Mark Alan Hughes

Biography

BA 1981 Swarthmore
PhD 1986 Penn (Regional Science)

Mark Alan Hughes is the Chief Policy Adviser to the Mayor (since 2009) and the founding Director of Sustainability (since 2008) for the City of Philadelphia. He is also a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the University of Pennsylvania (since 1999) and an opinion columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News (since 2001). 

Hughes joined the standing faculty at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School at the age of 25, teaching land use planning, public management, and antipoverty policy. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and Swarthmore. Hughes has held non-resident senior fellow appointments at Brookings and the Urban Institute; served as a senior consultant to the Urban Poverty Program at The Ford Foundation; and served as the first Vice President for Policy Development at Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia.  

His early research on urban poverty played a prominent role in the scholarly and policy debates over the "underclass" during the late 1980s: William Julius Wilson cited Hughes as his "most thoughtful critic" in Wilson's seminal 1988 Godkin Lectures at Harvard.  His argument that suburban job growth demands expanded job access for inner-city residents was twice cited by President Clinton in State of the Union Addresses in the mid-1990s. His research has appeared in the leading journals of several academic disciplines, including the Journal of Urban Economics, Political Science Quarterly, Economic Geography, Journal of the American Planning Association, and Urban Studies; and his work has been widely cited by journalists, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Governing. He has been supported by the Ford, Pew, WmPenn, MacArthur, Casey, and Rockefeller foundations.

As a policy developer, Hughes helped design and create (1) the $15 million Bridges to Work demonstration for H.U.D., which led to the $750 million Job Access and Reverse Commute federal transportation program; (2) the $35 million Transitional Work Corporation, now the nation's largest publicly financed jobs program under welfare reform and model for a national program under consideration by Congress; (3) the Campaign for Working Families, which annually returns over $15 million worth of public benefits to over 15,000 eligible households in Philadelphia; (4) the Revenue Acquisition Project, which identified over $100 million in feasible funding opportunities for the City of Philadelphia; and a number of smaller projects, ranging from the creation of a loan fund to preserve Philadelphia's endangered sacred places to an assessment of the Philadelphia region's disaster preparedness.

As a cabinet member in the Administration of Mayor Michael A. Nutter, Hughes established the City's first Office of Sustainability, created a distinguished 20-member Sustainability Advisory Board, and designed and produced the City's 2015 policy framework, Greenworks Philadelphia that presents fifteen ambitious targets for 2015. He also designed and led the City's strategy for maximizing the value and impact of federal resources under the Recovery Act. 

Hughes graduated from Swarthmore College in 1981 and received the Ph.D. in Regional Science from Penn in 1986, winning the discipline's international Dissertation Prize. He won the National Planning Award from the American Planning Association in 1992, the youngest recipient ever, for his academic writing on regional labor market mobility. The Week magazine named him one of the nation's five best local columnists in 2003. In 2006, Hughes entered the architecture degree program at Penn's School of Design, pursuing a lifelong interest in architecture's role in urban policy and practice; and in 2007, he served as policy director in Michael Nutter's successful primary campaign for Mayor of Philadelphia.