Jim Heid

Biography: Jim Heid, FASLA, is an infill real estate developer and strategic real estate adviser focused on the tools and techniques that lead to a more sustainable built environment. For more than 30 years he has advised cities, NGOs, legacy landowners, and private developers on more positive ways to build community. In 2017, he founded CRAFT D+A, a real estate company focused on incremental development and intentional place-building. Since its founding, CRAFT has adaptively refashioned a 1960's empty bank space into a bespoke 'club-working' space (www.craftworkhbg.com) that opened 60 days before the onset of the pandemic, and is completing an innovative twelve unit fee simple cottage court on 1.2 acres, both located in his home town of Healdsburg, CA - a small lifestyle town north of San Francisco. Over nine years ago he founded the Small Scale Developers Forum in collaboration with ULI to bring together real estate entrepreneurs developing fine grained, community driven projects that disrupt real estate norms while creating community value and increase the vitality of communities across the urban to rural transect. After leading tours and forums in over 15 cities with ULI, he authored ULI's newest publication - Building Small: A Toolkit for Real Estate Entrepreneurs, Civic Leaders and Great Communities. An active member of ULI since 1991, Jim has participated in, or chaired, over 14 Advisory Services Panels focused on resilience, sustainable development and mixed use or new community design and is a recipient of the Robert M OʻDonnell Award for his contributions to the ASP program . For over two decades he has led ULI's professional development courses in Sustainable Community Design, Mixed Use Development and Advanced Residential Development. He is a founding member of the Responsible Property Investing Product Council and is now a member of CRC-Platinum.