My first project in graduate school was a neighborhood redevelopment plan in North Champaign, where low-income residents of color were displaced so the city could rebuild several blocks from the ground up. Every time I asked decision-makers how it happened, the answer was some version of we were responding to the market.
The more I learned about the actual history (two decades of deferred code enforcement, a single-lot infill strategy, rehab assistance available only to owner-occupants in a neighborhood that was seventy percent renters) the less that explanation held. The outcome wasn’t the market working. It was a long sequence of choices, each defensible on its own terms, that together moved cost and risk onto the people least able to carry it.
Since then my work has focused on the black boxes: decisions about land and money that get made inside professional expertise, described as technical, and turned out to be anything but. Code enforcement. Property assessment. Municipal finance. How underwriters decide who is too risky to lend to. These are the places where a seemingly neutral change like a credit score threshold, a collateral requirement, or which zip codes get flagged, reproduces outcomes that from the neighborhood level look exactly like the ones that came before.
The methods follow from the subject. You can’t learn how these decisions get made by asking people to describe them, so I build designs that get at what self-report won’t reach.
Competencies
Mixed-methods research design | Survey design and analysis | Program evaluation and impact measurement | Theory of change | Public attitudes and behavior change research | Research translation for executive audiences
Doctoral Research: From ‘Perceived’ to ‘Real’ Risk: Community Development Loan Fund Housing Lending in Chicago
Ph.D., Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2022)
Community development loan funds exist to get mission capital into places conventional market lenders won’t serve. The field generally assumes they also lend more cheaply. Mostly they don’t, and I wanted to know why.
The answer turned out to sit upstream. CDLFs borrow from banks, and those banks assess them using CAMELS, a conventional enterprise risk assessment framework built to evaluate market lending, weighted toward capital adequacy, asset quality, and liquidity ratios. Mission lending is a different business: it runs on discretion, soft information, relationships, and bundled borrower services, none of which the framework can see. So a lender doing the harder work reads as riskier, pays more for capital, and passes that cost down. Some respond by holding more market loans to look better to their own assessors, which means the evaluation system quietly pulls mission lenders away from mission borrowers.
Inside the institutions, I found that the people assessing a borrower’s default risk and the people pricing it are different groups. Loan officers underwrite; credit committees set terms, and they’re managing a portfolio that has to stay legible to capital providers the borrower will never meet. Where information about a borrower is scarce, risk assessment increases to cover what nobody knows. And information is scarcest exactly where market lending infrastructure is thinnest.
There’s a counter-finding worth stating plainly: the discretion CAMELS can’t score is the thing that works. Underwriters expanding loan-to-value limits, using post-rehab stabilized values, weighting FICO less — these practices open access for low-wealth borrowers, and lender judgment predicts repayment in these portfolios better than the cutoff ratios do.
On method.
You can’t study this by asking. Everyone involved has a professional stake in how their institution looks, and the mechanisms are hidden behind proprietary systems. So the design sampled the full hierarchy from loan officer to executive rather than a single role, widened the frame to the rating analysts whose assessments these lenders are judged by, and triangulated interviews against the regulatory record. Partway through fieldwork I took an underwriting job at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, the institution capitalizing the lenders in my cases, because I wanted to watch the funding decision from the capital side before theorizing about how it had been described to me. The whole thing was abductive and iterative: build a proposition, go looking for what would break it.
In development: a framework for evaluating lending terms
My dissertation found that conventional risk frameworks systematically misprice mission lending, and that the discretionary practices those frameworks can’t score are often the ones expanding access. The obvious next question is what a better evaluation instrument would look like. One that treats underwriting judgment as signal rather than noise, and makes the distributional consequences of specific term structures visible. I’m developing that framework now for publication.
Peer-reviewed Publications
Williams, T., Prochaska, N., McCall, J., & Thetford, T. (2026). Balancing mission and measurement: Institutional pressures on evaluation practices in nonprofit community development loan funds. Journal of Urban Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2026.2645849
A 39-institution mixed-methods study of why evaluation in community development lending collapses into compliance reporting. Funders ask for proof, organizations produce what proves, and the measurement that would actually tell an organization whether its work is landing never gets built. We document how the pressure operates and what rebuilding evaluation as a learning function would require.
Pendall, R., Prochaska, N., Allred, D., & Hillyard, C. (2024). A New Skyline for Champaign: An Urban Dormitory Transformed. Housing Policy Debate, 34(5), 722–745. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2022.2124532
The standard account of the student housing boom credits upzoning. Working from 4,532 permitted projects between 2003 and 2019, archival policy analysis, and nineteen stakeholder interviews, we found the zoning change was largely downstream of what actually drove development. A useful case in how a clean causal story survives because nobody assembles the parcel data to check it.
Lowe, J., Prochaska, N., & Keating, D. (2022). Bringing Permanent Affordable Housing and Community Control to Scale. Cities. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2022.103718
On what it takes for community land trusts to move past demonstration scale. Related work of mine on the Chicago CLT found that trust membership did protect households from assessment-driven tax increases, but only those who appealed. With two staff serving a portfolio clustered in rapidly appreciating neighborhoods, most households didn’t appeal, and their escrow increases drove exactly the precarity the model exists to prevent. The mechanism worked; the capacity to deliver it didn’t.
Cutts, B., Greenlee, A., Prochaska, N., et al. (2018). Is a Clean River Fun for All? Recognizing Social Vulnerability in Watershed Planning. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196416
On what watershed planning misses when it treats a served population as undifferentiated, and what surfaces when social vulnerability is built into the analysis rather than noted alongside it.
Book Chapter
Prochaska, N. (forthcoming). How high capital costs limit CDFI low-cost lending to mission borrowers. In J. DeFilippis & S. Saegert (Eds.), Community Development Reader.
Selected Speaking
- Invited speaker, NeighborWorks America (2026): “Measurement and Evaluation in CDFIs: The Role of Funders as Partners”
- Invited Panelist, National Housing Conference (2025): “From Insights to Action: Data-Informed Strategy in Housing and Community Development”
- Invited Panelist, Opportunity Finance Network Conference 41 (2025): “From Oversight to Insight: Reclaiming IMM for Learning, Not Just Compliance”
- Invited Panelist, Southern Nevada Nonprofit Summit (2025): “Building a Culture of Learning and Evaluation: Embedding Continuous Learning Practices Across the Organization”
- Invited Panelist, Novogradac Housing Tax Credit Finance Conference (2025): “How OZ, RETC Changes Affect Housing”
- Invited Panelist, Nevada Housing Coalition Housing Conference (2024): “Navigating Federal Clean Energy Finance”
- Invited Panelist, Novogradac Housing Tax Credit Finance Conference (2023): “Green Energy & Affordable Housing”
- Presenter, Urban Affairs Association Conference (2022): “From ‘Perceived’ to ‘Real’ Risk: Community Development Loan Fund Housing Lending in Chicago”