CBE Senior Advisor for Policy and Procedures. Professor Ochsner has twice won the College of Built Environments Lionel Pries Award for teaching excellence. He is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects and a recipient of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor Award.
Professor Ochsner is author of H. H. Richardson: Complete Architectural Works (1982), editor and co-author of Shaping Seattle Architecture: A Historical Guide to the Architects (First Edition, 1994; Second Edition, 2014), co-author of Distant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson (2003), and author of Lionel H. Pries, Architect-Artist-Educator: From Arts & Crafts to Modern Architecture (2007), and Furniture Studio: Materials, Craft, and Architecture (2012). Lionel H. Pries, Architect-Artist-Educator was a finalist for the 2008 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography. Professor Ochsner has published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, JAE: Journal of Architectural Education, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, ARCADE and other journals. From 1990 to 1994 he was member of the editorial board of JAE: Journal of Architectural Education. He was the Local Chair for the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Seattle in 1995, and he served on the Board of the Society from 2000 to 2003. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Pacific Northwest Quarterly.
Dr. Vikramaditya “Vikram” Prakash is an architect, architectural historian and theorist. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning. He received his B. Arch. from Chandigarh College of Architecture, India and his M.A. and PhD in History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University.
Vikram works on issues of modernism, postcoloniality, global history and fashion & architecture. His books include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek), Colonial Modernities (co-edited with Peter Scriver), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma and Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide. A Global History is widely used as a textbook and being translated into five languages. His next book, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, is due in summer 2020.
Vikram is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Built Environments. He previously served as Associate Dean for External Affairs, Chair of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs. His public service includes terms on the Boards of Seattle Center and the Seattle AIA. He also directed Chandigarh Urban Lab, a series of interdisciplinary international studios.
Vikram is co-PI (with Mark Jarzombek, MIT) of three successive grants of $1.0 million (2014), $1.5 million (2016) and $1.0 million (2019) awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These resulted in the creation of GAHTC – a collective of over 200 teachers of global architectural history.
Vikram is host of ArchitectureTalk – a bi-weekly podcast based on curated conversations with invited guests. In its first two years, ArchitectureTalk received over 60,000 unique downloads and has been independently reviewed in The American Scholar.
The 2020 Annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture recognized Vikram with the title of ACSA Distinguished Professor.