Our Team

Vicki Been is the Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, an Affiliated Professor of Public Policy of the NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and Faculty Director at NYU Furman Center. She returned to NYU in February 2017, after serving for three years as Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development for the City of New York. In that capacity, she led the 2,400-person agency to finance the preservation or new construction of 62,500 affordable homes, secured the passage of the nation’s most rigorous yet flexible mandatory inclusionary housing program, changed the way HPD approached neighborhood planning, revised the policies and procedures for the allocation of affordable housing financed by the agency, and streamlined and updated many of the agencies processes.

Vicki, who has been on the faculty at NYU since 1990, focuses her scholarship on the intersection of land use, urban policy and housing. She has done extensive research on New York City’s land use patterns, inclusionary zoning, historic preservation, the interplay of community benefit agreements with land use practices, and on a variety of affordable housing and land use policies, including gentrification, mortgage foreclosure, racial and economic integration, and the effects of supportive housing developments on their neighbors. She also writes about environmental justice, the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the taking of property without just compensation, and international protections for property owners. She is the co-author of a leading land use casebook, Land Use Controls. 

Vicki is a 1983 graduate of New York University School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden Scholar. She clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the Southern District of New York and for Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States.