Katharine Nelson

Katharine (Katie) Nelson is the new Assistant Director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME). Her primary role is the build out and oversee CLiME’s Housing Studies Initiative.

Katie is a housing and community development expert, with sophistication in GIS, program evaluation, spatial analysis, and quantitative and mixed methods research. Her work emphasizes the role of finance in ongoing segregation and inequality, particularly in access to affordable housing and mortgage credit.

Katie comes back to Rutgers after spending two years as the Research Director at the Housing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, where she oversaw research focused on the dissemination and impact of the Treasury Department’s $46-billion Emergency Rental Assistance Programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. She received her doctorate at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in 2022. Her dissertation, FHA and the Dual Mortgage Delivery System in Philadelphia, was awarded the Association for Public Policy and Management's (APPAM) prestigious PhD Dissertation Award. Prior to her doctoral work, Katie worked at the Reinvestment Fund, a community development finance institution based in Philadelphia, where she was part of a small close-knit team that built PolicyMap, a national web-based data and mapping application now widely used by government, universities, nonprofits, and policy organizations.

Katie loves to teach and has developed and taught many courses related to housing, GIS and quantitative methods at the Bloustein School, Rutgers-Camden, Drexel University, and the University of Pennsylvania.