H. James Brown

H. James (Jim) Brown was a faculty member at Harvard from 1970 to 1996. Appointed in 1970 as assistant professor and assistant chairman of the city and regional planning department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he became a full professor in 1976. As director of the Center, he oversaw its transformation from the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 1988, he initiated the Center’s annual State of the Nation's Housing report. Building on his strong ties between academia, business, 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. After leaving Harvard, he served as president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy from 1996 to 2004 and was inducted into the National Housing Hall of Fame in 2002. He was the co-author of Microeconomics and Public Policy (with William Apgar), Microeconomics for Public Decisions (with Anne Steinemann and William Apgar), and editor of Land Use and Taxation: Applying the Insights of Henry George.