Carolina Reid is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Faculty Research Advisor for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Carolina specializes in housing and community development, with a specific focus on access to credit, homeownership and wealth inequality. She has most recently published research on the impact of the foreclosure crisis on low-income and minority communities, the role of the Community Reinvestment Act during the subprime crisis, and the importance of anti-predatory lending laws for consumer protection. Carolina is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research and the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Carolina brings nearly two decades of applied work experience to her research and teaching. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, Carolina worked for a year at the Center for Responsible Lending, where she undertook policy analyses on how provisions in Dodd-Frank could affect future access to credit for lower-income and minority households. Before that, Carolina served as the Research Manager for the Community Development Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for six years. At the SF Fed, Carolina published numerous journal and policy articles on topics related to housing and community development, and helped to build the capacity of local stakeholders — including banks, nonprofits, and local governments — to undertake community development activities, especially in the areas of affordable housing, early childcare education, asset building, and neighborhood revitalization.
Carolina has also held positions with the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., where she worked on urban environmental issues and the environmental impacts on health; the Environmental Health and Social Policy Center in Seattle, where she contributed to the evaluation of Jobs-Plus, a welfare-to-work demonstration targeted to residents living in public housing developments; and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment based out of Penang, Malaysia, where she managed an effort to understand how indigenous knowledge about environmental change could be integrated into international environmental decision-making processes.
- Housing and community development, with a specific focus on access to credit, homeownership and wealth inequality
- Impact of the foreclosure crisis on low-income and minority communities
- Role of the Community Reinvestment Act during the subprime crisis,
- Importance of anti-predatory lending laws for consumer protection
