PRRAC is excited to announce that Thomas Silverstein will be PRRAC’s new executive director. As early as 2008, when he was a legal assistant at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Thomas collaborated with PRRAC on the work of the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Since then, Thomas has become a national leader in multiple approaches to advancing fair housing and community development, including impact litigation, amicus participation, regulatory and legislative policy advocacy, and the provision of technical assistance to states, local governments, and public housing authorities.
Thomas will come to PRRAC from his position as Director for the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers’ Committee, where he leads the Project’s impact litigation docket, using the Fair Housing Act to foster the development of inclusive communities, expand access to opportunity, and fight displacement. Through this litigation, Thomas has engaged with pressing policy issues such as Housing Choice Voucher administration, public housing redevelopment, and exclusionary zoning. Additionally, he currently serves as Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School and previously taught a fair housing clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.
Thomas is an active member of multiple national coalitions, including the Alliance for Housing Justice and the Fair Housing and Lending Task Force of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Thomas has also spearheaded efforts to provide legal and policy support to grassroots housing justice organizers, building strong relationships with the Tenant Union Federation, the Right to the City Alliance, and Popular Democracy, among others.
Thomas has written extensively on the intersection of civil rights, housing, and land use, including publications in journalistic outlets such as Newsweek, SCOTUSblog, and Shelterforce, as well as academic articles in the A.B.A. Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law and the University of Baltimore Journal of Land and Development. Thomas has also published in PRRAC’s journal Poverty and Race: “Combatting State Preemption without Falling into the Local Control Trap,” 26:4 (2017) and “Negating Objections to Housing Decommodification through Strategic Tenant Movement Support for Comprehensive Economic and Social Rights,” 33:2 (2024).
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