Eviction Prevention
Eviction prevention has run through Maya’s work for more than 20 years. Maya has answered thousands of calls from renters, subletters, and rental property owners about evictions. She understands what it takes to effectively prevent evictions without breaking the rental housing market. She also understands that evictions are devastating and should be prevented whenever possible.
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In 2003, Maya conducted a statewide survey of sheriffs and constables to understand variation in eviction practices. She was a collaborator on an eviction prevention cost study for a national non-profit housing provider and worked with local partners to develop and evaluate a pre-filing eviction diversion pilot in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She developed an eviction prevention framework to strengthen policies for addressing the eviction crisis. Her framework helped inform discussion at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law’s 2019 Dispute Resolution Institute Symposium. Maya is also the lead author of a policy paper proposing a federal approach to break the link between hardship and evictions.
As policy staff to a DC councilmember during the pandemic, she wrote and secured passage of legislation on numerous topics, including closing an eviction moratorium loophole, crafting a surgically precise moratorium exemption, and partnering to build a post-moratorium eviction process that was both clear and humane. She also helped to broker understanding and a tentative agreement about a moratorium wind-down among disparate voices on the Mayor's Rental Housing Strikeforce.
Housing Partnerships and Services
Maya’s expertise in the connection between housing and other aspects of people’s lives has led to multiple keynote addresses, media interviews, and panel discussions. Through her work on connecting housing and wellbeing, she was honored to work alongside a small set of invitees, including a former top-ranking federal official, best-selling authors, and national leaders in racial health equity, at a weeklong innovation lab on the state of wellbeing in America.
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Spanning multiple professional affiliations, Maya played a longstanding role in the development of the Housing Matters initiative, linking access to affordable and decent housing with success in other areas of life. She planned and hosted groundbreaking events for inspiring housing leaders to look beyond their traditional partners–leading to the development of a home repair program to help seniors age in place. She envisioned and launched a cross-cutting initiative at the Urban Institute that continues to increase the use and accessibility of housing research among public officials, program administrators, and the broader research community through HousingMatters.urban.org .
Maya has written extensively on housing’s connections with education, asset-building, and health. To raise the bar for program design within housing authorities, Maya wrote and spoke about how to use cognitive science in the design and implementation of housing-based asset-building programs. Maya also contributed to an in-depth housing explainer aimed toward the public health field. More recently, Maya engaged with the Natural Resources Defense Council to support their team in building a housing justice approach that acknowledges that housing justice and climate justice work are essential for racial justice.
Homelessness Prevention and Response
Maya recognizes that the people who are homeless are people, not problems. As an inaugural member of the Baltimore chapter of Back on My Feet, she ran alongside teammates with histories of homelessness, incarceration, post-traumatic stress, and substance use disorders. People experiencing homelessness have hopes, dreams, and internal complexities just like any of us. Knowing their direct experiences has shaped how Maya thinks about homelessness policy and research. What works for one individual may not work for another, but respectful listening and engagement are essential.
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Maya has written case studies and policy guidance on developing permanent supportive housing for veteran homelessness. She has both spoken and written on ending family homelessness. As part of case-making work for a substantial investment in homelessness prevention and response, Maya has also worked to clarify the potential social and fiscal costs (and missing personal or public benefits) related to allowing U.S. homelessness to continue unabated.
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To spark a local dialogue on alternatives to DC's homeless encampment protocols, Maya explored the policy preferences and civil rights concerns of an array of councilmembers, legal service attorneys, homeless assistance advocates, businesses, and federal park service liaisons. Her openness to hear all perspectives and concerns resulted in a proposal for a policy change that would respect human rights and enable timely resolution of true public safety matters.
Comprehensive State and Local Housing Policy
For more than 15 years, Maya has elevated state and local housing needs and policy opportunities through a combination of reports, online guides, media availability, and speaking engagements. She developed the policy analysis framework and assessment system for an influential report on meeting the future housing needs of the Greater Washington region, She later adapted this approach to serve the different geographic, economic, and political situation in North Carolina. She has helped elected officials and advocates consider housing policy decisions within a federal, regional, and local context, encouraging more deliberate targeting of housing policies to fill current gaps.
Near the start of the pandemic, Maya leapt at the chance to help her home city and its people get through an unprecedented time. As an advisor to an active member of the DC Council’s housing committee, she reviewed program performance, agency operations, budget proposals, advocacy campaigns, and existing legislation. For a substantial revision to the DC Comprehensive Plan, Maya engaged closely with the Council Chairman’s office to ensure the plan reflected housing justice goals and displacement prevention priorities in viable and implementable ways.
Maya’s knowledge of housing preservation, production, and protections across the income spectrum–and clarity about the goals and resources driving housing policymakers’ decisions–resonates across market types. She has spoken on state and local policy in the South, West, Midwest, and Northeast–in hot markets, seasonal markets, and slow-growth areas. In all cases, Maya knows there is no single right set of housing policies, even though there are some universal challenges.
Public Housing
Maya has written and spoken about housing authority capacities, partnerships, and asset building programs. She has presented to national and regional audiences of housing authority staff and developed case studies that explore how housing authorities have used existing tools to support their residents’ education, health, and economic goals. Maya was also part of a team engaged by the Seattle Housing Authority to assess its school system partnership and identify growth opportunities.
She understands the complexity of public housing in the present moment and its importance for the future. Public housing is an essential public good, yet struggling due to chronic underfunding. Unless public housing funding and stigmas change, access to healthy housing will be even more inequitable than it is today. For a convening on the future of public housing, Maya designed a dialogue approach that honored the complementary expertise of housing authority directors, public housing residents, philanthropy, policy leaders, and researchers as collaborators in setting a new agenda for public housing policy. Efforts to build a viable future for public housing continue, even as advocacy for publicly owned affordable housing has increasingly adopted a different term for what housing authorities do: social housing.
As staff to DC Councilmember Elissa Silverman, Maya regularly engaged with the DC Housing Authority to identify how District government could help the authority overcome ongoing structural and operating challenges. She also collaborated with housing authority staff and other agencies to address concerns of housing authority residents and staff. At a critical moment for the authority, Maya analyzed the authorizing statutes and governing structures for highly-regarded public housing authorities and developed options for amending or reforming DC law. This resulted in a combination of an enacted emergency bill, an introduced major reform bill, and a shift in the conversation about the DC housing authority.
Equitable Communities and Schools
Through her work on housing and education connections, Maya developed a passion for education equity that goes beyond its links with housing. At the DC Council, she advised an at-large councilmember on education policy issues, taking a citywide perspective on school funding, location decisions, and pandemic learning and recovery. She clarified inequities in school locations and resources that affect access for students in wards with lower average incomes and a majority or plurality of Black residents.
Through her writing and research on housing and schools, Maya has pointed out inequities in the current US education system, such as the implicit tuition for public schools that home buyers and renters wrap into what they will pay for their home. Through viewing education, land use, and housing policies, Maya has documented why education equity requires a multi-system solution.
Maya has extensive community service related to education equity. She has facilitated racial equity dialogues at a gentrifying DC school. To build on those dialogues, she worked collaboratively on developing affinity groups that would deepen learning, understanding, and solution-building to allow the school’s racially, ethically, and economically diverse community to come together. Through her work with equity-seeking white parents at the school, she helped challenge prevailing but inaccurate assumptions about school and classroom quality–assumptions linked to racial composition. Through her more recent service on her ward’s education equity committee, she has collaborated to identify major issues, prepare and submit public testimony, and keep community members informed.