I'm an urban planner and MIT PhD candidate focused on housing inequality and neighborhood change.  My research applies several lenses — participatory action research, spatial analytics, historical methods, community-engaged design — to examine how racialized disinvestment drives displacement and explore strategies for reversing its effects. The heart of my work involves collaborating with intergenerational coalitions of resident leaders and affordable housing providers. Together, we ground community development in collective memory, surfacing overlooked histories and resident visions as guides to more just planning. Our research results in a range of public initiatives: digital humanities tools, plans for scaling emerging community land trusts, co-curated neighborhood exhibits, transferring land bank properties to affordable housing providers, the restoration of a historic home into a cultural center, and a memorial to enslaved laborers in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. 

Across these projects is a commitment to building more accountable, democratic forms of urban development — addressing housing crises while repairing the roots of distrust in planning.  My work has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Monument Lab Re:Generation, and MIT initiatives including the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center, Community Innovators Lab, and Racially Just Research Initiative.  

Prior to my PhD,  I was the Director of Emergency Rent and Housing Policy for the Works Community Development Corporation. I led eviction prevention for the $90 million Memphis/Shelby County Emergency Rental Assistance program, and co-created court data workflows and processes that connected 12,000 tenants to limited legal representation. Our work was profiled by NPR and deemed  "one of the strongest eviction diversion programs in the country" by the U.S. Department of Treasury.  

I received my master's in planning with distinction from Harvard GSD,  where I was a Gramlich Fellow in Community and Economic Development at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, and my B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia.

For the 2025-2026 academic year, I am a visiting assistant professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis. You can reach me at mhaltom@mit.edu.