City Planner Career: Salary, Urban Planning Jobs & How Cities Are Designed

We talk with NYC urban planner Eddie Joe about what city planners actually do and how cities are designed in the real world. From post-pandemic retail strategy and neighborhood revitalization to affordable housing, zoning, and economic development, Eddie explains how urban planners help shape the communities where we live, work, and travel.

We also discuss urban planner salaries, career opportunities, transitioning from architecture into city planning, and the skills needed to succeed in the field. Along the way, we explore GIS mapping, AI, smart cities, public engagement, and the complex balancing act between developers, government agencies, and local residents. If you're interested in urban planning careers, public policy, real estate development, or designing better cities, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most influential professions shaping modern life.

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Music credit: Kate Pierson & Monica Nation

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Transcript

Smart City Street That Rewrites Itself

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Everything would be smart. So the street would in the morning when there was lots of people going to work, it would be LED and there would be two-way, two lanes. And then once the city sensed that it was calmer, the street would turn with the straight lines and it would close and it would become pedestrian, entirely determined by sensors.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 0:21

Hi, and welcome back to How Much Can I Make? I'm Abuseri, a curious journalist who loves to know what people do for a living and how much money they can earn. Today we're gonna talk about cities. As you know, they don't just grow, they are designed and planned by experts who understand how people move, live, work. So our guest today is the city planner, Eddie Joe, who does exactly that. Helps improving the lives of New York residents. Let's find out what the job is all about and let's get started. First of all, thank you so much for giving your time to us and willing to share your experience. I have lots of questions.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah, so we're thank you for having me.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 1:05

Of course. Tell me a little bit, what is it that you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:09

My official title is I'm an analyst. We're uh urban planning, economic development, real estate advisory, and kind of urban policy.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 1:17

You deal with all these areas?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

We work, we work with all those areas at our firm. I have a background in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. So my focus is more on the kind of urban planning side. But as part of our work, I do some policy stuff and focus as well a little bit on the real estate development

From Architecture To Urban Planning

SPEAKER_00 1:36

side.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 1:36

Okay, so before we get into the nitty-gritty of your job, how did you get here? What kind of studying or schooling did you have to go through? And for how many years to get to where you at?

SPEAKER_00 1:46

I did an undergrad degree in architecture. It was a four-year degree. It was a bachelor of arts, it was not a professional technical degree, which are usually Bachelor of Architecture. I think I was interested in climate and maybe environmental issues, environmental studies, kind of more science-y side of things. And I think I learned pretty quickly that I was not very good at science. Um, in my first year, I went to Yale. They make you do a bunch of different courses in different areas, and I took an intro to architecture class that I really loved. And I learned that you can still think about sustainability and systems and how people live, but it's more about the physical stuff and less about the science and the big picture. So I did a four-year Bachelor of Arts that did not get me licensed and did not get me certified or anything. After that, I worked as an architect, intern for a year in Mexico City. I worked as a furniture designer. All of this was, I think, really cool design experiences, but they didn't result in the goal of licensure and certification, which is really how you get stability and do well as an architect. And so then I worked for two more years as a landscape architect. And I think that's when I really started to think I should transition away from the design side and more towards the planning and policy side. It sort of crept up on me and then to transition into urban planning from the kind of design world that I was doing. It wasn't so different. There was a lot of the same companies, a lot of the same city agencies working on the same projects. But I wanted to go back to school and do a master's degree to get a kind of new skill set so that I could make the transition more easily. So I went back to school for one year and did a one-year master's program.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 3:30

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

So total, it was about five years of school between the undergrad and the master's. That's not bad. What are you working on now?

Post-Pandemic Neighborhood And Retail Work

SPEAKER_00 3:38

I do now a lot of different kinds of analysis projects for the most part. So we're working on a couple of studies of neighborhoods in New York City post-pandemic versus pre-pandemic. So we're trying to understand, you know, big commercial districts, how have the consumers changed since before the pandemic with hybrid office patterns and people feeling more excited about certain corridors in the city than they used to, and less excited about other corridors. We're working on a retail strategy to try to support big neighborhoods like Times Square, Union Square, Soho, with different strategies that they can use to ensure that the businesses continue to get customers, continue to meet rising rents, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the concern is really vacancy, is like retail vacancy.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 4:22

I know. I see my neighborhood, the upper west side, it's all it's a lot of vacancies. So but most of your projects are done for a government, city, state, any government?

SPEAKER_00 4:33

I would say most, yeah, but we the so I work at a private planning firm. We are an employee-owned company, but at the end of the day, it's it's a for-profit company, it's not a nonprofit. We'll do work, you know, for anyone who aligns with our mission and our interests, and most of the time that's cities.

How Zoning Drives Development Decisions

Mirav Ozeri - Host 4:50

So when a developer wants to get into a neighborhood and develop uh three lots in the neighborhood, for example, does he have to hire you to convince the community or to come up with a plan and then convince the community?

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Yeah, in most situations, yes. Sometimes there are lots that and the reason the reason for that is zoning and other land use policy. So the city has decided that certain lots can be developed, no questions asked. But the reality is in most cities, all of the lots that could have been developed with no problems have been developed. And so at this point, you know, for any big transformative projects, typically you would hire a firm like us, like who would help you plan it, consider the economics, consider the real estate. You would hire an architect to actually do renderings and kind of sell the public and government on what the building is going to look like. And you might hire all sorts of other consultants, traffic engineers, sustainability engineers. Yeah, you would have to really kind of put

Building A Park With Community Input

SPEAKER_00 5:49

a team together.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 5:49

Right. What would you say is the biggest project up to date that you loved?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Yeah, one thing I did actually at my old job as a landscape architect, but had a lot of urban planning in it, and I think that's what encouraged me to kind of transition is in Brooklyn, in the Williamsburg neighborhood, there's a park called Marsha P. Johnson State Park, and they have a very popular weekend market called Smorgisbird there. They have like 10,000 people who visit every single day. I mean, it's a huge, like super popular park, and it needed a renovation to bring it up to accessibility compliance. It needed a bunch of other kind of changes that would bring it into the modern era. It's like an 120-year-old park, and the state hired the company I was working for to do a full renovation, but before to kind of hear what the public wanted in the space and do three months of public outreach. So we went through, we designed a whole program, we designed workshops to get community input. I don't know, we we did our best to try to meet the various diverse communities in the area. You have Spanish speakers, you have Yiddish speakers, you have Polish speakers, you have a whole mix. Um, so we tried our best to kind of bring everybody's voices into it. I mean, I've been there recently, it's been two years now, I guess, and the renovation is complete, and the park looks amazing, and it really feels diverse. It feels like really cool to see the fruit of a work that you did that was all behind the computer and all written, actually come into real life.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 7:15

How competitive is that job market, by the way?

SPEAKER_00 7:17

I think it depends on the city. I think New York City has a lot of construction and development happening all the time. So I think there's opportunities. In smaller cities, it can be very competitive. I have a friend who graduated from grad school with me, and then she wanted to move back to Miami, and there was almost no jobs in Miami because Miami has one development agency. They had all their jobs full at the time she was applying. There was a couple private companies, but not really enough to sustain a lot of graduates and a lot of employment.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 7:50

So, what would you say is the requirement for somebody who wants to become an urban planner?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

I think interest is probably number one because there's a lot of things that you have to think through. And if you're not passionate about the field, I'm not sure it's the right one. It's not it's not as much money as basically any other school for. And and another thing, I think in the case of the Marsha P. Johnson park that I just mentioned, there's a lot of conflict. Like there's a lot of public conflict. So we had these stakeholder meetings, and at every single one of them, people yelled at us, and people yelled at each other. And people get very passionate about public space, and they should because it's our shared space, we're all involved in it. But I think like an interest and a passion in urban planning would probably be number one because it's not a it's not a low-stakes job in a way. Like you're gonna deal with emotions, and if you are not caring that much about it, then get another job where you don't have to deal with people's emotions all the time, would be my advice.

The Personality Fit For Planning

Mirav Ozeri - Host 8:50

Right. How much can a beginner urban planner make?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

I think about this in the course of the couple of years I've been exploring these fields. Part of the reason, too, why I shifted from design to planning, I felt like the design world was had very low pay relative to the amount of work you did and the amount of education you had. And the hours were were terrible, like really bad.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 9:14

But it was very creative, so you loved it.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

It was very creative, and I liked it. And you know, I think it was it felt very fun. And I think that you know, you can an entry-level designer with a master's degree working in an architecture firm in New York City is making maybe $50,000.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 9:31

What that's all?

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah, so it's a it's a real problem. That's not fair. Yeah, and and that's people who you know have a master's degree who went for two years in their master's for a design school, maybe three. Wow. And so when I was thinking about switching and going back to grad school, I was looking at the salaries that graduates made. And an urban planner can make twice that, basically. Like, you know, maybe a little less, maybe 90,000, 80,000, but considerably more with a year or two less of graduate school. And some urban planners have been working since they graduated from undergrad and they've qualified to be licensed and never even had to go to grad school. They're ultimately earning a lot more than people who work in the design field.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 10:15

And what are the opportunities for growth, maybe from urban design to something else?

SPEAKER_00 10:20

One common path is to end up running a neighborhood development organization or running an economic development team, or even working in the private sector as a private developer. Once you've kind of learned the ropes of urban planning, you can be very valuable as a developer of real estate or a developer of really anything. Transportation hubs. A lot of urban planners go on to work at the MTA as a director of something, or you know, I think there's a lot of paths that kind of split once you've developed your niche. Because there's some people who are doing tons of projects in transportation, some people are doing tons of projects in park development. You can branch out into not necessarily different sectors, but different urban planning adjacent and development adjacent stuff. Whereas I felt like in the design world, it was much more, you would never be able to work outside of design.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 11:11

Where is the urban planning going in the next 10, 20 years, in your opinion?

Smart Cities After Toronto’s Backlash

SPEAKER_00 11:16

I mean, I think for your listeners who who who haven't you know checked this out before, right? Google has a whole team called Sidewalk Labs, which has been looking at this idea of the smart city for like the past 15, 20 years. Many of my professors, actually, a couple of them in grad school used to work at Sidewalk Labs and work at Google in their kind of smart city division. And I don't know if you know the story about the Toronto Sidewalk Labs project, but No, please tell me. Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, at least 10 years ago, Google bid on this enormous parcel in downtown Toronto on the waterfront. I think it was about 600 acres of urban development land that was just completely empty. There had been some warehouses there, and they knocked them down and it was prime for development.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 12:02

Why they wanted to use it for their own offices or something?

SPEAKER_00 12:05

No, they wanted to create uh a model neighborhood that was completely internet connected and everything was wired, everything would be smart. So the street would in the morning when there was lots of people going to work, it would be LED and there would be two-way, two lanes. And then once the city sensed that it was calmer, the street would turn with the straight lines and it would close and it would become pedestrian. And this would all be LED in the street, entirely determined by sensors and basically hardware. Wow, crazy. And yeah, it was an incredible idea, and they proposed it to the city of Toronto. There'd be all these other things too, like when your apartment was too hot, automatically the windows would open. You wouldn't have to say anything, you know. And when you were too hot, you could have another setting. When you were too hot, automatically the windows would open.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 12:52

I can't believe we became that lazy, but that's all right.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

There were some things that I would love, like you know, if the if I'm cooking and there's too much smoke or whatever, automatically the window opens. But again, there's other things where if I'm too hot, I don't want the house to decide that I have to open the window. Like I want my own free will. And at the in Toronto, for a variety of reasons, the people of Toronto protested, were furious about this idea, and ultimately Google pulled out because of community resistance. And I think since then, I'm not sure people have been as excited about the smart city idea after they've seen the resistance. And I think there's also this feeling, at least in the urban planning community, if like if Google can't pull it off, who can?

Mirav Ozeri - Host 13:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

So I don't know. I mean, I think there's some pros. I would love the idea of uh instead of painting one yellow line in the middle of the street, that we can have the street changing all the time and responding to what we need, but it's a question of how and and when.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 13:51

Yeah, I don't know if I want Google to control my Windows, but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

What kind of software do you mostly use? It depends on the project. If there's an architect, often they'll do drawings using like Rhino or AutoCAD or just photo, just Photoshop. Maybe they're completely Photoshopped images. You know, at my old firm, the landscape architects, we use the software called Lumion, which allows you to apply materials to all of the different surfaces and make kind of 3D renderings look really realistic. I suspect that as time goes on, AI will do most of the rendering.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 14:27

I know. I want to ask you about AI. And also the uh GIS you're working with,

GIS Mapping And Using AI At Work

Mirav Ozeri - Host 14:34

right? It's similar to AI.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah, GIS is geographic information systems, systems, and it's you know, a mapping software, basically. I use GIS a lot to make maps, particularly of specific neighborhood trends. So you know, you could take the upper west side, for example, you have a developer who wants to make a new building, you can map the median rent on each block over 20 years. And the developer can see a series of maps and say, okay, you know, I like the way this is trending, or oh, I really don't like that we're close to this block that's doing poorly for whatever reason. And, you know, the way I would do that is through QGIS, which is a free software that I learned in grad school, you know, I would download the data, I would do some kind of spatial analysis, and then for me, the fun part is graphically thinking through how we can make an argument. So, how can the drawing on first glance kind of explain to the reader like what's being what's the argument?

Mirav Ozeri - Host 15:30

And what do you do with AI?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Yeah, so AI, I I mean, to use the same example, in order to make a map of that kind, you'd have to have data. So you'd have to have the rent, and you know, you'd have to process that so that you can put it on a map in a specific place. And so for that, I might use AI. I might ask AI to help me with some coding or some analysis that I could put in Excel. And I'd just run, I would just put in Chat GPT. Can you solve this problem for me? And it would it would do it.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 16:00

Before you had to do all of it.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah, I mean, I think even for me, when I was in grad school two years ago, there really wasn't. I mean, I guess chat GPT was around, but people weren't using it the same as they are now. And I noticed two years ago I would have projects where I would have to make make models or do do this kind of GIS analysis. And I never used AI, and I had a problem, I would have to ask a classmate who was better than me at at software problems, or I would have to go on the Google it and search and find a forum where somebody wrote it up. And today I just always ask ChatGPT. It's like totally different in just two years.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 16:35

Do you think ChatGPT could take away your uh job away eventually?

SPEAKER_00 16:41

I hope not, but our field is at least we what we would tell a client is that part of what you're paying us for in the value that a private urban planning firm brings is strategy and like the so what. So like ChatGPT could probably eventually automate a lot of the analysis that I do and a lot of the drawing and a lot of the data stuff. But I think people hope that AI will never be able, will never be as good as a person to say, okay, I know what you care about, I know where your values are, and based on the information, here's my argument for why you should go this way or why you should go that way with your development. At least I hope, because otherwise I'm out of a job.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 17:22

At some point it's possible that AI will just shoot everything and you'll just go and deal with the community.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Maybe. I mean, there's definitely pros and cons, you know, like there's some work that I'm very happy, I'd be very happy for AI to do, and there's other concerns for sure. For

Developer Versus Resident Conflict

SPEAKER_00 17:38

sure.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 17:38

I was always thinking about urban developers. They are in conflict many times with uh residents. How how do you navigate those conflicts?

SPEAKER_00 17:48

Yeah, I think it's a challenge. I said I do most of my work for the government, but some work is for private developers. Well, one issue is maybe that a lot of developers don't live in the communities that they're developing in. When neighbors say, Oh, I don't want this new building because it affects this or it affects that, it's like the developer doesn't really care because at the end of the day, they don't they don't value that as much as the neighbors do. I don't really know if we always navigate that in the right way. I think when you're hired by a client, your duty is to your client. And I think, you know, there's there's questions that just like remain unanswered. Like we can say to a client, you know, if you build this building 30 stories tall, it's gonna cast a shadow on this space, and that's gonna be a problem. And there's nothing more we can do if they if they have the right to build the building to that height and they're gonna do it, you know, we can try to influence them. But I don't know that there's really another way that as urban planners we can really impact things.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 18:42

Right. So you have to know a lot about a lot of different things, not just architecture and not just landscape design. You need to know about millions of things.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Yeah, I think with a lot of these projects, we will be part of a team of maybe three or four different firms. So we would bring an urban planning expertise and maybe our specific kind of real estate and economic development skill set. And we would team up with a transportation engineer, for example, who knows more than us about all those issues, and we might team up with a designer specifically if there's a design component to the project. But you're right that it's at the end of the day, we have to incorporate different analysis into what we're doing, and you have to have some basic understanding at least of like what the different people are talking about when you're in the meetings.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 19:26

Right. Can you give me an example if you look at a city, any city, New York, LA, uh Paris, London, something that really hurts your eyes to look at.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

It's a good question. Yeah. Recently, me and my cousin biked to Patterson Falls in New Jersey. Uh-huh. And Patterson Falls is very cool and is beautiful. But along the way, we biked through so many towns that have no sidewalks, no open spaces where people can spend time together. You know, these were cities, these were not rural places, these were cities with just cars everywhere and no one walking nowhere to be alive, you know, like as a as a city dweller. That to me is I'm I'm depressed thinking about that. You know, if you if you live in a beautiful place and you need a car, it's one thing. But if you live in a town and you could walk and everything is close, it's uh I don't know. I think it's a that's to me is a failure of urban planning in those areas.

Affordable Housing, Car Cities, Long Timelines

Mirav Ozeri - Host 20:25

So if somebody would give you all the financing you need for a project, what project would you do?

SPEAKER_00 20:31

I don't know, it's a great question. I I think I think in New York City our our biggest issue is affordable housing. We don't have any, basically. No. We have some for some people, and it's it's great, and we should keep that, but I think for not enough for the size of the population. For everybody at every level, you know, it's it's become unbelievably expensive. And so I think a project where we could build tons of affordable housing in lots of different places. I live two blocks from the subway, and on the block of the subway we have a parking lot. I mean, we could keep the parking lot and build housing above the parking lot. And I think that's an over thousands, there's thousands of places like that where we could very easily make more housing. There's a lot of resistance to construction and new development in basically every community in New York City. If I had all the money in the world, I would just buy everybody off. I'd brag everyone.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 21:29

Okay, what's the biggest challenge of your profession?

SPEAKER_00 21:33

I think patience, honestly. Why there are things that are on 30 year timelines. You know, affordable housing is unfortunately probably on a 30 year timeline. The pace of change in New York City and I think other big cities is frustrating. New York City has built the Second Avenue subway for 110 years, and they've only got three of the stops finished. Part of that is a result of urban plans. I mean, we have so many systems in place that community leaders, local elected officials, basically everyone can influence the planning process. And that's really good in a lot of ways. And I think it makes it so that local communities have a big say over what projects get built, where they live and where they work. And that's good. Unfortunately, big development like affordable housing is not popular in a lot of places. And community boards and kind of other smaller elected and unelected groups are able to really stifle it. So patience maybe becomes the most important or the biggest challenge.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 22:37

I know. Yeah, I can't it wouldn't be right for me, I can tell you right now. But my you said that they built the Second Avenue subway for 110 years? You mean to use it for 110 years?

SPEAKER_00 22:49

No, so they first the first idea for the Second Avenue subway, I might have my years off, but I believe was in 1915, was the first time it was proposed.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 22:57

What?

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Yeah, I I mean please fact check me on a little bit.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 23:01

There's you know I mean, even 30 years is a lot of time.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

It's really crazy. Again, I'm not a transportation, like I don't focus on transportation as much, but I think the transportation planners are especially patient in what they get done and the timelines.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 23:17

Amazing. Okay, my last question. If you could redesign a major city, what city would you redesign?

SPEAKER_00 23:25

Hmm. You know, I'm gonna keep in the pattern of the cars in say Los Angeles. I've only been there a couple times, and I'm from I'm from New York, so maybe I just have East Coast, West Coast rivalry. But we just spent so much time in traffic and in the car. And LA is such a beautiful, beautiful place with nice weather, and you know, I guess the weather can be problematic as we've seen recently, but I think it's a warm place without a cold winter, without a lot of rain. It's perfect for public transportation. You could walk everywhere all year long and be very comfortable. For me, it's a lost opportunity in some ways to make that kind of utopian public transit biking city because everything is five, ten miles away from each other.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 24:11

All right. Eddie Joe, thank you so much for your time. Very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Thank you for having me.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 24:19

Do you have a dream of becoming a legislator or a community organizer or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

I don't I don't have that dream. I don't love the spotlight. Like I, you know, I don't I get nervous in public spectations. Yeah. But I think what one of the things that's fun for me about urban planning is like we're doing some of the similar work that legislators get to do, but we're we're behind the scenes. We're writing the documents, the memos, the reports that get published, and then you can interact with what I wrote and not what I said in the moment kind of thing.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 24:52

All right. Well, thank you so much. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

You too. Thanks.

Mirav Ozeri - Host 24:57

Bye-bye.

Closing And How To Reach Us

Mirav Ozeri - Host 24:59

Okay, that's a wrap for today. If you have a comment or question or would like us to cover a certain job, please let us know. Visit our website at how much canimake that info. We would love to hear from you. And on your way out, don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with anyone who is curious about their next job. See you next time.