Rolf Pendall Named Chair of The Department of Community & Regional Planning
May 13, 2025
Rolf Pendall, Ph.D, AICP, has been named Chair of the Department of Community & Regional Planning (CRP) at the University of New Mexico following a national search. He takes over from Professor Rodney Moises Gonzales, who served as chair of CRP since July 2021.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Dr. Pendall, who will bring excellent administrative and leadership experience to the School of Architecture and Planning, especially with his expertise in land-use planning and regulation, and his many years working with federal, state, and local affordable housing policy and programs. These are important contributions to our faculty and New Mexico and our students will benefit immensely from it,” says Dr. Robert Alexander González, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “We’re grateful to Chair Gonzales for his leadership in the department these past years.”
“We are looking forward to benefiting from Dr. Pendall’s leadership work in undergraduate planning education, particularly with its focus on career-focused pathways,” says Chair Gonzáles. Pendall is nationally recognized for his work in both the professional and academic realms. He is known for leading the development in 2020 of the on-going multi-campus course, “Zoning for Equity,” which introduces students to how planners are working now to zone for equity—an initiative that brings together educators on 10 campuses across the United States. His mission is to learn and show how planners can contribute to greater spatial justice.
Dr. Pendall joins us from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). 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. Pendall comes to us with many years of administrative experience, having joined UIUC as Department Head after having directed the Urban Institute’s Center for Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center in Washington, D.C from 2010 to 2018.
Before his work at the Urban Institute, Dr. Pendall was on the planning faculties of Cornell University, where he was an Associate Professor, and the University of Rhode Island. He holds a Ph.D form the University of California at Berkeley, master’s degrees in planning and Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Kenyon College (Ohio). He grew up in Albuquerque and graduated from Sandia Prep (with coursework in English from UNM).
UNM is looking forward to having Dr. Rolf Pendall join its tenured faculty and lead the Community & Regional Planning department. He will join the School in August 2025.
