Peter L. Bray named executive director of Brooklyn Heights Association
Peter L. Bray has been named the new executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) and will assume the role effective Sept. 1, 2015. The Board of Governors of the BHA announced the news, adding that Bray comes to the BHA with extensive experience and recognition in the community development field and a successful track record advocating on behalf of communities throughout New York City.
As a member of the Park Slope Civic Council, Bray has led the multiyear effort to expand the Park Slope Historic District, for which approval of a second extension is anticipated in 2016, undertaking an extraordinary effort of planning, coalition-building and relentless advocacy that he will bring to his BHA role.
Until recently, Bray has served as the executive director of the New York City Financial Network Action Consortium, which he founded to foster the growth of the city’s leading community development credit unions, expand access by residents of low-income communities to affordable financial services and responsible credit, and support economic development in disadvantaged communities.
This task followed upon extensive work in affordable housing earlier in his career as director of Housing and Economic Development Programs at the Mount Hope Housing Company in the South Bronx, overseeing the rehabilitation of abandoned or deteriorated multifamily buildings for hundreds of lower income families and those transitioning from homelessness and developing community facilities providing primary health care, social services and workforce training services. Before that, he was director of Small Homes Development for the South Bronx Development Organization, implementing the development of homeownership housing in the Charlotte Street area to transform a national symbol of urban devastation into one of hope and rebirth.