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Frank Popper teaches in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, where he also participates in the Geography and American Studies Departments. He teaches regularly as a visiting professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Princeton University. He is author of The President's Commissions (1970) and The Politics of Land-Use Reform (1981), coauthor of Urban Nongrowth: City Planning for People (1976) and coeditor of Land Reform, American Style (1984) and The Buffalo Commons and the Future of the Great Plains (Liveoak Editions: forthcoming).

Professor Popper has served previously on the governing boards of the American Land Forum, the American Planning Association, the Citizens Council on Land Use Research and Education, and Urban Ecology. He now serves on the boards of the American Land Publishing Project, Ecocity Builders, the National Center for Frontier Communities (formerly the Frontier Education Center) and the Great Plains Restoration Council, helped found the latter two and chairs the board of the latter. He has served on the editorial boards of American Land Forum, Journal of the American Planning Association, and Journal of Rural Communities and now serves on the editorial board of Housing Policy Debate, Online Journal of Rural Research and Policy, and APA [American Planning Association] Watchdog. He is a fellow of the American Geographical Society.

His article "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust" (Planning, December 1987), written with his wife, Deborah Popper, a geographer at the City University of New York, put forward the controversial Buffalo Commons idea that has stimulated a national debate about the future of the Great Plains region. The Poppers' Plains work was the subject of Anne Matthews' book Where the Buffalo Roam (1992), one of four finalists for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction; a second edition of the book appeared in 2002. The Poppers' work inspired Richard Wheeler's The Buffalo Commons (1998), a novel where the concept wins out in the end.

Symposia on the Buffalo Commons appear in the American Geographical Society's Focus (Winter 1993), the Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy (Winter 1994) and North Dakota Quarterly (Fall 1996). In 1997 the Poppers' Buffalo Commons work received the American Geographical Society's Paul Vouras Medal for regional geography, and Frank Popper received Rutgers' Presidential Award for Distinguished Public Service. In 2001 the Poppers became associate fellows at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, and in 2002 they became members of the National Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

Before entering academic life by coming to Rutgers in 1983, Professor Popper was a Gilbert White Fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC. He has been a land-use consultant to numerous government agencies, corporations, nonprofit groups, film companies and universities. A graduate of Haverford College, he has a masters degree in public administration and a doctorate in political science, both from Harvard University. He has been a visiting professor in the City and Regional Planning Department at Cornell University. The Poppers frequently teach together as visiting professors in the Environmental Studies Program, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University.

In 2003 Planning named his 1981 LULUs article and their 1987 Buffalo Commons one among the 25 most significant it had published in the previous quarter-century. The same year the Journal of the American Planning Association named his 1988 piece on understanding American land-use regulation one of four “classic articles”—“required reading for those who want to understand what the field of planning is all about” —it had ever published on land use.