About Cityscape

Peter Bergman is an associate professor in economics at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies how information problems affect human capital decision making. Much of his research combines technology and information interventions to improve outcomes for low-income families at scale. He has conducted large-scale experiments aimed at improving parent engagement, helping families find and move to areas with better schools, improving access to financial aid, using predictive analytics to track students in higher education, and assessing discrimination in systems of school choice. Peter’s research has been covered by the New York Times, CNN, and NPR, among other outlets.

Peter earned a BA in political economy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jose P. Duarte holds a professional degree in Architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon (TU Lisbon), and Master’s and PhD degrees in Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Currently Dr. Duarte is the Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation and director of the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Penn State, where he is Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and Affiliate Professor of Architectural Engineering and Engineering Design. Dr. Duarte was Dean of the Lisbon School of Architecture and president of eCAADe, the European association for education and research in computer-aided design. He was co-founder of the Penn State Additive Construction Laboratory (AddCon Lab), and his research interests are in the use of computation to support context-sensitive design at different scales with a special focus on housing and urban design. After addressing the generation of customized designs, his research has centered on the additive manufacturing of concrete structures to materialize such designs. Dr. Duarte has published extensively on these topics. Recently, he co-edited (with Branko Kolarevic) the book "Mass Customization and Design Democracy" (Routledge, NY, 2019) and his team was awarded 2nd place in the finals of the "NASA 3D Printed Mars Habitat Challenge, Phase 3: On-Site Habitat Competition."

Martha Galvez is the Executive Director of the Housing Solutions Lab at New York University's Furman Center. Her expertise is in housing and homelessness policy, with a focus on policies and programs that strengthen housing stability and neighborhood choice for low-income families. She has experience in mixed-methods research, and has designed and led studies involving complex administrative, survey, and qualitative data. Prior to joining the Lab, she was a Principal Research Associate at the Urban Institute. She has also held policy and research positions in several state and local research organizations, including the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services’ Research and Data Analysis division, the West Coast Poverty Center at the University of Washington, the Seattle Housing Authority, the New York City Department of Small Business Services, and the New York City Citizens Housing and Planning Council. Galvez earned an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and a master’s degree in urban planning and PhD in public policy and administration from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University.

Phil ME Garboden is an Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. He previously served as the inaugural HCRC Professor in Affordable Housing Economics, Policy, and Planning at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Garboden was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He holds a PhD in Sociology, an MA in Public Policy, and an MSE in Applied Math and Statistics, all from Johns Hopkins University.

His primary research agenda looks at how supply side actors – landlords, developers, and property managers – respond to state, local, and federal housing policy in ways that exacerbate the structural marginalization of low-income and non-white communities. This work has been published in numerous public policy, sociology, and urban planning journals including the Journal of the American Planning Association, the American Sociological Review, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He is currently working on a book for Princeton University Press entitled American Landlord (coauthored with Eva Rosen) that examines how landlords leverage the uneven power dynamics of low-rent housing markets in ways that shape tenant well-being.

Emily Hamilton is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research focuses on urban economics and land-use policy. She publishes both academic research and policy work. Her writing has appeared in outlets including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and she writes an occasional column at Governing. Hamilton has testified before several state legislatures as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. Hamilton serves on the Advisory Boards of Up for Growth and Cityscape. She received her PhD in economics from George Mason University.

Peter Hepburn is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and Associate Director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. His research examines how changes to three core social institutions—work, criminal justice, and housing—produce and perpetuate inequality. He uses a variety of quantitative methods and data sources to demonstrate and analyze disparities in exposure to precarious work, the criminal justice system, and housing instability. Throughout, he develops measures and models that allow for new insight into the variability of lived experience for disadvantaged populations and the transmission of inequality across generations. Professor Hepburn’s academic research has been published in Social Forces, Demography, Social Service Review, and Housing Policy Debate, among other venues, and he has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Slate. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He received his PhD in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Seema Iyer, PhD, is Senior Director of the Hive at USA for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Founded in 2015, The Hive's mission is to engage with the American public to raise awareness about refugees and design solutions that address their needs through technology and data science innovations. The Hive works with a broad network of refugee-supporting entities, including UNHCR’s Innovation Service, to strengthen and fully-embed within the domestic and global ecosystem to better serve the needs of forcibly displaced persons. Seema began her research career in the 1990’s focused on urban migration patterns after the collapse of the Former Soviet Union and how cities planned for changing population realities. She is a contributor to the 2008 book Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia.

Prior to assuming her role at The Hive in 2022, Seema developed her data science skills to understand neighborhood change in urban areas like Baltimore. She was the Director of Research for the Baltimore Department of Planning from 2005-2011, and then became Director of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) at the University of Baltimore. BNIA is the local partner of the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership of sites that provide longitudinal, community-based data on demographics, housing, crime, education, and sustainability. Her 2013 TEDxBaltimore talk “How Baltimore Grows” spurred nearly a decade of research on how neighborhood fortunes and opportunities have been economically, socially, and culturally diverging in Baltimore. In 2016, she spearheaded Baltimore’s efforts to localize the newly-adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She co-edited Promoting the Sustainable Development Goals in North American Cities (2021) to reflect on the experience in Baltimore and other cities. She has received several honors including the Fulbright-Nehru scholarship to understand how growing cities in India are using the SDGs for furthering economic competitiveness and the 2021 University System of Maryland Regents Award for Excellence in Public Service. She was also named a Baltimore Gamechanger in 2021 by Baltimore Magazine. She has a doctoral degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan.

Olatunde Johnson is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law at Columbia Law School where she teaches and writes about housing, civil rights, civil procedure, administrative law, democracy, and inequality in the United States. She directs Columbia’s Constitutional Democracy Initiative and co-directs the Center on Constitutional Governance at Columbia Law School. In 2023, she received a Columbia University service award for her collaboration on the podcast “Through the Gale” about the role of lawyers after the pandemic and protests of 2020, and for organizing the “Beyond the Casebook” discussion series on inclusive democracy. She is the chair of the Board of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, an organization that through research and advocacy works to address structural racial inequality in the United States. She is a member of the American Law Institute and served on the White House Commission for the Supreme Court and the Resolutions Committee honoring Justice John Paul Stevens. Professor Johnson has received several awards for her teaching and service including the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and Columbia Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2016.

Professor Johnson graduated with honors from Yale University and from Stanford Law School. After law school, Professor Johnson clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the United States Supreme Court. Prior to entering academia, Professor Johnson served as constitutional and civil rights counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF).

Michael Lens is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. Professor Lens’s research and teaching explore the potential of public policy to address housing market inequities that lead to negative outcomes for low-income families and communities of color. This research involves housing interventions such as subsidies, tenant protections, and production. Professor Lens regularly publishes this work in leading academic journals and his research has won awards from the Journal of the American Planning Association and Housing Policy Debate.

In ongoing research, Professor Lens is studying the neighborhood context of eviction, and the role of charter schools in neighborhood change. He is engaged in multiple projects (with Mike Manville and Paavo Monkkonen) concerning housing supply in California. Lens is also working on a book project that examines fifty years of neighborhood change in Black neighborhoods following the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Professor Lens’s research has received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, among other sources. Professor Lens teaches courses on quantitative analysis, poverty and inequality, community development, housing policy, and research methods.

Stephanie Moulton’s areas of expertise include housing and consumer finance, policy implementation and management, and program evaluation. She is currently involved in research studying home equity borrowing and reverse mortgages for older adults, housing policies implemented by state housing finance agencies, and consumer debt for vulnerable populations. Dr. Moulton works directly with government and nonprofit organizations to evaluate and improve public policies and programs, with research funding from federal agencies and foundations including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Russell Sage Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.

Dr. Moulton is currently co-editor for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and sits on the editorial boards for Public Administration Review and the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, and a faculty affiliate with the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty and Ohio State’s Center for Real Estate at the Fisher College of Business, and Institute for Population Research. She is a Research Fellow with the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Financial Security and a member of the Academic Research Council for the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. She is the Professional Conduct and Inclusion Officer for the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Dr. Moulton earned her PhD from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. Prior to her academic career, Moulton worked in the nonprofit sector, designing and managing housing and community development programs at the local and state levels.

Vanessa Perry is the vice dean for strategy, special advisor to the dean, and a professor of marketing as well as strategic management and public policy at the George Washington University School of Business.

Her research is focused on consumers in housing and financial markets, marketplace discrimination, and public policy interventions, and she has been published extensively in scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets.

Perry previously served as a senior advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and as an expert at the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She also served for several years as a senior economist at Freddie Mac. In her capacity as president of the Rice Coleman Ross Group, she has been a consultant to numerous public and private sector clients. Perry has a BA from the American University, an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Esther Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on poverty, spatial inequalities, urban governance, and housing, with a special interest in both forced and voluntary relocation. Her 2018 book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place, winner of the Robert Park Book Award, examines the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity in manufactured housing communities, which provide a central source of affordable housing in the United States. She was named a University of Colorado Denver Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholar, which recognizes outstanding contributions to public issues through community-engaged scholarship. Her research has appeared in American Sociological Review, Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of the American Planning Association and elsewhere, and has been covered in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and other media outlets.

Jack Tsai, PhD, currently serves as Regional Dean and Professor of Public Health at UTHealth. He also serves as Research Director for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine where he previously served on the faculty for a decade before coming to UTHealth. He has received federally funded grants and published over 300 peer-reviewed articles on topics related to homelessness, severe mental illness, trauma, and health disparities. He has held leadership positions in the American Psychological Association and the American Public Health Association and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, and npj Mental Health Research. Dr. Tsai is Taiwanese American and has lived in various parts of the country as well as abroad. He currently spends time living in Houston and San Antonio, Texas, and is actively involved in both communities.

Margaret Walls is a Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF), an independent, nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C., where she is Director of the Climate Risks and Resilience Program and the Environmental Justice Initiative. Dr. Walls’s research focuses on the impacts of extreme weather, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires on people and communities and the design of programs and policies to enhance resilience to such events. She has written about the benefits of natural infrastructure, such as coastal wetlands and riparian buffers, in reducing flood damages and the evaluation of conservation investment decisions in floodplains and coastal zones. She has also evaluated the role of information and disclosure in driving household location decisions in the context of both wildfire and flood risks. Dr. Walls has published widely in peer-reviewed journals on a wide range of natural resource and environmental issues and is the author of 36 book chapters and published reports. She is a Features Co-Editor of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy and a former board member of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a BS in agricultural economics from the University of Kentucky.