Demographic change, future of California, housing impacts, workforce and education, immigration and assimilation, communication for consensus about change
Dowell Myers, Ph.D., is a specialist in urban growth and societal change, with expertise as a planner and urban demographer. He has been an advisor to the Bureau of the Census and authored the most widely referenced work on census analysis, Analysis with Local Census Data: Portraits of Change (Academic Press, 1992). His demographic work has included substantial emphasis on immigration, and his 2007 book, Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, has been widely recognized. In the policy and planning field, he is a champion of future-oriented research, which helps inform better decisions today. As an instructor of planning theory, he professes a communicative, citizen-oriented approach that embraces the residents as consumers and the ultimate voting decision makers. His research embodies the approach of integrated demography that treats demographic factors as interwoven with aggregate behaviors and impacts. This also includes public perceptions and reactions to demographic change as part of the problem analysis. Recent research projects have focused on public narratives about immigration, aging, and taxation, projections of generational change in the U.S., California, and Los Angeles, and the upward mobility of immigrants the longer they reside in the U.S. Professor Myers has been an academic fellow of the Urban Land Institute and a member of the Governing Board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. He is also one of two recipients of the Haynes Award for Research Impact.