Sara C. Bronin is an architect, attorney, founder of the National Zoning Atlas, Freda H. Alverson Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law Schooland pioneering immediate past Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Bronin is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts in property, land use, zoning, and historic preservation law. Her most recent publication Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, is an eye-opening exploration of one of the little-known levers that controls our world—zoning codes—and a call-to-arms for using them to improve American society at every level.

In December 2023, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development Secretary Jake Day announced the appointment of Assistant Secretary Cat Goughnour. She serves at the helm of the Agency’s new Division of Just Communities, an unprecedented and data-driven effort by the State of Maryland to reverse decades of disinvestment in communities that have experienced redlining, urban renewal projects, high incarceration rates and disproportionate exposure to environmental and health hazards. As of June 2025, 419 of Maryland’s 1,463 census tracts have been designated for $400M in priority funding—representing 17 counties and the City of Baltimore.

This event, hosted by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Holstein Program in Ethics, will engage participants in a reading of Key to the City. Afterwards, Bronin will join Goughnour in a dialogue moderated by Thomas V. Mike Miller Director of Civic Engagement Patrick Nugent that reflects on the 115th anniversary of Baltimore Ordinance 610, Maryland’s first-in-the-nation policies and nuanced legacies of exclusion ahead of the American semiquincentnnial in 2026 and beyond.

The Starr Center extends is deepest gratitude to the event sponsors: Maryland 250 Commission, Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture, Maryland Center for History and Culture, Maryland Humanities, Preservation Maryland, Washington College’s Office of Intercultural Affairs, Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project, the Needle’s Eye Academy, the Bookplate, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, Kent Attainable Housing, and Rebuilding Together Eastern Shore.