Planning Commissions in a Pro-Housing Era

Philip Burns is a Planning Commissioner in the City of Pasadena, and Managing Principal at The Arroyo Group, a 50-year-old urban design and planning firm. His specialties include consensus-building with communities and stakeholders, housing policy, zoning. A former urban planning Peace Corps Volunteer and United Nations officer in Guatemala, he enjoys cross-cultural work and making abstract and counter-intuitive planning concepts understandable to the average citizen. Possessing a variety of technical skills, Philip often manages multidisciplinary teams and serves as primary client point of contact for complex planning projects. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies from Brown University and a Master of Planning with a Certificate in Real Estate Development from the University of Southern California.

Rick Cole is a Pasadena City Councilmember. A former Executive Director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, he is nationally recognized for his pioneering work in smart growth, affordable housing and transit-oriented development. A former Pasadena Planning Commission, he also teaches urban policy at Occidental College and Pepperdine University. Cole spent more than two decades in municipal leader including serving as Deputy Mayor and Chief Deputy Controller for the City of Los Angeles and City Manager in three California communities, Santa Monica, Ventura and Azusa.  Prior to that he spent twelve years on the Pasadena City Council, including a term as Mayor, where he spearheaded the revilatization of Old Pasadena. The Los Angeles Times called him “one of Southern California’s most visionary planning thinkers.” 

Cole has been recognized as one of “America's Public Officials of the Year” by Governing Magazine.

Jacob L. Wasserman serves as a Planning Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica. Professionally, he studies and manages research on public transit, the intersection of transportation and other social issues, and a range of mobility questions as a Research Program Manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Prior, he worked for the Cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Haven. He also served as a Transportation Justice Fellow for BART Director Lateefah Simon. He has served on the board of the North Westwood Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles city government. Wasserman holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Yale.