I am a community economic development professional focused on building stronger mixed-income urban neighborhoods.
At one level, I am a technician, comfortable with the complexities of economic analysis, cash flow modeling or regulatory rules. But, unlike most technical people, I am a community organizer at heart. I like working with people and I am not satisfied with analytical work until it reaches the point that people can understand it and do something with it.
Communities cannot be revitalized without a clear focus on the economics and financing systems that generated disinvestment in the first place. Most community residents, and many committed professionals, don’t come to the work with those skills. But it doesn’t seem to work well to send consultants off in a dark room to crunch the numbers and come back with the answers. My best work has all been about synthesizing the complex details of a financing tool, a regulatory structure or some dataset into a format that is accessible to real people with on-the-ground knowledge of a particular community in a way that helps them to make real decisions.
Clients
Local Initiatives Support Corporation
California Community Foundation
City of Irvine, CA
Workforce Housing Association of Truckee Tahoe
US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development
National Housing Conference, Center for Housing Policy
San Francisco Mayor's Office of Housing
City of Palo Alto, CA
City of Santa Monica, CA
National Cooperative Bank, Impact Capital
Neighborworks
Union Bank of California
PolicyLink
Lincoln Institute for Land Policy
Public Health Institute, Land Use and Law Project
East Bay Asian Local Development Corp.
Humboldt Bay Housing Development Corp.,
Housing Land Trust of Sonoma County
Strategic Action for a Just Economy
Habitat For Humanity, Los Angeles, CA
Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern CA
Northern California Land Trust
Youth Radio
California Reinvestment Committee
Vermont Community Loan Fund
Burlington Community Land Trust
