Image
"Racial Inequalities in Brazilian Housing Policy: An Examination of Minha Casa Minha Vida"
Julia Paiva is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has a doble major degree in Civil Engineering and Architecture-Urbanism at University of São Paulo and a master’s in urban planning. She previously worked as an urban planning consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she has supported sustainable and resilient urban development initiatives across Latin America. Her professional and academic work focuses on housing policy, transit-oriented development, and equitable urban growth, with a deep commitment to social justice.
During her Master of Urban Planning from UIUC, where she specialized in housing and social justice. During her time in the program, she received three fellowships to support her research and was awarded the 2023 Carroll Award, which recognizes a student demonstrating exceptional commitment to community development from both neighborhood and governmental perspectives. Her thesis was honored with the Best Master’s Thesis Award in 2024.
As a Lemann Center Fellow, Julia will conduct research critical to her Ph.D., which examines racial inequalities in Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) housing program. While MCMV aims to expand homeownership for low-income communities, her work explores how its market-driven approach fails to address the racialized barriers that disproportionately impact Black and Brown Brazilians. Her research seeks to uncover the institutional practices and structural dynamics that reproduce racial disparities in access to housing, and to offer evidence-based frameworks for designing racially just urban policy.
This fellowship plays a vital role in enabling Julia’s continued work toward inclusive, justice-oriented housing solutions in Brazil and across the Global South.