Welcome Aisling O’Reilly, Civilitude’s Urban Planner

Civilitude is so happy to welcome Aisling O’Reilly to the team! As we expand our services and grow as a company, we realized that we needed some fresh perspectives and someone to bring a new way of thinking to the table. In comes Aisling! She received her BS degree in Urban Studies from the University of Minnesota (go gophers!), so her role at Civilitude is intentionally pretty open ended. She is going to be heavily involved in applying the Affordability Unlocked policies to our projects, along with our Director of Public Affairs Conor Kenny. She also adds TIAs (traffic impact analysis) to our list of services, which is basically like a big memo that you have to do for a project if it’s big enough! Prior to working here, her work focused on traffic and transportation, and she has a specific interest in pedestrian safety and accessibility. With this background, she’s hoping to be able to provide some traffic engineering and urban design perspectives on project’s where we’ve primarily just focused on the civil side of things. 

As an Urban Planner, her mission is to create safe, affordable, and equitable communities for all people to enjoy, and in her words, “planning is a really direct approach to achieving that goal.” Austin, like many cities, is severely lacking in housing supply. So adding Aisling to the team to help with our affordable housing initiative is just the first step to helping provide mixed-income and inclusive housing opportunities to the community. Is it obvious that we’re pretty excited about her and the direction that she is helping take Civilitude in? When we asked her about what excites her about working with us on affordable housing in particular, she said, “Everyone here is really passionate about doing good work and doing it well, which is very motivating to be around. I think our passion is reflected in our projects.” Look at that, she already has that #doneright mindset.

I think it’s safe to say we can just leave it at that. Happy Friday, folks!