As senior research fellow, Chris’s work focuses on how urban policy shapes metropolitan economies and their social, natural and built environments. In his previous role as RPA’s senior vice president and chief planner, he directed economic, housing, transportation and environmental research and planning. He led the research and policy development for RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan, a long-range blueprint released in 2017 for tackling systemic inequality and climate change, and modernizing the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region’s infrastructure and institutions to promote broadly shared health and prosperity. Most recently, his work has focused on how the tri-state region’s economy and future development will be shaped by changes unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Since joining RPA in 1994, he has led multidisciplinary initiatives and analyses to improve economic, social and environmental conditions in the tri-state region, including a federal Sustainable Communities initiative that included 17 cities, counties and planning organizations, a series of reports on the future of Long Island, alternatives for Manhattan’s Far West Side, plans for transit-oriented and community development throughout the region, and the economic and workforce development chapters of A Region At Risk, RPA’s Third Regional Plan.

Prior to joining RPA, Chris was the special assistant to the deputy mayor for planning and development in New York City and supervisor of forecasting for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. He has a master’s degree in urban planning from Hunter College of the City University of New York and a bachelor’s degree from the University at Albany.