Paul Lipson

Principal
Barretto Bay Strategies
New York, NY

Paul Lipson is an urban solutions consultant and community development practitioner with a specialization in food systems, renewables, and clean transportation strategies for metropolitan areas. Lipson’s firm, Barretto Bay Strategies, currently advises a number of anchor institutions, development organizations, and firms in the food and clean tech sectors, each with projects positioned at the interface of public policy and market development in these spaces.

Barretto Bay’s recent clients have included the developer of a light manufacturing campus on the NYC waterfront; the owner of a former shipyard seeking a re-purposing strategy for a site that once employed 50,000 shipbuilders; a local development corporation planning for an artisanal food manufacturing facility; an offshore wind developer proposing a fabrication hub and technology training facility on the South Brooklyn waterfront; and a national affordable developer seeking to embed light manufacturing uses in a new mixed-use development.

From 2004 – 2011, Lipson, Barretto Bay’s principal, served as Chief of Staff to Congressman Jose E. Serrano (NY-16), an 11-term Democrat and senior appropriator from The Bronx, NY. In 2009, Lipson served as principal author of The American Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Act (HR 4399), a bill introduced with bi-partisan support aimed at scaling up the domestic electric truck industry and helping to address air quality deficits incurred by medium duty fleets based in places like the South Bronx.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Lipson founded and led The Point Community Development Corporation, a pioneering CDC based in the Hunts Point section of The Bronx and active in the sustainability sector. The organization launched the South Bronx Greenway, initiated the revitalization of 8 acres of scatter-site brownfields, redeveloped two significant industrial parcels, launched a creative sector business incubator in the historic American Banknote Building, and led local community consensus-building around land use and waterfront issues in the Hunts Point peninsula.