Get to Know NYCHA Leadership: Say Hello to Bomee Jung

Bomee Jung joined NYCHA as Vice President for Energy and Sustainability on July 6.

Prior to that, she served in various leadership positions at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., a national leader in greening affordable housing, and on the City’s Planning Commission.

During her tenure with Enterprise, Bomee is credited with securing New York City’s adoption of the Enterprise Green Communities Criteria as its required standard for affordable housing; designing and managing a Weatherization Assistance Program joint venture that piloted a portfolio- based model; and leading Enterprise’s Sandy initiative, which developed tools for long-term resiliency of multifamily affordable housing.

In 2002, Bomee founded GreenHomeNYC, a volunteer-driven not-for-profit that promotes sustainability. In her first career, Bomee developed Internet-based applications for digital agencies and start-ups.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Japanese from the University of Georgia and a master’s in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and serves on the board of Asian Americans for Equality, Inc., a city-wide affordable housing organization.

What is your mission here?

I lead the team responsible for the development of an Authority-wide, comprehensive sustainability agenda in support of NextGeneration NYCHA. The Department of Energy and Sustainability was recently reconfigured and realigned under Capital Projects to provide a better platform to pursue a broader sustainability mission. This mission includes providing a comfortable and healthy indoor living environment for residents, as well as managing energy, water, and waste effectively.

What are your early impressions coming here?

To support the success of NextGeneration NYCHA, we now need to develop a comprehensive sustainability agenda to get us back on top as the largest and best housing provider in the City. We have incredibly dedicated staff here and I know many of them will have great ideas about how to meet our four core sustainability challenges of healthy indoor environments, energy, water, and waste management.

What changes lie ahead for your area?

We’ve invested many years in building strong energy competency. We’ll need to re-invest there, both at the central office and in the field, applying the same discipline to these other three key sustainability areas: indoor environments, water, and waste management. At the same time, we’ll first need to perform a sustainability inventory to take stock of all the work we are doing across the Authority, and with the NextGen goals in mind, make smart decisions about how to best support the ambitious goals of the Mayor’s “One City, Built to Last” plan for sustainability.

What related programs here provide additional opportunities?

The FEMA-funded Superstorm Sandy recovery program provides an opportunity to improve not only the storm resiliency of the affected developments but also to invest in systems that will perform better every day.

How would you describe your management style?

I spent my formative professional years in the technology industry, where a high value is placed on collaboration and transparency as the best protection against the inevitable errors that individuals will make. I also learned that the important thing is not to design the perfect product, but to design the product you can ship quickly to your users so that you can get real-world feedback and iteratively improve the product.

In a similar way, my mission in NYCHA requires working with and coordinating the efforts of many departments to do more of the things that work for us and fix the things that don’t work for us. When it comes to indoor environments, energy, water, and waste, I see my team’s role as more like connective tissue than muscle. We’re here to support the interaction of the big muscles—Capital Projects, Operations, and Community Programs and Development— to work together toward a shared vision of sustainability at NYCHA.

How will you obtain the cooperation of residents for efficient use of resources?

People usually make reasonable decisions based on their options. It is critical to have a strong working partnership with residents as well as external organizations. Rather than asking residents for “changes in their behavior,” our job is to provide a better set of choices. For example, it’s very common in New York to open windows when it’s too hot in January, but this actually makes it colder in the lower-floor apartments and wastes energy. We can do a campaign to ask folks not to open windows (and we may very well ask), but if the apartment wasn’t too hot to begin with, there would be no need to open the window. Certainly trust and communication are key, so a part of our challenge is to always build trust and communication, even when we’re in really challenging circumstances.

Bomee has invited employees to email their sustainability ideas to: Bomee.Jung@nycha.nyc.gov.