Price, Alfred

Associate Professor Emeritus - Department of Urban and Regional Planning
adprice@buffalo.edu

Associate Professor Emeritus - Department of Urban and Regional Planning
adprice@buffalo.edu

Al Price headshot.

Professor Price’s research overlaps his professional practice and public service interests, and is concerned primarily with housing for low-income households.

As domestic housing policy at the federal level has changed, local governments are increasingly challenged to find new ways of responding to this challenge. Accordingly, Professor Price’s work spans investigation into site intensification schemes, creative financing mechanisms and approaches, and policy issues related to housing affordability. For over a decade, he has served as the urban planning member of the inter-disciplinary team assembled by US EPA Region II to address redevelopment of urban brownfields in communities throughout New York, New Jersey, and parts of the Caribbean.

Education

B.A. (sociology), Princeton University
M. Arch. & U.P., Princeton University

Course(s)

Professor Price enjoys teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses. Annually, he offers an undergraduate elective course titled "Design of Cities", a comprehensive review of urban design in the western cultural tradition. In the graduate program, he teaches the School of Architecture and Planning’s only seminar course in project finance, Financing Urban Development. He co-teaches the advanced policy colloquium jointly with UB Law faculty, a course required of all dual degree students earning the MUP/JD. In some years, Professor Price teaches Housing and Social Policy, and he periodically directs a section of the graduate urban planning studio.

Public Service

Over the course of his three-and-a-half-decade career at UB, Professor Price has served on numerous public boards: 16 years' service on the City of Buffalo’s Arts Commission; the citizens' review panel for the design of the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport; Artpark; the Advisory Council to Buffalo Housing Court; and the board of directors of numerous neighborhood housing corporations. In more recent years this service has included Downtown Neighborhood Development, Inc., Buffalo’s lead agency for housing initiatives in the central business district; and service as consultant to the Bethel Community Development Corporation, a not-for-profit agency sponsored by the oldest African-American religious congregation in the city. Bethel CDC is in the process now of implementing the neighborhood renewal plan developed in prior years with Professor Price’s guidance. Price is currently involved in work to establish a Black Heritage Cultural District on the city’s east side. This includes the February 2010 approval of an historic housing project by the New York Preservation League on that organization’s state-wide “Seven to Save” list. 

Selected Publications

  • “Bethel Neighborhood Redevelopment Plan: A Proposal for Action.” (2001). Conducted for the Board of Directors of the Bethel Community Development Corporation, Inc. Buffalo, NY: Bethel Community Development Corporation
  • “Buffalo’s New Tomato Fields: Greenhouse Crops Lead the Way” (1998). in Re-Developing Brownfields: a Different Conversation, Proceedings of the International Symposium. Waterfront Regeneration Trust, Toronto, Ont.
  • “Housing Affordability: An African-American Perspective” (1997). One-Third of a Nation, Vol. II, (L. Morris and U.J.O. Bailey, eds.) Washington, DC: Howard University Press

Selected activities, honors and awards

Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, State University of New York, 2000; Marcus Garvey Medal of Distinction (1991), conferred by the Hon. Richard Bernal, Jamaican Ambassador to the United States; Student Association of the University at Buffalo Excellence in Teaching Award, 1985.