Draft:Cary Lowe

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest policy, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. Detroittola (talk) 02:51, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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Cary Lowe is an American lawyer, writer, professor, and political activist. He grew up in post-war Europe in a family of Holocaust survivors, immigrated to the United States in his teens, served as an officer in the US Navy, and became engaged in American law, politics, business, and academia.

Family background and early life

Lowe was born in Austria in 1948 at a US Army hospital in Linz. His family lived at the time in the smaller nearby town of Braunau am Inn, which has the dubious distinction of being the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. That fact became an important influence on Lowe’s later life and activities.

Lowe’s parents, Ernest Lowe and Valerie Lowe (née Ernei) both were Holocaust survivors. Ernest Lowe was a refugee from Vienna who narrowly escaped Europe to the United States after the antisemitic Kristallnacht riots. Valerie Lowe grew up in Žilina, Slovakia. She and one of her sisters survived the war in hiding with sympathetic families and later joined partisan fighters in the Slovak National Uprising. Her parents and oldest sister, as well as other relatives, were killed at the Terezin concentration camp. Ernest also lost most of his relatives, other than his immediate family, to the Nazis.

After serving in the US Army and participating in the liberation of Europe from Nazi control, Ernest Lowe was recruited to work as a translator and investigator for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials from 1946-48. He and his wife lived in Nuremberg until 1948, when he transferred to a position with the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in the Allied occupation of Austria and was assigned to an interrogation unit based in Braunau. During the five years he worked there, his two sons (Lowe and his younger brother Dean) were born. In 1953, the CIC unit relocated to Camp McCauley, the US Army base in Linz, until the end of the occupation in 1955. Ernest then took a new position as an intelligence analyst at headquarters of US Air Forces in Europe in Wiesbaden, Germany. The Lowe family remained in Germany until 1961, when Ernest transferred to a similar position at Hanscom Air Force Base (then called Hanscom Field), in Bedford, Massachusettsnear Boston. After twenty years there, he concluded his career by serving as the Air Force’s representative to the Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington for development of the airborne early warning and control (AWACS) aircraft. On his retirement, he and Valerie moved to Laguna Hills, California, where they resided until their deaths.

During his childhood in Braunau, Lowe became aware of the Hitler birthplace (the Hitlerhaus), a former apartment building located along the street leading to the historic town square. He observed that his mother, his nanny, and many other adults avoided passing that site. His mother explained to him that a very bad man was born there, who killed her family and many others. He sensed that the Hitlerhaus cast a cloud over the community. Many years later, he would write about his childhood experiences in a memoir entitled Becoming American. He also would become involved in an effort to convert the Hitlerhaus into a House of Responsibility, a symbol of peace that would deter future fascist movements.

During the years he lived in Braunau, Lowe spoke primarily German. Upon moving to Linz, he rapidly assumed English as his primary language, as his family now lived for the first time among a large number of Americans and he began attending school at the military base there. That began the process of Americanization that underlies his memoir.

Education and teaching

After moving to the United States, Lowe attended high school in Bedford. He excelled as a student, and also participated widely in sports, including track and field, shooting, and wrestling. At the conclusion of high school, he earned a full college scholarship through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps.

In 1966, Lowe moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California (USC). That event determined the rest of his life and career. After completing undergraduate studies in English literature, he stayed on at USC to earn a master’s degree in international relations, after which he was commissioned as an officer in the US Navy. Upon completing his naval service, Lowe returned to USC to study law and earn a Juris Doctor. He graduated and was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1974. Shortly thereafter, while working, he returned to USC once more and earned a PhD in urban planning.

With a JD and PhD, Lowe was invited to teach in the Urban Planning Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He then returned to USC to teach first at the Law Center Law and subsequently at the School of Urban and Regional Planning. He also assisted USC in creating a graduate curriculum in real estate development and taught the law component of that program. After taking an extended break from teaching to focus on family and career, he resumed at the University of California, San Diego, where he also assisted in creating new degree programs in urban planning. In all, he taught for nearly twenty years at those various universities.

Professional career

After completing law school, Lowe spent the first eight years of his career working in public interest law, policy, and politics. He co-founded the Community Information Project, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization that combined investigation, legal action, and advocacy to expose political corruption, business misconduct, and racial discrimination.

In 1978, Lowe joined with noted journalist and activist Fred Branfman in opening the non-profit California Public Policy Center in Los Angeles. The organization developed and promoted state and local policy proposals in the areas of affordable housing, renewable energy, and investment innovation. It worked closely with a broad range of community and public interest organizations. At the same time, Lowe participated in founding of the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a statewide political organization.

Lowe began practicing law full-time in 1982, first with a downtown Los Angeles firm and then as an in-house counsel to a major homebuilding company and a land investment firm. Ten years later, he returned to law firm practice, first at a boutique firm specializing in land use and real estate law and later at the Los Angeles office of a national firm, Jenkens & Gilchrist. He concluded his law career by opening his own office and working for twenty years as a sole practitioner representing major builders and developers.

During the final stage of his legal career, Lowe became a certified mediator. He went on to co-founded a practice group focused on resolving land use and environmental conflicts.

In addition to his professional work, Lowe has regularly been a speaker at local, state, and national conferences, primarily of the American Planning Association, addressing legal and urban planning issues.

Civic and political engagement

Lowe’s first involvement in the political world occurred while still living in Europe, when he was appointed by a junior high school teacher to research and report on the US presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. During high school, he accompanied his mother in door-to-door campaigning for various political candidates in Massachusetts. Then, while in college, he did volunteer work for the presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern. During the 1970s and 1980s, Lowe increasingly worked on state and local political campaigns, including numerous campaigns around voter Initiative measures. He put aside campaign work for a number of years due to the demands of his legal practice, but resumed as his retirement approached. His final effort was as policy director for the San Diego mayoral campaign of Barbara Bry.

Throughout his career, Lowe served as a policy advisor to state and local government officials. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and City Council President John Ferraro appointed him to committees dealing with local housing issues. California Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to task forces on housing and investment policy. He later served on advisory bodies addressing planning concerns for the Southern California Association of Governments, the County of Riverside, and the City of San Bernardino, and chaired the Redevelopment Commission of the City of South Pasadena,. Later, he chaired advisory groups addressing environmental concerns and water supply for the City of San Diego.

After launching his career by working with a succession of public interest organizations, Lowe continued by co-founding California’s first statewide housing rights organization, serving on the funding board of a Los Angeles charitable foundation (Liberty Hill Foundation), and being an active member or director of groups advocating for improved land use and planning policies, environmental preservation, and Native American rights. The common thread in these efforts was advancing a progressive vision and promoting social justice.

Most recently, Lowe has been active in such efforts directed toward his hometown of Braunau am Inn, He worked with Austrian political scientist Andreas Maislinger and urban planner Eduard Schmiege in seeking to convert the Hitlerhausi nto a House of Responsibility, conceived by Maislinger as a center to promote peace and anti-fascism. While the Austrian federal government opted for a different use of the site, this work continues to develop the House of Responsibility at a different location in Braunau. The same group currently is advocating for renaming certain public ways in Braunau to remove their association with persons connected to the National Socialist regime.

Awards and recognition

In addition to receiving numerous appointments to public advisory groups, Lowe was formally recognized on several occasions by elected officials. He received commendations for his work from the Los Angeles City Council, the San Diego City Council, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, and the California State Senate.

In recognition of Lowe’s contributions to the urban planning field, he was admitted to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners, the top honor conferred by the American Planning Association.

Publications

Throughout his career, Lowe has been a writer on issues of public concern, publishing eighty opinion essays in the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, and other major newspapers ]. These have dealt with such varied issues as housing rights, land use, water policy, environmental protection, political reform, immigration, and climate change. He also published articles on housing and land use issues in professional journals.

In 2020, Lowe published his first full-length book, a political memoir entitled Becoming American. This book follows Lowe’s early years in Europe, gradual exposure to American culture, immigration to the United States, service in the military, and intense involvement with American society, education, law, business, and politics. His second book, a travel memoir entitled On Two Legs and Three Wheels ', was published in 2025. It describes two dozen travels with his wife, who is disabled and relies on a mobility scooter, as they visit twenty countries and nearly half the US states. Their travels take them from the Arctic Ocean to Caribbean islands, from mountain peaks and deserts to urban centers. Lowe has also published stand-alone travel stories in anthologies. His travel writing is intended to motivate older and disabled readers to continue traveling, regardless of their physical limitations.