Hosted by
The Innovations in Housing Affordability Summit is a premier event to bring together academics, nonprofits, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to focus on innovation and collaboration in America’s housing affordability challenges.
Date: November 11 – 12, 2021
Location: David Eccles School of Business
Robert H. and Katharine B. Garff Building
1731 E Campus Center Dr, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Thank you for joining us!
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our 2021 event. Below, you can find the slide deck presentations from several of our speakers. Page numbers are listed below for easier access.
- Innovations in Housing Affordability – Andra Ghent and Abby Ivory – pg. 3
- Racial Homeownership Gaps – Laurie Goodman – pg. 16
- What can State Government Do to Increase Affordability? – Jenny Schuetz – pg. 33
- Single-Family Rental: Why All the Hype? – Dejan Eskic and Bill Goldsmith – pg. 59
- Does the LIHTC System Work? Panel – Mike Eriksen, Adam Looney, Nathan Seegert, Andra Ghent – pg. 84
- Ivory Innovations Introduction and Welcome – Clark Ivory and Kent Colton – pg. 2
- Innovation in Construction and Design Panel – Gerry McCaughey, Mark Ginsberg, Hal Hinkle, Clark Ivory – pg. 4
- Innovations in Public Policy and Regulatory Reform Panel – Leila Benijamali, Kent Colton, Bill Huang, Terah Lawyer – pg. 26
- Frontiers in Housing Affordability Research: Eviction – Rob Collinson, Stuart Gabriel, Chris Herbert – pg. 56
- Frontiers in Housing Affordability Research: Gentrification – Kate Pennington and Dionissi Aliprantis – pg. 166
- Frontiers in Housing Affordability Research: Pricing – Gregor Schubert – pg. 264
Schedule
Thursday, Nov. 11
Visit the registration area for check-in and to pick up your summit materials.
Taylor Randall
President, University of Utah
Steve Waldrip
Representative, Utah State Legislature
Andra Ghent
Ivory-Boyer Chair in Real Estate; Professor of Finance
David Eccles School of Business
Abby Ivory
Managing Director
Ivory Innovations at the David Eccles School of Business
Get to know your fellow summit attendees
Alanna McCargo
Senior Advisor for Housing Finance
Office of the Secretary U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Laurie Goodman
Codirector, Housing Finance Policy Center The Urban Institute
Gary Acosta
Co-Founder & CEO, NAHREP
Laurie Goodman – Moderator
The Urban Institute
Richard Green
Chair, Department of Real Estate Development, University of Southern California
Alanna McCargo
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Enjoy a meal with your summit attendees
Jenny Schuetz
Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Full paper
Nick Abbott
Deputy Coordinator, Desegregate Connecticut
Cameron Diehl
Executive Director, Utah League of Cities and Towns
Adam Millsap
Senior Fellow, Stand Together
Michael Parker – Moderator
Vice President of Public Affairs, Ivory Homes
Get to know your fellow summit attendees
Dejan Eskic
Senior Research Fellow, Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute
Mike Eriksen
West Shell Professor of Real Estate, University of Cincinnati
Adam Looney
Executive Director, Marriner S. Eccles Institute of Economics and Quantitative Analysis
Nathan Seegert
Associate Professor of Finance, David Eccles School of Business
Andra Ghent – Moderator
Professor of Finance
Enjoy refreshments, network with your fellow summit attendees, and discuss your learnings from the day
Friday, Nov. 12
Clark Ivory
CEO, Ivory Homes
Kent Colton
Chair, Ivory Innovations Board
Mark Ginsberg
Principal, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects
Hal Hinkle
CEO, Bamcore
Clark Ivory
CEO, Ivory Homes
Gerry McCaughey – Moderator
Chairman & Founder, Entekra
Get to know your fellow summit attendees
Leila Benijamali – Moderator
CEO, Symbium
Kent Colton
Chair, Ivory Innovations Board
Bill Huang
Director of Housing, City of Pasadena
Terah Lawyer
Program Manager, Impact Justice
Omar Esposito
Vice President, Framework Homeownership
Riley Gibson
President, Silvernest
Michael Gosman
President & CEO, Acts Housing
Paraag Sarva – Moderator
Co-founder & CEO, Rhino
Enjoy a meal with your fellow summit attendees
More Than Shelter: The Effects of Rental Eviction Moratoria on Household Well-Being
Stuart Gabriel
Director, UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate
Full paper
Eviction and Poverty in American Cities: Evidence from Chicago and New York
Rob Collinson
Wilson Family LEO Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame
Full paper
Discussant
Chris Herbert
Managing Director, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University
Get to know your fellow summit attendees
Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement? The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco
Kate Pennington
Research Economist, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census
Full paper
What Explains Neighborhood Sorting by Income and Race?
Dionissi Aliprantis
Assistant Vice President and Senior Research Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Full paper
House Price Contagion and U.S. City Migration Networks
Gregor Schubert
Assistant Professor of Finance, UCLA
Full paper
Wrap up the summit
Keynote Speakers
Alanna McCargo
Alanna McCargo is the Senior Advisor for Housing Finance in the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Her responsibilities include improving policy and practices related to the Department’s housing finance, homeownership, and supply programs. Her portfolio includes the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance program, Ginnie Mae, Community Planning and Development, as well as the department’s Fair Housing and equity initiatives.
Prior to joining HUD, Alanna was the Vice President of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. In this capacity, she oversaw the Center’s research and development strategy and led a portfolio of work focused on reducing racial homeownership gaps, removing barriers to homeownership, and building wealth. Prior to that she held leadership roles with JP Morgan Chase, CoreLogic Government Solutions, and Fannie Mae and worked alongside the U.S. Treasury Department to implement housing recovery programs and policy during the Great Recession.
Alanna holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Houston, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Maryland.
Jenny Schuetz
Jenny Schuetz is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, 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 has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the PBS NewsHour, The Indicator podcast, Vox, and Slate.
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.
Featured Speakers and Panelists
Nick Abbott
Nick Abbott is the Deputy Director of DesegregateCT, a research and advocacy organization dedicated to statewide zoning reform in Connecticut. In his capacity with DesegregateCT, Nick works on policy development, legislative strategy, and legal analysis, and he currently oversees all aspects of the group’s activities. Aside from that role, Nick is a fellow with the American Planning Association’s Planning and Law Division and a third-year student at Harvard Law School, during which time he has held positions with the US Department of Justice’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section and the civil rights firm Relman Colfax.
Gary Acosta
Gary Acosta is the Co-Founder & CEO of The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP). NAHREP is the largest Latino business organization in the nation. In 2018, Mr. Acosta co-founded L’ATTITUDE, a mega-event co-owned by Acosta, Sol Trujillo, and music superstar, Emilio Estefan that celebrates the key role of Latinos in business, entertainment, and politics. He is a general partner of the L’ATTITUDE Venture Fund, one of the nation’s leading venture capital funds focused on Latino entrepreneurs. Mr. Acosta is also a partner, and the vice-chairman of The Mortgage Collaborative, a cooperative company of more than 200 banks and mortgage lenders. He was named by REALTOR® Magazine as one of the 25 most influential people in real estate, and Hispanic Business Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in America.
Dionissi Aliprantis
Dionissi Aliprantis is the Director of the Program on Economic Inclusion and a Senior Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. His research is focused on human capital formation, racial inequality, and neighborhood effects. He has also helped implement university programs using math to build community and foster creativity among middle and high school students, serving as a co-Director of Greater Than Math and recently completing a math textbook for grades 7-12. He earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, economics, and Spanish from Indiana University and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Leila Banijamali
Leila Banijamali is the Co-Founder and CEO of Symbium Corp., the Complaw® company, which she launched in 2018 with her Stanford co-founders. The company is fundamentally disrupting how complex planning regulations are consumed by the public and creating intuitive web applications from complex laws and regulations to make it easy for anyone to understand what’s possible on a particular piece of property.
Prior to launching Symbium, Banijamali founded businesses in the technology media industries in addition to acting as outside general counsel to hundreds of tech companies. In 2009, she founded the law firm, Bedrock, where she led over $200M in complex enterprise negotiations with Salesforce, Facebook, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Time Warner, Disney, Clorox, LinkedIn, and more.
Rob Collinson
Rob Collinson is an applied microeconomist with research interests in housing policy, urban policy, and the design of anti-poverty programs. He is the Wilson Family LEO Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses on topics in public economics, housing, and poverty. Rob is also research faculty at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) where he works with government and non-profit organizations to design and evaluate anti-poverty interventions. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he worked in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development. Rob holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from New York University, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster.
Kent Colton
Kent Colton is the President of K. Colton LLC and a former Senior Scholar at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. He has more than 30 years of experience as a housing scholar and expert in the field of mortgage finance and housing policy.
Prior to his work with the Joint Center and Colton,LLC, Kent was the Executive Vice President and CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, a position he held from 1984 to 1999. Before that, he served as an executive vice president of Freddie Mac for policy, planning and economic research. He was a member of the Millennial Housing Commission, and staff director of the President’s Commission on Housing.
A graduate of Utah State University, Colton received an M.P.A. from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. in Urban Studies from MIT.
Michael Eriksen
Michael Eriksen is the West Shell Associate Professor of Real Estate at the University of Cincinnati and Academic Director of the UC Real Estate Center. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Biology from Gonzaga University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse University. He was previously on the faculty at the University of Georgia and Texas Tech University before coming to the University of Cincinnati in 2015. Michael was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 2019.
Dr. Eriksen’s research focuses on low-income housing markets, and he has worked on projects concerning the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, housing vouchers, home safety modifications, and racial disparities in homeownership. That research has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Urban Economics, and Real Estate Economics. His work on fall prevention among the elderly won the 2014 best paper on senior housing award sponsored by the National Investment Center for Senior Housing.
Michael is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Housing Economics and previously served on the Board of Directors of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA). He has also received financial support for his research from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Research Institute for Housing America, Ohio Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. His research has also been featured in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Frontline, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Money Magazine, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Moneywatch, and U.S. Congressional Testimony. He has also presented his research at the Congressional Budget Office, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Government Accountability Office, Urban Institute, American Enterprise Institute, AARP Foundation, and Fannie Mae.
Omar Esposito
As a member and leader of Framework’s partnerships and business development team, Omar Esposito is focused on executing the company’s go-to-market strategies, scaling and aligning revenue-generating aspects of the social enterprise, and building long-lasting partner relationships with financial institutions, housing agencies, municipalities, and other key housing industry stakeholders in the drive to increase first-time and first-generation homeownership nationally.
Prior to joining Framework, Esposito was a founding executive and Chief Revenue Officer of Stackfolio until its successful sale to Jack Henry & Associates, where he became its lending division’s capital markets director. Esposito also worked as a Senior Relationship Manager with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. He originally joined the Bank in 2007, earning various promotions throughout the organization’s sales and treasury groups. Esposito spent several years as a Relationship Manager and Business Development Strategist – a newly created role for Esposito – at the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York and began his career as a Mortgage Trading Analyst at Credit Suisse in New York.
Stuart A. Gabriel
Stuart A. Gabriel is a Distinguished Professor of Finance and Arden Realty Chair at UCLA
Anderson School of Management. He is also the director of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. His research focuses on topics of real estate finance and economics, housing and mortgage markets, urban and regional economics, and macroeconomics.
Gabriel previously served on the economics staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has published more than 80 articles in economics and finance journals and serves on the editorial boards of seven academic journals.
Andra Ghent
Andra Ghent is a Professor of Finance at the University of Utah where she holds the Ivory-Boyer Chair in Real Estate. She is the Academic Director of the Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center.
Her current research interests are real estate finance, financial intermediation, and urban economics. Her research has been cited in US congressional testimony and by media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Bloomberg. Her research has been published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Management Science, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Financial Studies. She is an Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial Economics. She teaches courses on housing affordability and real estate finance.
More information about Professor Ghent can be found at www.andraghent.com.
Riley Gibson
Riley Gibson is the president of Silvernest, a unique online homesharing service designed to pair boomers, retirees, empty nesters and other aging adults with compatible housemates. He is responsible for overseeing the company’s strategic vision and day-to-day execution, driving innovation and growth for its technology platform, and creating housing solutions that serve as a model for the future.
Prior to Silvernest, Riley served in a wide range of product and leadership roles at startups and co-founded Napkin Labs, which built open innovative software for some of the world’s biggest consumer brands.
Riley has been a contributing author to Fast.Co Design, Harvard Business Review and Inc. magazine, and has a passion for bringing technology and design together to rewrite the rules in mature industries.
Mark Ginsberg
Mark Ginsberg FAIA, LEED AP, a native New Yorker, is a partner of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects LLP with over 33 years of professional experience in planning, urban design, institutional and housing projects. His expertise in affordable and mixed income housing, resiliency and green design has been recognized through his many lectures at national and local conferences and meetings. Mark has led C+GA’s efforts on developments that comprise well over 10,000 units of housing, most of which are affordable and sustainable.
Laurie Goodman
Laurie Goodman is a vice president at the Urban Institute and co-director of its Housing Finance Policy Center, which provides policymakers with data-driven analyses of housing finance policy issues that they can depend on for relevance, accuracy, and independence.
Goodman spent 30 years as an analyst and research department manager on Wall Street. 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 years. Before that, she held research and portfolio management positions at several Wall Street firms.
Michael Gosman
Michael, President & CEO of Acts Housing, is a social entrepreneur whose mission is to help families improve their lives through homeownership. An attorney, his service to Acts Housing began as a volunteer, prior to his joining the staff in 2013. Under his leadership, Acts Housing has increased the number of families it serves by 400% while improving the quality of services families receive. Michael is also the leader of Acts Lending, Acts’ rehab mortgage lending partner, which provides financing for families looking to purchase and repair distressed, foreclosed properties. He is responsible for the organization’s first expansion outside of the City of Milwaukee, a five-year initiative in Beloit, WI, the success of which is drawing demand for Acts services from other cities across the country.
Michael, a former professional poker player, is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and worked as a finance attorney at a large Wisconsin law firm. He was a 2019 Milwaukee Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree. Michael lives in Milwaukee with his wife, a high school English teacher, and his sons, Roger and George.
Dr. Richard K. Green
Richard K. Green holds the Lusk Chair in Real Estate and is Professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Marshall School of Business. In 2016, he finished a year as Senior Advisor for Housing Finance at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and as of July 1, 2016, became a Trustee of the Urban Land Institute. Prior to joining the USC faculty, Dr. Green spent four years as the Oliver T. Carr, Jr., Chair of Real Estate Finance at The George Washington University School of Business. He was Director of the Center for Washington Area Studies and the Center for Real Estate and Urban Studies at that institution.
Dr. Green also taught real estate finance and economics courses for 12 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was Wangard Faculty Scholar and Chair of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics. He also has been principal economist and director of financial strategy and policy analysis at Freddie Mac. He is or has been involved with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Conference of Business Economists, the Center for Urban Land Economics Research, and the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties. Dr. Green also is a Weimer Fellow at the Homer Hoyt Institute and a member of the faculty of the Selden Institute for Advanced Studies in Real Estate. He was recently President of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.
Christopher Herbert
Dr. Christopher Herbert is Managing Director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. Dr. Herbert has extensive experience in research related to housing policy and urban development both in the U.S. and abroad. His research focuses on the financial, social, and demographic dimensions of homeownership, the dynamics of the rental housing market, the nature and causes of racial and socioeconomic segregation, and the implications of a rapidly aging society for housing. Dr. Herbert is co-editor of A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality (2018) and Homeownership Built to Last: Balancing Access, Affordability, and Risk After the Housing Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Freddie Mac and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging. He holds a Ph.D. and Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University and a BA in History from Dartmouth College.
Hal Hinkle
Hal Hinkle is the CEO of BamCore and its parent Global Bamboo Technologies, Inc. He was introduced to BamCore first in 2014 when building a home in Sonoma County, CA. That led to a deep dive into understanding timber bamboo’s unique growth and use potentials. Because Hal had successfully started a number of businesses while at Goldman Sachs and post-Goldman, started and successfully sold BrokerTec Global, Hal saw the business opportunity to bring timber bamboo into the built world while simultaneously fighting climate change. Following his initial investments in BamCore, Hal assumed the leadership of BamCore in January 2017 and built the team that is now taking BamCore forward on its mission to lower the carbon, cost, and labor now going into the built world. He holds a BS degree in biochemistry from UC Irvine and an MBA and PhD from Columbia University.
William Huang
William “Bill” Huang – Housing Director – City of Pasadena – directs a department that provides a wide array of affordable housing and homeless programs, as well as, funding for social service and economic development activities with an annual budget of approximately $30 million. Pasadena is actively engaged in affordable housing with a highly effective inclusionary housing ordinance, numerous transit-oriented developments, an innovative housing first program, and a strong local government voice for new affordable housing and homeless legislation. Pasadena’s homeless population decreased by 54% from 2011-2016, top in the nation, as documented by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Prior to joining the City of Pasadena, Mr. Huang was the Housing Director for the County of Los Angeles, led the West Coast real estate consulting and lending operations of the Community Partners Program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and was the Deputy Director of the nonprofit Los Angeles Community Design Center (now Abode Communities) where he oversaw affordable housing development and architectural services for numerous housing and community facilities. He helped to establish several leading local nonprofit development corporations including Hollywood and West Hollywood Community Housing Corporations, Heritage Housing Partners, and others. Nationally, he has helped to train hundreds of mission-driven professionals in the development, design, and construction management of affordable housing.
Mr. Huang is a former licensed architect with degrees from SCI-Arc and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He has served on the boards of the Southern California Association of Nonprofit Housing, Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiatives, and California Housing Consortium’s Board of Governors. He has garnered numerous professional and academic awards including SCI-Arc’s Distinguished Alumni of the Year, induction into California Housing Hall of Fame, was profiled in Progressive Architecture Magazine’s Top Young Architects of North America edition and received the Pasadena Foothill Chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ Presidential Citation.
Abby Ivory
Abby Ivory currently works as the Managing Director of Ivory Innovations, which is focused on driving housing affordability by supporting companies who are driving change in the industry as well as educating students about the problem and ways that they could take action. She also holds a position as the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the David Eccles School of Business.
Prior to this, she has worked on the Impact Investing team for the Sorenson Impact Center and as an intern focused on researching Green Bonds with Equilibrium Capital in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Abby graduated with a Master in Business Administration from the University of Utah in 2016 with an emphasis in Sustainability.
Clark Ivory
Clark D. Ivory is the Chief Executive Officer of Ivory Homes, Utah’s Number One Homebuilder for more than 30 years. Since purchasing the company in 2000, Clark has built on his father’s legacy of principled leadership. Ivory Homes has built more than 23,000 single-family homes and 3,000 apartment homes, engaging more than 300 employees and nearly 3,000 suppliers and trades professionals.
Clark is also actively engaged in several collaborations to address the issue of housing affordability. In 2018, Clark and Christine established the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability which seeks to find the nation’s most promising ideas to improve affordability. Clark is co-chair of the Real Estate Advisory Board to the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, is a member of the Housing Innovation Vision and Economic (HIVE) Action Partnership, and previously served on the Policy Advisory Board for the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Clark and Christine are also the initial seed funders and a founding partner for Utah’s first-ever, community-driven effort to preserve existing affordable housing through the Utah Housing Preservation Fund. Their foundation has also announced an innovative student housing community at the University of Utah, where all net proceeds will be endowed to thousands of future scholarships.
Terah Lawyer
Terah Lawyer finds purpose in working to improve the justice system. She is the program manager for the Homecoming Project, an innovative re-entry housing program at Impact Justice. Her role includes matching eligible participants to compatible hosts while securing a support network for each arrangement.
Being formerly incarcerated, Terah has been an advocate for incarcerated people for more than a decade as a peer health educator, a certified drug and alcohol counselor, a youth diversion specialist. She is a past chair of the Beyond Incarceration Panel with the Central California Women’s Facility. She also developed numerous curricula for therapeutic workshops and groups that empower and change the lives of people in California’s state prisons.
Terah is a musician, graphic designer, and public speaker. She serves as a spokeswoman for the Drop the Life Without the Possibility of Parole campaign. She was featured on “A Living Chance” and “Wanda’s Picks” podcasts. Terah has also been at the forefront of restorative justice efforts, both inside prison and beyond. She interned at American Friends Service Committee’s Healing Justice Project, volunteers with the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners, and is a Next Generation Fellow at the Center of Juvenile and Criminal Justice. She joins Impact Justice with undergraduate degrees in business management and social & behavioral science. Terah is a Bay Area native.
Adam Looney
Adam Looney is Executive Director of the Marriner S. Eccles Institute and Professor of Finance at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was the Joseph A. Pechman senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and the Director of the Center on Regulation and Markets. While at Brookings, he has been called to testify in Congress by members of both parties on tax and student loan policy, and his research has influenced the development of federal tax policies and education reforms. Earlier, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department.
At Treasury, he advised the Secretary on economic issues related to tax policy, analyzed current and proposed legislation, and provided the official receipts forecasts and revenue estimates for the Administration’s budgets. Under his direction, the office initiated research projects on topics including business tax reform, capital gains taxation, and a carbon tax. He also studied the causes and consequences of student loan distress and the economic returns to postsecondary education and played an instrumental role in the advancement of several data-intensive projects including the production of the Department of Education’s College Scorecard.
Prior to joining the Treasury, Mr. Looney was policy director of The Hamilton Project and was a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings from 2010-2013. Previously, he served as the senior economist for public finance and tax policy with President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in economics from Dartmouth College.
Gerard McCaughey
Gerard “Gerry” McCaughey is an internationally respected business leader in FIOSS for the residential and commercial construction markets. Named “Industry Entrepreneur of the Year” by Ernst and Young, McCaughey was an influential force in Europe’s continuing transition to off-site construction of wood frame homes with MMC. In the early 1990s, wood-frame homes represented less than one percent of homes built on that continent. Today, FIOSS is used to build more than 30 percent of new homes in the U.K. and Ireland and nearly 70 percent in Scotland.
McCaughey was the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Century Homes in Ireland, and later named Chief Executive of Kingspan Century following the $100 million acquisition of Century by the European building materials giant Kingspan Group Plc. By focusing on fully automating the construction process with integrated technologies, McCaughey propelled Century from a small start-up operation of four employees into Europe’s largest FIOSS provider, with market share in excess of 40 percent in Ireland and a dominant position in the U.K. At the time of its sale to Kingspan, Century Home’s unit production would place the company among the top five homebuilders in the United States based on volume.
From 2009 to 2014, McCaughey served as Chief Executive of Infineco, providing executive-level strategy consulting to businesses making the transition to off-site construction, sustainable building, and clean energy. In this role, he helped raise more than $75 million for U.S. companies, providing them with the capital to effectively exploit new technologies and attain market leadership positions.
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Erin Mendenhall
Erin Mendenhall is the 36th Mayor of Salt Lake City. She earned a bachelor’s degree in gender studies and a master’s degree in science and technology, both from the University of Utah. Erin and her husband, Kyle LaMalfa, are the proud parents of three children, Cash, Everett, and Milå.
Adam A. Millsap
Adam A. Millsap is a senior fellow at the Charles Koch Institute with a focus on economic opportunity. His research and writing covers urban development, population trends, labor markets, and federal and local urban public policy. Prior to joining CKI, Millsap served as assistant director of the L. Charles Hilton Jr. Center for the Study of Economic Prosperity and Individual Opportunity at Florida State University. He also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics at Florida State, Clemson University, and George Mason University.
Millsap’s published works include the book Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City, and a range of op-eds and commentaries in national outlets such as USA Today, US News and World Report, Real Clear Policy, and The Hill, as well as regional outlets such as the Detroit Free Press, Orlando Sentinel, Cincinnati Enquirer, Orange County Register, and others. He is also a regular Forbes contributor.
Millsap earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in economics from Clemson University. He also holds a B.S. in economics and a B.A. in comparative religion from Miami University in Ohio.
Michael Parker
Michael Parker is a housing and economic development policy expert and serves as Vice President of Public Affairs, Marketing and is the Senior Economic for Ivory Homes. In this role, Michael helps direct and guide the policy efforts of Utah’s largest homebuilder to push for policies that support greater affordability in the fastest-growing state in the nation.
Kate Pennington
Kate Pennington is a research economist at the US Census who studies housing, displacement, and gentrification in the contemporary United States. Kate received a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 2021.
Courtney Porcella
Courtney Porcella heads up marketing and operations at coUrbanize, a woman-led startup that empowers people to shape the future of their communities through online engagement.
She’s passionate about helping companies transform and grow through inventive marketing and communications, and elevating women in their careers. She’s also active in her hometown’s arts and cultural community, coming off a three-year stint on her local Cultural Council.
Taylor R. Randall
Taylor R. Randall, Ph.D. led the nationally ranked David Eccles School of Business from 2009-2021. He became President of the University of Utah on Aug. 9, 2021. Under his innovative and dynamic leadership at the Eccles School, it has grown five-fold, creating significantly greater opportunity for students, faculty, and the community.
Significant milestones during his time as Dean include serving as Utah’s economic lead on the Unified Command for the COVID-19 recovery; increasing scholarship funding for students from $800,000 to over $15 million; forming the Ascent Program for first-generation students from underrepresented populations; achieving a top-three ranking among state schools nationally for the percentage of tenured and tenure-track women faculty; and creating five outstanding centers that serve students and the broader community locally, nationally, and globally. These centers, among others, include the acclaimed Lassonde Entrepreneurship Institute, locally prominent Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, difference-making Sorenson Impact Center, and nationally focused Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis.
In keeping with the Eccles School’s substantial upward trajectory and Randall’s growth mindset, over the past decade, he has overseen the funding, design, and construction of three major buildings on campus and is executing on the design phase of a fourth building dedicated to student experiences and housing. In addition, under his guidance, the University of Utah Venture Fund became the largest student-run venture fund in the country.
Before assuming the role of dean, Randall served as a professor of accounting for 11 years, earning accolades throughout his teaching career for his relentless focus on students. He graduated from the University of Utah with honors in accounting and then earned an MBA and Ph.D. in operations and information management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Randall is a third-generation professor with a long and deep commitment to the University of Utah.
Paraag Sarva
Paraag Sarva is the CEO/Co-founder of Rhino and a builder of products and services that give renters a more affordable way to live in the homes they want. Since its founding in 2017, Rhino has made it a mission to replace cash security deposits with low-cost, affordable insurance. The product is now offered in over 1 million homes across the United States.
Previously, Paraag led a property management and development company with over $100 million in assets and learning firsthand the pain points he’d go on to address with the creation of Rhino. He also served as City Hall Policy Advisor and aide in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and spent time in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. He graduated from New York University with Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in economics.
Gregor Schubert
Gregor Schubert is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, which he joined after graduating with a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 2021. He researches housing finance, urban economics, real estate, labor economics, and corporate finance, most recently focusing on how urban migration networks affect housing markets. Before his graduate studies, he worked in strategy consulting, advising financial and industrial companies on pricing and organizational strategy. He also holds a Masters in Economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and an A.B. in Economics with a minor in Theater from Princeton University.
Nathan Seegert
Nathan Seegert is an associate professor of Finance at the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan where he was a National Science Foundation IGERT fellow at the Center of Complex Systems. His research focuses on evaluating and designing optimal policies for governments and firms. To answer these questions, he has run surveys of businesses and consumers in the State of Utah, employees within a large call center, and businesses in the marijuana industry. Current work also includes affordable housing and specifically the low-income housing tax credit. His research has won the Sumantra Ghoshal Research and Practice Award and Oxford’s Centre for Business Taxation Best Paper by a Young Scholar award. His work has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CBS Moneywatch, Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Atlantic.
Brad Wilson
Brad Wilson is President and CEO of Destination Homes, a residential homebuilder in Utah. He also serves as Speaker of the House in the Utah State Legislature.
Wilson is a member of the Utah Chapter of the Young President’s Organization, has chaired the Davis Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, the Davis Economic Advisory Council, and Children’s Aid Society of Utah. He serves on the National Advisory Council for Weber State University and on the Construction Industry Advisory Council for Brigham Young University.
Rep. Wilson has a business degree from Weber State University and is a graduate of the College of Financial Planning. He is a Davis County native and lives with his wife Jeni and three children in Kaysville, Utah.
Learn more about our 2021 Ivory Prize Winners
2021 Construction & Design Co-Winner
– BamCore
2021 Construction & Design Co-Winner
– Curtis + Ginsberg Architects (C+GA)
2021 Finance Winner
– Homeownership with Keep by Framework
2021 Public Policy/Regulatory Reform Winner
– Impact Justice / The Homecoming Project
Interested in Registering or Have Questions?
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