Harvard Portrait: Judith Grant Long

Judith Grant Long

“Like most city planners, I’m a city planner and something else,” says Judith Grant Long, M.D.S. ’95, Ph.D. ’02, RI ’12, associate professor of urban planning at the Graduate School of Design. The “something else” involves sports and finance: once Canada’s third-ranked junior squash player, she later studied economics in college. Afterward, while working as a consultant, she realized that local governments often oversubsidize developers pushing big sports stadiums. She came to Harvard for a design-studies master’s, and met Christopher Long ’82, M.B.A. ’87, while waiting for friends at Harvest. (The couple recently celebrated their tenth anniversary there; they live in Concord with their two daughters.) Grant Long joined the GSD in 2005. Her first book, Public-Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities, argues that big stadiums almost always cost taxpayers dearly: Hamilton County, Ohio, for example, recently sold a hospital to cover debt payments on a Bengals stadium. But stadiums may confer other benefits, she says, in particular as redevelopment projects or sources of civic pride. Her current research on the Olympics shows that hosts almost never recoup their investment, either, but often have other motives for seeking the Games: “The classic example is Beijing in 2008, announcing its arrival as a sort-of-free-market economy.” For smaller cities, Grant Long says less-expensive soccer stadiums, which can be used by students and professional players alike, are among the best sports-facility investments. Otherwise, she advises, build parks and recreation areas that serve both kids and adults. “I’d like to take the focus off the big leagues,” she says, and encourage “sports, at the local level, that are multigenerational.”

Click here for the September-October 2013 issue table of contents

You might also like

Basking in the Beaux-Arts

Park offers art, nature, and history in New Hampshire

A New Voice

Ann Kim Ha’s poignant children’s books

Safe Streets

Working to curb road deaths

Most popular

Rebecca Henderson: Does Capitalism Need to be Reimagined?

How to reform capitalism to confront climate change and extreme inequality, with economist and McArthur University Professor Rebecca Henderson

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Explore More From Current Issue

Publications by Harvard Authors Spring 2025: New Releases

Operatic counterculture, a Passover graphic novel, James Joyce’s biographer, and more

Filmmaker Salvador Litvak's Jewish Movies

The “Accidental Talmudist” on making Jewish movies

Addressing Gaps in Care for Patients with Disabilities

Lisa Iezzoni explores the unmet needs of patients with disabilities.