Vicki Been

Vicki Been, Weinfeld Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, is also a Faculty Director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. She is one of the nation’s leading scholars on the interplay of land use, urban policy, property law, and housing. Professor Been has taught at NYU since 1990 but took leaves to serve as New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development from May 2019 until the end of 2021, and commissioner of housing from 2014 to 2017. In those roles she designed and implemented many of the land use regulations and housing policies that her scholarship explores and confronted the tensions between protecting property rights and achieving social justice, so she brings both practical experience and theoretical grounding to debates about property law, the affordable housing crisis, and land use policy.

As deputy mayor, she led 20 agencies and mayoral offices and a team of 30,000 people in financing the new construction and preservation of 200,000 homes on budget and two years earlier than promised; securing the first comprehensive rezonings to redress the lack of affordable housing in resource rich neighborhoods; revamping leadership at the nation’s largest public housing authority and securing unprecedented resources to rehab the Authority’s aging housing stock; introducing innovative community engagement models to secure more robust and inclusive resident involvement; supporting and stabilizing the city’s artists and arts and cultural organizations during the pandemic; designing and implementing strategies to expand the city’s life sciences industries; securing the city as a key port for the construction and servicing of offshore wind energy; and visioning the development of Governor’s Island as a world-leading climate mitigation research and demonstration center. As Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development for the City of New York, Been led the 2400-person agency in designing and implementing Housing New York, a comprehensive strategy for addressing the City’s affordable housing crisis.

Professor Been’s extensive research has focused on state land use reforms, the effects of housing supply constraints, inclusionary zoning, community benefit agreements, gentrification, tenant protections, and racial and economic integration.