The real estate market has tanked and the credit markets have shriveled.

But there are still deals to be made in a University of Miami classroom.

There, on a Friday afternoon, a group of students acting as developers, investors, and planners are being grilled by the “city council” over plans they hope will revive a downtown district. Neighbors are unsettled. Developers are juggling the numbers.

Is a compromise far off?

The students must craft one if they expect to succeed in the class—one of the first in a new Master of Real Estate Development and Urbanism (MRED+U) program that officially launches in the fall. They also have to ensure their plans will promote a livable, sustainable community.

Those characteristics are key to the degree, which marries one of South Florida’s largest industries with the New Urbanism principles central to the School of Architecture.

The program is also born of its time and place: As cities are taxed by traffic, water scarcity, rising energy prices, and a paralyzing credit crisis, this interdisciplinary course of study strives to educate a new generation of real estate professionals to approach the next metropolises holistically. After all, these days even mega-developers like Jorge Perez, the condominium magnate and major donor for whom the school’s main building is named, are finding it necessary to rethink past strategies.

Drawing on faculty from the Schools of Business Administration, Law, and Architecture as well as the College of Engineering, the one-year program will teach students how to build financially feasible yet environmentally and economically sustainable projects, says Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the School of Architecture, which is leading the program.

From boom to bust and back again, its curriculum incorporates the market’s ongoing realities.

“We are witnessing a shift away from the unsustainable, low-density, single-use suburban paradigm and short-term investment cycles,” says associate professor of architecture Charles Bohl, director of the Knight Program in Community Building and of the new master’s program.

“All trends point towards a new paradigm combining livable community design and sustainable development. A long-term investment outlook is on the horizon.”

The program’s adherence to those ideals received affirmation this year from the Urban Land Institute Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition, a prestigious contest that emphasizes sustainability.

In the University’s first year of competition, School of Architecture graduate students Victor Santana, B.Arch. ’94, Jeffrey Hall, Benyameen Ghareeb, and Jared Sedam, and M.B.A. candidate Warren Bane overcame 94 other teams from the U.S. and Canada to make the final four, along with teams from Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kansas State University. UM’s upstart program outpaced powerhouse entrants such as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan.

“It’s a tremendous boost,” Plater-Zyberk says. “It shows clearly that we have something to offer.”

The UM team’s task was to transform a 75-acre parcel in Denver, Colorado, that includes the city’s Design District, a new light rail station, and a big-box store center adjacent to historic neighborhoods with dramatic views of the Rocky Mountains.

The UM team integrated the stores’ parking lot into the surrounding street grid and created a pedestrian-friendly, 24-hour neighborhood by adding small retail, residences, and community gardens fed by a recycled-graywater facility. “The New Urbanism principles we instilled in the project really set us apart,” explains Santana, one of the first MRED+U students.

That focus on green building also will set apart the program’s graduates when they seek jobs—especially in this battered market and in light of federal incentives to encourage sustainable development and transit-related projects, explains Loretta Cockrum, founder and CEO of the Foram Group, a Miami-based real estate asset management company that works on LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) projects.

“People coming out of school will be almost better prepared than the developers who have been in business,” says Cockrum, a member of the School of Architecture’s visiting committee.

Stephen Nostrand, a South Florida real estate veteran and adjunct professor in the new master’s program, thinks entrepreneurial graduates will find opportunities in rehabbing distressed commercial properties and refashioning them into new urban town centers and main streets.

“These are the times when this relatively new philosophy of urban development will bear fruit,” notes Nostrand, executive vice president at commercial real estate firm Colliers Abood Wood-Fay.

The idea for a real estate and urbanism master’s program emerged four years ago from the Knight Program in Community Building, which awarded fellowships to mid-career professionals in a variety of related fields, such as governance, engineering, real estate, and environmental planning. At the fellows’ request, the University developed seminars focusing on the dynamics of the real estate market.

The seminars evolved into full-semester courses taught by faculty in architecture, business, and law. Most real estate programs fall into two categories of specialization, Bohl says: corporate business and real estate finance, or real estate development and entrepreneurship. Recognizing the assets of the School of Business Administration’s finance department and School of Law’s program in real property, the School of Architecture forged a new and unique path that incorporates expertise from three strong schools, creating a vital interdisciplinary foundation.

Word of UM’s program spread so quickly that eight students clamored to begin part-time in 2008 before the official fall 2009 launch. For the fall, candidates with undergraduate degrees and work experience in real estate, planning, architecture, engineering, construction management, and related fields have already applied from as far as Hawaii, Saudi Arabia, and China, Bohl says.

Rene Sacasas, chair of the School of Business Administration’s Business Law program, sees a hunger to participate among UM business students too, noting that classes in the school’s undergraduate real estate major are filled to capacity, while those in the M.B.A. program’s new real estate concentration are oversubscribed.

These new offerings are a natural for the University’s dynamic location, Sacasas points out: “Probably 80 percent of the wealth created in South Florida is created out of real estate. We’re not Detroit; we don’t build cars. We develop land and create services.”

Drawing on its interdisciplinary faculty’s depth of experience and expertise, the curriculum of MRED+U tackles real estate finance and law, market analysis, land use policies and codes, project management, sustainable development practices, entrepreneurship, and more. The capstone is a summer charrette, a combined development and community design studio, where students will strive to balance the desires of residents, government leaders, and financial interests to devise a community plan.

For the spring 2009 semester, Bohl and Nostrand co-taught “Urban Infill, Preservation and Redevelopment,” a course that exemplifies the program’s aims. During one session, Bohl, a livable communities expert, showed slides of government-led town-center redevelopment projects in several Florida cities. All possessed New Urbanism elements such as pedestrian-friendly streets and plazas intended to establish a sense of community.

Addressing the issue of financial feasibility, Nostrand noted that mixed-use developers must now be prepared to put down far more of their own money to get loans for projects—40 percent versus the 5 percent some banks considered sufficient three years ago.

“I haven’t seen a lot of developers here go out of business,” Nostrand told his students. “Yet we know there is a lot of pain.”

Later, the students broke into their assigned roles. Using the Urban Land Institute’s Urban Plan curriculum, a sophis-ticated case study that introduces the complexity of urban real estate development through a five-block study area, students addressed historic preservation, a homeless shelter, affordable housing, and a host of community group issues.

A local lawyer and developer quizzed them on their plans, market analyses, financial spreadsheets, and overall vision for the neighborhood in preparation for upcoming team presentations to a city council.

“Like many of our courses,” Bohl points out, “the project teaches students with very different backgrounds and technical expertise how to work together as a development team.”

One team initially designed an aesthetically pleasing New Urbanist project that later required several compromises because “when we came to the numbers it wasn’t feasible,” explains MRED+U student Eloine del Valle, B.Arch. ’08.

Seeking a mix of housing levels for a sense of community, the team’s ultimate project included affordable housing as 25 percent of the total and other elements that would appeal to city officials while achieving a healthy 17 percent return for the developer.

“The whole concept is about long-term sustainability and lots of uses,” says del Valle’s teammate Cary Sabol, who is pursuing his Master of Laws degree. “We really took that to heart.”

Bohl is confident that future development will look nothing like the suburban sprawl that occurred when baby boomers were kids. “Those ‘kids’ are now retiring, and their expectations for their golden years include active living and lifestyles very different from those of their parents,” he observes, adding that the boomers’ children and grandchildren, as well as millions of recent immigrants, are further fueling the market for walkable communities. “The MRED+U program is perfectly poised to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs to make those communities a reality,” Bohl adds. “We’re positioned for what’s happening around the country and around the world.”

MARIKA LYNCH is a freelance writer based in Miami, Florida.