Kathryn L.S. Pettit

Senior Research Associate

Kathryn L.S. Pettit is a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute whose work focuses on measuring and understanding neighborhood change. She is a recognized expert on local and national data systems useful in housing and urban development research and program development (with a particular emphasis in recent years on parcel-based systems with data pertaining to real estate and foreclosure) and in database management. She serves as the co-director of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners to further the development and use of neighborhood-level information systems in local policymaking and community building. She previously led the Institute's work on providing data and analytic content for DataPlace, a national web-based resource for small-area indicators. She is currently contributing to three research projects about foreclosures: a NNIP three-city study about the effects of foreclosures on children; analysis and technical assistance about the impact of the foreclosure crisis in the Washington, D.C. region; and content development for Foreclosure-response.org, a web site providing information about foreclosure effects, case studies of local policies, and neighborhood-level mortgage data to support decision-making.

Before joining the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center, Ms. Pettit worked at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy where she concentrated on the analysis and documentation of I.R.S. data sources on nonprofit organizations. She has a Masters in Public Policy from Georgetown University.

KPettit@urban.org

Publications by topic:
Housing

See all publications by Kathryn L.S. Pettit