Legacy Beyond the Numbers: Honoring Arthur C. Nelson, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development

When Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development Arthur C. Nelson retired from the University of Arizona in May 2022, he considered his legacy—not just at the University of Arizona, but across his distinguished, 38-year career in higher education following 12 years in the planning profession.

Though Nelson has long been a top-cited researcher in his field, serving as principal investigator or co-PI on 79 grants and contracts totaling more than $50 million, his ongoing passions aren’t based in his research prowess. Not completely, at least.

“I have an inner fire to change how decisions are made at local government and neighborhood levels with facts,” he says. “We need policy makers and citizens to understand where they’ve been and where they’re headed using objective measures.”

Decision-making must also include “equity implications across all dimensions of society,” he says, particularly in a time of shifting American demographics and wealth. “It’s aggravating when decision-makers implement policies that disrupt local fiscal structures and cause more regressive outcomes for low-income households—forcing them to pay more than their fair share for services.”

Circumventing the inequitable outcomes caused by ill-informed government decisions form the basis for his new book, Proportionate-Share Impact Fees and Development Mitigation, due out in November.

“Now that I’m retired from the University of Arizona, I look forward to continuing my work to help local governments rethink their fiscal structures,” he says. “We can demonstrate how property and sales tax structures penalize low-income households—and then we need to implement measures that advance fiscal sustainability and equity.”

Equity was also on Nelson’s mind in thinking about the role he played in further building the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture’s Master of Real Estate Development program. Thanks to Nelson’s collaborative leadership with other faculty, since he joined the college in 2014, the MRED has been restructured and grown into the nation’s top-ranked and most diverse online real estate development program.

But when it comes to graduate degrees, he notes there is still work to do: “Even as the nation’s population grew by 6% between 2012 and 2019, domestic students in planning programs shrank by nearly a third. And since 2015 virtually the entire population change in the U.S. has been non-white,” he says. “But the nation’s urban planning programs, and the profession itself, largely remain structured on the needs and aims of the white middle class.”

In Nelson’s view, enrollment in planning programs is declining nationally because they fail to understand shifting demographics and new economic realities. What worked for planning programs catering to mostly the white middle class last century doesn’t work now, and Nelson—a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners as well as a patron of several endowed fellowships and scholarships for planning students at UArizona, the American Planning Association and elsewhere—has some ideas how to fix that.

“We pioneered CAPLA’s online Master of Real Estate Development to be a planning degree in real estate cloth,” he says. “We teach demographics, equity and social justice, development and fiscal responsibility—the kinds of things other real estate programs don’t teach—and we do it online so it’s more accessible.”

The result? CAPLA’s online MRED program is the nation’s largest and most diverse, Nelson says. The lessons learned from the MRED’s online success can and, in Nelson’s view, must be extended to planning programs nationally.

Whether equity, demographics, housing or one of Nelson’s many other areas of expertise, his perspective is unique because it has been informed not just by his broad academic experience but also by his professional work in planning and economic development. “I’ve built a lot of programs, and those came from my experience as a consultant and planning director where I learned first-hand what the profession needs,” he says.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, both before and while he earned his PhD in Urban Studies from Portland State University, Nelson ran his own planning consulting firm. That experience informed both his academic program building and his interaction with local governments and citizens. For example, when he served as professor of planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Nelson led a series of nationwide workshops on impact fees, “training a whole generation of planners and economic development officers, resulting in an estimated $10 billion a year in impact fee revenue from the people who attended these workshops, studied our many books and other materials and implemented our teachings,” he says.

At CAPLA, Nelson’s legacy is likewise far-reaching. Among many other college and university committees, he served as the General Faculty chair and inaugural chair of the college’s Council of Faculty Members, helping to establish an expanded culture of shared governance. He also served as the principal investigator for the University of Arizona’s first successful University Transportation Center proposal through the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, founded the Urban Planning Emphasis in the Geography PhD program, and co-founded CAPLA’s highly successful Minor in Real Estate Development, “a minor more rigorous than any real estate major—where students learn more about the basics of responsible real estate development than anywhere else in the country,” he says.

As a teacher, Nelson taught a wide array of courses at UArizona, from Survey of Responsible Real Estate Development to Real Estate Finance to Planning and Real Estate Economics to Growth Management, with an even broader mix of courses from his time at Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech and the University of Utah. “My former students are in the thick of the policy changes across the nation. I hear my teaching resonate through their work, and that’s very rewarding,” says Nelson.

At CAPLA, in his research and in the classroom, the bottom line for Nelson is just that: the bottom line. “As an economist, we must understand the numbers before we make decisions about the future of our communities,” he says, imploring planners and policymakers to know how our society and economy are changing in measurable ways and then understand the role of policy to intervene in tangible, measurable ways that advance society’s goals.

For example, he cites an experience with the board of the Southern California Association of Governments. In the late 2010s, the board was close to adopting a plan that would lead to roughly two-thirds of all new housing units in the region being single-family. After he presented data on demographic changes, housing economics and household preferences for the region, however, the board reversed course and adopted a plan calling for approximately two-thirds of all new housing units in the region being attached.

As he heads into his post-UArizona years, Nelson returns to that fundamental drive to provide sound, equitable analysis and advice to help build more sustainable communities, asking: “How do we train students to address real-world problems? How do we inform decision-makers? How do we elevate the knowledge of those in the public and private sectors?”

Nelson’s interdisciplinary career has been nothing short of industry-changing. Yet it’s simple, too: “Just look at the numbers to understand how we got here, where we are headed, what the needs are, where to intervene and how to measure progress,” he says. More than mere quantity, it’s a quality demonstrated for the public good time and again in his impressive, influential career.

Learn more about Nelson's legacy in “A Festchrift in Honor of Arthur C. Nelson on the Occasion of His 50 Years in the Planning Profession and Academy,” Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy.