The Interview – Lyndsey Rolheiser
Lyndsey Rolheiser is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the Brookfield Centre in Real Estate and Infrastructure at the Schulich School of Business, who began teaching at Schulich in 2023. Her research explores real estate as a spatial asset and centres questions around the people residing/working within it and regulating it. Lyndsey’s research interests include neighbourhoods and housing, commercial real estate and climate change, and transportation infrastructure and land use.
We sat down with her to ask her a few questions about her research and experiences at Schulich.
Hi Lyndsey, nice to meet you!
So, to start, tell us a bit about yourself.
I am an urban and real estate economist researching a variety of topics related to residential and commercial real estate typically within an urban context. My background’s fairly interdisciplinary, which is an asset when dealing with complex issues involving the intersection of society and the built environment. I graduated from MIT in 2017 with a PhD in Urban Economics and completed a post doc at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
Where were you before you came to Schulich? And what brought you to our school?
Before I came to Schulich, I was an Assistant Professor of Research within the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies at the University of Connecticut. Prior to that, I was an Assistant Professor within the School of Urban and Regional Planning at TMU.
The Real Assets Group/Brookfield Centre (not sure what the title to use for official purposes…) is a small but dynamic group that really punches above its weight. The masters program is very high quality which makes it a pleasure to teach it. Schulich as a whole presents itself as an ever evolving school with a real and substantive focus on sustainability that reaches across the various disciplines within the school.
I appreciate that as a scholar who has now added important climate and air quality related questions to my research pipeline.
That sounds like a good segue to discuss your research and teaching topics.
My teaching spans topics of urban and real estate economics, real estate finance, real estate development, and quantitative methods. I have taught undergraduate economics, planning, and real estate students; masters and PhD students in planning, public policy, and real estate; and mid-career executive MBAs.
Have you started any projects in the last year?
There are a few projects I began in the past year. They are all quite different but all still fundamentally about the interaction between people and the built environment – They’re all clipping along at about the same pace.
The first paper continues work I published in Real Estate Economics earlier in 2024. We extended an initial exploration into the relationship between air pollution exposure and commercial real estate economic indicators to focus on identifying the mechanisms behind the drop in office rents observed after air pollution exposure. Specifically, we’re looking at existing literature on the negative effect of air pollution on worker productivity and show this worker-level effect can subsequently put downward pressure on office rents.
The second project I’m working on is also concerned with office buildings, specifically the spatial evolution of office real estate development from 1980 to 2020. Using geolocated construction year data, we’re working to identify trends in urban versus suburban development and changes in the role of local socioeconomic and demographic characteristics in development decisions across all major cities in the United States. We’re centring our research on the question of how household access to improvements in the built environment has changed along racial, income, and education lines over time. This allows us to explore questions of gentrification and employment access through a developer and investor lens.
I’m also looking at starting a research project that will focus the two sources of value associated with biodiversity: namely, local access to and general protection of biodiversity.
The first empirical exercise we propose considers the roll out of US legislation enacted at the state-level to preserve biodiversity—habitat connectivity in particular—over a twenty year period. We take two approaches here with slightly different questions in each. The first approach asks whether households (on average) value the enactment of biodiversity legislation, i.e. is the legislation a valued and thus credible signal for a given state’s future ability to limit biodiversity loss.
The second approach zooms into the state of Florida for a more granular spatial analysis focusing more on individual household access to biodiversity. Specifically, we exploit the spatial characteristics of regulations rolled out over the same twenty year period. This granularity allows us to identify a treatment gradient associated with proximity to biodiversity improvements. In other words, are future improvements in local biodiversity capitalized into housing prices?
Thinking about one or more projects that you’re working on now or that you’ve recently completed, what are the key take-aways for those stakeholders?
Outside of academics, my key stakeholders are policy makers, developers, real estate investors.
My research results are showing a clear negative effect of air pollution exposure on rents and value of commercial real estate is an important take-away for cities, commercial tenants, commercial property owners, and investors. While many components of air pollution have improved in cities over the past few decades, the recent increase in far reaching wildfire smoke has nearly erased these improvements. It is increasingly important that owners of commercial properties adapt to this new reality by making building-level improvements that mediate the effect of air pollution shocks on their tenants.
Stepping back a bit – what do you think some of the biggest challenges and opportunities are in the urban economics and real estate economics field?
There are so many questions out there for urban/real estate economists to tackle. Really it’s a matter of having enough time! From a Canadian research perspective, one big challenge for our field is the lack of available Canadian data. There are efforts underway to improve this but unfortunately we are far behind other countries which limits the amount of high quality research papers on important real estate topics in the Canadian context.
As you’re a relatively new member of the faculty, I’d like to ask you a few questions about your experience at Schulich – first off, how are you settling in?
I am all settled! Office plants are thriving. Office tea supply is topped up. Onboarding learning curve was minimal. Everyone at multiple levels of faculty and admin have been incredibly kind and helpful!
What has your teaching experience at Schulich been like thus far?
Teaching has been a great experience so far. I teach only masters students and have found them to be very engaged and curious. Their backgrounds are also quite varied interns of education and work experience so everyone brings something unique to class discussion.
Reaching students can be tough sometimes – what sort of strategies and approaches do you use to engage students? What do you find works?
I don’t want to stand in front of students and lecture from slides for three hours and they don’t want that either. It’s important to break up the class into different learning methods (lecture, discussion, activity, multimedia). I also use real world examples, bring in relevant guest speakers from industry/policy/government, give assignments that promote cons
tant critical reading and writing, and try to introduce variation in content delivery methods.
I know that not every student will be interested in every topic I present, but noticing sparks of interest for some struggling students presents a pathway to enabling them to conquer material they may have viewed as challenging as their general engagement increases. In other words, reel them in on the areas they are interested in, then show how it relates to areas they may have struggled in or avoided! Our program is short—only 12 months—so it’s important they feel comfortable with the faculty in that first semester so they can take advantage of our knowledge and networks as they progress through their coursework and case competitions.
One other thing – I find at the beginning of semester it’s like pulling teeth to get students to come to office hours. I have to repeatedly impress upon them that office hours are really student hours. These blocks of time are theirs! I am willing to chat about anything during this time. I encourage them to come in groups or alone, it doesn’t matter. Ask me about course material, current events, future employment opportunities, I am happy to be a soundboard for any of it.
Any concluding remarks?
Looking forward to many productive years at Schulich!
This interview was conducted in December of 2024. It has been edited for length and clarity.