Meet Joy Sinderbrand, Senior Vice President for Capital Programs 

For nearly two decades, Joy Sinderbrand has been instrumental in the execution of several public-private partnership projects that have shaped the city of New York; she has a knack for ensuring project teams are on the same page so they can achieve ambitious goals.  

As NYCHA’s Senior Vice President for Capital Programs, streamlining the agency’s capital project processes and leveraging best practices across project teams is at the top of her agenda.  

“My new role is rationalizing the work of the [former] Capital Projects Division, which used to have projects in various parts of the division,” said Ms. Sinderbrand. “What we’re doing now is taking all of the major capital projects and putting them in the same vertical. The idea is that whether it’s Recovery and Resilience, internal project managers or external program managers managing the projects, our processes have to be consistent, and our culture and priorities ought to be consistent across these groups.”  

From August 2016 until last summer, Ms. Sinderbrand was NYCHA’s Vice President of Recovery and Resilience; she managed the execution of projects associated with Superstorm Sandy recovery and preparing the agency for future climate change impacts. To date, about $2.7 billion of work has been completed at the developments most severely affected by Superstorm Sandy; 100 previously vulnerable buildings are now protected from storm surge and nearly 10,000 apartments are served by back-up power generators thanks to these efforts. 

“The idea that public housing should be a top priority for New York City is so important,” said Ms. Sinderbrand about her interest in public service. “You still have New Yorkers who appreciate public transportation and public libraries and public parks but don’t have the same appreciation for public housing. So part of our mission is the actual work of maintaining safe and healthy homes, and the other part of our work is getting New York City residents to value public housing as much as they value other public assets – so that they can be our allies and our advocates for funding when it’s needed.” 

Ms. Sinderbrand’s new role comes at a unique time of organizational transformation. Prior to the restructuring of the Asset and Capital Management division, which is headed by Chief Asset and Capital Management Officer (CACMO) Shaan Mavani, Ms. Sinderbrand said a variety of leadership styles, structures, and processes existed. Her job now is to ensure that best practices “go outside of each department and cross over so that everybody can benefit from them.”   

She said having Capital and Real Estate under the CACMO doesn’t necessarily change the work of Capital Programs: “Rather, it gives us a better opportunity to be strategic with where we invest our time and our resources…if a development is going down the path of PACT or the Trust, or if we have funding for a particular component, we need to be able to coordinate that work – we don’t want to invest where the needs can be addressed with other funding.”  

With Capital Programs and Asset and Capital Management under the same umbrella, Ms. Sinderbrand and her team are working to clear bottlenecks that have made it hard for project managers to get their work done; that involves strengthening existing partnerships across the Authority to meet NYCHA’s goals.  

For Ms. Sinderbrand, her new role is a “bit of an evolution from simply project delivery to really thinking about the systems that allow for successful project delivery…being able to take that step back and think about how to make the whole NYCHA machine work better is a really exciting opportunity, especially right now as the Transformation Plan is being put in place and as additional resources are coming to bear.”  

She believes now is a perfect time for NYCHA to “put its foot on the gas and do everything that it’s been doing before but do it more efficiently and better.” 

Before joining NYCHA, Ms. Sinderbrand spent a few years consulting on public-private partnerships. She has spent most of her career in government; she was at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for nearly seven years, working on the redevelopment of the World Trade Center and Penn Station. She also worked for the NYC Department of Transportation and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.  

She holds a joint Master in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland Honors College. As a third-generation Brooklynite, she’s raising her two children to care about long-term investment in NYC’s infrastructure.