Special Briefing - Addressing the Housing Crisis: Innovative Solutions from Across America

From repurposing underused office buildings and shopping centers to making sweeping changes in zoning, cities from coast to coast are taking concrete steps to increase housing construction. Join our Special Briefing expert panel as we discuss what the nation can do to alleviate housing shortages — one of the most critical issues facing the US economy in 2026. Speakers include Hannah Blitzer, Housing Sector Lead, S&P Global Ratings; Eric Goldywn, Program Director and Clinical Assistant Professor, Transportation and Land-Use, Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University; Laurie Goodman, Institute Fellow and Founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center, The Urban Institute; and Paul Steenhausen, Principal Fiscal & Policy Analyst, California Legislative Analyst's Office.

Moderated by William Glasgall, Volcker Alliance Public Finance Adviser and Penn IUR Fellow, and Susan Wachter, Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and Wharton Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance, this briefing is the sixty-sixth in a series of sixty-minute online conversations featuring experts from the national research networks of the Volcker Alliance and Penn IUR, along with other leading academics, economists, and federal, state, and local leaders. 

Special Briefings are made possible by funding from The Travelers Institute, the Volcker Alliance, and members of the Penn IUR Advisory Board. Recordings of the entire Special Briefings series are available on the Volcker Alliance or Penn IUR websites.

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Hannah Blitzer is Managing Director, Housing Sector Lead at S&P Global Ratings. In this role, she is responsible for analytical leadership and market engagement for the team that evaluates affordable housing debt associated with housing finance agencies, public housing authorities, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and nonprofit housing developers.

Prior to joining S&P, Hannah led American Community Capital (ACC), the lending platform and subsidiary CDFI for Boston Financial, a national low income housing tax credit syndicator. Previously, Hannah was the Managing Director, Public Housing Finance & Lending Strategies at New York City Housing Development Corporation where she oversaw a $10 billion lending platform for the rehabilitation of public housing. She has also served as Senior Advisor, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development at the New York City Mayor’s Office, Director, National Strategic Initiatives at Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a nationally recognized CDFI, and Vice President at Citi Community Capital.

Hannah received her MBA from Yale School of Management and her BA from Wesleyan University.

Laurie Goodman is an Institute fellow and the founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. The center provides policymakers data-driven analyses of housing finance policy issues they can depend on for relevance, accuracy, and independence. Before joining Urban, Goodman spent 30 years as an analyst and research department manager at several Wall Street firms. 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 straight years. Before that, she held research and portfolio management positions at several Wall Street firms. She began her career as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Goodman was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Hall of Fame in 2009. 

Goodman serves on the board of directors of MFA Financial and Arch Capital Group Ltd. and is a consultant to the Amherst Group. Goodman has published more than 200 journal articles and has coauthored and coedited five books. She has a BA in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and an AM and PhD in economics from Stanford University.

Eric Goldywn is a program director at the Marron Institute of Urban Management and a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Transportation and Land-Use program at the NYU Marron Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Columbia University. He teaches courses on urban planning and urban studies and his writing on cities and transportation technology has been published in academic journals and popular press outlets.