Tom Kingsley, an expert on national trends in community information systems like SAVI, will serve as keynote speaker at the first annual SAVI Users Conference on June 10 at the Ruth Lilly Health Education Center. Kingsley is a senior researcher and research manager in housing, urban policy, and governance issues at the Urban Institute, and is the author of numerous publications in those fields. He served as the Director of the Institute’s Center for Public Finance and Housing from 1986 through 1997. He currently directs the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership—an initiative to develop advanced data systems for policy analysis and community building in U.S. cities. He also serves as director of projects to develop and use national data files to analyze patterns of neighborhood change in America’s cities (for the Rockefeller Foundation), to develop decision support tools to help guide land market strategies in five cities (for Brookings), and to develop content for the Fannie Mae Foundation’s Community Data System web site.

In the 1990s, Kingsley was co-director of the Ford Foundation-sponsored Urban Opportunity Program, which produced four books on the status of urban policy issues in America and worked with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros on a series of essays on the future of U.S. cities. He has also directed several other major policy research programs, including: testing the market effects of housing voucher programs (1974-80, the HUD sponsored Housing Assistance Supply Experiment); analyzing the structure and potentials of metropolitan Cleveland's economy (1980-82, for the Cleveland Foundation); preparing a national urban development strategy for Indonesia (1982-85, for the United Nations); and helping the Czech and Slovak Republics design and implement policy reforms in housing and municipal infrastructure (1991-95, for USAID).

Prior to joining the Urban Institute, Kingsley served as Director of the Rand Corporation's Housing and Urban Policy Program, and as Assistant Administrator for the New York City Housing and Development Administration, where he was responsible for the agency's budgeting and policy analysis functions. He has also taught on the faculties of the graduate urban planning programs at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.