Margaret Haltom
Margaret is an urban planner and PhD candidate focused on housing inequality, neighborhood change, and cultural preservation. She uses several academic lenses — participatory action research, spatial analytics, historical methods, and community-oriented design — to examine how racialized disinvestment drives displacement and explore strategies for reversing these legacies. The heart of her work involves collaborating with intergenerational coalitions of resident leaders and affordable housing developers. Together, they ground community development in resident memories and the collective restoration of neighborhood records, surfacing historically-informed blueprints for planning. Her research has contributed to public-facing initiatives including digital humanities tools, co-curated neighborhood exhibits, plans for scaling emerging community land trusts, the restoration of a historic home into a cultural center, and a memorial to enslaved laborers in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.
Two of her community-based projects were recently selected for Monument Lab's 2024 ReGeneration National Cohort of ten public memory projects. Her research has also been supported by MIT's Racially Just Research Initiative, the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's "Policies for Action" program in collaboration with MIT CoLab.
Prior to her PhD, she was Director of Emergency Rent and Housing Policy for the Works Community Development Corporation. She led eviction prevention for the $90 million Memphis/Shelby County Emergency Rental Assistance program, and co-created court data workflows and processes that connected 12,000 tenants to limited legal representation. Her work was profiled by NPR and deemed "one of the strongest eviction diversion programs in the country" by the U.S. Department of Treasury. She continues to assist with eviction prevention and provide technical assistance to affordable housing partners.
She has served as a freelance planner on affordable housing development projects, a neighborhood mapper for resident coalitions, and a teacher/facilitator of youth design programs in public schools and housing developments.
She holds a master's in planning with distinction from Harvard GSD, where she received the GSD's planning thesis prize and was a Gramlich Fellow in Community and Economic Development at the Joint Center for Housing Studies. She has a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia.
