Biography
Marjorie Murray is President and CEO of the Center for California Homeowner Association Law (www.calhomelaw.org). She founded the Center in 2002 to protect seniors and the disabled from discrimination and financial abuse by homeowner associations. Its first goal was to initiate state legislation to strengthen the consumer and civil rights of homeowners living in California’s 52,000 associations. The Center’s continuing concern is high-risk owners who are seniors or are monolingual or limited English speakers.
The Center now trains Legal Services and private bar lawyers, homeowners, and the staffs of fair housing agencies in the complex laws governing associations. In 2009 the Center was nominated for the American Bar Association’s Ralph M. Brown award for its access to justice work.
Trained as a policy analyst at UC Berkeley, Ms. Murray has decades of experience in housing policy, public finance, and the law. At the California Department of Housing, she worked with cities and counties to bring their affordable housing plans into compliance with housing element law. At the Century Freeway Program in Los Angeles she negotiated with lenders and the secondary markets to provide mortgage financing for the thousands of homes built under the program’s federal Consent Decree arising from Keith v Volpe, 352 F. Supp. 1324, 4 ERC 1350 (C.D. Cal. 1972)
Fannie Mae then hired her to set up the first public finance department in its Los Angeles Western Regional Office. The department aided local governments in issuing credit-enhanced bonds to finance the construction of thousands of units of multi-family housing throughout Fannie Mae’s Western Region comprising 11 Western states.
Ms. Murray is the author of countless articles published in policy journals and on the web. Her BA cum laude is from College of Notre Dame, Belmont. Her graduate degrees are from the University of California, Berkeley.