Action Is Eloquence

Bio

A native of La Jolla, CA, K.Mc moved east to attend Yale College, where she graduated with honors in 2014. She won a prestigious Yale College Fellowship to study neighborhood ecosystems in Madrid, Spain for a year after college.

After returning to the states, she opened a satellite office of a San Diego-based real estate development company in Napa, CA following the company’s purchase of a three-acre brownfield site. While in Napa, K.Mc oversaw day-to-day pre-development planning operations, including lobbying the local Design Review Board and City Council to approve construction of a 51-unit condominium project, scoping new land acquisitions, coordinating RFP bids, and managing the company’s public relations with government officials and members of the press.

Wanting to learn more about the mechanics of land use law and state and local land use policy, K.Mc obtained a full-tuition scholarship to attend law school at Quinnipiac University in order to divide her time between studying law and investigating economic development land use strategies in a familiar environment, New Haven, CT.

In January 2019, at the start of her fourth semester of law school, K.Mc was asked to provide leverage for the then newly-appointed Economic Development Administrator for the City of New Haven as his unofficial Chief of Staff. While with the City, she learned about agency decision-making, layers upon layers of negotiations, strategic community involvement, and people management in centralized hierarchical corporate structures. During this time, she also became a semi-expert on how a city’s zoning code and housing code enforcement practices affect its affordable housing stock, judicial proceedings, and tax rolls.

A serial entrepreneur, K.Mc has devised numerous empirical research projects to test and validate her assumptions about community development, crowd-based policy making, and innovating in the housing and construction market. She is driven by an abiding desire to study how people live—in private, in digital communities, in cities, and in relation to each other. She graduates from law school in May 2020.

contact

katherine [dot] mccomic [at] gmail [dot] com