President Joe Biden sent the nominations of Mark Colón to be assistant secretary for Community Planning and Development (CPD) and Solomon Jeffrey Greene to be assistant secretary for Policy Development and Research (PD&R) within HUD to the Senate for consideration.
Mark Colón is president of the Office of Housing Preservation at NY State Homes & Community Renewal (HCR). In this capacity Colón has overseen one of the largest, most diverse affordable housing portfolios in the country, with more than 450,000 units in 3,200 developments across New York State. Previously, Colón served as HCR’s acting “Disaster Recovery” counsel, helping to lead New York’s post-Hurricane Sandy housing recovery efforts, by designing policies for the award of more than $4 billion in federal, state and privately-sourced relief funding.
Prior to his government service, Colón practiced law at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett and Dechert LLP. He graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College/CUNY and received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review. Following law school, Colón clerked for the Honorable Julio M. Fuentes, the first Hispanic justice in the history of the Third Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals.
Colón is currently the Chairperson of El Puente de Williamsburg and a board member of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). Colón is a native New Yorker and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Gina Kim, and their 14-year-old son.
Solomon Greene is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, where he leads research on fair and affordable housing, land use, technology and inclusive growth and recovery in cities. Before joining Urban, Greene was a senior adviser at HUD, where he helped develop policies to reduce segregation and expand neighborhood choice. He was also HUD’s principal adviser on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Greene has also served as a senior program officer at the Open Society Foundations, an adjunct professor at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a law fellow at NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, a litigation associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson, and a law clerk for the Honorable Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Greene serves on the board of directors for the National Housing Law Project, the American Bar Association COVID-19 Task Force Committee on Evictions, and the advisory board for Up for Growth. Greene received his BA from Stanford University, his Master of City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and his JD from Yale Law School. He grew up in Ulster County, NY and currently lives in Washington, DC.
