As one of New York's leading voices for community-based development, Brad Lander has spent his career standing up for affordable, livable, and sustainable communities in Brooklyn and throughout New York City. Brad has run programs and helped to change city and state laws that have created and preserved thousands of units of affordable housing, strengthened local small businesses, and helped hundreds of low-income New Yorkers find living wage jobs.

Brad directs the Pratt Center for Community Development, which works for a more just, equitable, and sustainable city for all New Yorkers by empowering communities to plan and realize their futures. He also teaches community planning, housing, and urban policy in Pratt's graduate city planning department. Brad served for a decade as executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, an award-winning, not-for-profit community-based organization in Brooklyn that develops and manages affordable housing, creates economic opportunities, and organizes tenants and workers to fight for a better community. Brad serves as the Housing Chair of Brooklyn's Community Board 6, on the board of directors of the Jewish Funds for Justice, and as a little league coach in the 78th Precinct Youth Council. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago, University College London, and Pratt Institute. Brad lives in Park Slope with his wife, Meg Barnette, the Director of Finance and Operations at the Brennan Center for Justice, and their children, Marek and Rosa, who attend Public School 107 in Brooklyn.

As director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, Brad works with community leaders, city government and non-profits to preserve and strengthen neighborhood quality-of-life, promote sustainability, and create opportunity in low-income neighborhoods. Under his leadership, the Center's successes include winning community-sensitive zoning in Bedford Stuyvesant, preserving affordable housing for public housing residents on Staten Island, convening a new grassroots coalition dedicated to transit improvements in low-income neighborhoods, and helping to create new parks as part of a greenway along the Bronx River.

Brad led the campaign to create New York City's "inclusionary zoning" program during the rezoning of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront and Hudson Yards in 2005. As a result, developers who want to build larger buildings must set aside 20% of all new apartments for low- and moderate-income tenants.

In 2006, Brad worked with housing advocates and members of the New York City Council and State Legislature to require developers who claim tax breaks to set aside 20% of units for affordable housing and pay their building service workers a living wage. Together, these reforms will save the City hundreds of millions of dollars, and generate over 20,000 units of affordable housing in the years to come.

Before joining Pratt, Brad helped create and preserve more than 1,000 units of affordable housing and hundreds of living-wage jobs as the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), an award-winning, not-for-profit community-based organization working in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, and Sunset Park that creates economic opportunities, and organizes tenants and workers to fight for a better community.

At FAC, Brad oversaw the construction of limited-equity cooperatives and rentals for working-class families, supportive housing for people with AIDS, and first-time homeownership opportunities.

Brad's work at FAC helped to preserve and renovate dozens of neighborhood buildings facing abandonment after the real estate recession of the early 1990s. FAC purchased these buildings from the City of New York, or out of foreclosure. In some cases, tenants were able to purchase their buildings as low-income co-ops. In other cases, FAC successfully pressured banks and landlords to provide services to tenants.

In a successful effort to bring street life back to abandoned areas, Brad worked with small business owners throughout the 1990's to bring them into the ground floor of FAC properties. This work helped to save long-time neighborhood businesses like Joe's Shoe Repair of Union Street.

In 1999, in response to the eviction of two 89 year old sisters, Carmen and Felisa Soto, the Fifth Avenue Committee launched the Displacement Free Zone - a campaign to prevent landlords from evicting families and seniors who had kept the neighborhood alive throughout the recession. The campaign was successful in preventing the eviction of dozens of Brooklyn families. This campaign also generated the idea for a "Good Landlord, Good Neighbor" tax credit for small building owners that rent their units to neighborhood tenants at affordable prices.

Brad's team at FAC developed groundbreaking programs to secure good jobs for low-income Brooklyn residents. Red Hook on the Road, a program to train unemployed and underemployed Brooklyn residents for living wage jobs as commercial truck drivers, and Brooklyn Networks, a partnership with NYC College of Technology to help place people leaving homeless shelters, welfare or incarceration into skilled jobs as cable installers, have placed more than 1,000 New Yorkers in full-time living-wage jobs.

Brad stood up for neighborhood residents who were struggling to get by on low-wage temp work and being gouged by for-profit temp agencies (in some cases paying them less than the minimum wage).

With the help of Good Shepherd Services, FAC launched FirstSource Staffing, a non-profit temp agency that aimed to place people into decent jobs at decent wages. FirstSource Staffing has placed more than 1,200 candidates who have worked more than 300,000 hours for more than 300 employers and become a nationally-recognized model for turning temporary assignments into good jobs.

Brad's record of standing up for livable communities, affordable housing, and good jobs has been recognized with awards from the Ford Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, American Planning Association NYC Chapter, New York Magazine, and the Prospect Park YMCA.

Brad serves as the co-chair of the Housing & Human Services Committee of Brooklyn's Community Board 6, on the board of directors of the Jewish Funds for Justice, as policy co-chair of Housing First!, and on several panels advising the City of New York on public policy issues. He holds two master's degrees - one in City and Regional Planning from Pratt and a second in Social Anthropology from the University College London. He also holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago.