Brown Named President

We are delighted to welcome Dr. H. James Brown as president of the Lincoln Institute, announces Kathryn J. Lincoln, chair of the Institute’s Board of Directors and of the Search Committee. “Jim is an accomplished and innovative academician who has served on the faculty of Harvard University for the past 26 years. He has also directed several research centers that bring together constituencies similar to our own–educators, public officials and private sector representatives concerned about city and regional planning, urban development, housing and land use policies.” Brown begins his tenure on May 1, 1996.

“I am very excited about this opportunity to help focus and expand the Lincoln Institute’s excellent research, education and publication programs in land policy,” Brown adds. “I hold the Institute in the highest regard for its important role in linking academics, local officials and practitioners in the areas of land use, taxation and regulation. I look forward to contributing both my administrative and teaching experience beyond the university setting. Providing decisionmakers in the public and private sectors with up-to-date information on rapidly changing policy concerns is a very important priority for this organization. ”

A native of Indiana, Brown graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, and subsequently spent a year at the London School of Economics as a research student. He completed his Ph.D. in economics at Indiana University in 1967, and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the university’s Institute for Applied Urban Economics. For the next two years Brown was a research associate in urban economic studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York.

In 1970 Brown was appointed assistant professor and assistant chairman of the city and regional planning department at Harvard University. In 1976 he was promoted to full professor, and in 1981 became chairman of the department. In 1982 Brown was also named director of the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, which had been established in 1959. The center was reorganized in 1984 as the Joint Center for Housing Studies, a collaborative venture of the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. The center is supported by 40 corporate sponsors and other public and private constituencies and is considered the most prestigious research center on housing in the country. Brown initiated the center’s annual report titled The State of the Nation’s Housing, now in its thirteenth year.

Building on his strong ties in the academic and business worlds and the public sector, Brown chaired the 1993 and 1995 sessions of the Housing Leadership Conference, a national forum for discussing and debating major issues affecting the housing industry. Some 100 private, public and nonprofit housing leaders participated in each conference, as well as members of Congress and the Clinton Administration, including Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry G. Cisneros.

“I’m especially eager to get involved in the Institute’s education programs,” Brown adds. “I really enjoy teaching, and have developed some new ways of teaching economics that allow the students to work through cases to learn and communicate the concepts as opposed to simply proving or disproving them.” Brown has also taught operations management, total quality management and strategic management courses at the Kennedy School, and three years ago he was voted Teacher of the Year. “I look forward to working with land use practitioners and local policymakers in the Institute’s courses,” he says.