Nick Valenzuela

A Los Angeles native who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, Nick Valenzuela worked a 20+ year career investigating housing discrimination complaints for non-profit fair housing advocacy & municipal government enforcement agencies, and all in tandem with the United States Department of Housing & Urban Development. He's fully-investigated several hundred housing discrimination & hate crime complaints; coordinated thousands of systemic & complaint-based rental, sales, mortgage lending, and insurance tests in auditing the housing industry; and, navigated administrative hearings, state & federal court litigation (including benchmark 6th Circuit Court of Appeals cases reaching the threshold of the United States Supreme Court), and conciliation / negotiated settlement agreements in order to resolve discrimination cases. In addition, Nick worked as a Building Commissioner and a Senior Planner for municipal governments in central Indiana. In 2018 he published his debut novel, Lack of Appeal, a quasi-memoir of literature based on his experiences in discrimination investigation.

Nick graduated from HUD's five-week National Fair Housing Training Academy as a certified fair housing investigator (the highest certification in the field) and has a liberal arts degree from the old Bellarmine College.

Lack of Appeal is the debut novel heavy in autobiography masked as literary fiction, featured in 24 countries' media and an excerpt published by the state of Indiana's Disability Justice & Violence Prevention Resource Hub (https://indisabilityjustice.org).

He's married to the county library director where they live in Indiana, and he constantly vows to read more books.