Unpacked with Papa

Jennifer Molisnky, PhD, is Director of the Housing an Aging Society Program and a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. As Director, Dr. Molinsky leads research exploring the housing challenges facing an aging population, including affordability, accessibility and safety in the home, community livability, and connections between housing, services, and health.

She was lead author on the Center’s major reports on the challenges of housing an aging society, including Housing America's Older Adults 2023; Advancing Housing and Health Equity for Older Adults: Pandemic Innovations and Policy Ideas, The State of the Nation’s Housing for Older Adults 2018 and 2019; Older Households 2015-2035: Projections and Implications for Housing a Growing Population (2016); and Housing America’s Older Adults: Meeting the Needs of an Aging Population (2014), and has also written about the role of housing in wellbeing in older age. Jennifer was also a co-editor of the 2018 book A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality and the 2014 book Homeownership Built to Last: Balancing Access, Affordability, and Risk After the Housing Crisis.

Jennifer serves on the steering committee for The Chan School of Public Health Initiative on Health and Homelessness at Harvard and co-directs the Healthy Places Design Lab at the Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining the Center, she was Chief Planner for Long Range Planning in Newton, MA, and held positions with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Municipal Art Society of New York, Abt Associates, and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ government housing finance practice. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT, a Masters of Public Affairs-Urban and Regional Planning from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and a BA from Yale.