Affordable Housing Institute: Affiliates
Mario Novarro
Loeb Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Visiting Fellow, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Profile
Mario Navarro is a Loeb Visiting Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Visiting Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy at Cambridge, Massachusetts. As visiting fellow he has done research and is writing a book about the last 30 years of the Housing Finance in Chile. He has also served also as consultant for the Inter American Development Bank in Housing programs in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Before coming to Cambridge he was Housing Policy Director in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in Chile. During his three years as Director, he dramatically revised the housing policy of Chile, bringing the private banking community into the process, getting the federal bureaucracy out of the construction business, and more than doubling the percentage of housing subsidies directed toward the poorest citizens of the nation.
Mario Navarro is an Industrial Engineer with dual mayor in Business and Transportation from the Catholic University of Chile (1994) with a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (2000). He began his professional career as a public servant working for the Chilean Ministry of Public Works in a $3 billion highway concession program. He was part of a multidisciplinary team that conceived and developed the project which was a successful example of public-private partnership that helped to upgrade the under invested highway system in Chile. He has also served as a project finance consultant for the Inter American Development Bank.
Current Interests
- Housing finance policy
- Housing subsidy policy
- Targeting in social housing
- Progressive housing