Carlos Martín

Carlos Martín is a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he leads research on the physical quality of housing and communities.

Martín, a trained architect and construction engineer, connects the bricks and mortar of housing to its social outcomes. His areas of expertise include green housing, disaster mitigation, substandard housing, and the construction workforce. He has experience with independent research and formal evaluations for public, nonprofit, and philanthropic clients. Publications include Housing Recovery on the Gulf Coast, Phase II; Rebuild by Design Evaluation; and The State of the Residential Construction Industry. Martín is leading research on housing strategies for climate adaptation for the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program, strategies for promoting technological innovation in homebuilding for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the rate of housing recovery under HUD’s Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery. He also leads the multiyear global evaluation of the Rockefeller Foundation–pioneered 100 Resilient Cities.

Before joining Urban, Martín was assistant staff vice president at the National Association of Home Builders for Construction Codes and Standards, SRP professor for energy and the environment at Arizona State University’s Del E. Webb School of Construction and School of Architecture, and coordinator for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing.

Martín received his BSAD in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MEng and PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University.