Justin Steil
Justin Steil is an Associate Professor of Law and Urban Planning. As a lawyer, a paramedic, and an urban planner, his research focuses on spatial dimensions of inequality. Justin analyzes spatial inequality in the domains of environmental justice, housing and land use policies, and health equity, among others. Recent research on environmental justice focuses on the effects of climate-change-related disasters on renters, including on rents, evictions, and affordable housing production. Work on housing policy includes scholarship on housing discrimination and its effects, fair housing law and policy, gentrification and displacement pressure, and the dynamics of eviction. Scholarship on land use disentangles how the structure of local governance and the regulation of land use interact with housing policies to shape the spatial structure of our social world in ways that produce economic and racial inequality. Recent research on health equity focuses on the effects of neighborhoods on health and on the role of emergency medical services in advancing health equity.
Justin is the co-editor of three books: Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America’s Neighborhoods (2021); The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity (2019); and Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (2009).
Before coming to MIT, Justin was a Fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University Law School. Prior to NYU, he clerked for the Hon. M. Margaret McKeown, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Hon. Kimba M. Wood, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Before graduate school, he worked as advocacy director for a non-profit fighting predatory lending practices, urban planner for an environmental justice organization focusing on brownfield redevelopment, program manager for a project bringing youth and prisoners into critical dialogues about justice, and trainer with a domestic violence crisis center instructing police in Ciudad Juárez in the support of survivors of sexual assault.
Justin received a B.A. from Harvard College in African-American Studies, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics in City Design and Social Science, a J.D. from Columbia Law School, and a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. For most of the past two decades, he has volunteered teaching in jails or prisons, and he has co-founded volunteer teaching programs at Boston’s Suffolk County House of Correction; New York City’s Riker’s Island Correctional Facility; and the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
Justin serves on the Board of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council and was formerly a member of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank's Community Development Research Advisory Council. He is an affiliate of MIT’s Women’s and Gender Studies program, Sociology at MIT, MIT’s Legal Studies Concentration, and a member of the Steering Group of the Inter-University Consortium on Migration. Justin is a frequent expert in federal civil rights litigation for state and local attorneys general and local and national civil rights organizations and authors amicus briefs related to fair housing, including to the U.S. Supreme Court in Bank of America v. City of Miami. Justin is a nationally registered paramedic, the researcher in residence for Boston Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and a volunteer EMT for MIT EMS.
Justin has received numerous awards for his teaching and advising, including the student awarded Departmental Teaching Award in 2016 and the Departmental Advising Award in 2022 and 2023, the MIT Office of Graduate Education Committed to Caring Award in 2018 and the MIT Graduate Student Council Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising in 2021. MIT in 2018 awarded Justin the Paul Gray Award for Public Service, recognizing “a member of the MIT faculty who exemplifies building a better world” through his or her teaching, research, advising, and service.” MIT in 2021 awarded Justin the Harold E. Edgerton Award for exceptional contributions in research, teaching, and service. The International Municipal Lawyers Association awarded him an amicus service award in 2019 and Boston Emergency Medical Services in 2023 awarded him a Special Citation for “extraordinary actions improving Emergency Medical Services…through continuous contribution.”
His research is regularly cited in leading journalistic outlets, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR's Weekend Edition and On Point, Stat, Bloomberg, The Associated Press, and other news sources.
