Lunchtime Data Talk
Demographic Change in the US and its Implications
for Housing and Mortgage Lending
Speaker Biographies
Jim Carr is the Coleman A. Young endowed chair and professor in urban affairs at
Wayne State University. He works on several research projects and placed-based
efforts to improve the benefits of urban revitalization for lower-income families and
people of color. His work also centers on strategies and programs to reverse growing
economic inequality. Carr is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress.
Previously, he was chief business officer for the National Community Reinvestment
Coalition, where he launched and managed minority- and women-owned business
centers that provided more than $1.8 billion in capital and $350 million in federal
contracts to clients during his tenure. Before that, Carr was senior vice president for
financial innovation, planning, and research for the Fannie Mae Foundation, visiting professor at Columbia
University, assistant director for tax policy and federal credit with the US Senate Budget Committee, and
research associate at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. He has served on research
and policy advisory boards at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Carr has also been an adviser to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Urban Affairs Project Group in Paris, France, and a consultant to the World Bank and International
Development Fund. He has testified before Congress and has appeared on CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC,
FOX News, PBS, and other news outlets.
Laurie Goodman is director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
This center provides policymakers with data-driven analysis of housing finance policy
issues that 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. 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. The UBS securitized
products research group was ranked number one by Institutional Investor for 11 straight years. Before that,
Goodman held positions as a senior fixed income analyst, a mortgage portfolio manager, and a senior
economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She has published more than 200 articles in professional
and academic journals and coauthored and coedited five books. She serves on the board of directors of MFA
Financial and is a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Housing Commission, the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, and the New York State Mortgage Relief Incentive Fund Advisory
Committee. Goodman has a BA in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA and PhD in
economics from Stanford University.
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Rolf Pendall is director of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at
the Urban Institute. He leads over 40 experts on various housing, community
development, and economic development topics consistent with Urban’s nonpartisan,
evidence-based approach to economic and social policy. Pendall’s research expertise
includes metropolitan growth trends; land-use planning and regulation; demographic
change; federal, state, and local affordable housing policy and programs; and racial
residential segregation and the concentration of poverty. He directs Urban’s Mapping
America’s Futures project, a platform for exploring the local implications of future
demographic change. Other recent projects include Urban’s evaluation of the US
Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Choice Neighborhoods demonstration, a HUDfunded research study on the importance of cars to Housing Choice voucher users, and long-standing
membership in the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Building Resilient Regions. From 1998 to
2010, Pendall was a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, where he
taught courses and conducted research on land-use planning, growth management, and affordable housing.
Walt Scott is a senior economist in Fannie Mae’s credit division and is the company’s
lead economic researcher in its role as program administrator for the US Treasury’s
Making Home Affordable program. He has authored research papers on principal
forgiveness and on loan modification treatment effects, which have been published on
Treasury’s website. Scott has also conducted economic and financial modeling and
research for various projects in support of Fannie Mae’s underwriting and pricing,
credit, and capital markets divisions. The nonborrower household income provisions in
Fannie Mae’s HomeReady program were developed as a direct result of his research.
Before becoming an economist, Scott was a software engineer and architect for Fannie
Mae and an adjunct economics instructor at American University. He studied computer science as an
undergraduate at Yale University. He is working on his economics PhD dissertation at American University,
researching a boom-and-bust period in the US housing market in the late 19th century; he has received two
grants to support this work.
URBAN INSTITUTE  2100 M STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20037  URBAN.ORG