Demographer Bill Frey Joins Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy

Demographer Bill Frey, an expert on migration, U.S. urban and regional demographic change, and the U.S. Census, has joined the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy as a visiting fellow.

At Brookings, Frey will focus on what the 2000 Census and recent surveys reveal about the new demographic contexts of urban and suburban America.

Frey, who is on the faculty of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center and a senior fellow at the Milken Institute in California, is the author of Metropolitan America: Beyond the Transition (Population Reference Bureau, 1990) and the co-author, with Alden Speare Jr., of Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the United States (Russell Sage, 1988). He is a contributing editor for American Demographics.

From 1980-81, he was a visiting research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria), and in 1988 was the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scholar at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C. In 1995, he was the Hewlett Visiting Scholar at Child Trends, also in Washington, and was a contributor to President Clinton’s National Urban Policy Report. He has been a consultant to the Census Bureau on migration research publications.

Frey received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1974.

Other recent personnel changes at the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy include the appointments of Myron Orfield and Anne Power as nonresident senior fellows.

Of the three appointments, Bruce Katz, the center’s director, said: “Bill, Myron, and Anne all bring unique research perspectives to the urban center. They are at the forefront of redefining how urban and suburban places look and function in our changing economy.”

Orfield, a state senator in Minneapolis and an expert on metropolitan planning and policymaking, is president of the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation and an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. He has completed over forty studies of regional disparity and land use, and is the author of American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Brookings, 2002).

Anne Power is a professor of social policy and the director of the post-graduate MSc/Diploma in Housing at the London School of Economics. She is a member of the British government’s Housing and Urban Sounding Boards, advising ministers on housing policy and urban matters. Her research interests include European, American, and international urban problems; crime; social exclusion; community involvement and sustainable development. Her recent books and publications include: Cities for a Small Country with Richard Rogers (Faber and Faber, 2000), and Estates on the Edge (Macmillan, 1999).