CityHallNews.com

Propping himself up on the cumbersome wooden table in his high-ceilinged office, Greg Atkins smiled stiffly at the photographer—“Brooklyn” pin glistening on his blazer, Brooklyn map towering over his head.

“A good staffer,” he said, “always stays out of pictures.”

But once the photographer left, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s chief of staff instantly relaxed, more comfortable as “the guy behind the guy—or girl.”

Atkins has been working behind Markowitz since June of 2003, after the borough president called him to ask him to apply for the just-opened position.

But his path to a professional niche in waterfront development began with a summer landscaping job in high school which inspired him to major in landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts. He then completed a master’s degree there in regional planning with a focus on city planning. Internships at the local city council in college prepared him for his first job in waterfront development, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

He had been headed for Washington but the Republicans’ sweep of both the House and Senate in 1994 crushed those hopes.

Just a few months later, he answered an ad in the New York Times for a position with the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation and brought his experience in waterfront development to Sunset Park and Red Hook. There, tax credit programs he helped craft created over 2,000 new jobs and even attracted Halle Berry and a filming crew.

Following a leave of absence in 1996 to campaign for Clinton and Gore, Atkins returned to New York newly politicized.

Less than a year later, Assembly Member Joan Millman hired him as chief of staff. Meanwhile, he was rising quickly through the ranks of the New York State Young Democrats to become president. In a 1999 national Young Democrats convention in Arkansas, Atkins met his future wife, Julie Hendricks, as they debated the death penalty.

As chief of staff for both Millman and Markowitz, Atkins has made Brooklyn’s economic development his raison d’être. He pointed to the recent explosion of the borough’s population, which has shot up from 2.3 to 2.6 million since 2000.

“That’s 300,000 people,” said Atkins. “It’s like bringing Syracuse to Brooklyn.”

Atkins estimated that in response to this boom, the borough would need 60,000 new housing units to stabilize the market, an increase that would require collaboration between the city and private developers.

One of the more prominent of these has been Atlantic Yards. Aware that fear of gentrification and displacement preoccupies many Brooklynites, Atkins explained that critics of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development proposal do not consider the housing squeeze as it effects the borough as a whole. It is largely because of the new housing the project would create that he supports it.

“The solution to gentrification is to create a supply to meet the demand,” he said.

Despite Markowitz’s staff of 65, described by Atkins himself as “superb, dedicated and loyal,” he struggles with the borough’s tight budget. With what he calculates as about $2 per Brooklynite in the city budget (as compared to close to $9 per Staten Islander), he said that the toughest part of his job is saying no.

A staffer at heart, he said that he nevert plans to run for office himself, a shift that might force him to neglect the creation and implementation of policy in favor of dinner parties and graduation speeches.

But that does not mean he has any plans to leave politics behind, especially if, as many expect, Markowitz makes a bid for citywide office in 2009. “Whatever Marty’s plans are,” Atkins said, “that’s his decision. I’ll go with him, if he’ll have me.”

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