His earliest research, focused on the social networks of poor young people, examined the controversial desegregation of public housing following a landmark civil rights lawsuit in Yonkers, New York — later the subject of an HBO miniseries, Show Me a Hero.

His edited book, The Geography of Opportunity (Brookings, 2005), analyzed the singular role of segregation as America has become more racially and ethnically diverse and at the same time more economically unequal.

A second book, "Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe" (MIT Press, 2009) offers an account of transformative change and the politics of reform in the U.S., Brazil, India and South Africa.

The book, which was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Prize, also offers an alternative theory of the functions and forms of democracy, focusing on local governance and grounded in core concepts of learning and bargaining, accountability, and stakeholder participation.

Influenced by American educator and political philosopher John Dewey, this work argues that learning and bargaining are the twin capacities essential to collective problem-solving and shows the conditions under which it is possible to cultivate and advance both.

In 2010, he and co-authors Susan Popkin and John Goering published "Moving to Opportunity: The Story of An American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty" (Oxford University Press).

His mother, Angela (1933–2015), was the daughter of Bill Aranha, Nassau's crown lands officer during the 1940s, and his father, Nevin Briggs (1932–1978), was an out island doctor, born and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada.

He later received a BS in engineering from Stanford University, worked with the innovative planning firm of Moore Iacofano Goltsman in Berkeley, CA, and won a Rotary Scholarship to study education and community development in Brazil, living in Salvador, Bahia.

In 1996 he earned a PhD in sociology and education from Columbia University, where he studied under Robert Crain, Herbert Gans, Charles Kadushin, and other scholars.