As Vice President for Real Estate Development, Meena oversees development projects from pre-development to completion and lease-up, including financial analysis, design and construction, and transfer of the project to property management.
Meena is one of POAH’s most experienced development staff and has successfully led some of POAH’s most complicated projects, including the transformational redevelopment of the Boston Housing Authority’s Whittier Street Apartments public housing community into the award-winning Flat 9 at Whittier mixed-income community. This complex, multi-phase neighborhood revitalization involved significant community participation and coordination among local stakeholders, the City of Boston, Massachusetts’ state housing finance agency, and HUD. Meena led the financial closings, construction, and successful lease-up of phases 1 and 2 of the project and the recent closing and construction commencement of the project’s third and final phase, a 12-story mixed-income tower that will be the first high-rise developed by POAH.
Meena is now leading two of POAH’s largest and most impactful projects: the redevelopment of the Boston Public Library’s West End branch into an affordable, mixed-income housing community in Boston’s West End; and a new, mixed-use affordable housing community in Charlottesville, Virginia that is being developed in partnership with the University of Virginia, National Housing Trust, and Wickliffe Development Corporation.
She has a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.