Fort Wayne, Ind. – The City of Fort Wayne Metropolitan Human Relations Commission announced today that Pulitzer Prize winner Dr. Matthew Desmond will be the keynote speaker for the 2022 Fair Housing Summit. Desmond’s best seller Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has effectively changed the understanding of inequity and economic exploitation in America.
The Fair Housing Summit is hosted by the City of Fort Wayne’s Metropolitan Human Relations Commission and Office of Housing & Neighborhood Services and is set for April 27th from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum Conference Center, 4000 Parnell Ave. More information regarding the event is coming soon and will be found here.
Desmond is the founder and Principal Investigator of Princeton’s Eviction Lab. He launched it in 2017 following conversations with renters and policymakers in an effort to answer questions about residential instability, forced moves, and poverty in America. In 2018, the organization published the first-ever national dataset of evictions in America, collecting millions of data points going back to 2000.
Fort Wayne Metro’s mission is to enforce civil rights laws and empower the citizens of Fort Wayne through education on diversity and discrimination issues. The City’s Office of Housing & Neighborhood Services works to attract and support housing investment throughout the community and expand access to safe, quality, affordable housing. The department also partners with local non-profit organizations to address critical needs in the community.