NEW YORK CITY-From as early as she can remember, Patricia J. Lancaster has always been an infrastructure junkie. “I worked at the Port Authority in the 1980s and I had the privilege of going to the top of the George Washington Bridge,” she tells GlobeSt.com. From there, Lancaster has worn many hats in the construction business, from vice president at LCOR Inc. to New York City Buildings Department commissioner.

Now, Lancaster is the newest clinical professor at the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate, where she will teach courses on construction management, infrastructure and urban planning. “My whole career has prepared me for becoming a professor,” she says.

In her new role, Lancaster will focus on two core elements of the program: real estate development and Schack’s construction management thesis class. “I’d like to show that real estate projects don’t stop at the property line, especially in this time where we are faced with power, sewer, light and transportation issues,” she says.

A veteran of both the public and private sector, Lancaster was responsible for setting local construction standards, enforcing the building code and zoning resolution for more than 975,000 buildings and regulating New York City’s $35 billion per year construction industry as Buildings Department commissioner from 2002 to 2008. Prior to that, she served at LCOR, Inc., where she oversaw public/private development for the Northeast region with a portfolio of $2 billion. She also founded and served as president of her own consulting firm, the Lancaster Group, in 2008.

Earlier in her career, Lancaster worked in the city’s Department of General Services as deputy commissioner for design and construction from 1994 to 1996 where she created the agency’s project management structure that still exists today. She also gained experience in academia as Columbia University’s assistant vice president of planning, design and construction, where she completed the university’s five-year $850 million capital program.

And in an era of austerity and reduced spending, Lancaster says the biggest challenge infrastructure faces is time and funding. “We need to find different ways of financing these things,” she says, explaining that public-private partnerships could emerge as a new funding model for large, complex projects. “The issue is for infrastructure is that it takes a long time. What you really want is something like PlaNYC, which is a 30-year plan that you want to have financed carefully and responsibly for that length of time.”

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From Buildings Dept. to Schack, Patricia Lancaster Joins NYU Faculty

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