Ellen has been Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service since 2009, with multiple stints as Program Director, and she has served as Faculty Director at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University since 2014. She is currently the President-Elect of the Association for Public Policy and Management and previously served as the president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. Ellen has written numerous peer-reviewed articles related to housing policy, neighborhood change, and segregation.  She is also author of Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press, 2000), co-editor of How to House the Homeless (Russell Sage, 2010), and co-editor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019). Ellen has held visiting positions at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.

At RSF she is working on a book examining neighborhood policies in the United States. She is focusing on how neighborhood policies have weighed the preferences of incumbent residents against the interests of potential future residents and broader societal goals—tensions that can often be seen across the country in NIMBY (not in my backyard) versus YIMBY (yes in my backyard) debates. Ellen is evaluating neighborhood policy initiatives from the 1910s through the 21st century. She argues that these policies have rarely struck an appropriate balance between these groups and that, over the last 100 years, policies have primarily favored incumbent residents, especially in higher-income neighborhoods.