Kristen Smith '03
Co-Liaison, Association of Black Princeton Alumni (ABPA)
Kristen N. Smith is Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Chicago, IL, focusing her practice on commercial real estate and community development finance. Previously, she was an attorney in Holland & Knight’s Chicago office, working on multifamily affordable housing finance matters. She has represented institutional lenders providing debt financing and investors providing equity financing in the construction and preservation of affordable housing developments eligible for low-income housing tax credits.
As a former Affordable Housing Fellow at New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and a former Assistant General Counsel at the New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC), Kristen has a wealth of experience working with city, state, and federal agencies on affordable housing transactions involving tax credits, tax-exempt bonds, and multiples sources of subsidy funds throughout the United States. She is a current board member of Ascendent, a community development corporation serving the East Harlem neighborhood in NYC. She is also currently a board member of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
Kristen graduated from Princeton in 2003 with a BA in Anthropology with Certificates in Latin American Studies and Spanish Language and Culture. She received her JD from Boston University School of Law in 2007. Kristen is also a former Princeton Project 55 Fellow in Chicago at Bethel New Life and has been an active member of the Princeton AlumniCorps community in each city she has lived in - Boston, New York, and Chicago.