Harris Alumni Manage Big Government Budgets to Affect City Policies

Recent Harris School of Public Policy alumni are helping governments and their agencies navigate big money, big stakes funding challenges as they work on bond deals to finance affordable housing and infrastructure in Illinois and stabilize neighborhoods in Detroit.

Although it may not always be glamorous (these jobs come with a lot of paperwork), the nitty-gritty of municipal finance has an outsized impact on cities and the lives of their residents.

Straight from Harris Public Policy, Patrick Curry, MPP’23,  joined the Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA), where he is a debt and liability management analyst; Briana Diaz, MPP’24, went to work for the Illinois Governor’s Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) as a financial analyst; and Christina Shaw, MPP ’23, headed to Detroit, where she is an associate debt manager for the city.

“The jobs that these alumni have gone into are really high impact with a tremendous amount of responsibility very early on,” said Professor Justin Marlowe, who leads the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance. “They have all been part of teams on big borrowing transactions, which ultimately have major implications for taxpayers.”

Shaw, for example, worked on Detroit’s first competitively sold general obligation bond since its bankruptcy more than a decade ago.

“We get to fund some of the city's most foundational and critical work,” said Shaw, who has been working on projects including the $250 million in Neighborhood Improvement Plan (NIP) bonds the city issued to remediate urban blight, including by stabilizing and demolishing vacant homes. 

The 2021 issuance (which was followed by another in 2023) won the Bond Buyer’s Midwest Deal of the Year award.  “More important than winning an award,” she said, “these bond issuances funded work that fundamentally transformed the city landscape. Being able to secure financing for this work at the right time was critical.”

“The story of Detroit going from bankruptcy to an investment-grade city is truly amazing,” she added. “Now I get to work with people who charted this path forward for the city, which is an incredible opportunity.” 

These municipal finance jobs allow alumni to use much of what they learned at Harris, Marlowe said.

There are the basics of municipal finance, of course, Marlowe said, because they need to understand the mechanics of the debt issuance process. But, he added, there's also a political economy lens to this.

“One thing we do particularly well at Harris is give students a structured way to think about when, how, and where politics matter,” he said. “When and how these governments choose to borrow money and what they borrow money for are not random decisions. Those are political decisions, and the people who really thrive in these roles are mindful of the political context in which they're working.”

Shaw gets to see that political context at the City Council meetings she attends. Curry, who worked in politics for five years after earning his undergraduate degree, said he didn't view a jump to municipal finance as a career change. “I more thought of it as the next step in a continuation of what I consider working in public service and politics,” he said. 

While “incredibly important,” municipal finance is not an industry most people know much about, Marlowe added. 

Curry, who today works on a range of projects including single family housing bond deals that can top $400 million per issuance, said before arriving at Harris he didn't know what municipal finance entailed and “definitely didn't know about municipal bonds.” 

“If it wasn't for the municipal bonds class at Harris, I wouldn't be working in what I'm working in,” he said. “My boss even told me during my interview that it is so rare for people to have any knowledge of municipal bonds that my having taken a class on it was a huge plus.”

Shaw, too, hadn't considered municipal finance before Harris. 

“I was interested in urban development,” she said. “But it was at Harris that I realized that urban development and municipal finance go hand in hand.”

Most Harris students, Marlowe said, are interested in making a difference in communities. “And generally, when you think about making a difference in communities, you think about working on policy solutions and policy ideas,” he said. “However, after they arrive here, many students quickly realize that what really makes a difference is who's paying for what and where and how the money is coming and going.”

That was the case for Diaz.

“I had a whole career before I came to Harris, largely working in education policy,” she said, “and the reason that I ended up moving into municipal finance was that in education, we were always just downstream of somebody else's budget.”

Diaz worked for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, which partnered with Chicago Public Schools. 

“We kept having these conversations that were like, ‘We'd love to do X, Y, Z policy that the data shows is effective, but we have no money.’ And I thought, ‘OK, let me go figure out how we make money for the school district and then we can figure out how to best utilize it based on what the data shows works,’ ” she said. 

“I had no idea where the funding came from. I had no knowledge of what a municipal bond was at that point,” said Diaz, who now finds ways to finance big spending projects for the state, such as for roads and facilities.

Harris has many resources to help students explore a newly acquired interest in municipal finance, including the Center for Municipal Finance, which is perhaps best known for its groundbreaking work on property taxes, its weekly Public Money Pod podcast, and for the Harris Policy Innovation Challenge, a student competition in which teams will compete to design solutions for revitalizing Chicago’s downtown.

“A big part of what we do at the Center is try to be an interface to the municipal finance industry,” Marlowe said. Thanks to a robust network of alums, students who show any interest in the industry can talk to industry leaders. “I think that makes a really big difference,” he added. 

What other career doors do such public sector roles open?

People in these jobs may get recruited to work at investment banks or for ratings agencies or even for investors who buy municipal bonds, said Marlowe, adding that municipal finance is a “really great career path.”

“I feel very lucky that the stars aligned for me,” Diaz said. “I was still young enough to go back to school at Harris and make this career pivot in a way that allows me to feel like I am still on my path toward making a difference. And what I would say to my policy friends is ‘you need to know how all this municipal finance stuff works because it affects you.’ It’s so central to policy. It is the fulcrum on which all policy spins.”