Mrs. Allison Ladd
Deputy Mayor & Director, Economic and Housing Development City of Newark
Allison Ladd spearheads Newark’s housing and development efforts. Under her leadership, Ms. Ladd has focused on implementing Mayor Ras J. Baraka’s equitable growth strategy: harnessing the many billions of dollars of new investment in Newark to create opportunities for all residents and businesses.
She came to Newark after serving as Deputy Director of the Washington, DC Department of Housing and Community Development Department (DHCD). Deputy Mayor Ladd assumed her new role in Newark with the intention of furthering Mayor Baraka’s work to create a culture of participation and inclusion that enables inequality to be replaced by equitable opportunity, prosperity and growth, rather than the gentrification and displacement that has happened elsewhere. She has done exactly that.
In Newark, Allison Ladd has led the development of new policies, programs and financing tools to preserve and expand affordable housing, minimize foreclosures, prevent evictions, help residents purchase their first homes, transform abandoned properties into neighborhood assets, and create mixed income housing through inclusionary zoning. She oversees the city’s new Equitable Growth Commission and is Board Chair of Invest Newark, formerly the Newark Community Economic Development Corporation (N.C.E.D.C.), the quasi-governmental organization charged with strengthening Newark’s small businesses, implementing the city’s new land bank and operating the nation’s fastest broadband fiber network.
With the arrival of the COVID-19 crisis, Ms. Ladd focused her department on creating new programs to minimize the economic impact of the virus on Newark’s already struggling residents and small businesses.
As Deputy Director of the Washington, DC DHCD, Allison Ladd led a 180-person agency with over a $300 million annual budget. There Ms. Ladd spearheaded the transformation of a team that today is an award-winning agency. She effectively executed the financing of real estate development projects with loans in excess of $830 million. In addition, Ms. Ladd led the development of programs that preserved affordable housing to help generations of District residents remain in a high cost city.
Before joining DC DHCD, Ms. Ladd served as the Associate Executive Director of the District of Columbia Housing Finance Agency; Chief of Staff of the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development; the Director of the Maryland Governor’s Housing Policy Commission; and the Special Assistant to the Director in Prince George’s County (MD) Department of Housing and Community Development.
Ms. Ladd holds a Masters of Community Planning from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, and a Bachelor of Arts (emphasis on Urban Studies) from the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, RI. She is a Korean- American from New England who enjoys cooking and traveling.
