Robert Schafer

Robert (Bob) Schafer, 83, long-time resident of Belmont, MA, passed away peacefully in Austin, TX on April 1st, 2026. Bob was the deeply devoted husband of the late Penelope “Penny” Schafer, loving father of Karl Schafer (Maura Murnane), and beloved grandfather of Una Schafer.

He lived a long and rich life, during which he accomplished a great deal – working for civil rights in the South with the Tuskegee Institute Community Education Program and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, helping to found the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review as one of its first Editors in Chief, and playing a key role in reshaping the program in City and Regional Planning at Harvard’s Design School. Bob was an Associate Professor at Harvard’s Design School and a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing. Outside of academia, he was a partner at Csaplar and Bok for many years, before becoming general counsel at Suffolk Construction and working in private practice. He published numerous books on discrimination and housing inequality, including Discrimination in Mortgage Lending (MIT) and Housing Urban America (Routledge), worked for community development and affordable housing in the Boston area with organizations like
CHAPA and DBEDC, built a beautiful summer home in Maine, and (late in life) helped to oversee the construction of a new town library as a member of the Belmont Public Library Building Committee.

Bob was the first member of his immediate family to go beyond high school in his education but went on to study Physics at Yale (MS 65), and Law and Economics at Harvard (JD 68, PhD 73), receiving post-graduate degrees in all three. Into his eighties, he continued writing and researching – publishing a new book on gerrymandering with the American Bar Association just a few years ago, and teaching after retirement at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.

Bob’s keen observational skills, critical intelligence and strong sense of personal decency will be missed dearly, as will his quiet courage over the last few years in his long battle with Parkinson’s. The family promises to continue his work making his granddaughter Una a Red Sox fan.

A celebration of his life with a reception to follow will be held at the First Church in Belmont, Unitarian Universalist, 404 Concord Ave. Belmont on May 29, 2026 at 11am.

In lieu of flowers, we appreciate gifts in memory of Bob to the Belmont Public Library  https://belmontpubliclibrary.net/   or the First Church in Belmont, Unitarian Universalist  https://www.uubelmont.org/

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