Scott Figenshow

Senior Policy Analyst-Housing
Queenstown Lakes District Council
4 ½ years in Local Government

“There is tremendous variety in the work, and a team of bright and interesting colleagues to work with.”

My work experience before working in local government

Before moving to New Zealand in 2005, I was a consultant to a variety of Southern California affordable housing providers and was an Executive Director of a non-profit housing developer and supportive service provider in Los Angeles.

Improving housing affordability and more

There are three aspects to my role as Senior Policy Analyst- Housing. One is the implementation of the Housing Our People in Our Environment (HOPE) Strategy, a 32-action blueprint for improving housing affordability in Queenstown Lakes District.

The second aspect is working on policy and planning projects involving visitor accommodation, heritage, district plan changes and various studies that seek to manage growth in the district.

The third aspect involves serving as Executive Advisor to the Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust, providing policy and programme development support to their initiatives, such as the successful Shared Ownership programme.

Key skills needed to do be a Senior Policy Analyst

Key skills include an ability to listen; to collaborate; to tie together disparate strands of ideas and information that can make sense to address the issue at hand. It also helps to have good writing and presentation skills, as others look to us to express an agreed direction through various reports and presentations.

A bit different to other policy and planning roles, my area of work in housing affordability also requires housing finance skill, with the ability to understand what makes developments work, balanced with an understanding of what market economics mean for our working families.

Qualifications needed for a Senior Policy Analsyt

Qualifications that have helped me build these skills include the following:

• RMA Professional Practice course at Massey University
• Master of Arts in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles
• Advanced Bachelor of Arts in Industrial Design from Occidental College, Los Angeles
• Professional Practice certificate in Affordable Housing Finance from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation

Variety in the work

I like working on the challenges facing the southern hemisphere’s premier mountain resort community. There is tremendous variety in the work, and a team of bright and interesting colleagues to work with.

We are tasked with finding planning and policy solutions to problems that have both rural and urban aspects, that need to balance the needs of over a million visitors per year with the needs of a permanent community of approximately 30,000 residents. We do this in the New Zealand context, where the challenges we are addressing are being looked to by other regions in the country, to see how we sort it out.

Ensuring action results

Our work on housing affordability means that we are developing the first policy framework in New Zealand to assess the impacts of growth and development on housing affordability. There has been a lot of debate about this, at all levels of government.

Regardless of how it works out, local government is the environment that sits in the middle of this (and other) similar debates. It is our task to figure out what might work, and who should be engaged in which actions, then working with government, the private sector, and the community sectors to ensure action results.

Working at Queenstown Lakes District Council

It’s great to be part of an organization that strives to accomplish positive improvements for the community. At Queenstown Lakes District Council, we have the opportunity to be creative and present a variety of well researched options for their consideration. People get to be heard, and there is a good culture of debate that often finds solutions that may not have been apparent at the beginning of the process.