Rachel Garschick Kleit, PhD

Steering Committee Chair

Rachel Kleit is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Engineering. Previously, she served as Head of the City and Regional Planning Section at the Knowlton School. Before coming to Ohio State, she was an associate professor in the Evans School of Public Affairs and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. She received a Bachelor of Arts, with Highest Honors, cum laude, from Brandeis University, a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy from Tufts University, and a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kleit’s research interests include housing mobility and location choice, affordable housing policy, housing as a poverty alleviation strategy, equity impacts of economic development, urban and regional disparity. She teaches courses on affordable housing policy, metropolitan policy, social equity, and advanced planning theory. Kleit is an occasional guest on WOSU’s On the Record, engaging in discussions around economic inequality in Columbus and the city’s recent Smart City Challenge win. Kleitis the recipient of the 1998 Young Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association and Sage Publications, and the 1999 Best Student Paper Award in Housing and Community Development from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Fannie Mae Foundation. She is also a recipient of a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Urban Scholar Postdoctoral Fellowship to support research on the New Holly HOPE VI site in Seattle. Learn more [redirects tohttp://knowlton.osu.edu/people/kleit]