Our People
As a Senior Planner, Paula works on a range of community-based planning and economic development initiatives at Pratt Center. Recent projects include Bridging Gowanus, a year-long effort to engage local stakeholders in a participatory planning process and create a planning framework to address key questions about future growth and change in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. She also led a five-organization partnership that designed a planning process and convened stakeholders to discuss the future of industrial Brooklyn, culminating in a two-day event that set new priorities for the future of the borough’s manufacturing sector. This effort helped bring about a broad-based coalition of affordable housing and manufacturing advocates who are currently addressing issues of mutual importance and working together to ensure low income communities get the most out of the de Blasio administration’s affordable housing plan.
Currently Paula is working on a study of the Bathgate Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) in the Bronx; an industrial policy brief about IBZs and mixed-use zoning in New York City; and a community-based climate resiliency plan for public housing in Gowanus and Red Hook. Paula serves as the Coordinator of the Center’s graduate student Fellowship program and the Taconic Fellowship, which gives faculty and students from various departments at Pratt Institute opportunities to engage in community-based work.
Paula has a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a Master's degree in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute and has been a planner at Pratt Center since 2002.