With this issue of Cityscape, the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) of the Department of Housing and Urban Development fully inaugurates its new publishing format.

In its 14 years, Cityscape has brought numerous valuable contributions to the attention of policymakers, researchers, and practitioners. Its varied audience and its openness to findings from many disciplines have made it a forum of choice for many authors on housing and urban policy, both distinguished researchers with past achievements and investigators still making names for themselves.

But we can do more, and we can do better. We want to reach our readers more often, with the highest quality material that we can make available for a multidisciplinary audience. In pursuit of those goals, we have initiated the following changes:

1. I have appointed a distinguished Advisory Board. The board members, whose names appear on the inside front cover, can attest that we have adopted many of their suggestions.

2. We commit to publishing three issues a year. This issue is the third of calendar year 2007. We anticipate that the increased frequency and regularity of publication will lead to greater recognition for the authors of these pages.

3. We no longer will devote an entire issue to a single theme. Instead, we will offer a Symposium, a set of papers on a common theme. We will add a new section, Refereed Papers, which may analyze a wide variety of topics. We will also add two new smaller features to a Departments section, Policy Brief and Data Shop.

4. Our guest editor or editors will be responsible for the intellectual coherence and integrity of each Symposium.

5. Our managing editor, Mark Shroder, will seek expert opinions to judge submissions for the Refereed Papers.

6. In each issue, a Policy Brief, usually from the PD&R staff, will point researchers to an area in which national policy has undergone relatively recent change and in which the consequences of change deserve the attention of scholars.

7. In each issue, an entry in the Data Shop, edited by David Vandenbroucke, will lay out the technical means by which social scientists can systematically construct variables from data available for public use to test a wide range of hypotheses.

I hope these changes in the frequency and flexibility of the journal will contribute to the vitality of national conversations on public policy. Share your thoughts with us by e-mail to Cityscape@hud.gov.