Yeah.

So my name is Abdul Razak Zachariah.

I am from West Haven, Connecticut originally.

And prior to working with the city plan department in my role, which I started back in July of 2025, I worked for the city of Boston's planning department for two years on the zoning reform team there.

So I doing very similar work to what I'm doing now with the New Haven City Plan Department, where we were focused on rezoning in alignment with city goals, particularly around transit-oriented development, mixed-use development, mixed-income housing, and also thinking a lot about the ways that the city could be working with anti-displacement strategies and policies to pair with the zoning and development changes that were happening there.

all before that i was a youth worker in the city of new haven for about three years i worked for an organization called leap in new haven here which is a really great after school and summer program where i worked with high school and college students who then were running programs for younger kids and it was through the work i was doing with those young people that i became interested in i think planning in a broad sense but really like community development and the mechanisms by way of families young people their caregivers have a role or impact in the ways that their cities develop grow change and align with their own development so while i was working as a youth worker i decided to apply for and go to graduate school so i first went to the harvard graduate school of education where i studied Education, community engagement, and participatory action research, a kind of method and approach to how do you have people ask and answer their own questions about what they want to see in their community, the powers that be that they want to impact, and then continued on to a graduate program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in urban planning.

really focused on housing, community, economic development, land policy, and again on these topics of anti-displacement as well as how communities can kind of retain the investments and benefits that come when change and growth occur.

So what did I miss? Yeah.