Between 2020 and 2023, I worked as a researcher at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, where I authored ten reports (seven as lead author) on topics including place-level assets and their relationships to regional economic and built ecosystems. Urban structure, transit, and disinvestment in minority communities in the United States were primary focuses of my work.
While a full list of my articles can be found on my Brookings Institution author page, the article list below is organized based on topics and projects.
Contents
- Mapping America’s Activity Centers
- Community Disinvestment
- Post-Pandemic Revitalization
- Demographic Change
Mapping America’s Activity Centers
The largest project that I worked on during my time at Brookings was a three-year effort to identify “activity centers”—places within regions where economic, physical, social, and civic assets cluster—and to characterize their role in the metropolitan environment. Activity centers were defined in terms of 2020 Census block groups, and were identified based on five categories of assets: community, tourism, consumption, institutional, and economic amenities. We then identified three types of activity centers, primary centers (the largest, most important clusters in a metro area), secondary centers (smaller clusters with a mixture of asset types) and monocenters (large clusters of a single asset type).
The centerpiece of the activity centers project was a major report in which we identified activity centers in the 110 US metro areas with at least 500,000 residents, and then analyzed their role in the economic, demographic, and transportation geographies of their regions:
Tracy Hadden Loh, DW Rowlands, Adie Tomer, Joseph W. Kane, and Jennifer S. Vey. “Mapping America’s Activity Centers: The Building Blocks of Prosperous, Equitable, and Sustainable Regions.” Research Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2022).
- Report Front Page
- Full Report PDF
- Interactive Map of Activity Centers
- Methodology Appendix
- Data Download
As one of several follow-ups on the main report by its authors, I was sole author on an analysis of commuting patterns that showed that the job density of activity centers is a better match than either population density of developed land or population-weighted median population density for the intuitive observed density of US metro areas, as well as for the metro areas’ share of “green” commuters who do not drive to work alone.
DW Rowlands. “Why ‘Activity Centers’ are Key to Greener Commutes.” Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2022).
I was also the lead author, along with Tracey Hadden Loh, on an American Planning Association “planning note” discussing the activity centers approach, including both how planners can identify their own locality or region’s activity centers and how they can make use of such an analysis in planning practice to support and expand their communities’ economic productivity, sustainability, and equity.
DW Rowlands and Tracy Hadden Loh. “Identifying Activity Centers: A How-To Guide.” APA Planning Advisory Service. No. 116. (2023).
In addition to these publications, I have written up a summary of the activity centers project and its results, which can be found here.
Community Disinvestment
In my time at Brookings, I was lead author on two reports about disinvestment in American communities: one on gun violence, and one on retail location and race:
DW Rowlands and Hanna Love. “Mapping Gun Violence: A Closer Look at the Intersection Between Place and Gun Homicides in Four Cities.” Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2022).
In our report “Mapping Gun Violence: A Closer Look at the Intersection Between Place and Gun Homocides in Four Cities,” Hanna Love and I found that gun homicide increases in four cities—Chicago; Nashville, Tenn.; Kansas City, Mo.; and Baltimore—were driven predominantly by increases in neighborhoods where gun violence has long been a persistent fixture of daily life, alongside systemic disinvestment, segregation, and economic inequality.
DW Rowlands, Manann Donoghoe, and Andre M. Perry. “What the Lack of Premium Grocery Stores Says about Disinvestment in Black Neighborhoods.” Research Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2023).
In our report “What the Lack of Premium Grocery Stores Says about Disinvestment in Black Neighborhoods,” Andre Perry, Manann Donoghoe and I analyzed the distribution of premium grocery stores, as well as low-end dollar stores that sell food, in US metro areas. We found that premium grocery stores are less likely to be located in Black-majority neighborhoods, regardless of the average household income of those neighborhoods, and are substantially more likely to be located in neighborhoods where the Black population share is less than 10%. In other words, businesses and the broader real estate and financing sectors are not investing even in prospering Black-majority neighborhoods, which devalues these communities and hinders opportunities for growth.
Post-Pandemic Revitalization
Given that I started work at the Brookings Institution only a few months after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its unprecedented impact on commute patterns, cities, and transportation, it is perhaps unsurprising that a significant amount of my research involved questions of how cities and public transportation could revitalize in the aftermath of the pandemic.
DW Rowlands and Tracy Hadden Loh. “Ensuring the Intertwined Post-Pandemic Recoveries of Downtowns and Transit Systems.” Research Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2023).
In our report “Ensuring the Intertwined Post-Pandemic Recoveries of Downtowns and Transit Systems,” Tracey Hadden Loh and I analyzed public transit ridership and travel patterns based on the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) in major US metro areas.
We compared transit usage patterns in the six large metro areas where at least 5% of all trips were made by public transportation in 2017 (Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, which together accounted for 56% of US transit ridership) to the remainder of the twenty largest US metro areas, which had 2017 transit mode shares ranging from 3.8% (Baltimore) to 0.4% (Tampa, Fla.). We argued that, rather than focusing solely on getting remote workers to return to taking the bus or train to downtown offices, U.S. transit agencies should focus on building public transportation networks that can serve all trips—not just commutes—in the areas where features such as density, mixtures of uses, walkable and well-connected street grids, and low automobile ownership make these transportation modes most viable.
DW Rowlands and Tracy Hadden Loh. “Retail Revolution: The New Rules of Retail Call for Small Business Empowerment.” Research Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2020).
In our report from the early days of the pandemic, “Retail Revolution: The New Rules of Retail Call for Small Business Empowerment,” Tracey Hadden Loh and I analyzed trends in retail across metro areas, finding that all metro areas, but especially those in the Midwest and Southeast, would face surplus retail space in need of major capital investment for adaptive reuse in the aftermath of the pandemic. We argued that the industry and policymakers should view this as an opportunity to work together to create new opportunities for housing, institutional uses, and locally empowered retail entrepreneurship.
Tracy Hadden Loh, Egon Terplan, and DW Rowlands. “Myths About Converting Offices into Housing—And What Can Really Revitalize Downtowns.” Research Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2023).
In our report “Myths About Converting Offices into Housing—And What Can Really Revitalize Downtowns,” Tracey Hadden Loh, Egon Terplan, and I discussed the realities of the possibility of office-to-housing conversions and the practical strategies that cities can adopt for downtown real estate conversion.
Tracy Hadden Loh and DW Rowlands. “This Labor Day, Employers and Workers Should Work Together to Build a Better Future for the Office.” Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2023).
In our report “This Labor Day, Employers and Workers Should Work Together to Build a Better Future for the Office,” Tracey Hadden Loh and I discussed the research on the trade-offs between in-office and remote work, and how a mixture of both sorts of work can benefit both workers and employers.
Demographic Change
I was the lead author on two Brookings reports on demographic change in the US: one focused on urban areas, and one focused on rural America:
DW Rowlands and Tracy Hadden Loh. “Reinvesting in Urban Cores Can Revitalize Entire Regions.” Research Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2021).
In our report “Reinvesting in Urban Cores Can Revitalize Entire Regions,” Tracey Hadden Loh and I analyzed the US’s transition from a nation of cities in 1950 to a nation of suburbs in 2020 by comparing the populations of white residents and residents of color in the core cities (by 1950 boundaries) and metro areas (by 2020 boundaries) of the 44 metro areas that contained the country’s 50 largest cities in 1950. In doing so, we underscored how wealth and jobs moved out of American cities and left behind segregated, disinvested communities.
Our data for the 44 metro areas in the study can be found on the Brookings website.
DW Rowlands and Hanna Love. “Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change.” Report. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program (2021).
In our report “Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change,” Hanna Love and I analyzed data from the 2020 Census on the racial demographics of non-metropolitan US counties. We found that, it is true that the population of nonmetropolitan America fell by about half a percentage point between 2010 and 2020, the future of rural America is increasingly marked by growing diversity and expanding inequity within and across regions—creating an intricate picture that binary thinking can’t capture.