Policy Associate, ILH&PR

Boston College Introduction

Founded in 1863, Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university located six miles from downtown Boston with an enrollment of 9,654 full-time undergraduates and 5,072 graduate and professional students. Ranked 37 among national universities, Boston College has 923 full-time and 1,336 FTE faculty, 2,822 non-faculty employees, an operating budget of $1.4 billion, and an endowment in excess of $3.9 billion.

The mission of the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property Rights (the Initiative) is to address real property issues that impact poor and disadvantaged communities that are disproportionately though not exclusively communities of color. Many of the activities the Initiative undertakes assist disadvantaged communities that have been harmed as a result of lacking adequate land, housing, and other property rights.

The Initiative’s core activities include catalyzing both theoretical and applied, policy-relevant research on various land and housing issues that have been understudied and under theorized; proactively working to develop impactful legal reform and policy solutions to address property problems disadvantaged communities experience; sponsoring both continuing legal education programs for lawyers and community legal education and other outreach programs for disadvantaged communities; and training law students and other students to develop legal and other technical expertise to help disadvantaged people and communities address their land and housing issues.

The Initiative collaborates with other stakeholders in a true spirit of partnership to address land and housing issues that disadvantaged communities experience in ways that a single organization doing the work could not do as effectively.

Position Summary

The ILHPR seeks a Policy Associate to help further build up the Initiative’s Legal Reform and Policy Laboratory (the Lab) under the direction of the Policy Director. The Lab develops legal reform and policy proposals to address critical land and housing issues at the local, state, and federal level and, in addition, assists other stakeholders doing such work. A model of the type of legal reform and policy proposals the Initiative works to develop is the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), a groundbreaking model state property statute, which was principally drafted by Professor Thomas W.

Mitchell, the Initiative’s founder and Director and a Mac Arthur Fellow. Thus far, the UPHPA has been enacted into law in 27 states and jurisdictions that are located in every region of the country. It has helped thousands of disadvantaged families across the country maintain ownership of their family-owned properties and their generational wealth. In addition to developing model legislation, the Lab also works to develop policy solutions using other tools, including, for example, working with other stakeholders to develop model private agreements that disadvantaged families can use to manage their family-owned properties in ways that better promote just and sustainable ownership.

Overall, the Lab works to advance policy solutions to remedy economic instability and property loss among vulnerable communities. In addition to heirs’ property policy work, the Lab engages in a growing scope of work on other reforms to advance affordable and fair housing for homeowners and renters, prevent land loss among disadvantaged communities, promote environmental justice, and support intergenerational asset building.

The Policy Associate will work with the Policy Director and external stakeholders on projects in the Initiative’s policy agenda while under the supervision of the Policy Director. The Policy Associate together with the other members of the Policy team – and other Initiative staff as needed – must work assiduously to ensure the high quality of policy projects at each stage of every project and also must complete each stage of any project in a timely way to maintain a proper work flow.

As needed, the Policy Associate will provide support to the Policy Director in identifying funding opportunities for policy projects and in helping to draft funding…