Regina Myer, A.B. ’82, M.U.P. ’84, leads sustainable regrowth in Brooklyn using skills honed at U-M.
After earning a Master of Urban Planning from the University of Michigan in 1984, Regina Myer returned to her native New York City to work as an intern in the city planning department. Over the next four decades, she would become one of the Big Apple’s most successful urban reformers.
In various executive-level roles, Myer has been instrumental in developing thousands of units of affordable housing, transformed abandoned industrial sites into bustling business and cultural spaces, and created urban green space as a core component of her revitalization strategy.
Driving true transformation in America’s largest metropolis requires boldness, political acumen, and a broad skill set. An urban planner by training, Myer is also a deft dealmaker. Environmental steward. Open space visionary. Housing champion. Fundraiser. And much more.
“For me, urban planning is really about being an ‘expert generalist,’” says Myer, who for the past eight years has served as president of the nonprofit Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. “It’s being able to learn what tools are out there, master them, and apply them in different situations. That’s what I was trained to do. My education at Michigan prepared me for a really amazing career in New York City.”
Growing up on Long Island, some of Myer’s earliest memories “about loving New York City” come from helping out at her parents’ liquor store in Manhattan. “It was an amazing opportunity to learn about Midtown through the eyes of someone who ran a mom-and-pop store,” she says. “It made me hyperaware of how New York City worked, not just from a business perspective but from
a transportation perspective.”
As a high-schooler, Myer wanted to leave the East Coast for college. She landed at the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) Residential College, where she would earn a bachelor’s degree before being accepted into the master of urban planning (M.U.P.) program. Myer loved her time in Ann Arbor. She was the music director at WCBN-FM, met her husband on campus, and eventually the couple would send a daughter to U-M. “Ann Arbor to me was an incredible time,” she says. “Even though it was a small town, it was a fun place to live and very walkable. I never drove in my six years in Michigan. I got around by foot, bike, and bus like everyone else.”
Myer studied urban planning during the 1980s when many cities were reeling from disinvestment. She examined affordable housing with the late Professor Kate Warner and other urban issues with faculty members including Allan Feldt, Hemalata Dandekar, and Doug Kelbaugh.
“These are all people who made a huge impression on me,” she says. “They really believed in the importance of urban life at a time when that economic model was really being questioned. And I feel like they impressed upon me how important it was to continue to work within urban systems, to make them better, to make points of growth, to see points of positivity.”
After U-M, Myer spent 22 years with the New York City Department of City Planning, the final seven years as director of the Brooklyn Office. Throughout her municipal career, she had to balance the pressures of private development with neighborhood planning — a balance she says she was prepared for largely due to her education at U-M.
Myer was at the forefront of developing affordable housing in Brooklyn, leading a rezoning effort in Greenpoint/Williamsburg that saw developers voluntarily make at least 20 percent of their units affordable. “The Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program the city now has in place was modeled after the successes we had,” she notes.
In 2007, Myer took the opportunity to serve as president of the nonprofit Brooklyn Bridge Park Corp., which the city created to reclaim 85 acres of abandoned industrial waterfront for recreational space and to reconnect residents to the waterfront. “I really felt like I could figure out how to build the park,” she says. “It had been in the planning stage for about 20 years and when the city and state needed to identify the person to build it, I figured out that I could be that person.” Over her nine-year tenure, Myer proved that she was, indeed, the right person by raising over $200 million, establishing multiple public-private partnerships, and ultimately creating what
The Bridge: Brooklyn Business News calls “an iconic vibrant cultural and recreational destination.”
She’s seeing similar successes during her tenure with the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, including the 2024 opening of Abolitionist Place Park, which provides vital green space in a rapidly developing area. Still, she says there are challenges ahead — including significant post-COVID vacancy rates in Brooklyn’s office and retail space — that she’ll continue to address using an extensive set of tools and skills first honed in Ann Arbor.
“To the extent that I understand planning as an exercise in being both an expert generalist and having the ability to understand systems and how they relate to one another, that’s certainly something I was prepared for because of my time at U-M,” she says. “When you think about it, we have an absolutely wonderful architecture school at Taubman College, but it’s the planners and the urban designers that understand how to take the beauty of specifics and bring them to a larger context.”
