A senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies since 1997, he currently directs a three-year project supported by and in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey entitled "Patterns and Process of Sprawl" that explores metropolitan development from 1970 to the present. Among his other works on urban development are two co-authored Joint Center Working Papers entitled "Forty Years of Fighting Sprawl: Montgomery County, Maryland, and Growth Control Planning in the Metropolitan Region of Washington, D. C." (2002) and "The Historical Origins and Causes of Urban Decentralization in the United States" (2002); "All That Sprawl," Boston Sunday Globe, March 12, 2000; and "Housing Heats Up: Home Building Patterns in Metropolitan America," The Brookings Institution and Joint Center for Housing Studies, December, 1999.

In the area of community development, Dr. von Hoffman has written many works including House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2003), Fuel Lines for the Urban Revival Engine: Neighborhoods, Community Development Corporations, and Financial Intermediaries (Fannie Mae Foundation, 2001); "Issues in Nonprofit Community Development," Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, 2002, and "Good News! The Community-Based Housing Movement Is Transforming Bad Neighborhoods from Boston to San Francisco," The Atlantic Monthly, (January 1997).

Dr. von Hoffman has written extensively on the history of low-income housing policy in the United States, having published three working papers for the Joint Center for Housing Studies and articles such as "A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949" Housing Policy Debate (2000) and "Why They Built Pruitt-Igoe" in John F. Bauman, et al, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth?Century America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). In the field of urban history, he is the author of several works including Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Prior to coming to the Joint Center, Dr. von Hoffman was an associate professor of urban planning and design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and a Fellow at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government of the Harvard Kennedy School. He received a Ph. D. from the Department of History at Harvard in 1986.

December 2002