 I started going to planning commission meetings, which are very different in the small town environment that I experience in the city planning department of my hometown in western Colorado. I'm Emily Hamilton. I'm a research fellow here at Mercatus. When I was in undergrad, I fell into an internship in the city planning department of my hometown in western Colorado. While I was there, I started learning a lot about urban policy and the land use regulations that shape what's allowed to be built in our cities. I started going to planning commission meetings, which are very different in the small town environment that I experience there from what I've seen in DC and Arlington. But nonetheless, in both environments, tons of land use regulations stand in the way of landowners putting their property to its best use. Following undergrad, I came to the Mercatus MA fellowship. When I was in that program, I had more opportunities to learn more about urban policy and to get into the weeds on all sorts of state and local public policy issues. After the Mercatus Masters fellowship, I worked briefly in the private sector and then returned to Mercatus. I've been on a bunch of different teams here from the student program side then to working on our outreach team. Then I worked for several years as a program manager commissioning research from our network professors and overseeing Mercatus's review process for that research. And then nearly two years ago, my colleague Selene Firth joined Mercatus and we started the new research project that we call Urbanity to use the tools of GMU economics to study how policies are affecting issues like housing affordability and the potential for cities to grow and accommodate more exchange over time.