Previously Ms. Piper assisted the City of Chicago in the transition of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) from Federal to local oversight. She served in several positions with the City’s Department of Housing and CHA to coordinate local public sector redevelopment activities and revitalize Chicago neighborhoods, while producing a less concentrated stock of permanently affordable housing. She worked with City and CHA leadership, civic organizations, and public housing resident organizations to create CHA’s Plan for Transformation. To implement the redevelopment components of the Plan, she recommended investment policies and refined transaction documents for CHA. She also projected needs, timing and sources of public funding to support the development of up to 10,000 units of very low income public housing, plus affordable and market rate units for sale and rental. She worked with multiple stakeholders to pilot and later institutionalize a community planning and federal procurement process being used to engage private and non-profit development partners for all CHA’s mixed income developments. Core stakeholders involved in the process for each site include public housing residents, surrounding neighborhood organizations, and City agencies, as well as the plaintiff’s counsel and court-appointed receiver in a major desegregation lawsuit. Developments involving 297 acres of CHA property were begun during her tenure.

Prior to her work in Chicago, Ms. Piper developed new financial products and services for the National Equity Fund, Inc., and its parent organization, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. She also helped to start new initiatives in Federal agencies supporting community revitalization, with the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Her experience at HUD included working through policy and programmatic issues raised by the first mixed income public housing transactions and launching the mixed finance development approach in the HOPE VI and public housing capital programs. Ms. Piper’s earlier work with local private and non-profit organizations includes project management with the Cooper’s Ferry Development Association in Camden, NJ, civic work for city planning with the Municipal Art Society in New York, NY, and real estate financial analysis with The First Boston Corporation.

Ms. Piper holds a Master of Government Administration from the Fels Center of Government, University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University, where she graduated magna cum laude.