Presenter Biographies

New Orleans · October 2007

Effective Zoning Techniques

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.

Environmental Justice

Tom Daniels is a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Daniels often serves as a consultant to state and local governments and land trusts. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where for nine years he managed the county's nationally recognized farmland preservation program. He is the author of The Environmental Planning Handbook and several other books.
 
Nicholas Targ practices environmental, land use, and natural resources law with Holland & Knight. He works with clients to address due diligence, entitlements, permitting, and environmental compliance needs. He also assists states, counties, and other government agencies in meeting their compliance, training, and public involvement requirements and policy objectives. Before joining Holland & Knight, Targ served, first as Counsel and later as Associate Director for Environmental Justice Integration, to the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice in Washington, D.C. He was responsible for developing the tools and strategies for addressing environmental justice agency-wide. The principal legal adviser to that office, he helped bring successful resolutions to high-visibility issues such as the Clean Air Act; RCRA/CERCLA; enforcement; and NEPA permitting, compliance, and policy matters. He also provided strategic advice on legislation, regulatory initiatives, and public participation issues to congressional offices; the President’s Council on Environmental Quality; and federal, state, and tribal agencies.

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.

Mariia V. Zimmerman is vice president for policy at Reconnecting America. Zimmerman has held numerous planning and policy positions within the federal government, including serving as chief of staff to Congressman Earl Blumenauer (Portland, Oregon) and with the Federal Transit Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation. She has written and researched a variety of transportation topics including transit-oriented development, joint development, and innovative finance.  At Reconnecting America, Zimmerman spearheads the organization’s work on TOD and mixed-income housing, and intercity transportation. She has a Master of Planning from the University of Minnesota, a Master of Geography from the Pennsylvania State University, and graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband and young son, where she also serves on the County Transportation Commission and enjoys daily the lifestyle benefits of TOD.

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.