Nadia M. Anderson, associate professor of urban design in the School of Architecture and director of the City Building Lab, is among the second cohort of Gambrell Faculty Fellows. The Gambrell Faculty Fellowship Program was developed by the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in 2018 through a collaboration with the Gambrell Foundation and the Charlotte Opportunity Insights Partnership. The goal of the fellows program is to support research that addresses issues of economic mobility in the Charlotte area.
Anderson will create a “Design Toolkit for Affordable Homeownership” that will offer strategies for how to build for-sale housing in ways that make it affordable and enable more people to buy. The lack of affordable housing is a key impediment to economic mobility, and home ownership is one of the most important wealth-building vehicles in the United States.
“I’m hoping with this project to be able to take a little bite into what we really need to do to be able to build houses that are affordable for people below the median income to actually own,” she said in an article by the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.