Featured Researcher: Andrew Mueller

Andrew Mueller

Each week, Daniels is featuring a researcher who conducts meaningful research that impacts their field and the wider community. Learn more about their work in Q&As with the Daniels Research team and email them to nominate yourself or a colleague for a future Q&A. 

Andrew Mueller is an associate professor at the Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management. Before joining DU, he worked as a consultant for international firms and real estate developers in Colorado and the Northeast. He also taught at Colorado State University and Regis University. Mueller holds a PhD and MA in economics from Colorado State University, an MS in real estate and construction management from DU, and a BBA in finance and environmental studies from Emory University. His research, published in top journals, spans regenerative development, affordable housing, zoning, walkability, smart cities, ESG, real estate portfolio optimization, transportation behavior and macroeconomic factors influencing real estate investment.

What do you study and how did you get started?

My interests have evolved over time toward the intersection of urban development, zoning and community impact. I was able to publish three articles from my dissertation work, which looked at zoning and its impact on walkability in Denver. Those articles used spatial econometrics and other behavioral choice models to look at the zoning around people’s houses and if that had an impact on how much they walk, bike, drive or take transit. That was all based on a survey data set from the Denver Regional Council of Governments. I also enjoy cross-disciplinary research. I recently published an article with two business information and analytics professors that investigated how innovation happens at the City of Denver’s Living Labs project. The Living Lab is a collaborative project with city planners, traffic engineers and other departments that experiments with new technologies that they’re thinking about rolling out across the city, such as better pedestrian detection at crosswalks and digital traffic light controls.

Recently I’ve started to transition to a concept that I’m very passionate about, which is regenerative development. Regenerative development encompasses an approach that is trying to get environmental, social and economic systems working together, creating positive feedback loops that are regenerative, restoring environmental productivity, culture and economic opportunity, primarily for lower income people. For example, when I first started at DU, I worked with one of our adjuncts and the Denver Housing Authority on strategies to get folks from the Sun Valley neighborhood—the poorest neighborhood in Colorado, with a median household income of $9,000 and 31 languages spoken—out of poverty and restore the environment in that neighborhood.

You mentioned working with a few different local stakeholders. Can you talk about the importance of working with community organizations in your research and your work?

Real estate benefits from the localized nature of the asset itself, so every real estate project is highly localized. There are no two pieces of ground that are exactly the same anywhere. So, from that standpoint, I think it’s important to get involved in the community, so that you can come up with and deliver research that is actually going to help communities create the outcomes they want in the future.

How would you like to see your work impact the world?

I think one of the reasons why regenerative development is having a hard time taking hold in the real estate development world is it requires the whole process to be being changed. Instead of a real estate developer coming in and offering to inject capital into the community by, let’s say, building a new elementary school and fixing some roads, regenerative development requires an iterative process where the developer has an ongoing dialogue with the community to evolve solutions to the community’s needs. That’s challenging from a developer’s perspective under the current system because they have to hold the land for a longer period of time, and it doesn’t get delivered to market as quickly. But there are ways to alter the process to help create collaborative solutions and speed up the process.

How do you bring your research into the classroom?

A lot of the research into the development process is used to inform several development-oriented courses, such as Sustainable Development. It’s also directly applicable to the development competition course I teach, the NAIOP Rocky Mountain Real Estate Challenge. Students are asked to come up with a full feasibility study for the redevelopment of a large project. They go out into the communities and get ideas and guidance from a bunch of different practitioners in the industry and get real hands-on experience. I help coach them through that process.  It’s very valuable, the type of hands on learning I think our students are looking for.