WGI Whitepapers

After the Award: Navigating Environmental Compliance on MARAD-Funded Port Projects

WGI — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:51:38 GMT

Federal money is reaching American ports at a scale the industry has not seen before. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed $2.25 billion to the Port Infrastructure Development Program (PIDP) between 2022 and 2026, and the Fiscal Year 2026 round made roughly $488.6 million available for capital and planning projects at ports and their intermodal connections. Applications closed on June 1, 2026. Award announcements will follow. For a port authority or public agency that may have spent two years assembling an application, the notification is a genuine milestone. It is also the point at which a different kind of work begins, and that work is the part many applicants have thought least about. A decade ago this was a small problem, because there was relatively little federal money available. Limited funding authorization meant limited demand for Maritime Administration (MARAD) environmental documents, and few practitioners specialized in preparing them. MARAD has grown substantially since. The grant programs are larger, the award lists are longer, and a great many port owners are now encountering the federal environmental review process for the first time, on a project that already has a construction schedule attached to it. Plainly stated, a PIDP grant is a reimbursement award. The recipient pays project costs and invoices MARAD for them, and pre-award costs are generally not reimbursable unless MARAD authorizes them in writing. MARAD does not obligate grant funds until the recipient has satisfied applicable environmental review requirements, and no ground may be disturbed and no construction materials purchased before review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is complete. The award letter is a starting gun, not a trophy. The next real milestone is environmental clearance.

Speed to Approval: Compressing the Affordable Housing Entitlement Timeline in Florida and Texas

WGI — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:40:13 GMT

Entitlement speed has become the binding constraint between capital and units delivered for affordable housing developers in Florida and Texas. Two structural shifts since 2023 explain why. The federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed in July 2025, made permanent a 12 percent increase in 9 percent Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) allocations and lowered the private activity bond test for 4 percent credits from 50 percent to 25 percent. Novogradac estimates these changes could finance 1.22 million additional affordable rental homes between 2026 and 2035. At the state level, Florida's Live Local Act and Texas's SB 840 have opened administrative pathways that bypass discretionary zoning approvals for qualifying affordable projects. More capital is available, and more sites are eligible. What has not expanded is the rate at which deals can move from site identification to groundbreaking. Funding allocation calendars from the Florida Housing Finance Corporation (FHFC) and the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) still operate on fixed cycles, and applications still require demonstrated ability to proceed. More eligible properties chasing the same finite funding allocations means competition for funding streams has tightened, even as the credits themselves expanded. The deals that can demonstrate clean ability-to-proceed earlier in their development cycle win the funding competition. The deals that cannot, lose it. What follows walks the three levers that compress the entitlement timeline: pathway selection, public engagement strategy, and integrated up-front scoping. Each is rooted in what works in Florida and Texas markets specifically, where WGI's affordable housing clients are navigating both the new regulatory tools and the tightening funding landscape.

Parking Structure Cost Outlook for 2026

WGI — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:10:58 GMT

Since 1983, WGI has specialized in the planning and design of parking facilities. Our annual construction cost report is a premier industry resource for parking structure planning that has been employed by more than 9,000 AEC and parking industry professionals. Beginning with our initial publication in 2006, we have established and maintained an extensive proprietary database of hundreds of parking facility projects, varying in scale, complexity, and geography. By leveraging Engineering News-Record’s (ENR) Building Cost Index and RS Means location factors, we normalize the historical data to determine the current national median cost. Using the national median cost, we can extrapolate localized cost projections for nearly every U.S. city. To preserve consistency in the analysis, our forecast excludes statistical outliers, such as underground parking facilities, parking below buildings, and parking facilities of very large or very small size. In recent years, we have also culled older projects from our analysis because parking structures have evolved from the very utilitarian structures of the 1980’s and 90’s into the architecturally interesting, environmentally sustainable, and technologically-advanced buildings we see today. Modern parking facilities incorporate technology, amenities, and uses never contemplated by designers 40 years ago. As of May 2026, our analysis indicates that the median construction cost for a new parking structure is $33,300 per space, or $98.75 per square foot—a 6% increase compared to the 2025 median cost of $31,400 per space. The table in this report outlines the 2026 median construction costs for parking structures in various U.S. cities, with Houston representing the lowest cost, San Francisco the highest, and Detroit aligning closely with the national median index of 100.0. Please note that the figures represent "hard" construction costs. "Soft" costs—such as A/E fees, geotechnical investigations, materials testing, special inspections, permitting, land acquisition, environmental assessments, financing, administrative, and legal costs—typically add an additional 15% to 25% to the total project budget but may be higher for owners who allocate internal expenditures directly to the project.

Built to Survive vs Built to Last

WGI — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:40:53 GMT

Most buildings in the United States are designed to meet the building code. That statement carries an assumption most owners never question: if a structure is “to code,” it should perform when it matters. In reality, building codes are written to establish minimum life safety standards, not to ensure continuity of operations, long term functionality, or rapid recovery after extreme events. This distinction matters more today than it did a generation ago. As hurricanes move inland, their outer bands frequently generate tornadoes hundreds of miles from landfall, exposing inland communities to a second, and often unexpected, wind hazard. At the same time, tornado activity overall has shifted eastward into regions that historically planned almost exclusively for hurricanes. Facilities in Florida, Texas, and the Carolinas are increasingly exposed to multiple wind hazards over the course of a building’s life—not one isolated event type. In this environment, the question is no longer whether a building meets code. In this environment, the real questions are whether facilities are engineered for wind demands beyond code prescribed thresholds and whether their systems and infrastructure support continued operation following a wind hazard event. A code compliant building may stand yet be unusable. Power may be limited to emergency lighting but not core operations. Communications may fail despite intact structure. Access roads may flood even when the building itself remains dry. None of these outcomes violate the building code. They fall outside its scope entirely. We will examine the gap between survival and performance, between buildings designed to pass inspection and buildings designed to function under stress. Using real storm outcomes, current code frameworks, and facility scale examples, this paper explains why compliance should be treated as the starting point, not the finish line, for owners responsible for facilities that cannot afford to go dark when conditions are at their worst. December 10, 2021. Edwardsville, Illinois. An EF3 tornado hit southwestern Illinois that night, winds above 150 miles per hour. Inside a large distribution facility, part of the roof structure failed. So did sections of the exterior walls. Six workers were killed. The building had been built to code. Nothing in the applicable standard for an industrial warehouse required it to survive an EF3. It was not designed for that storm. It was designed to get a permit, and it got one.

Before You Break Ground: What Data Center Developers Need to Know About Site Viability, Utility Coordination, and Community Approval

WGI — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:37:13 GMT

Somewhere in Texas right now, a developer is signing an LOI on a data center site without a clear answer on water. Somewhere else, one just discovered that the interconnection queue for their preferred location runs three years deep and requires a $22 million financial guarantee just to enter. And somewhere else still, a project that checked every engineering box is stalled because the city council member who represents the neighboring subdivision wasn’t part of the conversation until the permit notice hit their desk. None of these are hypothetical. They are the patterns playing out across the most active data center market in the country, and they are the reason this paper exists. The market context is well-documented. According to McKinsey, global investment in data center infrastructure is projected to reach $7 trillion by 2030 — with approximately $3 trillion attributable to real estate alone. [1] In North America, more than 35 gigawatts of new capacity is currently under construction, a figure that has more than doubled since 2023. [2,3] Vacancy in primary markets has fallen to a record low of 1.6 percent, with 92 percent of new capacity preleased before delivery. [3,4] The pipeline is not speculative. This is capital that has been committed and sites that are being built. Texas sits at the center of it. The state offers a deregulated power grid, substantial renewable energy capacity, land at scale, favorable tax policy, and geographic positioning that serves both coasts and Latin America simultaneously. It has also become the most instructive market in the country for understanding what large-scale data center development actually requires. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the nonprofit organization that manages 90 percent of the state’s power grid [6], had received large-load connection requests totaling more than 572 gigawatts as of mid-2025, with over 70 percent of those requests coming from data centers. [8,9] That figure represents more than five times the state’s current total generation capacity, and it has made Texas the most advanced proving ground in the country for the grid, water, and community challenges every high-growth data center market will eventually face. This paper is not for the hyperscalers. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have built entire internal teams around these problems. It is for the developers, design-build contractors, and corporate real estate programs entering this space who need a clear-eyed picture of what they are walking into before they write a check or sign a lease. The data center market spans gigawatt-scale hyperscale campuses down to 5–10 megawatt boutique enterprise facilities. The nature of the problems described in this paper does not change across that range. Only the scale of the consequences does.

Mapping the Full Water Column

WGI — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:32:53 GMT

2026 Strategic Technology Trends for the Infrastructure Industry

WGI — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:47:59 GMT

Each year, WGI examines the technologies shaping the future of infrastructure and the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. These trends are not abstract ideas or distant forecasts. They reflect real shifts already influencing how projects are planned, designed, delivered, and operated across the United States. Across the AEC market, digital transformation has accelerated from experimentation to execution. Industry research consistently shows that a majority of architecture and engineering firms are actively investing in digital tools, with artificial intelligence, advanced modeling, and data analytics increasingly embedded in everyday workflows. What was once viewed as innovation is quickly becoming baseline capability. The 2026 strategic technology trends reflect an industry reaching a new level of digital maturity. Data is no longer scarce, models are no longer static, and automation is no longer confined to isolated tasks. Instead, infrastructure organizations are learning how to connect systems, intelligence, and workflows across the full project and asset lifecycle.

Unlocking Hidden Value in Risky Sites

WGI — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:34:55 GMT

Environmentally challenged or “risky” sites continue to represent a significant source of untapped opportunity in today’s commercial real estate market. Former industrial properties, underutilized commercial corridors, infill parcels, and legacy sites are often bypassed, not because they lack development potential, but because environmental uncertainty introduces hesitation, and often institutional aversion, among developers, lenders, and investors. In many transactions, environmental due diligence is treated as a compliance requirement, a check box on a loan application, rather than a strategic input. Reports identify potential liabilities, but those findings are rarely translated into an actionable development or financial strategy for site acquisition. When environmental risk is evaluated in isolation from land use, capital structure, and redevelopment plans, even manageable conditions can derail otherwise viable deals. Strategic Environmental Due Diligence (SEDD) reframes this approach. Instead of asking whether a site is too risky, SEDD focuses on how environmental risk can be understood, managed, and integrated into the broader development strategy. By aligning environmental evaluation with intended use, regulatory pathways, and investment objectives, SEDD converts uncertainty into strategy and strategy into confidence. This whitepaper outlines a practical SEDD framework designed for developers navigating complex sites and competitive markets. It demonstrates how EPA guidance, risk-based corrective action strategies, and early planning can reduce surprises, improve deal certainty, and unlock value in properties others avoid. It also highlights how WGI helps developers move from risk avoidance toward strategic risk management that supports stronger returns on investment and successful redevelopment outcomes.

Building North Carolina's Transportation Future: Connecting Communities, Strengthening Infrastructure, and Advancing Mobility

WGI — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:21:58 GMT

For more than two decades, WGI has been a trusted partner in shaping the future of transportation infrastructure across North Carolina. Since opening our Raleigh office in 2004, our team has successfully delivered a wide range of projects through both conventional and alternative delivery methods for the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) and numerous local agencies. Our continued success is built on a foundation of technical excellence, integrity, and collaboration. WGI’s engineers, planners, and specialists share a commitment to improving mobility, safety, and sustainability while exceeding client expectations on every project. Over the years, we have become known not only for our engineering expertise but also for our ability to foster long-term client relationships and adapt to a constantly evolving transportation landscape. This paper explores North Carolina’s growing infrastructure needs and the challenges that accompany rapid population growth and environmental pressures. It also highlights WGI’s comprehensive capabilities, case studies from across the state, and the value we bring as a strategic partner dedicated to delivering safer, smarter, and more resilient infrastructure for North Carolina’s communities.

Seeing Below, Saving Above: Delivering Safe, Cost-Effective, and Future-Ready Infrastructure

WGI — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 22:14:05 GMT

A New Way of Seeing

Every project begins with a vision – an airport expansion, a safer roadway, a mixed-use development that reshapes a community. But before vision becomes reality, one question must be answered: what lies beneath the ground? Buried infrastructure forms the unseen lifeline of our modern world. Water and wastewater pipes, fiber optic cables, storm drains, power lines, and natural gas networks are woven into a dense, hidden network that keeps our communities functioning. Each is essential. Each is vulnerable. And each poses risks that, if misunderstood or overlooked, can unravel even the most carefully planned project, often threatening safety, schedules, and budgets. For decades, projects stumbled over these risks. Outdated records, incomplete as-builts, and unseen conflicts led to costly redesigns, unexpected delays, and dangerous strikes. Subsurface Utility Engineering (SUE) emerged as a proven solution to mitigate these risks. By applying cutting-edge geophysical prospecting tools, advanced data modeling, and non-destructive excavation methods, SUE provides accurate, actionable intelligence on underground conditions before shovels hit the ground. At WGI, we’ve taken SUE further. By combining proven methodology with cutting-edge technology and an unwavering commitment to safety, we empower clients to move forward with clarity and confidence. For us, SUE is not simply about finding utilities; it’s about unlocking savings, enhancing safety, and accelerating delivery – it’s about turning uncertainty into opportunity.