Authors

G. Thomas Kingsley, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, specializes in housing, urban policy, and governance issues. He served for over a decade as director of the Institute’s Center for Public Finance and Housing and for 17 years as director and co-director of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, an initiative to further the development of advanced data systems for policy analysis and community building in US cities. Since 2000, Mr. Kingsley’s research topics have included analyzing neighborhood patterns and impacts of the foreclosure crisis; assessing lessons from HUD’s HOPE VI program for urban policy and the future of public housing; providing analytic support to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections Initiative; and analyzing the patterns and effects of concentrated poverty in America’s urban areas. In the 1990s, Mr. Kingsley was co-director of the Ford Foundation–sponsored Urban Opportunity Program, which produced four books on the status of urban policy issues in America. Before that, he was the director of several major policy research programs, including testing the market effects of housing allowance programs (1974–80, for the HUD-sponsored Housing Assistance Supply Experiment); analyzing the structure and potentials of metropolitan Cleveland’s economy (1980–82, for the Cleveland Foundation); preparing a national urban development strategy for Indonesia (1982–85, for the United Nations); and helping the Czech and Slovak Republics design and implement policy reforms in housing and municipal infrastructure (1991–95, for USAID). Mr. Kingsley previously served as director of the Rand Corporation’s Housing and Urban Policy Program and as assistant administrator for the New York City Housing and Development Administration. He has taught on the faculties of the graduate urban planning programs at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

Claudia J. Coulton is distinguished university professor, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, where she is also the Lillian F. Harris professor of urban research and social change. Her research focuses on approaches to community change and the challenges facing distressed urban neighborhoods. She is the founding director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and oversees a multidisciplinary team working to better understand the systemic forces that produce distressed neighborhoods and what individuals, organizations, and policies can do to reverse these conditions. Under her leadership, the center has built a model of how to provide data for community initiatives, including a dynamic neighborhood indicators system, a parcel-based property-tracking system, and a longitudinal multiagency integrated data system for children. Coulton is a founding partner of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and has served as research advisor to many community change programs, including the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, and the Invest in Children program. Her current studies focus on processes of residential mobility and neighborhood identity in poor communities, the effects of the foreclosure crisis on families and neighborhoods, and the impact of the built and social environments on outcomes for families and children. She is the author of numerous scientific publications and policy reports. Coulton received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University, an MSW in social work from Ohio State University, and a PhD in social welfare from Case Western Reserve University.

Kathryn L. S. Pettit is a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her work focuses on measuring and understanding neighborhood change,
particularly in low-income neighborhoods. She is a recognized expert on using local and national data systems for housing and urban development research and program development. She directs the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners to further the development and use of neighborhood-level data systems in local policymaking and community building. Other recent work includes a study on the role of open data at the local level and an assessment of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. Past projects include serving as coauthor for a seven-year series on housing markets in the Washington, DC, area; producing data and guides for the website DataPlace; and contributing to several indicators-related projects and neighborhood analyses for various federal agencies. Pettit has a master’s degree in public policy and a BS in international relations from Georgetown University.

Essayists

Riccardo Bodini, European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises

Hedy N. Chang, Attendance Works

Robert J. Chaskin, University of Chicago

Cory Fleming, International City/County Management Association

George Galster, Wayne State University

Lina Hedman, Uppsala University

Julia Koschinsky, Arizona State University

Sheila Martin, Portland State University

Jeff Matson, University of Minnesota

Meg Merrick, Portland State University

Lisa Nelson, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Greg Sanders, Chapin Hall at University of Chicago

Jacob Wascalus, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis