Rolf Pendall

Associate Professor

City and Regional Planning

Cornell University

214 West Sibley Hall

Ithaca, NY 14853

Phone: 607-255-5561

Fax: 530-678-8103

rjp17@cornell.edu

 

Background

Rolf Pendall is an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, where he teaches courses in land use planning, growth management, environmental planning, affordable housing, infrastructure planning, and planning methods. His research on land-use controls concerns why communities adopt them, how they vary across the United States, whether they work as intended, and whether they have desirable or undesirable consequences for affordable housing, ethnic and racial diversity, and the environ­ment. In particular, he is interested in the prevalence and patterns of exclusionary zoning in US cities. He also researches land use change, using geographic information systems (GIS) and qualitative methods to analyze the patterns of and reasons for transition from rural to urban land use. Other research interests include tenant-based housing assistance and private property rights. Pendall holds a Ph.D. (1995) in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. in Community and Regional Planning and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (1989), and a B.A. in sociology from Kenyon College in Ohio (1984).

Courses

Fall 2007

      CRP 525: Introductory Methods of Planning Analysis

      CRP 659.04: Comparative Land Use Policy

Selected previous courses

Spring 2007: Cornell in Rome program

 

Fall 2006

      CRP 552: Land Use Planning

      CRP 343/643: Affordable Housing Policy and Programs

 

Spring 2006

      CRP 553: Land Use Regulation

 

Fall 2003

      CRP 558: City & Regional Planning Workshop (Housing Needs in Tompkins County)

            See also http://crp.cornell.edu/outreach/housing.mgi for full results of this planning workshop

 

 

Ongoing research

  • Building Resilient Regions. MacArthur Foundation. Principal Investigator: Margaret Weir, University of California at Berkeley.

This project, one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “networks,” unites leading scholars in the fields of political science, sociology, economics, public policy, and city planning to identify dimensions of social, economic, political, and environmental resilience in U.S. metropolitan areas facing common challenges, including rapid growth, prolonged economic decline, foreign immigration, and racial and ethnic diversification. For more information on the project, see http://www-iurd.ced.berkeley.edu/brr/.

 

  • Sprawl And Residential Preferences: Investigating and Building Educational Strategies on New Understandings of Land Use. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hatch and Smith-Lever funds. October 2004-September 2007. $299,280. Role: Co-PI; PI: Joseph LaQuattra, Jr., Cornell University.

This project analyzes housing markets in the Rochester, Binghamton, and Albany metropolitan areas to learn more about the sources of demand for rural housing and how and whether rural, village, and city submarkets differ from one another. The research includes both quantitative (regression-based) analysis of home sales from the late 1990s and early 2000s, stated preference (survey-based) methods, and qualitative focus-group findings.

 

Recently completed research

  • The Landscape of Local Land-Use Regulations and Affordable Housing Programs. Brookings Institution. Investigators: Rolf Pendall, Jonathan Martin.

Starting in early 2003, we surveyed over 3,000 local governments in the 50 largest metro areas in the United States. We asked the respondents to tell us whether they had a series of regulations including zoning, building permit caps, urban growth boundaries, and development impact fees, and affordable housing programs including both regulatory/incentive based programs and funding programs. Combined with Pendall’s 1994 survey of local governments using the same survey instrument, this new information allows a long term view of how regulation and housing programs have changed over time. The first publication from the research was released in August 2006 and is available at http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20060810_landuse.htm .

 

  • The State of Upstate New York. Brookings Institution. Investigators: Rolf Pendall, Susan Christopherson, Matthew Drennan, John Sipple (Cornell University); Kieran Killeen (University of Vermont)

This research resulted in a series of five publications examines the social and economic health of Upstate New York over the past two decades. It focuses on trends in Upstate as a whole, in the 11 major metropolitan areas that make up Upstate, and the six broad regions (such as Hudson Valley and Rochester/Finger Lakes) that are home to these metro areas and their surrounding rural counties. The analyses use data from the U.S. Census of Population and Housing, the Regional Economic Information System, County Business Patterns, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Resources Inventory. See Publications, below, for links to the completed reports, or go to http://www.brookings.edu/metro/projects/upstatenewyork.htm.

 

  • “Biocomplexity: Physical, Biological, and Human Interactions Shaping the Ecosystems of Freshwater Bays And Lagoons.” National Science Foundation, Biocomplexity Program. Investigators: Mark Bain, Natural Resources, Cornell University; Edwin A. Cowen, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Cornell University; Daniel P. Loucks, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Cornell University; Nelson Hairston Jr., Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University; Rolf J. Pendall, City & Regional Planning, Cornell University; Donald Leopold, SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry; Charles Driscoll, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Syracuse University; Stephen Ellner, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University. October 2000-March 2007.

The NSF Biocomplexity Program recognizes that thorough knowledge of ecosystem structure and function must incorporate the external environmental surroundings. The principal theme organizing the research effort is biocomplexity in open ecosystems. The main hypothesis is that the average time water takes to move through an aquatic system is a key variable defining the extent that ecosystems are self-organized or dominated by outside influences. The project team will study distinct and enclosed freshwater bays and lake-level lagoons (embayments) along the New York coast of Lake Ontario including the associated watersheds, wetlands, and human settlements. Lake Ontario embayments are representative of wetland-dominated coastal habitats around much of the Great Lakes and they are of great importance in the region. The embayments provide habitat for most Great Lakes aquatic species, change the quality of water entering the lakes, affect nutrient inputs to the open waters, support highly diverse and productive wetland vegetation, and provide very desirable locations for water-oriented human settlements.

The research team is organized at two levels; space-time multidisciplinary groups and whole study integration. Three Cornell investigators will measure and model external processes working at the watershed scale to determine water quality and quantity entering the embayment systems. They will develop watershed hydrologic simulation capability, model land use and land cover, and develop a hydrodynamic simulator to model water exchange between Lake Ontario and the bay ecosystems. Investigators at Cornell and Syracuse University will study internal ecosystem processes that rapidly change (weekly) in the open bay waters: plankton, pelagic fishes, water quality, and water mixing. Investigators at Cornell and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (Syracuse) will study the internal ecosystem properties that change seasonally: fish community composition, littoral invertebrates, aquatic plants, and wetland flora. SUNY and Cornell investigators will also study internal system properties that change over long-time scales using historical patterns of human settlements and vegetation distributions. Finally, all data and model simulations will be integrated mathematically to determine the conditions that allow ecosystem self organization or ecosystem property forcing by external factors. The investigators have identified eight study ecosystems that combine extremes of three key factors that will determine water residence time: bay volume, watershed size, and connectedness to Lake Ontario.

While the study was designed to answer fundamental questions about ecosystem control, the research will have major practical value for resolving technical questions about Great Lakes water level regulation. For this reason, a management and policy advisory panel was organized with representatives of key international, federal, New York State, intergovernmental, and academic organizations. Panel involvement in the research will allow these organizations to understand the details of NSF sponsored research, and it will provide opportunities for them to be early adopters of the results. The education goal for the project is to complete a set of seven doctoral students that conducted their research within our interdisciplinary surroundings while specializing on one of the component fields. Project investigators will promote the themes of the NSF Biocomplexity Program to students through cooperative inter-field advising, cross-disciplinary research involvement, and a team directed graduate-level course in Biocomplexity Theory, Principles, and Research Methods.

For more information on this project, see the project web pages.

 

Selected Publications

 

Upstate New York Series from Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program

Pendall, Rolf and Susan Christopherson. 2004. Losing Ground: Income and Poverty in Upstate, 1980-2000. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

Pendall, Rolf, Matthew P. Drennan, and Susan Christopherson. 2004. Transition and Renewal: The Emergence of a Diverse Upstate Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Pendall, Rolf. 2003. Sprawl without Growth: The Upstate Paradox. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Pendall, Rolf. 2003. Upstate New York’s Population Plateau: The Third-Slowest “State.” Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

 

Selected reports, chapters, and refereed articles

Pendall, Rolf, Robert Puentes, and Jonathan Martin. 2006. From Traditional to Reformed: A Review of the Land Use Regulations in the Nation’s 50 largest Metropolitan Areas. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

Pendall, Rolf, Nelson, Arthur C., Casey J. Dawkins, and Gerrit J. Knaap. 2005. “Connecting Smart Growth, Housing Affordability, and Racial Equity,” in The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Editor. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 219-246.

Pendall, Rolf. 2005. “Does density exacerbate income segregation? Evidence from U.S. metropolitan areas, 1980-1990,” in Desegregating the City: Space and Inequality in Global Perspective, David P. Varady, Editor. SUNY Press, 175-199.

Nelson, Arthur C., Rolf Pendall, Casey J. Dawkins, and Gerrit J. Knaap. 2004. “The Link between Growth Management and Housing Affordability: The Academic Evidence.” In Anthony Downs, ed., Growth Management and Affordable Housing: Do They Conflict? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 117-158.

Pendall, Rolf. 2004. “Varieties of U.S. Growth Management: Lessons from New York and San Francisco,” in Managing Urban Change: Urban Sustainability Issues in East Asia, North America and Europe. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 80-94.

Pendall, Rolf and John I. Carruthers. 2003. “Does density exacerbate income segregation? Evidence from United States metropolitan areas, 1980-2000.” Housing Policy Debate 13(4): 541-590.

Ewing, Reid, Rolf Pendall, and Donald Chen. 2003. “Measuring sprawl and its transportation impacts.” Travel Demand And Land Use 2003: Transportation Research Record (1831): 175-183.

Pendall, Rolf , Jonathan Martin, and William Fulton. 2002. Holding The Line: Urban Containment In The United States. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Nelson, Arthur C., Rolf Pendall, Casey J. Dawkins, and Gerrit J. Knaap. 2002. The Link Between Growth Management and Housing Affordability: The Academic Evidence. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Pendall, Rolf, Ronald M. Wolanski, and Douglas McGovern. 2002. “Property Rights in State Legislatures: Rural-Urban Differences in Support for State Anti-Takings Bills.” Journal of Rural Studies 18(1): 19-33.

Pendall, Rolf. 2001. “Municipal Plans, State Mandates, and Property Rights: Lessons from Maine.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 21(2).

Fulton, William, Rolf Pendall, Mai T. Nguyen, and Alicia Harrison. 2001. Who Sprawls Most? Exploring and explaining urban density changes in the US, 1982-1997. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

Pendall, Rolf. 2000. “Why Voucher and Certificate Users Live in Distressed Neighborhoods.” Housing Policy Debate 11(4): 881-910.

Pendall, Rolf. 2000. “Local Land-Use Regulation and the Chain of Exclusion.” Journal of the American Planning Association 66(2): 125-142.

Pendall, Rolf. 1999. “Opposition to Housing: NIMBY and Beyond.” Urban Affairs Review 35(1): 112-136.

Pendall, Rolf. 1999. “Do Land-Use Controls Cause Sprawl?” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26(4): 555-57.