Contact Information
Mailing Address:
- Housing Affordability Initiative
MIT Center for Real Estate
77 Massachusetts Avenue, W31-310
Cambridge, MA 02139
Website: http://web.mit.edu/cre/research/hai/
Staff Contact Information:
- Lynn Fisher, Director
Telephone: 617-252-1685
Fax: 617-258-6991
Email: lfisher@mit.edu - Professor Lynn M. Fisher is an Associate Professor of Real Estate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (effective July 2008) and at the Center for Real Estate at MIT. She currently holds the Ford Development Chair and is Director of the MIT/CRE Housing Affordability Initiative. She received her Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Smeal School of Business at Pennsylvania State University in 2002 where she concentrated in real estate finance and microeconomics. Her academic research has been examining the influence of laws and legal institutions on the efficiency of contracts and bargaining outcomes in real estate markets. Recently, she has employed both bargaining theory and empirical evidence in exploring the relationship between local government regulators and private-sector developers in the context of land-use regulations. In other on-going research on residential real estate markets, she is investigating the history of the laws, norms and rules governing the right to prepay residential mortgages in the U.S., mortgage contracting variation across legal systems, and the impact of homeownership on labor markets. With colleagues at the MIT/CRE Housing Affordability Initiative, she has also spent the last several years working to produce an economically meaningful measure of affordable housing for regional policy makers. Her teaching portfolio at MIT includes graduate courses on housing markets, real estate development, and the legal issues in development.
- Henry Pollakwoski, Senior Economist
Telephone: 617-253-3701
Fax: 617-258-6991
Email: pollak@mit.edu - Henry O. Pollakowski is an economist and a Research Associate at the MIT Center for Real Estate, as well as the editor of the Journal of Housing Economics. Dr. Pollakowski has done extensive work in housing economics, including influential contributions to the measurement of quality-adjusted housing price changes. He has also specialized in the study of office markets, land-use regulations, and rent control. Dr. Pollakowski spent over a decade as a senior researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. He has also taught at Boston College, Harvard University, the University of York (UK), and the University of Washington. He is the author of numerous scholarly and professional journal articles, as well as Urban Housing Markets and Residential Location, a book focusing on the role of location. He is also the author of Housing Economics, the first Russian language textbook on the subject. Much of Dr. Pollakowski's recent work has involved the application of economics to real estate market analysis. In addition to completing numerous industry and foundation-sponsored projects, he has developed a market analysis course that makes modern tools of analysis accessible to the student. As a faculty fellow of the Homer Hoyt Institute, he has organized conferences assessing the state of residential and commercial real estate analysis. Dr. Pollakowski has also served as a Director of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and as guest editor of the Association's journal for a recent office markets issue. Dr. Pollakowski received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
- Amy Sargent, Administrative Assistant
Telephone: 617-253-5901
Fax: 617-258-6991
Email: sargenta@mit.edu
