John Cruz, AICP

Department: Land Use – Housing
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 617-933-0712

Biography:

John Cruz is a Senior Housing and Land Use Planner at MAPC with prior experience in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. He works with communities across Greater Boston to address regional and local barriers to housing opportunity, inclusivity, equity, and affordability. He provides project management and technical assistance to implement the goals in MAPC’s regional plan, MetroCommon, including work on housing production plans, zoning, and local policy and programming.

John brings a unique perspective to his work at MAPC. Following a 12-year career in web development and administration, John joined Rise Community Development as their Data Management Coordinator in 2015. In this role, he worked to bring equitable data and planning practice together. This work included LIHTC development, support for local organizations, various types of planning processes (neighborhood, municipal, consolidated, strategic), and data intermediary projects. Following Rise, he worked for the City of Crestwood, Missouri as their City Planner, overseeing all planning, zoning, and economic development activity. John is also an instructor of GIS at the Washington University in St. Louis’ Brown School of Social Work.

John holds a Master of Urban Planning from Wayne State University and a Bachelor of Science in Web Development from Baker College. Prior to joining MAPC in Boston, he has lived in Detroit, Montreal, and St. Louis.

John’s areas of expertise include master planning, affordable housing development, community engagement, neighborhood change, local governance and programming, data practice, and GIS mapping