Welcome
Caroline Bhalla
Director of Civic Engagement, USC Lusk Center for Real Estate
Caroline Bhalla, Ed.D. is the Director of Civic Engagement at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, where she oversees the Neighborhood Data for Social Change initiative and the Ross Program in Real Estate.
She spearheaded and launched NDSC in 2017 and has since built it into a free public resource that helps community members, advocates, and local leaders track neighborhood-level change across Los Angeles County. Before moving into her current role, Caroline served as Executive Director of the Price Center for Social Innovation, directing all operations while expanding the center’s strategic vision around equity and quality of life in low-income urban communities.
Earlier in her career, Caroline spent nearly a decade at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, starting as a research assistant in 2002 and rising to Associate Director. There, she was the project lead on the annual State of the City’s Housing and Neighborhoods report, making her connection to the SOLACHAN mission a particularly fitting one.
She has taught as an adjunct professor in USC Price’s Masters in Nonprofit Leadership and Management Program and at NYU’s Department of Culture and Communication, where she led courses in Interviewing Strategies and Conflict Resolution. She holds a B.A. in Mass Communications and Rhetoric from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in Culture and Communication and an M.A. in American Studies from NYU. She completed her Doctorate in Higher Education Administration at the USC Rossier School of Education, where her research explored how universities can become more diverse, equitable, and community-engaged institutions. She also serves as a commissioner on the Los Angeles City/County Native American Commission.
Scott Laurie
President and Chief Executive Officer, The Olson Company
Scott Laurie is President and CEO of The Olson Company where he oversees the company’s administrative and operational functions, including strategic planning, acquisitions, development, finance, construction, legal and risk management, and human resources.
With experience in the development and construction of more than 12,000 homes throughout Southern California, Scott brings extensive expertise in urban infill development, master-planned communities, and affordable housing. Under his leadership, The Olson Company has continued its longstanding commitment to partnering with cities to deliver innovative housing solutions. The company has received the Eliant Homebuyers’ Choice Award for Best Overall Home Purchase and Ownership Experience in North America nine times over the past eleven times, reflecting a sustained commitment to customer satisfaction and operational excellence.
Prior to joining Olson, Scott served as Inland Valley President for KB Home and held several corporate and division-level executive positions during a ten-year tenure with the company.
Active in the homebuilding industry since 1996, Scott serves on the Executive Committee of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and is a member of the Urban Land Institute’s Residential Neighborhood Leadership Development Council and New Home Trends Institute’s Private Builder Council. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Urban Planning and Development from the University of Southern California.
Report Findings
Cameron Yap
Systems and Data Manager, Neighborhood Data for Social Change
Cameron Yap (he/him) is the Systems & Data Manager at Neighborhood Data for Social Change, the data initiative housed within the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. In that role, he develops NDSC’s data infrastructure, supports projects with their quantitative needs, and maintains the platform’s overall data protocols and integrity. His research interests center on racial justice, housing policy, and equitable community access to data.
Cameron is a native of Orlando and earned a Master of Public Policy Data Science jointly from the USC Price School of Public Policy and the Viterbi School of Engineering in 2022. Before joining NDSC, he helped create equity report cards for school districts in North Carolina at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, and worked with the North Carolina Housing Coalition to evaluate its community outreach efforts.
For the SOLACHAN report, Cameron is part of the core research team responsible for carefully tabulating and interpreting the high-quality data sources that underpin the analysis.
Ben Henwood
Professor of Social Policy and Health, USC School of Social Work
Benjamin Henwood, Ph.D., LCSW is the Frances L. and Albert G. Feldman Professor of Social Policy and Health at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He directs the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at USC Social Work and holds a secondary appointment as a professor in the USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. He also serves as director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute, a joint operation of USC Social Work and the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy.
Trained as a clinical social worker and researcher, Professor Henwood’s work connects clinical interventions with social policy, with particular expertise in permanent supportive housing, care for adults experiencing homelessness and serious mental illness, and the integration of primary and behavioral health care. He’s a co-author of the book Housing First, published by Oxford University Press, and led the launch of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare’s Grand Challenge to End Homelessness.
His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Google.org. He has served as the methodological lead for the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count since 2017, the largest unsheltered count in the United States.
Before joining USC, Henwood helped start and served as clinical director for Pathways to Housing in Philadelphia, a Housing First agency, where he also led clinical research on integrating primary and behavioral health care. He received his MSW in 2004 and his Ph.D. in 2011 from NYU’s Silver School of Social Work. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College.
Jared Schachner
Research Assistant Professor, USC Price School of Public Policy
Jared N. Schachner is an Assistant Research Professor of Real Estate Development in the Smith Department of Real Estate Development at the USC Price School of Public Policy, where he is affiliated with the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and the USC Homelessness Policy Research Institute. He serves as Research Director of NDSC/SOLACHAN at the Lusk Center.
Jared’s research examines how a range of contemporary urban “shocks” involving housing markets, homelessness interventions, school enrollment, environmental conditions, and digital access reshape — and often reproduce — inequality by race, class, and baseline levels of cognitive and socioemotional development. His studies typically examine these dynamics within vulnerable populations including children and older adults and employ his hometown of Los Angeles as an empirical case. Recent L.A.-based studies have examined whether Housing First interventions’ effectiveness among older adults varies by race and ethnicity, and whether the expansion of school enrollment options and school quality data has coincided with increased neighborhood and school segregation.
This work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Demography, Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, and JAMA Network Open. Prior studies have received recognition from the American Sociological Association and The Gerontologist journal, and coverage by the Los Angeles Daily News, NBC Los Angeles, and Education Week, among other outlets.
As a principal investigator, he has secured nearly $1 million in external funding from sources including the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, the L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, and First 5 LA. He has also helped secure over $3 million in additional funding, including a recent Haynes Foundation award to co-develop a public-facing outcomes assessment system for L.A. County government departments under Measure G.
Jared holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard, where he was a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a Meyer Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, and a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, summa cum laude. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago before arriving at USC.
Racial Disparities in Mortgage Lending
Chris Boone
Dean, USC Price School of Public Policy
Christopher G. Boone is Dean and the C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Chair for the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. At the USC Price School, he holds an academic appointment as Professor of Public Policy. Born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he graduated from Queen’s University with a BA (honours) in Geography. He received a master’s and PhD degree in Geography from the University of Toronto, focusing his research on Brazilian urbanization, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of the Environment at McGill University.
His research contributes to scholarship and practice in sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, urban ecology, global environmental change, and higher education innovation. For nearly two decades, he was a co-pi and senior scientist for two Long Term Ecological Research programs, the Baltimore Ecosystem Study and the Central Arizona Phoenix LTER. He served on the scientific steering committee of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Programme (an IHDP and Future Earth project) and was a board member for the Global Council for Science and the Environment, dedicated to advancing the scientific basis for environmental decision making.
He is a co-founder, past president, and executive committee member of the National Sustainability Society, an organization created to develop sustainability as a coherent, transdisciplinary scholarly field, support the growth of sustainability programs in colleges and universities, and convene and connect sustainability researchers, practitioners, employers, and graduates. For the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, he serves on the executive committee. Before joining USC, Boone was the Dean of the School of Sustainability and Founding Dean of the College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. He has held visiting professor positions in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University and in the Yale School of the Environment.
Richard Green
Executive Director, USC Lusk Center for Real Estate
Richard K. Green, Ph.D. holds the Lusk Chair in Real Estate and is a professor at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Marshall School of Business. He recently served as Senior Advisor for Housing Finance at HUD and is a Trustee of the Urban Land Institute. Previously, he held faculty positions at The George Washington University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Wharton, and served as principal economist at Freddie Mac.
Dr. Green’s research focuses on housing markets, policy, and finance. His work has appeared in top journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, and Housing Policy Debate. He co-authored A Primer on U.S. Housing Markets and Housing Policy and Introduction to Mortgages and Mortgage Backed Securities. He has testified before Congress, spoken at major policy forums, and been cited in national media. Dr. Green holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an A.B. from Harvard.
Manuel Pastor
Distinguished Professor, Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity, Director, USC Equity Research Institute
Amalie Zinn
Graduate Research Assistant, Neighborhood Data for Social Change
The Future of Housing Preservation in LA County
Ann Sewill
Manager, Housing Development and Preservation, Los Angeles County Development Authority
Ann Sewill is a Senior Advisor to the Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA), bringing more than four decades of experience across nearly every level of housing policy and community development in Los Angeles.
She previously served as General Manager of the City of Los Angeles’ Housing and Community Investment Department, where she directed the city’s programs for housing preservation, accessible housing production, community investment, rent stabilization, and code compliance. Before joining HCIDLA in 2020, she spent 14 years as Vice President of Health and Housing at the California Community Foundation, overseeing grantmaking, lending, public policy, and advocacy work aimed at developing affordable housing and addressing the root causes of poor health outcomes for Angelenos.
Earlier in her career, she served as Vice President and California Director of Enterprise Community Partners, Assistant General Manager of the Los Angeles Housing Department, CEO of the Los Angeles Community Design Center (now Abode Communities), and Housing Director for the City of Santa Monica. She also worked with the Los Angeles offices of both the California Department of Housing and Community Development and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Her board service has included the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Affordable Housing Advisory Council of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing, Mercy Housing California, the California Housing Consortium, and the Los Angeles Development Fund. She holds an M.A. in Urban Planning from the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Araceli Palafox
Associate Director of Policy, Enterprise Community Partners
Araceli Palafox is the Associate Director of Policy for Enterprise Community Partners’ Southern California Market, where she leads the development and implementation of the organization’s policy agenda across affordable housing production and preservation, homelessness, capital solutions, climate resilience, and racial equity. Her work spans coalition-building with community leaders, public agencies, and multi-sector collaboratives to build and scale solutions that deliver results in housing and community development across the region.
Her recent work at Enterprise has focused on some of the most consequential housing policy moments in California in recent years. She co-authored Enterprise’s analysis of the state’s FY 2025-26 budget negotiations, which ultimately restored funding for several critical affordable housing and homelessness programs and placed an $11.25 billion affordable housing bond on the November ballot. She has also written on the uneven pace of wildfire recovery across Los Angeles, drawing attention to how disaster response systems consistently leave multifamily residents and residents of nontraditional housing behind.
Before joining Enterprise, she served as Director of Programs at California Forward, where she led and managed large-scale state initiatives, including the state’s CA Dream for All shared appreciation homeownership program.
Araceli holds a Master of Public Policy from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Chicano Studies from Loyola Marymount University. A first-generation daughter of immigrants and a mother, her commitment to just and equitable communities isn’t background context; it’s the engine behind the work.
KeAndra Cylear-Dodds
Chief Housing Policy and Program Officer, LACAHSA
KeAndra Cylear-Dodds is the Chief Housing Policy and Program Officer at the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), where she leads the development and implementation of strategic housing policy initiatives to keep Angelenos housed, expand housing access, and support a net increase in affordable housing.
Before joining LACAHSA, she served as the inaugural Executive Officer of Equity and Race at LA Metro, where she led the agency’s efforts to normalize and operationalize equity across all facets of its work. Prior to Metro, she was Manager of Preservation at the Los Angeles County Development Authority, overseeing all of the county’s affordable housing preservation and homeownership programs and co-leading the development of several county tenant protection ordinances, including the rental stabilization ordinance. She began her work in the public sector as a Housing and Transportation Deputy for LA County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis.
Outside of government, she has worked as the Senior Program Director of Policy and Special Initiatives at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit. She began her career as a California state affordable housing attorney at Western Center on Law and Poverty.
She holds a J.D. from the USC Gould School of Law, where her legal training shaped her approach to crafting policy with a focus on enforceability and impact. She also serves as the Board Secretary of Inclusive Action for the City.
