Vermont Racial Justice

Housing Jam

Shanti Abedin is the Vice President of Housing and Community Development at the National Fair Housing Alliance. In this role, Shanti is responsible for providing strategic direction, thought leadership, and programmatic planning and management for NFHA’s Housing and Community Development division,  including the Inclusive Communities and Keys Unlock Dreams Initiatives. She oversees NFHA’s investments and work in communities throughout the nation to increase affordable housing, reduce barriers to equitable housing opportunities, increase quality amenities and services in communities of color, and broaden the network of organizations working to advance fair housing goals.

Tony Pickett is Chief Executive Officer for Grounded Solutions Network, the nation’s leading expert for inclusive affordable housing policies and programs – such as community land trusts (CLTs), deed-restricted housing, and inclusionary housing. Tony’s 35 years of community development leadership and accomplishments are collectively described by peers and collaborators as innovative—thinking about and achieving equitable outcomes in a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary manner. His exciting 10-year expansion vision for “Lasting Affordability in Housing Now” to achieve one million new affordable housing units, has launched new initiatives and strategic partnerships with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, the Colorado Health Foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust and NeighborWorks America.

During Tony’s tenure as CEO of Grounded Solutions Network, the organization as has been featured in national news publications such as Bloomberg Businessweek, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Tony is frequently engaged as an expert housing practitioner, thought leader and public speaker for national housing industry convenings sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Banks, Urban Land Institute, National League of Cities, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Habitat for Humanity.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Up for Growth Coalition, Trust Neighborhoods and Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. He is also a founding member of the national community development sector CEO Circle.

Tony is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Architecture, Art and Planning, with a successful 30+ year career that includes his LEED accredited professional credentials and experience spanning award winning architectural design, master planned residential development, public housing agency senior real estate management, nonprofit senior leadership and professional consulting.

I am a human geographer and interdisciplinary scholar focused on municipal politics, urban planning, and urban security in Canada. I approach this work with an interest in social and racial justice, and often draw on relevant work in Black studies and Black geographies to document how ideas about “race” shape dominant urban policies and practices, and how social and racial justice movements imagine and seek to create different urban worlds.

Most of my work can be grouped into two broad categories:

– Urban planning and anti-blackness. Inspired by the long history of Black struggle against urban planning in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I have traced how anti-blackness (or simply anti-Black racism) has shaped urban planning ideas and practices in Halifax from the late 19th century to the present. This work is best represented in my book Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Recently, I have extended this work to Montreal, examining how new urban planning ideas and new tenants’ rights in the 1980s were ultimately used to evict Black tenants in an emerging war on drugs and gangs.

– Urban security and policing. In a variety of studies, I have sought to document the prevalence of racial profiling and violence in policing and security practices, as well as the containment and repression of movements to transform the police. This work, all of it focused on Montreal, includes a participatory-action research project with racialized youth in the neighbourhood of Saint-Michel, various reports and media articles on policing and crime, a history of efforts to combat racial profiling and violence, and an ongoing project examining how Montreal’s war on street gangs since the late 1980s has transformed policing and urban security.
I am interested in supervising masters and PhD research on municipal politics, urban planning, housing, and urban security, particularly in the city of Montreal.

I am Assistant Professor of Political Science at the School of Law and Government. I research policymaking and governance with three main areas of interest: citizen participation, housing policy and social mobilization. My previous research funded by the Irish Research Council examined recent housing mobilization for housing justice in Ireland and Portugal. My work focused on citizen inclusion at the sub-national levels, especially in contexts where participatory democracy was being implemented. This work led to the publication of the book ‘Participatory Democracy and Crisis’ with Palgrave and other several articles. My co-edited volume ‘The Consequences of Brazilian Social Movements in Historical Perspectives’ examines the political outcome of social movements explores the various consequences of social protest and was recently published with Routledge. I have also worked on the interconnections between political participation of vulnerable groups and have an ongoing interest in democratic innovations in Ireland, Latin America, the EU and beyond.
I’m currently co-editor of the International Review of Public Policy (IRPP), the open access journal of the International Public Policy Association (IPPA) and the co-convenor of the PSAI’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group.

Leah Rothstein is co-authoring, with Richard Rothstein, a sequel to The Color of Law. While in The Color of Law, Mr. Rothstein described how government policy created residential segregation, the sequel will describe how local community groups can redress the wrongs of segregation.  Leah has worked on public policy and community change, from the grassroots to the halls of government. She led the Alameda County and San Francisco probation departments’ research on reforming community corrections policy and practice to be focused on rehabilitation, not punishment. She has been a consultant to nonprofit housing developers, cities and counties, redevelopment agencies, and private firms on community development and affordable housing policy, practice, and finance. Her policy work is informed by her years as a community organizer with PUEBLO and Californians for Justice, working on housing, public safety, environmental justice, and youth leadership, and as a labor organizer with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE).

Leah received her Bachelor’s Degree with honors in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.