Executive Director

  
    Maeve Elise Brown is Executive Director of HERA. She has 19 years of experience as a public interest attorney, starting in Southern California at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. She then joined the staff of the East Bay Community Law Center, first as a staff attorney, then as director of the Housing and Economic Development Units. While at EBCLC, Ms. Brown was lead organizer and founder of People's Community Partnership Federal Credit Union, a community development credit union. Thereafter, Ms. Brown joined the staff of National Housing Law Project where she directed the Section 8 Homeownership, Predatory Lending, and Rural Housing Foreclosure Avoidance Initiatives, providing training and technical assistance nationally. Ms. Brown has published articles on affordable housing issues and authored a chapter in the American Bar Association’s Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development.


  
   

HERA's Board of Directors

  
   

Elizabeth A. Renuart (President) is an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC). She is a nationally-recognized consumer law expert who focuses on predatory lending, truth in lending, consumer credit and sustainable homeownership issues. She co-authored two of NCLC's treatises, Truth in Lending and The Cost of Credit: Regulation and Legal Challenges, as well as NCLC Report: Credit & Usury. She is the principal author of the new Stop Predatory Lending: A Guide for Legal Advocates. Ms. Renuart advocates on behalf of low-income consumers before the Federal Reserve Board, HUD and other federal agencies. She teaches consumer law to legal services, private and government attorneys and other advocates around the country. She has been a legal services attorney since 1977.

Elizabeth Clark (Vice-President) is an attorney who has worked extensively with clients in real estate, land use, banking and commercial transactions and is now counsel with Fitzgerald, Abbott and Beardsley, in Oakland, California. Previously with the Wendel Rosen law firm, Ms. Clark has received commendations for her volunteer work, including serving as supervising attorney for the Low Income Eviction Project for Landlords for the Alameda County Volunteer Legal Services Corporation. She received the Individual Distinguished Service Award in 2006 from the Alameda County Bar Association and was named Volunteer of the Year in 2004 and Mentor of the Year in 2006 by the Alameda County Volunteer Legal Services Corporation. Ms. Clark is admitted to the State Bar of California, the New York State Bar and the U.S. Virgin Islands Bar.

Scott Chang is an attorney specializing in representing plaintiffs in fair housing cases. For more than a decade, Mr. Chang has been a frequent workshop trainer and speaker at national fair housing conferences and events. Before entering private practice, Mr. Chang was a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Santa Clara County. Thereafter, Mr. Chang managed his own practice and represented both individual clients and fair housing organizations in a variety of housing discrimination cases. Throughout this time, Mr. Chang made available his expertise to several non-profit legal service providers throughout California, serving either as primary or co-lead counsel on seminal fair housing cases of which some have resulted in published decisions. Mr. Chang has served on the State Bar of California Standing Committees on Federal Courts and the Delivery of Legal Services, and he is a past president of the Silicon Valley Asian Bar Association. In 2005, Mr. Chang joined Relman and Associates, a civil rights law practice in Washington D.C.

Arthur Levy has 25 years of litigation experience in business and financial services litigation. He is a business litigator whose practice has historically focused on environmental, insurance and securities cases. More recently, he has served as lead counsel for consumers in class actions and unfair business practice cases in the financial services area, most notably cases against Mercury Insurance Group, Infinity Insurance Company, Eastwood Insurance Services, IKON Business Solutions, Xerox, and Bank of America. He has been lead trial counsel and tried several significant cases in the consumer, environmental, real estate and securities fields. He has also been active in alternative dispute resolution, serving as a neutral for the San Francisco federal and state courts for the past several years. A native of San Francisco, he attended Reed College and holds an M.A. in economics from The Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1980, where he was a member of the California Law Review and Order of the Coif. His 25 years of litigation practice include associate positions at Morrison & Foerster and Collette & Erickson in San Francisco and nine years as a partner at Ewell & Levy before co-founding Levy, Ram & Olson.

Roxanne Romell is a private attorney, based in Oakland, California. Her areas of expertise include tenant law, commercial real estate, and residential real estate law. For the last 10 years, she has operated her firm with a focus on social justice for low-income tenants. She is licensed to practice in the United States District Court, Northern District of California, as well as California State Court and is a member of the Women Lawyers of Alameda County, National Legal Aid & Defenders Association, East Bay Tenant's Bar Association, ACORN and local bar associations in the East Bay. Her litigation experience includes representation of 39 low-income, immigrant families in a habitability case against a slumlord who owns 18 properties in Oakland, and representation of four Chinese-American families in a suit against a multi-millionaire developer.