Vicki Been is the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development for the city of New York. She was previously the New York City commissioner of housing preservation and development. Prior to her public service, she was the Boxer Family Professor of Law at the New York University (NYU) School of Law, an affiliated Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and the Faculty Director of the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
Raphael W. Bostic is the fifteenth President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. From 2012 to 2017, Bostic was the Judith and John Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC), following a three-year stint as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Edward G. Goetz is the Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota and the Codirector of the University-Metropolitan Consortium. He has served as an Associate Dean and as the Director of the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program at the Humphrey School. His research focuses on issues of race and poverty and how they affect housing policy planning and implementation.
Megan Haberle is the Deputy Director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, where she has worked since 2012. She specializes in policy designs, public education, and technical assistance relating to government programs and civil rights, with a focus on advancing fair housing and environmental justice.
Howard Husock is the Vice President for Research and Publications at the Manhattan Institute. From 1987 through 2006, Husock was the Director of Case Studies in Public Policy and Management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was also a Fellow at the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Management.
Reed Jordan is an urban planner and policy analyst. He is currently the project manager for Where We Live NYC, the city of New York’s comprehensive fair housing plan to fight discrimination, confront segregation, and increase access to opportunity. He previously was a housing and community development policy researcher at the Urban Institute. He received his master’s degree in city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Nicholas F. Kelly is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on affordable housing and public policy, with a particular focus on segregation and urban politics. His current work develops tools to increase access to opportunity neighborhoods for low-income families and examines how political institutions shape efforts to promote equity in housing. He has worked at the Boston Housing Authority, at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and as an aide for Senator Chuck Schumer.
Michael C. Lens is the Associate Faculty Director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UCLA Luskin. In recent research, Professor Lens is studying the effect of the housing bust on housing subsidy demand and local government finances, the role of public investments in gentrification processes, and the spatial concentration of evictions.
Katherine O’Regan is a Professor of Public Policy and Planning at NYU Wagner, the Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Public Policy program, and the Faculty Director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. She spent April 2014 to January 2017 in the Barack Obama administration, serving as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at HUD.
Patrick Pontius serves as a principal adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, providing leadership to the bank’s outreach strategy and working closely with bank president Raphael W. Bostic and the Management Committee to advance the bank’s strategic plan. Before relocating to Atlanta, he served for six years in the federal government in several roles, including as a senior policy adviser at HUD.
Justin P. Steil is an Associate Professor of Law and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Broadly interested in social stratification and spatial dimensions of inequality, Steil is a leading scholar of causes, consequences, and policy responses to residential segregation, particularly the intersection of urban policy with land use and civil rights law. He is also the coeditor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019) and Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2009).
Lawrence J. Vale is an Associate Dean and Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His eleven books include four prize-winning volumes about low-income housing in the United States (From the Puritans to the Projects [Harvard University Press, 2000]; Reclaiming Public Housing [Harvard University Press, 2002]; Purging the Poorest [University of Chicago Press, 2013]; and the coedited compilation, Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy [Cornell University Press, 2015], as well as the recently published book After the Projects [Oxford University Press, 2019]).
Alexander von Hoffman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Joint Center and a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A historian by training, he is the author of House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (2003), which chronicles the rise of the community development movement in New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles; and Fuel Lines for the Urban Revival Engine: Neighborhoods, Community Development Corporations, and Financial Intermediaries (Fannie Mae Foundation, 2001), which examines the relationship between funding organizations, community development corporations, and others.
Maia S. Woluchem is a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation in New York City. She received a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working on issues of housing, socioeconomic and racial equity, and social marginality. She previously served as a Harvard Rappaport Public Policy Fellow, dually housed at the Department of Innovation and Technology and the Office of Fair Housing and Equity in the city of Boston.