Director of Research at the Washington, DC-based Poverty & Race Research Action Council. He is the founder and former Chair of the Planners Network, a national organization of progressive urban and rural planners and community organizers. He has served on the planning faculties at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, UC-Berkeley and UNC. He holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Harvard and served on the faculty there as well as at Yale, the University of North Carolina, Cornell, the University of California-Berkeley, and Columbia University. He founded and was President/Executive Director of PRRAC – Poverty & Race Research Action Council and was a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He has been a consultant to numerous public and private agencies, including HUD, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Stanford Research Institute, Arthur D. Little, California Rural Legal Assistance, the Urban Coalition, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, and the Legal Aid Society of New York. Among his books are: Housing Urban America (Aldine, 1973; rev. ed 1980), Poverty & Race in America: The Emerging Agendas (Lexington Books, 2006), There Is No Such Thing As a Natural Disaster: Race, Class & Hurricane Katrina (Routeledge, 2006) and Mandate for Change: Policies and Leadership for 2009 and Beyond.