FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The University of South Alabama will turn its attention to one of the fastest-changing corners of the state next month, with a discussion on how Baldwin County can manage rapid growth without losing what makes its communities distinct.
The event is set for Thursday, Aug. 13, at the USA by the Bay campus auditorium in downtown Fairhope as part of the ongoing USA by the Bay Speaker Series. Dr. Grayson Glaze, a distinguished professor of real estate in the university’s Mitchell College of Business, will moderate a panel titled “Building Baldwin County: Balancing Real Estate, Growth and Community.”
The conversation is expected to dig into the tension many coastal Alabama communities are facing as new development, population increases and demand for housing collide with efforts to protect local identity. Few places in Alabama illustrate that tension like Baldwin County, which has ranked among the state’s fastest-growing counties for years and shows no sign of slowing, with subdivisions spreading across former farmland from Spanish Fort to Foley and the county’s population climbing toward the quarter-million mark.
Fairhope itself — the picturesque bayfront city that has become both a destination and a symbol of the growth debate — offers the panel a fitting backdrop. Its downtown, its schools and its real estate market have absorbed pressure from buyers priced out of larger metros and retirees drawn to the Eastern Shore, and the city’s long-running questions about zoning, infrastructure and character are the same questions the panel is designed to explore.
A Program on the Rise
The gathering will also serve as an update on the university’s real estate program, which was elevated to a full undergraduate major last fall. Glaze is expected to describe how quickly the program has taken off, noting that student enrollment has doubled since he arrived at South a year ago, and to outline how the coursework is shaping future real estate professionals who will serve Alabama’s expanding communities.
The rapid enrollment growth reflects more than a new major’s novelty. Real estate has become one of the most direct routes into Alabama’s economy — development, brokerage, property management, lending and construction all draw on the discipline — and students watching cranes rise across Mobile and Baldwin County have connected their coursework to a market they can see from campus. A dedicated major, with coursework spanning valuation, finance, market analysis and development, gives them credentials the university’s business graduates previously had to assemble informally.
Glaze joined the Mitchell College of Business faculty in 2025 as professor and director of the real estate program, taking on the task of growing it into a full major. He spent more than 20 years at the University of Alabama before coming to South, where he led the Alabama Center for Real Estate and helped shape it into a nationally connected program linking students to industry mentors, market data and career pipelines across the Southeast.
His years at the helm of the Tuscaloosa-based center made him one of the state’s most visible real estate academics, a regular voice on market trends quoted in business media and a convener of industry gatherings. Bringing that network to South Alabama’s program signaled the university’s intent to compete for students and industry partnerships in a metro region where real estate is a defining economic story.
The Program’s Guests
University President Jo Bonner and Executive Vice President and Provost Dr. Andi Kent are among the special guests expected to attend, along with current real estate students and professionals from the local business and property industries. A reception is planned immediately following the panel discussion.
The presence of the university’s top leadership underscored the strategic weight behind the USA by the Bay campus and the speaker series that operates from it. The Fairhope facility extends the university’s footprint into Baldwin County, serving students, professional programs and community events on the fast-growing side of Mobile Bay, and events like the Aug. 13 panel serve double duty as public programming and as introductions between the university and the business community it hopes to serve.
For the students expected in the room, the panel offers something a classroom cannot: developers, brokers and local officials discussing in real time the same growth pressures they study in coursework. The professionals attending, for their part, get a look at the pipeline of graduates the program is producing — the future analysts, brokers and project managers the county’s growth machine will need.
Event Details
Doors are scheduled to open at 5 p.m., with the presentation beginning at 5:30 p.m. and the reception starting at 6:30 p.m. The format — an early-evening panel followed by a reception — is built for the working professionals the series courts, allowing attendees from Mobile and around Baldwin County to reach the Fairhope campus after the workday and stay for the conversations the reception is designed to host.
The USA by the Bay Speaker Series has made a habit of pairing university expertise with the issues that dominate the bay area’s civic agenda, and the Baldwin County growth theme fits squarely in that tradition. Panels of this kind rarely produce policy, but they do produce the shared vocabulary that developers, planners, elected officials and residents use when the next zoning fight or infrastructure bond arrives — and the series’ audience of business and civic leaders is exactly the room where that vocabulary gets built.
The Growth Question Baldwin County Faces
The panel’s premise — balancing real estate, growth and community — names the central dilemma of coastal Alabama’s decade. Baldwin County’s population growth has outpaced its infrastructure for years, with school systems racing to build, highways like the Beach Express and the Interstate 10 corridor absorbing traffic that the original road network never anticipated, and municipalities annexing and rezoning as fast as developers file. The county’s appeal is its character — the bayfront towns, the agricultural interior, the beaches — and that same character is what growth threatens to blur.
Communities across the county are experimenting with the tools of managed growth: impact fees and planning commissions, comprehensive plan updates, and the hard conversation about where sewer and water extension should — and should not — go. Real estate professionals sit at the center of those debates, since every purchase, entitlement and listing is a data point in the pattern the community is weaving.
Glaze’s academic framing for the evening points to that intersection. A market as hot as Baldwin County’s rewards speed and capital; a community as cherished as Baldwin County’s asks for deliberation and memory. The professionals the university is training — and the ones attending the panel — will spend their careers negotiating between those two demands, one subdivision and one public hearing at a time.
With the university’s president and provost in the room, the event also doubles as a statement about South Alabama’s ambitions on the Eastern Shore: that the institution intends to be the intellectual home for the region’s growth conversation, training the professionals who will build it and convening the leaders who will decide what it becomes.
Why the Real Estate Program Matters Locally
The elevation of real estate to a full undergraduate major filled a gap in the region’s professional pipeline. Until recently, students at South Alabama who wanted careers in development or brokerage studied finance or management and picked up real estate knowledge on the job, while firms recruiting in the area pulled graduates from programs farther afield. A degree-granting program on the Gulf Coast changes that calculus, keeping local talent in local markets and giving Mobile and Baldwin County employers a recruiting base they previously lacked.
The doubling of enrollment in a single year also reflects a deliberate academic build-out. Programs that grow that quickly pair classroom instruction with industry immersion — site visits to active projects, guest lectures from working developers, internships with brokerages and property firms — and the USA by the Bay panel is exactly that kind of programming delivered in the market the students will serve.
Glaze’s background running the Alabama Center for Real Estate at the University of Alabama included the center’s signature work: statewide market research, economic impact studies and the industry conferences that connected students to the professionals whose firms would hire them. His move to South Alabama carried that model to a region whose real estate story — port-driven growth on one side of the bay, population-driven growth on the other — had outgrown its academic coverage.
The Aug. 13 session effectively introduced both halves of that mission to the Fairhope community: the students, whose presence in the room demonstrates the program’s momentum, and the panel, which demonstrates the university’s ability to convene the region’s serious conversation about itself.
For Baldwin County’s civic and business leadership, the message is one of partnership. The county’s growth machine needs appraisers, planners, brokers and developers who understand both the numbers and the place — and a university program headquartered across the bay, with a campus in downtown Fairhope and a speaker series devoted to the county’s defining question, is positioning itself to supply them. The doors opening at 5 p.m. will lead to more than one evening’s discussion; they open onto the working relationship between the region’s university and the region it is helping to build.