Flávia Leite is the Pollman Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She is also a researcher at Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV-Cidades) and a fellow at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) in Brazil.

Her research lies at the intersection of housing policy, real estate, and urban governance in the Americas, centered on two lines of inquiry. First, she examines how housing policy shapes urban inequality along lines of class, race, and gender — specifically, patterns of wealth-building, affordability, and debt burdens. Second, she explores how municipalities finance and govern urban infrastructure and public goods, tracing how instruments such as land value capture and public-private partnerships allocate risks and costs between households, private actors, and the state, and what that means for equity and public accountability.

She holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master’s degree in Public and Urban Policy from The New School for Social Research, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of São Paulo. Beyond academia, she has more than a decade of experience working in public and private sector organizations on housing, land use, real estate, and local economic development in Brazil and the U.S.