Steven Hornburg is a national housing strategist, with over 20 years of experience in housing and mortgage finance policy and practice. In 2001, he founded Emerging Community Markets (ECM), a practice focused on expanding housing and mortgage finance opportunities for people and communities not well served by private markets. His current work involves affordable housing, housing finance, homeownership education and counseling, workforce housing, subprime lending and predatory practice, regulatory barriers, community development, fair lending, smart growth finance, and HUD programs.

Prior to founding ECM, Hornburg established and headed the Research Institute for Housing America (RIHA), a new independent think tank founded by the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. RIHA's mission was creating knowledge, through research, that expands housing opportunity -- particularly for underserved populations and communities. Before heading RIHA, Hornburg was Senior Director of Policy for Fannie Mae and the Fannie Mae Foundation, where he managed the corporation’s and foundation’s policy research agenda, including lead responsibilities for the first eight years of Housing Policy Debate and the Annual Housing Conference.

He has extensive experience in housing and urban issues at both federal and local levels. His national policy experience started in 1983, when selected as a Presidential Management Intern with the Department of Labor. Hornburg then served as a policy expert for Congressman Stan Lundine and later as chief advisor on housing and mortgage finance, community development, and transportation for Senator Lawton Chiles on the Senate Budget Committee. Prior to his Washington experience, Hornburg managed housing and community development programs in local government.

Hornburg has served as a Harvard Fellow with the Joint Center for Housing Studies, an adjunct professor in the Urban & Regional Planning program at the Virginia Tech College of Architecture & Urban Studies, and is on the advisory boards of Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research (published by HUD) and the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. He has remained active in local housing affairs, including serving as past chair of the Housing Commission for Arlington County, Virginia, his current home.