Alliances and Partnerships

LandUseUSA | Urban Strategies

Sharon Woods, CRE, CNUa, FBCI, NCI, MA
Principal | President & CEO

Sharon is the founding Principal of LandUseUSA | Urban Strategies and a certified Counselor of Real Estate (CRE). She has 35+ years of business experience; including tenure with four Fortune 500 Corporations (Target / Dayton-Hudson, Macy’s / Federated, Sears / Kmart, and General Motors / Urban Science); plus decades in professional consulting.

Sharon Woods Bio PDF Sharon Woods CV PDF

For an urban perspective, Sharon has lived a total of 17 years in Midtown Minneapolis and downtown Cincinnati; and worked 15 years in downtown Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Lansing. She eventually settled on the shores of Lake Victoria in central Michigan in 2002. Today she is an avid boater and spends her free time kayaking rivers and lakes; touring cities across the country; photographing placemaking amenities; and studying urban building formats.

Primary Contact | Founder

Sharon Woods | President, CEO
Email | SharonWoods@LandUseUSA.com
Phone | (517) 290-5531

Incremental Development Alliance

Sharon Woods
Faculty Member, Private Sector Partner

The Alliance helps local entrepreneurs and civic leaders strengthen their neighborhoods through small-scale real estate projects. We are a not-for-profit Alliance of practitioners who train small developers, helping citizens strengthen their own neighborhoods and helping city champions benefit from the types of development that community truly wants.

There is work to be done. Strong places are built at the speed of trust from the bottom up, and today’s cities need systems to support that incremental development. It’s messy, slow, and difficult work but we know this is how great places come to be. That leaves us with a challenge – to build the capacity for locals to invest in their own neighborhoods, and to help institutions encourage that small scale development. We do both.

Additional Information

incrementaldevelopment.org
City, State | Fort Wayne, Indiana

MiCNU | Michigan Chapter

Sharon Woods
CNU-accredited | Vice President

Members of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) help create vibrant and walkable cities, towns, and neighborhoods where people have diverse choices for how they live, work, shop, and get around. People want to live in well-designed places that are unique and authentic, and CNU’s mission is to help people build those places.

The Michigan Chapter of CNU has about ten board members with representation across the state, including the Upper Peninsula, Traverse City, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, and Detroit – plus Windsor Ontario. We also collaborate with our sister organization CNU Midwest, which represents members throughout Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The MiCNU Michigan chapter focuses on educating the public and planning profession about the principles of urbanism. We facilitate meetings, conferences, workshops, and book clubs; and we also provide various forms of technical assistance. Many additional resources are available through social media (see our website and Facebook page, below).

Contacts