Students at the University of Michigan Law School are able to submit Notes for consideration for publication in the Michigan Law Review. The Res Gestae will be interviewing student authors whose Notes will be published in Vol. 123 of the Michigan Law Review to ask them about their experiences writing and submitting Notes.
If there’s one thing Nat Jordan loves, it’s a good fight. Not the kind that gets you thrown out of Skeeps on a Saturday night, but the kind that changes the way people live, work, and — most importantly — where they can afford to live. His Michigan Law Review Note, Growing the “Heartland”: Towards an Economic Fair Housing Act does just that.
Before he was drafting legal scholarship on housing equity, he was just a kid from Cape Elizabeth, ME, unknowingly prepping for his future in advocacy. Growing up in a well-off town with virtually no affordable housing, he didn’t think much of it — until he did.
During college, Nat was home for a local town hall meeting about a proposed affordable housing project. He arrived to a packed room — so packed, in fact, that he had to stand in the back. He quickly realized he was the youngest person there by about 30 years.
“I remember the feeling of looking over a bunch of heads of white hair,” he recalls. And then the public comments began. People decried the proposal as an eyesore, a blight on their idyllic town. But one woman’s testimony changed everything for him. A single mother, she explained that she and her kids lived in the only affordable housing complex in town — a centuries old building now infested with mold. If this project didn’t go forward, she would have to move her children out of their school district.
“That woman was what incited me to join the fight,” Nat says. He got involved with Cape Citizens for Affordable Housing, trying to push the project through. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as local opposition killed the project, but the fire was lit.
It got him thinking: What more could he do? The answer, as it turned out, was go to law school.
At Michigan, Nat has stayed busy — not just with legal research, but with anything that let him advocate for something he cared about. He was a 2L representative for the Law School Student Senate (LSSS), running entirely on a platform to fix what he calls the “death march from Jeffries to Hutchins” (a.k.a. the missing crosswalk between the two buildings). He is also involved in mock trial and the Innocence Clinic, which he calls “one of the best things I’ve done in my life.” Through it all, he stayed passionate about housing and land use, spending a summer at a Boston firm working on real estate and land use cases. But at the end of the day, public defense remains his true calling.
That passion for advocacy naturally extended into the classroom. Professor Noah Kazis’ Local Government course (his favorite class at Michigan) got him thinking about how he could contribute to the conversation on housing and land use.
He reached out to Professor Kazis during his 2L year, pitching a few ideas for his Note. Eventually, he found inspiration in an article by Richard Kahlenberg proposing the Economic Fair Housing Act — a proposal to add economic status as a protected class under the Fair Housing Act.
In essence: Right now, landlords cannot discriminate based on race, but they can reject tenants simply because they use housing vouchers. Nat’s Note argues that economic status protections could be a logical extension of existing anti-discrimination laws.
And, let’s be real — “People are tired of high housing prices. We know that intimately well in Ann Arbor.”
Nat had one major advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it): he wasn’t on Michigan Law Review. He simply decided to write a Note because he was passionate about it. That passion carried him through a long process — outlining, research, multiple drafts, and months of editing. His summer after 2L year? Spent clocking 70–80 hours refining his Note. Giving a huge shout out to the cite checkers and Notes editors — “they brought my Note back from the dead.”
Despite his deep interest in housing policy, Nat has decided to pursue public defense after graduation. “I like fighting for people who have been forgotten in between the lines.”
But housing and land use will always be part of his work — just maybe not in the courtroom. “Housing advocacy will be more of a personal project for me as a private citizen.”
So, if in 20 years, you see a groundbreaking economic fair housing policy making waves? Don’t be surprised if Nat Jordan had something to do with it!
Editor-at-Large Lana Charara can be reached at lanac@umich.edu.
