ABOUT

I am a PhD student 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. Prior to commencing my PhD, I worked in different public and private sector organizations for nine years on issues of housing and land use policy, real estate, and local economic development in Brazil and the U.S. During this period I also pursued my passion for public policy as a research associate at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, as an independent researcher for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil.

RESEARCH

I am particularly interested in investigating how housing, land, and local economic development policies and regulations affect the economic well-being of different individuals and neighborhoods, especially across income and racial lines. My PhD research project delves into the unintended consequences of housing formality for low-income households in São Paulo. My project asks: how does formal homeownership impact housing affordability, stability, and debt consumption for low-income beneficiaries of the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program in the city? By attempting to answer this question through the integration of a quasi-experiment, computational methods, and interviews, I hope to provide a more nuanced understanding of the implications of housing formalization for low-income households, and of the challenges and opportunities of formal homeownership as a policy goal. Another of my research areas relates to the implementation of urban land-based financing instruments in Brazil and the US, and their impact on municipal finances, spatial inequality, and local economic development.

RECENT AND ONGOING PROJECTS

• I am currently working on a project led by Prof. Nick Tsivanidis (Berkeley Economics Dep.) on land value capture tools (LVC) in São Paulo, focused on the auction of CEPACs/air rights in Urban Operations.

• I am also working as a Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation with Prof. Carolina Reid, analyzing investor activity in US neighborhoods. Another recent Terner project I worked on looked at access to credit in BIPOC communities, using home mortgage microdata.

• I am co-creator and regular co-host of the Sur-Urbano podcast, an initiative of the Latin American Cities working group at UC Berkeley. We talk (in English, Spanish and Portuguese) to leading scholars on Latin American cities about their most recent work.

• Recently, I co-authored a policy report with Bridget Fisher (the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis), shining a light onto the use of land value capture to finance Penn Station’s redevelopment plan in NYC. This research was featured in some media outlets, such as The NY Times and NY Daily News

CV

Download my CV here