An Interview with the APA President: Angela D. Brooks, FAICP

During a time of extreme housing affordability challenges around the country, the American Planning Association (APA) is under leadership from a professional dedicated to delivering housing solutions. In the capacity of her day job, current APA President Angela D. Brooks is the director of director of the Illinois Program at the Corporation for Supportive Housing, a program with a track record of delivering high quality, mixed-use affordable housing projects. Brooks has brought that focus to her tenure as APA president as well, launching the APA’s Housing Supply Accelerator in January 2023 and co-authoring the APA’s “Housing Policy Guide,” published in 2019 during Brooks’s time as the AICP co-chair.

Planetizen is pleased to present the following interview, conducted with Brooks in 2022, lightly edited for clarity, and published in the front matter of the 7th Edition of the Planetizen Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs. The interview spans a career dedicated to housing, with lessons for leadership for the younger generations that will continue the work of ensuring quality, affordable housing for all Americans.

How do you describe your current professional work? What organization do you work for and what are your goals as a professional right now?

I am the director of the Illinois office for the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). We are a national nonprofit that provides solutions for permanent supportive housing. Our office does the Illinois Supportive Housing Institute, a four-month program of ten sessions teaching developers how to develop permanent supportive housing. Shelters and emergency housing aren’t our niche—we work for permanent housing, so you own your home. You’re going to have a lease in your name; you’ll have your own utilities.

Right now, we do a lot of contracts with state government entities to do work that they might not have capacity to do. Post-Covid, and with the great resignation, there are a lot of government agencies that aren’t able to hire to fulfill some roles that are much needed, such as ensuring people are getting housed. One of the things I like about CSH is that from day to day, and office to office, the work can be different, but at the end of the day, we do anything that falls under the permanent supportive housing niche. Here in Chicago, 80% of the people that are homeless, or unhoused, are African American. Only 20% of the city is African-American. So I’m looking at how to start removing systemic barriers to housing.

A lot of the current housing policy discussion revolves around zoning reform. Where does your approach to permanent supportive housing, especially focused on social justice and equity, fit into the larger scope of housing policy in the United States?

I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that because the APA (American Planning Association) is doing a lot about zoning reform. This might be one of the first times there is a direct correlation in the housing policy work I do, as a “houser,” and the more core planning skill set I trained for. Zoning is probably the largest contributor to why so many people need housing. Zoning started as a racist tool to promote segregation. In a lot of areas, like my native Seattle, lack of density and lack of land drove up costs.

At CSH, we are looking at doing a resource guide for planners on how to better support permanent supportive housing in communities. NIMBYism is real, and we see it probably more visibly with the encampments and clearing of homeless encampments, but when people hear about permanent supportive housing developments going up next door, you’re going to get a lot of pushback. We still have people pushing back against market-rate apartments. There are rural areas that have unhoused issues as well that aren’t doing their fair share. I hate using the term NIMBY (Not In My Backyard), but it’s real. How do we support people? How do we change the image of who needs to be housed and what that looks like? There’s a perception of who is homeless, and I probably had some of it myself when I started this work. But there’s a wide breadth of people, and I think Covid has demonstrated to a lot of us that a lot of people are literally two paychecks away from being unhoused.

With that said, in all communities, from the highest income to a lack of income, every human being deserves a decent, safe, affordable place to live. That’s kind of the model of my life and my life work—the diversity of what that looks like and how we can all live together. That’s kind of the work that I want to do. And hopefully the work that we are doing at CSH will really provide solutions for a wide breadth of folks.

How is the housing market different in Chicago than maybe it is in some of the places that sort of dominate the conversation, like San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York?

I live on the South Side of Chicago, where on any given day, I can look around and see acres and yards and feet of vacant land. When I go home to Seattle, I don’t see that. In terms of access to land in the city, there’s just a lot of land that can be developed that’s just not being developed. It gives us the opportunity here to look at how to change zoning and do comprehensive planning that supports the level of density that would support more housing options. That isn’t necessarily the case in areas on the West Coast and New York.

The reason we have so much vacant land is just bad policy decisions decades ago that have left a tale of two Chicagos: the South Side and the West Side look exceptionally different than the North Side. The city of Chicago has the Invest Southwest program, which looks at some of the systemic barriers in financing that have been contributing to the differences between those areas.

If you’re poor, it’s hard to live anywhere, but if you’re a middle-income person, Chicago is still relatively obtainable. That’s changing quickly, certainly.

As of January 1, 2023, you’re the president of the American Planning Association (APA). What is the mutual benefit of this organization to the profession?

As a member, I personally have benefited from APA from more of a student perspective—in getting mentors. As an emerging professional, particularly when I was living in Seattle, where there’s not a lot of diversity, I was able to get a more diverse network of people in the space. I haven’t always read Planning magazine or the PAS (Planning Advisory Services) reports, but as I got more senior in my roles, those are very, very helpful. The policy guides certainly have been helpful. The “Zoning for Equity” guide that just came out for comment will be a very useful tool for planners in general. The role of a professional organization, in my perspective (and ask me in a year; after I’ve been president for a year, this might change), should be supporting the members where they’re at. The hard part is we’ve got everything from people just starting to people just retired, so we’re working to meet people where they are and provide resources and support.

I’m really excited about the advocacy work APA is starting to do, being very intentional and getting people involved, not just on the state and local level, but at the federal level. We’re getting people to think beyond the partisan stuff to core issues that, I think everybody can agree, planning impacts.

When I see a project in Planning magazine or other projects that have been successful or demonstrate the priorities of the organization, it’s been really helpful to pull those examples, particularly now that part of my job is talking to politicians and lobbying around permanent supportive housing.

What are the lessons that you learned at graduate school in New Orleans that you’ve kept with you? Were there lessons that you weren’t able to learn until you were a professional?

I’ve been out of graduate school since 1999, so it’s been a while. For my first job out of planning school, I interned with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle. They had a brownfield lending project, which is what I did my final project on. So that was kind of cool, because I learned the finance piece on the job. I tell every student: do not walk out of school without understanding finance. Learn how to do a real estate pro forma, even if you don’t want to be a real estate developer. When you’re a traditional planner, somebody will come with a real estate deal, and you’re going to need to understand their numbers to see if they’re lying to you when you’re telling them what they need to implement in their plans. You’re still going to have to learn some on the job, but you can leave school and understand exactly what you need to know to have an impact.

I learned another lesson on my second job, permitting cell towers. This would have been in 2000, when nobody wanted cell towers (they probably don’t want cell towers now, but they particularly did not want them then). I left school prepared to be on the receiving end of a permit, not the submitting end. So I had to learn how to conduct a community meeting, particularly one when you’re building something with strong opposition. I knew the structure of those meetings, but I wasn’t necessarily prepared for the actual presentation of ideas. I walked out of school most able to understand site plans, for sure.

I’m glad to see more students doing internships. I was working and going to school, so I didn’t have the opportunity to do that. More and more planning programs have real world practicums and capstones— we didn’t have that 20-some-odd years ago.

Living in New Orleans, I got to learn a lot about historic preservation, which I wouldn’t have learned in Seattle because Seattle is pretty new. I walked away with the most knowledge of, and most appreciation for, preservation, which has come in handy living in Chicago and working in my previous role at the Housing Authority, working on sites that weren’t on the registry, but were very well on their way.

What have you learned about the differences between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors? What are the differences in the work, but also in the motivation or the skills required of those different kinds of jobs?

When I was doing permitting for cell towers, one thing I was grateful for was the AICP Code of Ethics, because I could pull that out for support. The bulk of my career has been in different government entities, and patience is the one thing I had to learn. I also had to learn that even if I’m the expert, I’m not the expert. So, I had to learn how to deal with local politicians and convince them that my expert ideas were theirs. Working with politics and with residents I had to learn how to work with people and build consensus. Some things are inevitably going to happen. I approach everything very directly: like “you may not like this but let’s be honest: this is going to happen, so what can we do to make it something you could live with?” Learning how to negotiate and not come off as a complete jerk is important. In some instances, I’m learning how to work with politicians and convince them of things I believe are important that might not necessarily be what they believe.

I’m really learning about community engagement and getting people whose voices aren’t usually heard in the room. I don’t think anybody has a solution for that.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with potential students in planning?

The thing that’s led me best in my career is to be really, really flexible. It’s helpful to create one of those cool little charts and plans of what your life may be, but as you progress in your in your career, and you meet people and you start getting your feet wet, opportunities might arise that cause you to move to an area you don’t think you want to work in. But you really want to roll with the punches and be flexible on where the journey can take you. Because at the end of the day, you get some great experience and even if you find yourself not particularly caring for what you’re working on, it’s experience that builds to something else.

I often say I’m kind of a master of all of all trades, or a jack of all trades, master of none, but, I feel like all of my random experiences led to a pretty well informed professional. If I had just stuck to the idea of being a planning director, I don’t know where I’d be—I would have been still sitting somewhere too scared to move or scared to do something else. So don’t be scared and really lean in.

The good thing about planning is we’re so interdisciplinary. If there’s something you’re passionate about, you can probably find a related job that makes a real difference. When I was permitting for cell towers, it wasn’t the most related to what I wanted to do, so I spent a lot of my time working on nonprofit boards and other community aid organizations that needed a planning skillset. There’s always a way to kind of build your resume both for pay and by volunteer work.

Brooks is the first Black female to be elected president of APA. She will serve two years as president, leading the 16-member APA Board of Directors in governing the association, setting strategic goals, and elevating the importance of planning across the U.S. This is a volunteer position. Read more about Brooks at the APA’s website.