Maia Small

Maia Small has been working on the built environment for over thirty years with a commitment to centering racial and social equity. She is currently the Planning Director at SFMTA focused on growing trust, mobility choices, and environmentally healthy ways to get around through community planning. In her prior ten years, she was a Principal Planner at the San Francisco Planning Department, where she was a key contributor to and manager of the team that updated the Housing Element, lead the urban design program, and contributed widely to development approvals and long-range projects. She is a licensed architect and, prior to public service, a co-founding partner of Thurlow Small Architecture, a design firm that completed street and urban design revitalization projects in New England. She has worked for design offices in San Francisco and New York, taught at a variety of universities, including Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design, and earned a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. She currently lives in bike-friendly Emeryville with her husband, Andrew, and their middle-schooler, Henni, and looks forward to living in San Francisco when it becomes affordable for everyone.