Presenter Biographies

Chicago • June 2008

Affordable Housing

Alan Mallach, FAICP, is a senior research fellow at the National Housing Institute. He has been engaged for 40 years in virtually every dimension of affordable housing, as developer, consultant, public official, scholar, and advocate. He is the author of Inclusionary Housing Programs: Policies and Practices as well as numerous articles, reports and op-eds on the subject.

Michael Pyatok is principal of Pyatok Architects, an Oakland-based firm that serves nonprofit organizations and private developers buildings market-rate and affordable housing, mixed-use developments, and community facilities. In the past two decades, he has designed more than 30,000 units of housing for lower-income families in the United States, as well as 500 units in the Philippines and Malaysia. He is also the director of the Stardust Center for Affordable Homes and the Family at Arizona State University and a professor of architectural design at the University of Washington. In 2007, Builder magazine named him one of the 50 most influential people in the housing industry. He has also studied housing as a Fulbright Scholar in Finland and as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

Conflict Management

Allen J. Zerkin has been teaching conflict management courses at New York University' s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service since 1988 and has led the popular one-day workshop on negotiation at the APA' s National Planning Conference since 1999.

Sustainable Zoning and Development Controls

James Duncan, FAICP
Duncan is one of the nation's leading urban planning and growth management practitioners. During his four-decade-long career, he has served more than 200 cities, counties, regions, and states, creating a series of award-winning comprehensive plans and development codes. He is a past president of APA, a former vice-chair of APA's Chapter Presidents Council, and the co-author of the APA Planners Press book Growth Management Principles & Practices.

Christopher Duerksen
Duerksen is managing director of Clarion Associates of Colorado, LLC, a land use consulting firm. He has represented local governments, nonprofits, and the private sector in a variety of land-use and zoning matters and specializes in development code revisions, growth management planning, historic preservation, natural resource and scenic area protection strategies, airport-area development, and market development strategies. A co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute, Duerksen has written and spoken extensively on land use issues in Colorado and nationally.

Transit-Oriented Development Design

Karen B. Alschuler, FAICP, is principal at SMWM. Alschuler has been an active professional planner for more than 30 years, working initially as a public planner for Santa Cruz County, California, and then for two distinguished private consulting firms: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and SMWM in San Francisco and New York, where she founded and now leads the planning and urban design practice. Transit-oriented development projects under Alschuler' s leadership have ranged from countywide transportation and land use policy strategies to TOD guidelines to the district and terminal plans for San Francisco' s downtown terminal to San Mateo' s commuter rail TOD design at Hayward Park.

David Dixon is an urban designer and principal at Goody Clancy, a Boston-based planning, architecture, and preservation firm. He received the American Institute of Architect' s (AIA) 2007 Thomas Jefferson Award for " a lifetime of ... significant achievement in advancing the public sector' s mission to create more livable neighborhoods, vibrant civic spaces, and vital downtowns and main streets." As 2003 president of the Boston Society of Architects, he chaired The First National Conference on Density, held in Boston. David served as the 2006 chair for the AIA' s national Regional and Urban Design Committee and he writes and speaks frequently on the roles that increased density, mixed-income housing, sustainability, and a vibrant public realm play in creating livable 21st century communities. He is addressing these issues through projects for cities, developers, and universities to create new urban neighborhoods, plan transit oriented development and districts, and revitalize urban districts in Alexandria  (VA), Atlanta, Asheville (NC), Boston, Baltimore, Kansas City, and Norfolk (VA). David is also leading an interdisciplinary team to prepare a citywide master plan and new zoning for New Orleans.