Roberto G. Quercia directs the Center for Community Capital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is also professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies.

Quercia leads major research projects in the areas of low-income homeownership, mortgage lending, subprime and predatory lending, and financial services issues. He is principal researcher on an evaluation of a secondary mortgage market initiative for community reinvestment loans funded by The Ford Foundation. The multi-year evaluation is also examining the impacts of homeownership relying on a longitudinal survey of low-income borrowers. The first ten years of this research are summarized in the recently published book  "Regaining the Dream: How to Renew the Promise of Homeownership for America's Working Families" (with Allison Freeman and Janneke Ratcliffe).

Quercia has conducted extensive research on neighborhood dynamics and poverty for government agencies, municipalities, community organizations and private entities, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Congressional Budget Office, General Accounting Office, Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. He has published numerous articles, primarily on the topics of low-income homeownership, affordable lending and the assessment of lending risks, and homeownership education and counseling.

He currently serves on the editorial boards of Housing Policy Debate and Housing Studies and on the Research Advisory Council of the Center for Responsible Lending and has held appointments at the University of Texas, the University of California at Berkeley, the Wharton Real Estate Center (University of Pennsylvania) and the Urban Institute in Washington, DC.  Dr. Quercia has a masters degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.