What is Urban Marketplace?

Founded by Michael Banner, president and CEO of Los Angeles LDC, and other leaders of ULI Los Angeles in 2000, Urban Marketplace has become a signature annual event, with a focus on underserved and underinvested communities. Urban Marketplace tackles revitalization, gentrification, and systematic disinvestment in Los Angeles. It promotes the best practices of city building with leaders at the forefront. Urban Marketplace was designed to flip displacement on its head and bring attention to flourishing economic opportunities before the flood of gentrification.

The event features a dynamic format including “roundtable” discussions that offer direct access to decision-makers. Representatives of the public sector (i.e., transportation, housing, and so forth), the design and planning community, community advocates, small business owners, neighborhood-focused developers, and others all interact with each other and attendees so that ideas and connections ignite.

The event motto—“make a deal, make a difference,” coined by commercial broker and poet Ed Rosenthal at the 2000 inaugural Urban Marketplace—expresses this mission. And “make a deal, make a difference” has been the event’s rallying cry ever since. Leaders gathered at this event not only have the means to improve communities of color and lower income, they also bring their vision and sense of responsibility in the crucial realm of housing.