Erika Poethig

About Erika Poethig

Erika Poethig is the Executive Vice President for Strategy and Planning at the Civic Committee and Commercial Club of Chicago. In consultation with Civic Committee and Commercial Club members and senior executive leadership, she leads the development and execution of a comprehensive strategic framework and action plan for the Civic Committee and Commercial Club reflecting their distinctive roles in strengthening Chicago’s and Illinois’ economic future. Working with colleagues and key partners, she develops strategies and helps to advance initiatives on immediate and emerging issues and challenges – education, public safety, transportation, economic development, inclusive innovation, business diversity, and state/city finances – that bolster economic opportunity and social mobility in Chicago, in an effort to make our region a better place for everyone to live, work and do business.  

From 2021 - 2023, Poethig was the Special Assistant to the President for Housing and Urban Policy in the White House Domestic Policy Council. In this capacity, she led interagency policy development on the housing and community and economic development components of President Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda. Under her leadership, the Biden-Harris Administration created results-oriented action plans and new policies to prevent evictions and foreclosures, increase the supply of rental and for-sale housing, improve housing affordability for low- and moderate-income Americans, address racial and ethnic bias in the home appraisal process, reduce unsheltered homelessness and ensure federal infrastructure investments result in more equitable development. 

Prior to joining the Biden-Harris administration she served as vice president and chief innovation officer at the Urban Institute, where she created and led the Research to Action Lab, an innovation hub serving decisionmakers and creative thinkers eager to effect social change.

Before joining Urban, Poethig was acting assistant secretary for policy, development, and research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. During her tenure in the Obama administration, she was also deputy assistant secretary for policy development and was a leading architect of the White House Council for Strong Cities and Strong Communities. As associate director for housing at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, she developed grantmaking strategies focused on rental housing policy and research and research on how housing matters. In the 1990s, she was assistant commissioner for policy, resource, and program development at the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing and developed Mayor Richard Daley’s campaign to combat predatory lending, prevent foreclosures, and stabilize communities.

Earlier in her career, she was associate project director of the Metropolis Project of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which produced the Metropolis 2020 policy and action agenda to address major issues faced by metropolitan Chicago.

Poethig serves on the Harris Council, the Advisory Committee for the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Low Income Investment Fund’s board of directors. 

She was a Phi Beta Kappa member at the College of Wooster, a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna, and has an MA with honors in public policy from the University of Chicago. In 2022, she received a Career Achievement Award from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.