About Rolf Pendall
Rolf Pendall, Ph.D., AICP, is Professor and chair of the Department of Community & Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico. His mission is to learn and show how planners can contribute to greater spatial justice. Over his 35-plus years as a practitioner, scholar, and teacher, he has researched and taught about the connections between core planning domains—especially land use and housing policy—with harmful outcomes like urban sprawl and spatial injustice. Before joining the faculty at UNM, Pendall was Professor (2018-25) and Department Head (2018-23) of the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; he previously directed the Urban Institute’s Center for Metropolitan Housing & Communities (2010-18) and held positions on the planning faculties at Cornell University (1998-2010) and the University of Rhode Island (1995-97). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and master’s degrees in planning and Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Areas of Expertise
Land use, affordable housing, planning theory & historySelected Publications
Kim, Minjee, Ivis Garcia, Edward Goetz, Bernadette Hanlon, Paavo Monkkonen, Rolf Pendall, Deirdre Pfeiffer, Jason Reece, and Andrew Whittemore. 2025. Commentary: “Bring Zoning Back Into the Planning Curricula.” Journal of the American Planning Association. Online ahead of print at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2025.2455162.
Pendall, Rolf, Natalie Prochaska, Dustin Allred, and Caitlin Hillyard. 2024. “A new skyline for Champaign: An urban dormitory transformed." Housing Policy Debate 34 (5): 722–745.
Pendall, Rolf, Lydia Lo, and Jake Wegmann. 2022. “Shifts toward the extremes: Zoning change in major US Metropolitan areas from 2003 to 2019.” Journal of the American Planning Association 88 (1): 55–66.
Pendall, Rolf, Kathryn Foster, and Margaret M. Cowell. 2010. “Resilience and Regions: Building Understanding of the Metaphor.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society 3 (1).
In October 2019, we released the National Longitudinal Land Use Survey (NLLUS), a freely downloadable database of responses in 1994, 2003, and 2019 to a survey on local land-use regulations and housing programs in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. The first iteration (25 metropolitan areas only) was the basis for my 1995 dissertation from U.C. Berkeley.
Recent Courses Taught
Dr. Pendall has taught a wide range of courses in land use policy, plan making, affordable housing, planning history and theory, and professional practice. His teaching experience includes both graduate and undergraduate levels at the University of Illinois and Cornell University, with new courses in development as a professor at the University of New Mexico.
Professor & Chair