School of Planning, Design and Construction

Nat M. Zorach is a teaching specialist in the Construction Management program in the School of Planning, Design and Construction. After undergraduate internships in planning and economic development, he began his career in earnest as a designer-in-residence with conceptual artist Theaster Gates, Jr. working on community development in St. Louis, before transitioning to working in Chicagoland and Detroit on real estate finance and construction management in affordable housing and adaptive reuse. Having worked with Southwest Solutions, the City of Detroit, Exelon, and Consumers Energy, he helped develop the Detroit Home Mortgage program and the Detroit Climate Action Plan as well as a number of utility decarbonization programs. He most recently worked for ADL Ventures, a national venture developer and consultancy, developing a national strategy for affordable housing development using modular and industrialized construction, and recently celebrated more than a decade of writing on sustainability and urbanism as The Handbuilt City.

He has participated in two German-American professional exchange programs including the EU-funded Post-Carbon Cities of Tomorrow (POCACITO) program in 2016, and a sustainable mobility study program with the German-American Chambers of Commerce in 2017. He became a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow in 2020, and was an Urban Land Institute Larson Fellow in Detroit in 2023-2024. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College in 2010, his city planning credential in 2020, and received his MBA from American University in 2021.

When he isn’t thinking about the equitable decarbonization of the built environment, he is an avid cyclist and looks forward to his next RAGBRAI  (450+ mile bike ride across Iowa). He is also a fan of reading, dogs, cooking, and (a whole lot of) music, and volunteering for a number of initiatives working to build a more sustainable and just built environment.