Purnima Kapur, executive director of the Department of City Planning, will leave the de Blasio administration by the end of August to take a consulting job at Harvard University.
Kapur worked at the department for 28 years and led the Bronx and Brooklyn offices before becoming the executive director in 2014 after Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected, according to Crain’s. Policy initiatives under her tenure included Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, which requires developers to include permanently affordable housing units in their projects if they receive increased density through a rezoning.
Kapur will work as a planning consultant at Harvard, which is planning a big expansion into Boston’s Allston neighborhood. She will also work as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Kapur told Crain’s she was surprised by how hard it had been in her role to get neighborhoods to accept rezonings.
“I was a little bit taken back by the intensity, even though people had been asking for more affordable housing for years,” she said. [Crain’s] – Eddie Small