This is one of those posts I’ve put off writing because writing it means I have to admit that John Quigley is really gone, and I really don’t want to. John was a giant in urban economics, and his students are among my favorite scholars, including three of my most valued colleagues: Chris Redfearn, Juliet Musso, and Gary Painter. John Quigley passed away last weekend. Here is a lovely obituary written by his colleagues.

Keep in mind, I only met Quigley once, last year, at a function for the Goldman School. I’ve been at the academic rodeo for a little while now, and I can tell you: you meet your intellectual heroes, and many of them are jerks. By contrast, John was an intellectual hero of mine, largely because of his work on housing markets, and honestly, even my fangirl crush couldn’t have constructed a warmer, more decent man to go along with my image of what a great scholar should be: brilliant, humble, accessible, and as interested in your ideas as he is in his own. In our brief interaction, Quigley embodied all of those things.

Here are three of my favorite papers:

Quigley, J.M. Urban Diversity and Economic Growth. The Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 127-138

Quigley, J.M. and S. Raphael. Is Housing Unaffordable? Why Isn’t It More Affordable? Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 18, Number 1, Winter 2004 , pp. 191-214(24)

Quigley, J.M. and S. Rapheal. Regulation and the High Cost of Housing in California. The American Economic Review.Vol. 95, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, Philadelphia, PA, January 7-9, 2005 (May, 2005), pp. 323-328