ABOUT

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of São Paulo and a Master’s degree in Public and Urban Policy from The New School. I have more than a decade of experience working in public and private sector organizations on issues of housing and land use policy, real estate, and local economic development in Brazil and the U.S. I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil.

I am on the 2025–2026 job market.

RESEARCH

Broadly speaking, my research investigates how housing and land policies in the Americas, frequently mediated by debt, serve as mechanisms of welfare state privatization, reallocating risks and costs across households and communities in ways that impact urban inequality. My PhD dissertation identifies contradictory trends in Latin America’s largest social housing program, Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV). I examine the program in the city of São Paulo, focusing on its lowest-income tier (faixa 1), and explore the following puzzle: Why does a program that provides virtually free access to homeownership still generate debt, evictions, exits, and housing precarity? I address this question through a combination of quasi-experiment, computational methods, and interviews. Overall, my thesis complements a long tradition of qualitative research on low-income housing programs in Latin America by bringing new quantitative data and methods. Theoretically, it challenges the notion of homeownership as a stabilizing welfare policy for very low-income people, showing instead how debt and informal practices become central mechanisms of coping with the costs of formality.

Another of my research areas relates to the implementation of urban land-based financing instruments in the Americas, and their impact on municipal finance, spatial inequality, and local economic development.

CV

Download my CV here