Former Atlantic Yards state overseer Hankin, after "growing disillusioned with economic development efforts," now a cannabis innovator

Remember New York State's first Atlantic Yards project director, the only one who spoke regularly to the public with any authority?

Well, as I reported, after Arana Hankin left in 2013 for a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, her qualms about Atlantic Yards--renamed in 2014 Pacific Park Brooklyn--surfaced in both a public lecture and a published article.

She criticized the absence of accountability, called promises of jobs and housing overblown, and suggested government officials were overmatched by the powerful real estate industry. She said it was difficult to reconcile both the interests of the private developer and community needs.

Hankin also described economic development agencies as "quasi-private entities [that] function more like a private corporation [and] are not required to be as transparent as government agencies."

Explaining her departure for Harvard, she said, "I was looking for ways to do development in a new, progressive way, and I started to feel as though working in government was not allowing me to do so, so I was certainly for searching for something better....To try to figure out the best way to really make an impact through real estate devleopment."

Moving on to cannabis

Let's go to City & State's The 2023 Above & Beyond: Innovators, posted 6/26/23 and subtitled "New Yorkers who are disrupting the status quo and driving transformative change."

Among the "50 innovative New Yorkers in the public, private and nonprofit sectors" is Arana Hankin-Biggers, Co-Founder and President, Union Square Travel Agency, which is... a legal cannabis business, partnered with The Doe Fund, which works with the homeless. (Since AY, she's gotten married.)

Hankin-Biggers' LinkedIn describes it as "A cannabis retail company that is committed to supporting efforts to reverse the damage created by the war on drugs."

 

The profile begins:

Arana Hankin-Biggers didn’t set out to become a cannabis entrepreneur.

The Union Square Travel Agency co-founder worked with then-state Sen. David Paterson, then oversaw the state’s development of Atlantic Yards and Columbia University’s campus expansion before growing disillusioned with economic development efforts.

She eventually pivoted to cannabis. After all, her grandmother’s cousin was the first Black person in the state to receive a liquor license.
...
Hankin-Biggers recruited a team of cannabis experts, found hemp cultivators from distressed communities upstate and women-owned brands, and hired 50 “budtenders” from communities of color. She opened her dispensary on 13th Street and Broadway in February.

(Emphases added)

It's interesting that Hankin-Biggers sees the cannabis economy as furthering the socio-economically disadvantaged after, apparently, "growing disillusioned" that the world of state contracting and state project management did not.

Note that "eventually pivoted" covers a reasonable period of time. In June 2014, according to her LinkedIn, Hankin-Biggers worked for the real-estate advisory firm HR&A Advisors, and moved on to WeWork, the Lela Goren Group, and two other firms in the development space, before starting in cannabis in October 2022.