Janell Byrd-Chichester

Janell Byrd-Chichester currently serves as the General Counsel of the National Fair Housing Alliance.  She previously was the Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), from May of 2019 until May of 2022.  As the Director of the Marshall Institute, she led the staff in the production of social science research, public education materials and trainings, and led the development and implementation of targeted advocacy campaigns on issues ranging from the racial wealth gap, foreclosures and evictions, and the concentration of race and poverty to algorithmic bias, COVID-19 disparities, and the Census.  She also managed LDF’s national and seven state focused voter education, advocacy, and election protection efforts for the 2020 primaries and general election.

Prior to her role at LDF, Ms. Byrd-Chichester was the Chief of Staff at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) from October of 2014 to January of 2019. In that role she had broad leadership responsibility advising the Director and senior executive staff on substantive policy and regulatory matters and on management and operations.  Her leadership roles included the establishment of the Office of Fair Lending Oversight at FHFA, the development and implementation of the Multi-Year Language Access Plan, launch of the Mortgage Translations Clearinghouse, addition of the language preference question on the Uniform Residential Loan Application, revisions to the Enterprises’ Uniform Deed of Trust and Note, review of automated underwriting criteria and alternative credit scores, development of principles of corporate governance for the Enterprises in conservatorship, development of a policy and process for internal agency decision making, and the inclusion of the residential economic diversity provisions in the Duty to Serve rule.

From 2010 to 2014, Ms. Byrd-Chichester was a Partner at Mehri & Skalet, a Washington, D.C. law firm, where she developed and led a practice in fair housing, fair lending, and consumer protection in mortgage lending.  Ms. Byrd-Chichester was lead or co-lead counsel on consumer protection and fair housing cases, including class actions, involving the adequacy of disclosures of private mortgage insurance, lender receipt of private mortgage insurance premiums under captive reinsurance plans, lender special forbearance plans, REO maintenance and marketing, testing of lender compliance with non-discrimination provisions of the Fair Housing Act in loan originations, and compliance with the design and construction requirements of the Fair Housing Act in Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments.  She also served as counsel of record for national civil rights organizations on a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief regarding standing to sue under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and as plaintiffs’ counsel in a lawsuit regarding the impact of reverse mortgages on surviving spouses.

Ms. Byrd-Chichester is a graduate of American University and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she served as an Associate Editor of the California Law Review.