Living Together by Design Housing to Connect Generations

Chris Herbert is Managing Director of the Center. Dr. Herbert has extensive experience conducting research related to housing policy and urban development, both in the US and abroad. A key focus of his research has been on the financial and demographic dimensions of homeownership, and the implications for housing policy. Chris was named managing director of the Center in 2015, and oversees the Center’s diverse sponsored research programs, its local and national conferences and symposia, as well as its student fellowship programs, designed to help train and inspire the next generation of housing leaders. 

Jennifer Molinsky is Director of the Housing an Aging Society Program and a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Design. As Director, Dr. Molinsky leads research exploring the housing challenges facing an aging population, including affordability, accessibility and safety in the home, community livability, and connections between housing, services, and health. She was lead author on the Center’s major reports on the challenges of housing an aging society. Jennifer is a member of the Advisory Board of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging and the Board of Directors of both Hearth, Inc and 2Life Communities. She also serves on the steering committee for The Chan School of Public Health Initiative on Health and Homelessness at Harvard and co-directs the Healthy Places Design Lab at the Graduate School of Design. 

Donna Butts is a senior fellow with Generations United. She previously served as the Executive Director of Generations United from 1997-2025.  For more than 30 years, Butts has worked tirelessly to promote the well-being of children, youth and older adults through nonprofit organizations across the country and around the world. She began her career in her home state of Oregon as a youth worker with the YWCA, where she worked one-on-one with teens and saw the positive effects of intergenerational programs firsthand. Butts has held leadership positions with Covenant House, a New York-based international youth serving organization, and the National 4-H Council. She served as the Executive Director for the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention.

Dr. Ernest Gonzales is an Associate Professor and the James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University, where he leads The Center for Health and Aging Innovation, the Healthy Aging Specialization in Social Work, and Grand Challenge on Advancing a Long, Healthy, and Productive Life. As a critical gerontologist, he investigates risk and protective factors affecting health throughout the lifespan. His research on productive aging—covering education, work, civic engagement, and caregiving—highlights the individual, neighborhood, and institutional elements that enhance health, economic stability, and social connections. Dr. Gonzales has created innovative tools like the Workplace Age Discrimination Scale and the Summative Dis/Advantage Scale to identify factors that bolster the capacity, and choice, to productive engagement in later life.

Noelle Marcus is the CEO and Co-Founder of Nesterly, an award-winning platform for intergenerational homesharing. In this role, Noelle has won over a dozen awards for business and social innovation and has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Forbes, and NPR’s Marketplace as well as news outlets in Spain, France, China, Argentina, Mexico, and Japan. As a lifelong public servant her career has focused on building equitable cities through civic technology, entrepreneurship, public policy, and economic development. Over the past decade she has worked within and for over a dozen cities around the world. She is a former MIT Sloan Business School Fellow, a graduate of MIT’s Masters in Urban Planning (M.C.P.) program and received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from Barnard College.

Natasha Pilkauskas is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Her research considers how demographic, social safety net, and economic shifts in the U.S. affect families and children with low-incomes. One strand of her research focuses on the living arrangements of children‚ especially those who live multigenerational households. A second aspect of her work considers economic insecurity, poverty and family wellbeing. A third area focuses on how cash transfer policies, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, might improve the developmental and life trajectories of children living in poverty. Pilkauskas’ current research projects include several studies of both the Earned Income Tax Credit and the 2021 Child Tax Credit. 

Jonathan Evans has built a career designing impactful projects that advance justice in the built environment. He is a Principal at MASS leading the Boston Studio, where he stewards a portfolio of civic projects and housing developments. During his tenure at MASS, Jonathan served as the principal-in-charge of the architectural scope for “The Embrace”, a memorial dedicated to the legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott, and the power of love that their partnership embodied. His civic work also includes the creation of public realm projects and masterplanning initiatives, primarily in communities that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved. 

Jenny French is a partner at French 2D, an internationally recognized Boston studio, which she co-founded with Anda French, and Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at the GSD. French 2D works on mixed-use projects combining ideas of collectivity with more radical organizations and typologies. Their work centers collaboration across multiple scales, from participatory events and installations to urban-scale textiles and buildings for collective living. French 2D’s housing work focuses on uncommon housing types, found in their cohousing, compact living, and adaptive reuse projects. The practice also works on civic installations and exhibitions that call upon the domestic to bring people together for familiar rituals in unfamiliar spaces, found in furniture, textiles, and environments.

Wandy Pascoal is an artist, photographer, and architectural designer and is Program Manager, Housing Innovation & Awards for the Boston Society for Architecture. Wandy holds a BFA in Architecture from UMass Amherst and a Master of Architecture from MassArt, where she focused on the urban and housing design of a self-sustaining eco-village in her home country of Angola. Previously, she worked as an architectural designer at Stull & Lee, Inc focusing on affordable housing projects in the New England area. She has also worked with the Madison Park Development Corporation, where she first gained a deeper understanding of the complexities of local services and housing creation.

Rafi Segal is an award winning designer and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT. His practice engages in design and research on both the architectural and urban scale. Segal’s projects include Villa 003 of the ORDOS 100 Project, the Kitgum Peace Museum in Uganda, the Ashdod Museum of Art and more recently the winning proposal for the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. His current ongoing projects include the design of a new communal neighborhood for a kibbutz in Israel and the curating of the first ever exhibition on the architecture of Alfred Neumann undertaken during the 1960s.

James Stockard, an expert in affordable housing and community development, held the role of curator of the Loeb Fellowship for 17 years.  He continues to teach housing courses at the GSD. As a principal for over 25 years with the Cambridge-based consulting firm Stockard & Engler & Brigham, he worked with nonprofit groups and public agencies across the country on such issues as affordable housing development, property management, neighborhood revitalization, and local, state and national housing policy. He was the principal investigator for the Public Housing Operating Cost Study commissioned by the US Congress. Stockard served as a commissioner of the Cambridge Housing Authority for 40 years and is a founding trustee of the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust Fund. He is a past president of the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, Massachusetts’ largest research and advocacy group for housing and community development issues. He has been a member of the Massachusetts Housing Appeals Committee, ruling on Chapter 40B cases, for the past 17 years.

Andrea Burns is director of the Age-Friendly Boston initiative for the City of Boston. Since 2014, she has led efforts to make Boston a better place to grow older, focusing on housing, transportation, community engagement, and creating age- and dementia-friendly businesses.

Patricia Cafferky is a registered architect in Massachusetts and is the Deputy Chief of Operations, Capital Investment for the office of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. She has also been a Lecturer of Urban Design and Planning at MIT since 2022. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and a Master in City Planning from MIT. 

Will Cohen is a senior planner focused on zoning reform at the Boston Planning & Development Agency with a decade of experience in urban planning, policy, and design. He holds a MUP from Harvard GSD and a BA in Sociology and English from the University of Chicago, and has led teams as an associate principal at Utile and as co-founder and planning lead at Supernormal. Will’s background spans community-facing work, from Peace Corps teaching to data and policy analysis, giving him a pragmatic, equity-centered approach to zoning, engagement, and urban technology.

Kristin McSwain serves as the Chief of Policy and Research for the City of Boston, working across cabinets and departments to coordinate the city’s efforts to analyze, test, and recommend policy actions to advance the Mayor’s citywide agenda. She previously served as Senior Advisor and Director of the Office of Early Childhood in the Mayor’s Office and as the Executive Director of the Boston Opportunity Agenda, working directly with families, educators, and public and private organizations across the Commonwealth to remove systemic barriers for underserved youth. McSwain holds a BA in Religion from the College of William & Mary and an MPA in Government from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Tim Love is the founding principal of Utile and leads the firm’s urban design and planning practice. He is also a Lecturer and Senior Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches courses that focus on topics at the intersection of design, policy, and real estate development. In addition, Love is the Assistant Director of the Master in Real Estate program. Love’s expertise ranges from innovative zoning approaches; to a comprehensive understanding of market-driven building types; to the strategic layout of streets, blocks, and parcels; to the design of Complete Streets and the larger public realm. He has also led research initiatives that are meant to unlock housing production, including a report that makes a case for single-stair building code reform and a proposal for a new model of form-based zoning geared towards municipalities with underutilized parcels within older residential neighborhoods.