Una Corbett talks about her MPhil in housing policy and her work in US federal and state government on social policy issues.
Una Corbett’s MPhil focuses on finding solutions to the housing crisis which is affecting many countries, including the US, UK and Canada.
“I’m really interested in housing supply which is a vital issue in terms of affordability. We need to build more homes of all kinds. I am particularly interested in land use and zoning,” says Una [2025].
While she is passionate about the dynamism and cultural richness of cities, she is very aware of the growing inequality within many of them as the cost of living continues to rise and that housing is a key factor.
That has resulted in a rise in homelessness and other social and economic problems in countries around the world. While there are several overlapping elements of the housing crisis around the world and there is disagreement on how to fix them, Una says that since almost everyone acknowledges it is a major issue that we need to work on, there is some potential for consensus building.
Through her MPhil dissertation, she has been keen to explore different ways to incentivise action on housing in the US, looking at case studies in New Zealand, Canada and the UK as well as US states like California. For instance, she looked at New Zealand’s upzoning approach which enables more multifamily housing, resulting in lower housing costs. She has been keen to explore what is stopping people building houses where they are needed.
She has a particular interest in California, having worked on policy for the state’s Governor as well as, before that, on education policy in the US federal government under Joe Biden’s presidency.
Childhood
Una was born in New York City and grew up in the suburbs. Her parents are now both retired, but her mother was a librarian and her father was an editor. She says they were both very informed and encouraged her and her older brother – who is an ornithologist – to be curious about the world and aware of what was going on. She also recalls spending lots of time in nature with her brother, with him studying birds and her exploring.
Una caught the politics bug early on. She remembers being very excited at the age of 10 to watch a primary debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. She didn’t really understand what they were talking about, but she was very keen to try. She says she had a sense early on that politics was something everyone could be an important part of and was energised by the idea of being able to have a say in who became president when she grew up.
At high school she became very involved in the Model UN – it gave her an opportunity to learn about politics and meet other kids who were also interested as well as to do public speaking. Una ended up running her school’s Model UN club and learning about political debate, building coalitions, strategising and reaching a consensus. “I learnt that it was intense, but it could be fun and intellectually stimulating,” she states.
University
Una finished school in 2016 and voted for the first time. Graduating in 2020, she says her undergraduate years were bookended by Trump’s first election term. Having witnessed the huge swing from Obama’s administration to Trump’s, she was aware that things can change quickly which spurred her to work on the Biden campaign. When she started her undergraduate degree in history and literature at Harvard, she knew she was interested in policy and advocacy work.
She was very passionate about women’s issues and she focused on women’s history and social movement history, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, in her academic work. “I was always interested in how history is alive in the present,” she states. Her senior thesis was on the 100th anniversary of the women’s right to vote in the USA and how political actors in 2020 were using the anniversary for their own purposes. She says it’s important to explore the historical forces behind current policy issues and political debates.
During her vacations Una worked for a feminist nonprofit in her first summer and in her second in a museum on Capitol Hill focused on women’s suffrage history. The summer before her senior year Una interned for the Democratic National Committee. She had been a member of the College Democrats organisation throughout her time at Harvard and took part in election campaigns, making phone calls and knocking on doors, including in nearby New Hampshire. In 2020 she campaigned in Pennsylvania, a swing state where the vote was very much divided. Despite it being ‘the hardest job I’ll ever do’, Una loved it. “I got to really connect with people,” she says.
Because of Covid, a lot of the campaigning was done remotely which Una says was the hardest part of the job. But in the last one and a half months, with a lot of safety measures in place, Una was able to do in person campaigning which she found very rewarding. She met people who had been Democrat campaigners for years. “I got to connect with people from very different walks of life, but who shared one goal,” she states. Her team worked across two counties and managed to flip one back to Biden from Trump. It was exciting because Pennsylvania was such a key state in the election campaign – Joe Biden’s projected win in Pennsylvania secured him the necessary electoral votes to win the presidency. “It was a remarkable moment,” says Una, “and showed me how important it is not to give up on people and to keep trying to reach them.”
Government policy
Working on the campaign was her first job after graduation. At the age of just 22, she then joined the presidential transition team and then the administration in Washington DC. Una worked as Confidential Assistant to Secretary Miguel Cardona at the US Department of Education and says it was a privilege to do so. “It was a very challenging time for education as schools were reopening,” she says, “but there was also so much thought being put into how to channel relief dollars into innovation to make things better for students.” She travelled around the country visiting schools and seeing how federal funding was being used and how policy decisions were affecting people’s lives. A big focus was on how to embed young people’s social and emotional learning more holistically, for instance, through extracurricular activities, organised sport and a community schools-based approach.
After a year and half, Una took up a Fulbright scholarship she had been awarded after finishing at Harvard, but had delayed due to the pandemic and her work in politics. So in 2022, she went to Western Sydney University for eight months to do research on gender and higher education, taking a historical look at how tuition-free universities in Australia in the 1970s enabled more women to enter higher education for the first time. Una spoke to women from that era and young women today.
When she finished her research in 2023, Una moved to California to join her partner who works in the technology sector. She was drawn to the policy arena and felt California offered a lot of potential to do innovative work, given it is the fourth largest economy in the world and looks at innovation on a huge scale. She took up a job doing research and communications work for the Governor of California and she learned a lot given her role involved speaking to experts across government. “I got to work with brilliant policy strategists at the forefront of building policies to address people’s needs. It also showed me where the gaps in my knowledge were,” says Una.
It is those gaps, particularly in economic policy, that led her to her MPhil in Public Policy at Cambridge. She chose Cambridge because she was keen to get an international perspective.
She says she has very definitely benefited from the international nature of the MPhil she did, getting a broad range of perspectives on the housing problem. This was aided by being in classes with people who had actually worked on policy issues in different countries. “That was very valuable as different levers work in different contexts,” she says.
Her humanities background has also been useful as she began her research by trying to understand the historical context of the current housing crisis and the unintended consequences of previous policies. “Every policy professional needs to have some historical understanding of how we got to where we are today,” says Una.
She adds that Gates Cambridge has been an important part of her time at Cambridge and speaks about how friendships with scholars from other disciplines has shaped her to think more expansively about her own work.
Post-MPhil, she will return to California to work as a policy consultant for a number of organisations. Una says it has been good to take a step out of the policy world, but that her studies are always rooted in practice. “I am excited to go home and get stuck into policy again,” she says.
