Quincy Howard Data Analysis
Quincy is a certified Urban Planner with a background in water resources, international development, and land use planning. After earning her B.A. in Mathematics, she joined the Community and Regional Planning program in the School of Architecture at U.T. in Austin. The curriculum provided Quincy with a well-rounded understanding and analytical perspective of the issues, challenges and possibilities facing urban environments in the United States. She then spent time working as a project associate for the National Wildlife Federation’s “Texas Living Waters” campaign in Austin, Texas. Her work for the non-profit focused on utilizing data to demonstrate the potential water savings of various policy options and she saw the impact that data analyses can have on decision-making.
Looking for a change of pace, Quincy joined the Peace Corps in 2004 and moved to Copán Ruinas, Honduras, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located near the Honduras-Guatemala border. The town features the Copán site of Mayan ruins located less than 2 kilometers from its central park; tourism was a strong and growing influence. Quincy collaborated on a World Bank-funded project to create an urban development plan to manage the growth to benefit the local population and avoid negative impacts to the nearby ruins. A decade of increasingly rapid and unregulated development created a politically charged, culturally-sensitive and dynamic environment, much like that of post-Katrina New Orleans. In addition to her primary areas of focus--improving the waste management and the transportation systems-Quincy was involved in the design and planning of an extensive socio-economic survey; development of local building codes; digitization of the tax assessor’s records; and definition of the town’s urban growth and disaster zones. Quincy’s ability to identify, analyze and apply data to understand and draw conclusions about disorderly or perplexing urban contexts is an asset unique to Spark InSites.
Since moving to New Orleans in late 2007, Quincy has worked with the environmental engineering and consulting firm CDM, Inc. In 2010, she was a primary planner contracted by the City of Galveston to develop the island’s Neighborhood Master Plan, a massive effort to capture community input and incorporate it into the larger, Gustav-Ike recovery plan. In addition to her involvement in more traditional planning projects for CDM, she worked extensively as a grant manager of federal disaster recovery funds. Contracted by the Louisiana Office of Community Development, her team was tasked with administering $411 million in Disaster-CDBG funding to the City of New Orleans for Katrina-Rita related recovery projects. Later contracted by the Louisiana Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration, Quincy worked as a grant manager on several coastal flood protection projects sponsored by Gustav-Ike disaster funding. She brings valuable working knowledge of data management and analysis techniques, urban systems theory and practice, and public sector recovery efforts to the Spark InSites team.
Quincy is a certified member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, is a certified market analyst through the National Council of Affordable Housing Market Analysts, and has earned a certificate in Urban Redevelopment Excellence from the University of Pennsylvania. She has a M.S. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas and received her B.A. in Mathematics from Dominican University.
Favorite street in NOLA:
Freret
Favorite restaurant in NOLA:
Juan's Flying Burrito
Where I was when the Saints won the Super Bowl:
House of Blues in the French Quarter