Sarah Brundage is the Senior Advisor for Housing Supply and Infrastructure in the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). She previously served as General Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations at HUD. Prior to joining HUD, Sarah was the Senior Policy Director at Enterprise Community Partners, leading the national organization’s tax and fair housing policy and advocacy. Sarah co-led the national ACTION Campaign to strengthen and increase the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Sarah also previously led Enterprise’s state and local policy in California, where she managed the state fair housing taskforce and the successful implementation of California Opportunity Maps. Sarah previously contributed to research with Color of Law author Richard Rothstein, the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, and worked for the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Sarah holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Florida and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Laura Brunner is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Port, a public, mission-focused, quasi-governmental agency dedicated to expanding prosperity by repositioning real estate and creating value from land assets in a way that benefits everyone in Hamilton County, Ohio.

Since her appointment in 2011, Laura has leveraged her background in commercial real estate and public accounting to lead The Port in strengthening its platform to improve regional economic, social, and environmental conditions and foster greater economic mobility. Laura works closely with The Port’s Board of Directors delivering on a three-pronged revitalization approach that guides its work – an innovative Public Finance practice that drives development; a holistic Neighborhood strategy that restores property to productive use and raises quality of life; and an urban Industrial revitalization initiative designed to create development-ready sites that support next-generation manufacturing to attract high paying jobs to our region. She launched an impact investing program to support these bold initiatives, creating a Patient Capital Note structure that raises private capital and a revolving loan fund to help distressed neighborhood business districts.

More recently, Laura led the unprecedented effort to keep the American dream of homeownership alive for many Cincinnatians by acquiring nearly 200 single-family homes previously owned by out-of-town investors who were renting these properties. The Port’s intent in acquiring these homes is to create a pathway for homeownership.

Laura earned a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, and spent 15 years in the public accounting industry, achieving the status of partner at Barnes, Dennig & Co. She is the recipient of dozens of awards, including Cincinnati Enquirer Woman of the Year and the Merlin G. Pope, Jr. Diversity Leadership Award. She is also a board member of Cincinnati ArtsWave and the Queen City Club.

Laurie Goodman is an Institute fellow and the founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. The center provides policymakers with data-driven analyses of housing finance policy issues that they can depend on for relevance, accuracy, and independence. Before joining Urban, Goodman spent 30 years as an analyst and research department manager at several Wall Street firms. From 2008 to 2013, she was a senior managing director at Amherst Securities Group LP, a boutique broker-dealer specializing in securitized products, where her strategy effort became known for its analysis of housing policy issues. From 1993 to 2008, Goodman was head of global fixed income research and manager of US securitized products research at UBS and predecessor firms, which were ranked first by Institutional Investor for 11 straight years. Before that, she held research and portfolio management positions at several Wall Street firms. She began her career as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Goodman was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Hall of Fame in 2009.

Goodman serves on the board of directors of MFA Financial, Arch Capital Group Ltd., and Home Point Capital Inc. and is a consultant to the Amherst Group. She is also on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Advisory Board. Goodman has published more than 200 journal articles and has coauthored and coedited five books. She has a BA in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and an AM and PhD in economics from Stanford University.

Bruce Katz
Bruce Katz is the Co-Founder and inaugural Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab.

Katz regularly advises global, national, state, regional and municipal leaders on public reforms and private innovations that advance the well-being of metropolitan areas and their countries.

Katz is the co-author of The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism (Brookings Institution Press, 2018) and The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Brookings Institution Press, 2013). Both books focus on the rise of cities and city networks as the world’s leading problem solvers.

Katz was the inaugural Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution from January 2016 to March 2018, where he focused on the challenges and opportunities of global urbanization. Prior to assuming this role, Katz was a vice president at the Brookings Institution and founding Director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

Before joining Brookings, Katz served as chief of staff to U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros and was the senior counsel and then staff director for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs. After the 2008 presidential election, Bruce co-led the housing and urban transition team for the Obama administration and served as a senior advisor to new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary Shaun Donovan, for the first 100 days of the Administration.

Katz is a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. He gives dozens of lectures and presentations annually before public, corporate, civic, and university audiences across the world. In 2006, he received the prestigious Heinz Award in Public Policy for his contributions to understanding the “function and values of cities and metropolitan areas and profoundly influencing their economic vitality, livability and sustainability.” Katz is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School.

Bianca Motley Broom was sworn in as the 27th mayor of College Park, Georgia, in January 2020. She is the first woman and the first person of color to serve as mayor of College Park. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she has lived in College Park since 2008.

Even with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, under Mayor Motley Broom’s leadership College Park has continued to thrive. Mayor Motley Broom has championed new housing developments in areas of the city plagued by a generation of disinvestment. Those efforts have paid off through projects such as South Park Cottages (a tiny home community) and Somersby (a mixed use/mixed income development adjacent to North Clayton Middle School). The Diamond @ College Park, a partnership with the College Park First United Methodist Church, recently broke ground near the College Park MARTA station, which will bring an arts campus and additional residents to a vibrant part of the city.

Mayor Motley Broom is the Third Vice President of the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA) and chair of GMA’s Member Services Advisory Council. She is a registered arbitrator, civil mediator, and domestic relations mediator in Georgia and a full-time neutral with the largest mediation and arbitration firm in the Southeast. From 2017-2019, she served as a part-time judge in Fulton County Magistrate Court. Prior to her appointment to the bench, she was a trial attorney and litigator for nearly fifteen years.

Mayor Motley Broom earned a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy Studies and Religion from Duke University. She also minored in African and African-American Studies. She earned her Juris Doctorate at Washington University School of Law, where her commitment to public service was recognized by her designation as a Webster Society Scholar. She received an MBA with honors and earned certificates in Strategy and Execution, Change Management, and Management Analytics from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.

Elora Lee Raymond is an urban planner and Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning in the College of Design at Georgia Tech. She is interested in the financialization of housing and property in land, displacement and dispossession through housing systems, housing and disasters, housing justice, race, segregation, and the transnational Pacific Islander community.

Dr. Raymond has explored widening housing wealth inequality following the real estate and financial crises of the 2000s, and the relationship between financialization of rental housing and eviction-led displacement. She has studied the effect of the foreclosure and affordability crises on Pacific Islander communities in Los Angeles, as well as the financialization of customary land in Samoa. Dr. Raymond has ongoing projects on housing, displacement and disasters, including work on eviction and migration following disasters.

Elora has published articles in Cityscape, JPER, Urban Geography, Housing Studies, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper Series. Her research has been featured in the Economist, New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bloomberg’s Businessweek, NPR’s Morning Edition, ABC's Good Morning America, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Univision, and Radio New Zealand, among other news outlets.

Esther Sullivan
Esther Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on poverty, environmental inequality, legal regulation, and the built environment, with a special interest in housing and residential mobility. Her book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place won the 2019 Robert Park Award. The book examines the sociolegal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for an entire class of low-income residents in U.S. manufactured home parks. She continues to publish on various aspects of housing insecurity as it relates to manufactured housing. Her work on this topic has appeared in American Sociological Review, Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of the American Planning Association and elsewhere. Her research has been covered in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and TIME.

Elin Zurbrigg joined Mi Casa, Inc. as Project Director in 2002, becoming Deputy Director in 2006. Ms. Zurbrigg holds a Masters' degree in Community Planning from the University of Maryland, with an emphasis on equitable development and preserving diversity through maintaining affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods. Ms. Zurbrigg has worked in the affordable housing and community development field for more than 22 years, and volunteered as an advocate for affordable housing and community-based arts and education. Ms. Zurbrigg chaired the Finance Committee on the DC Council's Limited Equity Coop Taskforce, and served on the Board of Directors for the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development (CNHED) for more than 15 years. She currently co-chairs CNHED Tenant Purchase Working Group, which focuses on building support for affordable co-ops.