Graciela Watrous

MBA '20

Graciela Watrous (HBS 2020) is an urban policy leader who has dedicated her career to affordable housing and community revitalization efforts across the public and private sector. A native of Brooklyn, she is passionate about making cities work better for the people who live in them.

Graciela began her career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. She took that finance background to the City of Detroit, where she led public-private partnerships in the city’s Housing and Revitalization Department under Mayor Mike Duggan. In this role, Graciela facilitated the strategic sale of city-owned and vacant land to private developers, helping create hundreds of new units of affordable housing. She also led planning studies to center community perspectives in development project and assisted in international negotiations to ensure maximum benefit to Detroiters from U.S.-Canada infrastructure developments.

After getting her MBA at Harvard, Graciela served as VP of Property Strategy at a Softbank-backed joint venture investing in transformative infrastructure projects in urban centers, before pivoting to her current role as the founding employee of an affordable housing acquisition firm based in New York City. As the most senior acquisitions professional at Contour Housing Partners, she deploys capital to preserve affordable housing properties throughout the United States.

Graciela earned her BA from Stanford University. In her spare time, she is a writer, musician, and urban explorer.