JOY CONWAY
‘A dream job’
Ending a 20-year career with one of the state’s most powerful real estate trade associations, Joy Conway is leaving the Greater Boston Real Estate Board by the end of this month.
Conway is leaving GBREB to become the director of policy and public affairs of a national group called Living Cities: The National Community Development Initiative. The organization invests in inner-city neighborhoods by providing funding to nonprofit community development corporations in 23 cities, including Boston.
Conway, GBREB’s senior vice president for government and industry affairs, is the board’s second senior executive to make such an announcement this year. In June, Edwin J. Shanahan, the group’s chief executive officer, announced that he would be leaving the organization by the end of the year to start a full-time lobbying practice.
Leaders of Living Cities who have had professional ties with Conway in the past approached her several weeks ago about a newly created position at the organization. The organization, which was restructured in the summer, was searching for someone with experience in the communication and public policy arenas and tapped Conway to fill the position.
“There was no question in my mind that this is what I wanted to do,” said Conway. “If I could have created a dream job in this stage of my career, this would be it.”
‘Protection Actions’
In an interview late last week, Conway said she was looking forward to her new role at Living Cities, which is trying encourage more for-profit, private-sector development in inner cities as well as supporting community-based developers. In this decade, Living Cities has committed to investing $500 million in cities, doubling what it invested in the 1990s.
“The future of real estate development is really in the inner cities,” she said. “The builders who are going to succeed in this are the ones who will be able to recognize the accomplishments of the people who have lived and worked in the inner cities and struggled through some very difficult times.”
Throughout the past two decades, Conway has been a key legislative advocate for the real estate industry in Massachusetts.
“Joy Conway’s 20-year career at the board is chock full of legislative and regulatory protection actions concerning private property rights,” said Andrew Chaban, chairman of GBREB’s Government Affairs Committee and chief executive officer of Princeton Properties.
In a brief interview, Chaban said the board will be losing “someone with a high degree of both public and private trust.”
“[Conway’s] credibility is enormous,” said Chaban, who rattled off a list of committees and commissions on which Conway has served.
Conway has served on the Citizens Advisory Committee for the Columbus Center in the air rights of the Massachusetts Turnpike and has chaired the Advisory Committee for the city’s Fort Point Downtown Municipal Harbor Plan. She will continue to chair the Green Building Task Force in Boston.
Conway has worked as a consultant on real estate projects including a recent national study of brownfields redevelopment and finance. Prior to joining GBREB, she worked at the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency, now known as MassHousing. Before moving to Boston in 1970, Conway began her career in housing and real estate development in New York City where she worked for Mayor John V. Lindsay.
