Speakers | Keys to Opportunity in the Housing Market: Research on Strategies for Preserving and Expanding Rental Housing Affordability

Ophelia Basgal

Affiliate, Terner Center for Housing Innovation

Ophelia Basgal is currently an Affiliate at the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation and board member and Secretary/Treasurer of the Terner Housing Innovation Labs.  During the Obama Administration, she was the Region IX Regional Administrator for the Department of Housing Urban Development.  From 2005-2010, she was the Vice President for Community Relations at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States.  She was Executive Director of the Alameda County and Dublin California Housing Authorities from 1978-2005. 

Ophelia has a BA with Distinction from Arizona State University and Masters in Social Welfare, with a specialty in Administration, from the University of California, Berkeley.   She is an active member in the community serving on the board of the Alameda County California Employees’ Retirement Association, a $11+ billion public pension fund, where she is first vice-chair and on the boards of the Public Policy Institute of California and the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy.  In June 2023, she completed ten years of service on the San Francisco Foundation Board of Trustees where she was Chair for the last two years of her board term. 

Anamita Gall

Civic Designer, The Lab @ DC

Anamita Gall is a Civic Designer with the Lab @ DC an applied research team in the District of Columbia’s Office of the City Administrator. She works with city agencies and residents to collaboratively develop, implement, and evaluate programs and policies and programs. Her current projects focus on civic design and evaluation projects on human services, job training, and education programs. Prior to joining the Lab, Anamita held positions with the DC Department of Housing and Community Development where she recently implemented affordable housing preservation policies and programs, as well as emergency rental assistance programs. Before joining the District, Anamita worked with ICF a public sector focused consultancy and worked on a variety of job training evaluation and technical assistance projects for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, the U.S. Department of Labor, and various state and local government agencies. Anamita is driven to use her background in the arts and a Master of Public Administration to devise ways to promote equity and access for those that need it the most. 

Jacob Haas

Senior Research Specialist, Eviction Lab

Jacob is a Senior Research Specialist at the Eviction Lab, where he works on the Eviction Tracking System (ETS), a collaborative project tracking eviction activity in real time across the United States. His research focuses on eviction policies and filing patterns since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic across different neighborhoods and demographic groups. He previously worked as a Research Associate with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Jacob earned his B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis.

Annette Kim

Associate Professor, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California

Annette M. Kim, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy. She is also the Director of SLAB, the newly formed spatial analysis laboratory at Price that advances the visualization of the social sciences for public service through teaching, research, and public engagement. 

Her research experiments with ways to recover data of overlooked peoples and phenomenon by incorporating fieldwork and humanities knowledge into spatial analysis. She utilizes critical cartography and spatial ethnography to re-conceptualize contemporary urbanism and find more inclusive and humane ways to design and govern the 21st century city. She has also researched the development of real estate markets and the reformation of property rights in transition countries in Eastern Europe and Asia. Her books include Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam’s Transition Economy (Oxford University Press, 2008). 

Previously, Dr. Kim was Associate Professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She received her Ph.D. in city and regional planning and masters of visual studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She received her masters in public policy and urban planning from Harvard University and her B.A. in architecture and studio art from Wellesley College. She is a native of southern California. 

Senta Leslie

Associate Director, Eviction Prevention, Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development

Senta Leslie has worked in the field of affordable housing and homelessness for nearly 20 years. She currently serves as the Associate Director of Eviction Prevention for the Commonwealth of Virginia at the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD).  

Prior to joining DHCD, her roles in our sector included serving as the Executive Director of the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless, where she led statewide policy, community organizing and strategic communication efforts. She has also served as Program Developer for the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation’s supportive housing division which serves approximately 30% of the homeless families in St. Paul, MN. Immediately before joining DHCD, Senta worked at Minnesota’s largest Civil Legal Aid office as their Director of Philanthropy.  

As a girl, Senta’s family accessed many of the programs she has spent her career strengthening and protecting. In her free time, Senta loves spending time on the beautiful James River with her husband and their three children.  

Nicholas Marantz

Assistant Professor, Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine

Nicholas J. Marantz is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. His research and teaching focus on the impacts of law, politics, and planning on housing affordability and access to resources and opportunities. Marantz received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Igor Popov

Chief Economist, Apartment List

Igor is the Chief Economist at Apartment List, where he leads the research team in publishing original housing market research. Igor teaches an undergraduate seminar titled “Housing, Neighborhoods, and Homelessness” at Stanford University, and his research has been published in the American Economic Review. Prior to joining Apartment List, Igor worked as an economist and data scientist at Airbnb and earned his Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University. 

Jenny Schuetz

Senior Fellow, Brookings Metro

Jenny Schuetz is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, and is an expert in urban economics and housing policy. Dr. Schuetz has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on land use regulation, housing prices, urban amenities, and neighborhood change. Dr. Schuetz is the author of the 2022 book Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems. Topics of recent research include: how statewide zoning reform could improve housing affordability; local strategies to help renters during the COVID-19 crisis; rethinking homeownership incentives to narrow the racial wealth gap; and how housing costs exacerbate economic and racial segregation.

Before joining Brookings, Dr. Schuetz served as a principal economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Dr. Schuetz was also an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a post-doctoral fellow at NYU Furman. Dr. Schuetz is a nonresident senior fellow at GWU’s Center for Washington Area Studies and teaches in Georgetown’s urban planning program. 

Dr. Schuetz earned a PhD in public policy from Harvard University, a master’s in city planning from M.I.T., and a B.A. with Highest Distinction in economics and political and social thought from the University of Virginia. 

Vince Wang

Assistant Professor, Runstad Department of Real Estate, University of Washington

Ruoniu (Vince) Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He studies spatial justice and inclusive communities, including their impacts reflected in the built environment, human behaviors, and policy interventions. Vince joined the University of Washington after serving six years as the research manager and director in a national non-profit organization Grounded Solutions Network. He has designed and conducted a U.S. Census of inclusionary housing policies, a U.S. census of community land trusts, and a national performance evaluation of shared equity homeownership programs. His research expands to policy evaluation for the two largest federal assisted housing rental programs in the U.S.: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and the Housing Choice Voucher program. Vince grounds his research with applied tools to democratize data for low-income communities. 

Rebecca Yae

Director, The Housing Initiative at Penn

Rebecca Yae is Director of the Housing Initiative at Penn. Her research focuses on emergency rental assistance, housing policy, racial equity, and alternative housing models and her work has been published in Housing Policy Debate. Most recently, as a Senior Research Analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), Rebecca led a team of researchers studying emergency rental assistance (ERA), including by creating the only comprehensive national database of ERA program features and spending. Her graduate capstone project, Self-Management Law, Now! Fostering Community-Owned, Permanently Affordable and Sustainable Housing in Brazil, supported social movements in Brazil in advocating for and enhancing a national legal framework for self-managed housing and collective property. The project won the 2021 Student Project Award from the American Planning Association. Prior to her housing-related work, Rebecca supported communities in identifying and addressing significant community health needs and evaluating health-related initiatives using qualitative and quantitative data. 
  
Rebecca holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley.