City Geek: Alicia Glen on Loving New York and Playing All Sides
By Julia Gamolina
Alicia Glen is a nationally recognized expert in urban development, infrastructure finance, job creation, and housing policy. Additionally, she created and serves as the Chair of women.nyc, the first municipally sponsored initiative and platform designed to enable women to earn money, gain power, and achieve success. Most recently, she was named the Chair of the Trust for Governors Island.
As Deputy Mayor for New York City from 2014 to 2019, Alicia was responsible for growing and diversifying the City’s economy and creating a new generation of affordable housing. Her pro-business, pro-growth outlook included investing in emerging industries even as she continued to support traditional businesses. She championed the expansion of the arts, libraries and parks, and promoted new multi-modal transportation systems to keep New York City the global capital of commerce, culture and innovation.
Prior to being appointed Deputy Mayor, Alicia served as the Head of the Urban Investment Group at Goldman Sachs, spurring more than $5 billion of mixed-use development in New York and other cities, and financing innovative public-private partnerships, including NYC’s “Citibike” and the first domestic social impact bond. From 1998 to 2002, Alicia served as the Assistant Commissioner for Housing Finance for New York City. She is a graduate of Amherst College and Columbia Law School. In her interview, Alicia talks about loving and supporting urbanism in its many facets, advising those just starting their careers to work for the smartest people in the spaces and places where one can make a difference.
JG: You’re born and raised on the Upper West Side - tell me about how growing up in New York sparked your interest in the built environment.
AG: I’m very lucky to have grown up on the Upper West Side when the city was in a time of real transition. We’d just come out of an incredibly prosperous post-war period in the 50s and 60s, and the neighborhood was a place of intellectuals and political activism.
I grew up on Central Park West in one of these fabulous, grand buildings overlooking Central Park, and a block away from my house was a real concrete representation of the urban renewal programs of the 60s and 70s. I grew up very aware that the city was an incredible hodge-podge of building typologies, architecture, uses, and diversity in every meaning of the word, and the block I lived on was a microcosm of that - public housing, middle-income housing, beautiful old brownstones - and also had a diversity of people and spaces that ignited my love and curiosity for it.
Alicia at a rally in Washington Square Park, to support women in the workforce.
The unveiling of "Bella Abzug Park" in Hudson Yards - Alicia spearheaded the effort to name the park after Bella.
You then studied Political Science in college and went on to law school. What were you hoping to get out of both? What did you get out of both?
People nowadays are much more strategic about college, but I was lucky to go to a great liberal arts college and take classes that were interesting and that had the best professors.
I’ve always been interested in politics, but political science and politics don’t actually have very much to do with each other - you’re not exactly going to be reading Marx and Hume all day when you get out of school. Politics I learned on the streets, through my parents, and on the Upper West Side. I grew up hanging out with Bella Abzug near the subway, handing out leaflets for her when she was the first woman to run for mayor and was taken seriously.
I worked in city government after college, but I went to law school for both the right and wrong reasons. I looked around at all the people that I thought were awesome - my family is all made up of lawyers - and the bottom line is, at that point going to law school was about gaining the discipline to be a great writer and an analytical thinker. Being able to write and think clearly is a very important skill - reasoning and thinking through your arguments are dying arts. I went to law school not because I wanted to be a lawyer, but because it made sense to me.
You practiced as an attorney, then you were Assistant Commissioner, then you went to Goldman Sachs, and then you were Deputy Mayor. Tell me about your path.
I’ve had a very non-linear career path; I’m a big fan of non-linear. You gotta mix it up and take risks - otherwise your life is Dullsville and you won’t be that good at what you do. I realized that early - too many people are in one lane, but the highway is so big!
I’ve always been about cities, and urbanism, and making cities great - and you can do that in a million ways. I was a legal services lawyer representing tenants getting the shit kicked out of them, I was at the housing agency working on all housing types, I worked at Goldman Sachs investing in mixed-income, mixed-use transformative projects throughout the country, and also in minority-owned businesses. These are people and places we need to invest in, not just to support cities, but to support the American economy and the things we stand for. If we don’t support cities, and diverse people, this whole thing is coming down. And then I was deputy mayor and I can’t even begin to talk about what a great job that is because I got to do it all!
“Cities should celebrate who they are, and putting New York City back on the map as a great port city by helping people really enjoy our waterways and continuing to redevelop our waterfront...those are all my greatest joys.”
What are your take-aways from all of these experiences?
Everything is a battle. If you want to make change, or really move the needle, you better be ready to fight and to be unpopular. However, you also have to figure out how to drive consensus, so you have to learn how to take the fight, but ultimately how to make a deal.
That’s the difference between hardcore advocates and pragmatists. I want to get things done and what worries me now about what I’m seeing is a cancel-culture of, “Everything sucks, everything is terrible, we hate development.” You have to be passionate and opinionated and be prepared to piss people off, but you also have to listen enough to see where the chinks on the bricks are to find a place that gets you even 80% of the way there. Nothing is perfect - newsflash! You can bemoan it, or you can keep doing things and pushing the needle. Whether it’s the housing agenda, the innovation economy, the jobs agenda, finishing Brooklyn Bridge Park, developing Governors Island, launching the NYC Ferry - are all of these things perfect? Of course not! But they got done.
What’s an example of how you’ve compromised and pushed through?
With the new ferry system for example, critics said that we didn’t make it accessible to everyone. What we were doing though, is combining data of where people would actually use the ferry, with other social issues that we wanted to address. There’s always art and science to solving these problems, the vision and the data. So, what we said was, “Let us start with these stops, and we can add more as we go along.”
We also rezoned East Midtown, which was one of the most complex and important things that happened in New York in the past couple of decades. We were trying to balance the interests of the landmarks community who wanted to be able to sell their air rights under an as-of-right framework which would allow new buildings to be built, but we also wanted to make sure that the public was getting something from that density increase.
We were balancing three very interesting, and often competing, stakeholders. A lot of people said, “You need to make sure you have more money going into mass-transit for each incremental amount of FAR.” And we said, “Yes, but we also can’t demand too much because we then defeat the purpose.” Was it perfect, the formula, with respect to how much the public realm fund gets when a building is built there? I’m not sure it’s perfect, but we were able to make a deal that was not done in the prior administration because everyone was too strident in their positions, and nobody would give.
There’s no way to do every deal the same, but you understand that you need to know who the stakeholders are and what it is that you’re actually trying to accomplish. You do the best deal that you can that’s in front of you, or you can whine.
Alicia at an affordable housing announcement in her capacity as deputy mayor - the announcement that the office had far surpassed the city's all time record of affordable housing starts in one year.
Alicia speaking on a panel at The Wing on women in the workforce, with The Wing’s Co-Founder and CEO Audrey Gelman and other power women.
Given all of this, what have been the biggest challenges in your career so far?
There’s always been, and there continues to be, the veiled language that people use to undermine and challenge women. It’s still there in a very deep way. The press, for example, has often called me “difficult”, “pushy”, “a maverick”. It’s almost too trite to say, but all of these qualities are admired in men.
“Pushy” is “proactive” and “difficult” is “passionate” when applied to men.
The fact that this continues to happen to me, I find astonishing. Even after this next wave of issues around the deeply entrenched sexism in so many industries, the fact that the press continues to talk about it like that is mind-boggling to me.
Even in the way in which people talk about what’s possible for a woman in her career. Through all of my career, and I know of other women who have also been very successful in our field - development, real estate, finance - there’s been a sense of, “The world is not your oyster.” No matter how good you are, we have to fight tooth and nail for every next thing, and it’s astonishing to me that in this day and age it’s still the case. It’s probable less true for women in their twenties and thirties today, but it’s still pretty true.
Also for women, their failures are highlighted more than their successes. MaryAnne Gilmartin and I talk about this - any deal that you didn’t do gets more press than the deal that you did. The standards are different.
You hear a lot about men losing millions of dollars being entrepreneurs. Women can’t do that.
It’s like a badge of honor for men to have a start-up by the time they’re thirty and to lose their friends’ money. If a woman raised 50 million or 100 million on a good idea and lost it, she’d be burned at the stake, or, what’s even worse in my opinion, it would deter other women from trying to do it. It’s a two-way street, the results - people being less likely to bet on a woman, and women less likely to try. The gender bias is still unbelievable.
“Everything is a battle...you have to learn how to take the fight, but ultimately how to make a deal.”
How do you combat it?
I drink a lot of martinis [laughs]. In all seriousness, I get up every day, and I just double down. If you’re incredibly good at your job, the world should be your oyster.
Switching gears, what have been your biggest highlights?
The housing plan is one of the most astonishing accomplishments of the administration and certainly something I take a lot of pride in. It has changed the blueprint for housing for the next couple of decades, which directly links density and growth to affordability in a way that is a game changer.
The sceptics and the critics say that we should address only very very low-income New Yorkers, and I just disagree with that as a policy matter. I don’t want to be a city that doesn’t think it’s equally as important to house teachers and entry-level workers and other people who make the city great. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more every single day for low-income people, but that also is a battle, to make sure that low-income people can make more money. It’s not just about housing, it’s about economic advancement.
I’m also incredibly proud of the ferry system; I think it’s a game changer and it’s fun. Policy can be fun! Cities should celebrate who they are, and putting New York City back on the map as a great port city by helping people really enjoy our waterways and continuing to redevelop our waterfront, finishing Brooklyn Bridge Park - those are all my greatest joys. The park’s work has been incredible, a lot of the work I did with the cultural institutions to support a broader cultural ecosystem is amazing. What makes a city great? It’s the arts, the parks, and the open spaces.
Alicia announcing the launch of "She Built NYC" - the City's initiative to build monuments to great NYC women throughout the five boroughs.
Alicia firing up the crowd at the women.nyc launch party in May 2018.
What advice do you have for architects?
I love architects - I think that architects are always caught between wanting to build beautiful spaces and spaces that think about the way people live. Because it’s such an amazing field, architects put energy towards being the best and most visually fabulous, and winning the awards, but often not towards how architecture can also be driving projects that can act as catalysts.
At the end of the day, if you build one very expensive building in your career, maybe you win a prize and it’s a work of art - but don’t you actually want to be impacting more people’s lives? For example, how do we build the most efficient but still beautifully designed apartment for a mom and her three kids who are struggling? How do we do that in a way that respects the dignity of that family, and is also financeable? To me, the question is how do architects become the solution.
Since you mentioned designing for moms, how does being a mom influence your career?
I have two amazing daughters, and I can’t take any credit for that because that’s just how they popped out [laughs]. They’re super cool - my older daughter works on the Elizabeth Warren campaign and runs a region in Iowa, and my younger daughter is at the University of Chicago studying everything from theatre to law. They’re total urbanists, and for my daughter in Iowa, what is going on nationally today is so fundamental to how we’re going to make cities like New York continue to be great cities. My daughters have really been partners in crime with me - we’ve had a lot of fun.
“...how do we build the most efficient but still beautifully designed apartment for a mom and her three kids who are struggling? How do we do that in a way that respects the dignity of that family, and is also financeable? To me, the question is how do architects become the solution.”
What has been your general approach to your career?
I know what I love. I love cities, I love to make them better, I love urban walkability - I’m a city geek. For my own career, I’ve always been asking, “How can I play in the city ecosystem from all sides of the debate?” I was a better Deputy Mayor because I had worked on Wall Street, I was a better city official because I’ve actually been in housing court, I was a better Deputy Mayor because I’ve met women who are struggling to support their families. I was also a really big change agent at Goldman Sachs, because I brought to them my perspective and was able to fight tooth and nail to get the resources I needed at Goldman to do important work.
My career has really been to play all sides of it without fear of being stereotyped. When I worked at Goldman Sachs, everybody hated Goldman Sachs more than anything on the planet, but that’s pretty short-sighted because learning how to move the needle in places like that is important. When I worked for Rudy Giuliani, no one on the Upper West Side talked to me, but I said, “Better I’m there than someone else he would have hired!” You have to be risky, you have to do things that people won’t like.
Finally, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers?
Find what you love and work for the smartest people in the spaces and places where you can make a difference. And then just keep making risky choices. Don’t get too comfortable. I left a job at a law firm to go work for Rudy Giuliani as Assistant Commissioner, I left Goldman Sachs to go work for some guy named Bill de Blasio, who at that point I’ve only met twice in my life, and I quit my job recently and no one has any idea what I’ll do. All that is pretty risky, and people thought I was nuts! But I did all of those things because I knew I could go make a difference. Sometimes the most counterintuitive choice is the most rewarding choice. If you’re smart, and you’re good, and you have great friends, and you know how to make a great martini - you’ll be ok.