Josephine Ennis is a Master in Regional Planning student (class of 2023) with a long-standing interest in affordable housing. Growing up in South Louisiana, she was first introduced to the housing field after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged over a million homes in her region. She worked as an affordable housing advocate for a local community development organization and then as a researcher at an economic development agency before going to law school at the University of Washington in Seattle. Upon graduation, she served as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and then as a public finance attorney at Pacifica Law Group in Seattle. She has also represented non-profit housing developers at Kantor Taylor P.C., and has volunteered to protect tenants' rights at the King County Housing Justice Project.
Josephine has returned to school at Cornell to learn more about housing markets, housing finance, and exclusionary land use regulations. In addition to her work with the Housing + Property Lab, she is working with professor Sara Bronin on a Zoning Atlas for King County, Washington. Through her research, she hopes to analyze and visualize King County's legacy of exclusionary zoning and existing constraints on multi-family housing development.
