Kate Ascher
“Identifying what kind of place you want to work in, what is going to be the currency of your day-to-day job, and more importantly how much support are you going to have from the organization in learning what you don’t know, is really important.”
#GirlWhoBuild, Meet Kate Ascher.
Besides leading large scale development and urban planning projects as a partner at BuroHappold Engineering Group, Kate is also a published author of several books and a Milstein professor of Urban Development at Columbia University. Throughout her career, she has held a variety of incredibly impressive public and private sector roles, such as the Executive Vice President of the New York Economic Development Corporation and the Assistant Director of the Port at the Port Authority of New York, to name a few. Her work continues to shape the development of major infrastructure and master planning projects in New York City. Kate sat down with ArchNative to discuss her career path, her favorite project, and her advice for women who are starting their career in real estate.
You received your Bachelor Degree in Political Science at Brown University and your Master Degree and PhD in Government at the London School of Economics. What made you decide to choose real estate and urban planning as a career path instead?
I wouldn't really say that it was chosen. It kind of happened over time, like a lot of these things do, as a result of a series of choices. I didn't really start in real estate. I had never wanted to be a Political Scientist, so that was not really what my career was about either. I took economics, I took history, I took law, and I ended up with kind of a lukewarm political science major in college - not enough credits to graduate with a full major in it because I was interested in so many topics.
When I did my Doctoral degree, I was not in school full time. I was working as a management consultant, so really school was a part time undertaking. It was just an excuse to be in London and what I studied isn't relevant at all to what I do day to day. At that time, I wanted to know about business, it wasn't about real estate. It was about things like market research, strategic planning, and acquisitions. I didn't want to go to business school, but I did want to learn about business. I ended up doing urban planning and real estate later. From consulting in London, I went to the Port Authority and worked on infrastructure – which I was very interested in. So it was typically a series of incremental decisions after a certain number of years in a job that ended up leading me to where I am today.
Do you think that the work you had done while working at the management consulting company prepared you for your role in urban planning and real estate?
Not at all. Nothing I took there prepared me for what I do today. I wouldn't say that I didn’t enjoy it, and I wouldn't say it wasn't a growth experience, because it gave me a lot of self confidence in understanding the way the world works. Whether it's the way that politics work internationally, or its the way big business works, it's helpful to understand. That's why I feel I can trade between disciplines relatively easily and put things together: I understand the private side by having worked in business, and I get the government side by having had studied government and worked in government. So I wouldn't say that it had no value, but I wouldn't say that it prepared me directly. For example, I never studied zoning or urban design or real estate finance; that was all picked up pretty much on the job.
Was that shift to urban planning and real estate difficult?
Not really, because I always had a particular spine that I could trade on. When I went to the Port Authority to do infrastructure (I was doing a bit of aviation and shipping),I knew the business parts, and I learned the infrastructure parts on the job. I took that knowledge of infrastructure subsequently to jobs in corporate finance, where I was using it to structure companies and their relationship to government and how to deliver public services. Again when I went to the city to do economic development, I started with the infrastructure stuff. That was really where I was exposed to large-scale master planning, because I was overseeing a division that did a lot of transaction work to develop properties. It was more on-the-job training than anything else. And I learned a lot from my staff because I was actually doing those projects.
On top of formerly leading the BuroHappold's Cities Group and your planning practice today, you are also a writer, and an academic, how do you juggle these various roles?
I did my Ph.D. as a separate thing while I was working, so I have always had an academic life that was separated from what I called my “real life” or my work life. After I received my doctorate, I had no intention of teaching and I really did not have any academic affiliation for 25 years. I was in England, I was here, I was back and forth, I was working, and I also had kids, so I had plenty going on. I didn't even think about it until I was approached by NYU, who asked me to come and teach urban planning as an adjunct. That is how I returned to academia.
How did you balance motherhood and these various roles?
Now I don't have to (balance motherhood) because my kids are grown: one is in college and one is out of college and working. But for all of those years, it definitely impacted the types of jobs I wanted to take, how much travel I could do, where I wanted to live. It put constraints on things and that was just a piece of life. Everyone has constraints; mine happened to be that I wanted to be with my kids a lot.
What has been your favorite project to work on?
I think my favorite project is the one I’m working on now, believe it or not, which is so crazy, because I could have easily ended up not agreeing to do it. The project involves a lot of what I’ve learned in a lot of different components of my career. It's on a very large scale, looking at transforming a 360-mile waterway in Upstate New York and the communities alongside it. It's a statewide project that involves over 100 towns and a lot of infrastructure, climate change and resilience issues - and also a lot of people. It's everything, on a very large scale, in a geography I don’t know very well. It’s not like New York City, where I know how to do most projects; they are kind of the same politics and you're used to it. This is all new and challenging. Thinking about planning and development, looking at sites, looking at people, and thinking about small towns and figuring out how you make them grow is something that's familiar - it's just challenging because there is so much of it and the geography is new.
Throughout your career, what has been your biggest challenge?
For me, in terms of a career, the biggest challenge has been identifying opportunities that fit with the rest of life and what I wanted in terms of my family, specifically locations. I think it's a matter of crafting opportunities or finding opportunities, because you can't go off and do what you want if it doesn't fit with the rest of life. There have been a lot of jobs that I have turned down because they weren't in the right place, or they required a ridiculous amount of travel, or I would get home at midnight. I was separated, divorced, and remarried along the way, and with two kids all of those family things become even more important when its really only you. For me, it was like the perfect storm: you would really like to stay in the public sector, but you need more money, but you can't take a job where you would be home at 10 at night, that sort of thing. It was definitely a challenge at that particular period of my life.
What is one piece of advice you have for women entering the field?
I would say choose your first job wisely, because when you are starting out there is a lot you can learn. Talking to people and identifying what kind of place you want to work in, what is going to be the currency of your day-to-day job, and more importantly how much support are you going to have from the organization in learning what you don’t know is really important. Having that support and encouragement, and feeling comfortable in that learning process, is important because you're going to be learning when you're starting out. It doesn't matter how much academics you have behind you; you really don't know. So to be embraced in a way that supports you at the early stages of your career is really important. There are places that are really supportive and there are places that are really not, that just want the work or the hours and don't necessarily make women feel as good about what they're doing or learning. Those are the ones to avoid.