Frank Ford

Senior Policy Advisor

Fair Housing Center for Rights & Research



Frank Ford is Senior Policy Advisor at the Fair Housing Center and serves as Chair of the Greater Cleveland Vacant and Abandoned Property Action Council (VAPAC). He is an attorney who has worked in the field of community development for over 40 years. From 2013 to 2022 Frank was Senior Policy Advisor at the Western Reserve Land Conservancy where he led VAPAC policy initiatives and conducted housing research focusing on disparate impacts on people of color communities. In 2013 a research study he led on the outcomes of property emerging from foreclosure was published by Harvard University. From 1999 to 2013 Frank was Senior Vice President for Research & Development at Cleveland Neighborhood Progress (CNP) where he directed CNP’s Land Assembly, Vacant Property Reform and Neighborhood Stabilization Initiatives. From 1991 through 1998 Frank was Associate Director for Urban Programs at the Colorado Center for Community Development at the University of Colorado at Denver where he taught community development and conducted applied research. In Denver he published one of the first studies in the U.S. to document racial disparities in lending to small businesses – this study was cited by Attorney General Janet Reno in her Martin Luther King Day speech in Birmingham, Alabama in 1997. A study he conducted on home mortgage lending discrimination was the subject of a news story aired by Tom Brokaw, NBC Nightly News in 1993. From 1986 through 1990 Frank served as Executive Director of the Union-Miles Development Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1986 he litigated the first case under Ohio’s Nuisance Abatement Property Receivership Law. Frank graduated from Kenyon College with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English, and received his Juris Doctor Degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.