Nicole Lindler ’06 proudly calls herself a “housing warrior” — an advocate who believes that housing is a right, not a privilege. She’s made that belief the mantra for her career, starting as a real estate broker assisting low-income buyers after she graduated from the USC Marshall School of Business, then pivoting to housing policy.
After working as policy advisor to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Lindler was tapped to take her passion national. Over the summer she was appointed to serve in the Biden-Harris Administration as the senior advisor for Intergovernmental Relations at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Secretary Marcia Fudge. Her responsibilities include representing HUD by maintaining and building relationships with local, state and tribal officials across the United States.
“The most important thing to me right now is the opportunity to meet this moment, under the leadership of President Biden and Secretary Fudge, who’ve made it clear that affordable housing is a big priority, and to make sure that all Americans have safe, stable housing,” Lindler said.
Warrior Victories
Lack of affordable housing is a daunting problem. “Across the nation,” Lindler noted, “we are short approximately 7 million homes for the lowest-income renters and about one in every seven households are housing cost-burdened or struggling to maintain housing.”
Lindler, a first-generation American whose family arrived in the Bay Area from Jamaica, brings a lifelong passion for housing rights and more than a decade of experience to her new role. She most recently made some major inroads as policy advisor to Mayor Breed for three years.
“One month into my appointment,” Lindler said, “I was put in charge of a project where the mayor had an ambitious goal to open and create 1,000 new shelter beds — something that no elected official in the last 30 years in San Francisco had attempted — and given two years to do it.”
At any given time, there are 4,000 people who are living on the streets in San Francisco. That means Lindler took on a project to shelter a quarter of them. It sounds kind of crazy, she admits, but by February 2021 they nearly hit their mark, having opened over 800 beds and built three new shelters from the ground up.
“We would have gotten completely to 1,000 had the pandemic not hit,” Lindler said.
Her North Star
Lindler’s mother immigrated to the United States when she was 14, some years after her grandmother had made a home in the Bay Area. “My family had always invested in real estate and rented to Section 8, low-income tenants. There was always this altruistic view of housing in my family — the understanding that in order to survive in America you have to have a roof over your head, you have to have stable housing, and where you live matters.”
Housing is a requisite for success, Lindler believes. “Had I not had stable housing, or had I not been in a decent school district,” she said, “I don’t think I would necessarily be where I’m at today. I truly believe that is the only reason I was able to go to USC. So, for me, it became this North Star, especially as a Black woman or a Black child, that everyone should have access to housing stability.”
At USC Marshall, Lindler studied international marketing. “I love that Marshall really showed very different sides of the coin of social economic class. I had to learn a lot about diversified localities and cultures and how businesses run locally versus globally. That was all part of what really inspired me to do socially sustainable work.”
After graduation, Lindler got her real estate license and began selling shortly after the economic collapse in 2008.
“I like to call myself a housing warrior because I like to run toward the fire,” she said. “And I saw an opportunity in the community, especially in South Central, when everyone was losing their homes and people were crying out for help. I took the opportunity to help people that were in desperate situations save their home and, on the flip side, to help people become first-time homeowners.”
After six years, she returned to the Bay Area and worked for various nonprofits helping the lowest-income people procure housing. She later went back to school and earned her master’s degree in public affairs at UC Berkeley, where she focused on housing policy, and landed at the mayor’s office and now HUD.
Lindler has some advice for Marshall students: “You have to be open to the possibilities. I can honestly say that I never imagined in a million years that I would be invited to be in any presidential administration.
“For anyone at Marshall who’s wondering where their career will go, be open to the possibilities because it could be beyond your wildest dreams.”
