Carmen Gandulla grew up in Trenton watching her father go to work as a welder. Her parents still live there. So when she talks about economic development, affordable housing, homeownership, business growth or what happens when investment returns to cities that have experienced decades of disinvestment, she isn’t speaking only as a finance professional. She knows these places.
“I think being born in a city that has had—and is still having—disinvestment, and still coming from small roots, has always shaped who I am, what I do, why I continue to figure out how to create more funding opportunities for our communities,” Gandulla said.
That personal connection has followed her through a career that has taken her from banking and finance to community development, municipal government and, now, Invest Newark. It also makes her particularly interesting to talk to during Hispanic Heritage Month.
There is a tendency during these commemorative months to spend a lot of time talking about culture and accomplishment—and those things absolutely deserve to be celebrated. But Carmen and I spent much of our conversation talking about something else: money. Who has it. Who can get to it. Who gets supported while building a business, buying a home or developing property. And who is often expected to figure it out on their own.
“It’s never enough,” she said of the funding available to communities. Before entering government, Gandulla worked in banking, including at JPMorgan Chase. She appreciated learning how money worked—retirement, securities, homeownership, financial planning and the different mechanisms people use to create wealth. What she didn’t love were the metrics.
The job required her to sell financial products and opportunities to people based, in part, on the bank’s bottom line. At the same time, she was beginning to see a much bigger picture.
You can sit across the table from someone and tell them how they should prepare for retirement or what they need to do to become a homeowner. But that advice lands differently when the person sitting across from you comes from a family or neighborhood that never had access to the same financial opportunities in the first place.
Gandulla had grown up in one of those communities. “I appreciated the empowerment about creating wealth,” she said. “What it was to be a financial advisor. What it was to plan for securities, or what it was to get homeownership.”
But the work also caused her to think more deeply about the conditions people were starting from. There is a tremendous amount of conversation about development here. New housing. New businesses. New parks and public spaces. New investment. But development is not an abstract thing. It happens somewhere, and there are already people living there when it arrives. Gandulla considers that part of the work.
“You’re building a building, but you’re not building affordable housing,” she said. “Or you’re building a park, but you don’t want to build affordable housing. Or you want to invest in certain businesses, but you don’t believe that other businesses should thrive. Why?”
Those questions became increasingly important as she moved from banking into government. She didn’t exactly plan that move. A sorority sister who was running for the Jersey City Board of Education helped bring Gandulla into proximity with people working in government and public service. Gandulla began meeting people, volunteering and making herself useful.
Eventually an opportunity came to work in community development. The salary was lower than what she had been earning in banking. She took the job anyway. “I think it was about helping,” she said. Her sociology background suddenly made a little more sense, too. Gandulla had studied people, communities and the environments they create. Community development allowed her to combine that perspective with what she had learned about finance.
Her work included programs specifically intended to serve low- and moderate-income communities: federal Community Development Block Grant funds, Emergency Solutions Grants, housing programs and an Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The work was closer to home. “Those were specifically designed to help the low- to moderate-income community, which is the community that I came from in Trenton,” she said.
Gandulla eventually became Jersey City’s first Hispanic community development director. Later, she became its first woman and first Puerto Rican finance director.
The word “first” carries weight. It can also become a little too easy to celebrate the individual achievement without asking what happens after somebody gets through the door. Gandulla thought about that while she was there. “Being the first, it’s scary,” she said. “But it’s also empowering at the same time to make sure that you are mentoring and giving back.” She began creating internship and fellowship opportunities and bringing younger people into the department. She promoted longtime staff members into management roles and gave people opportunities to take on more responsibility.
The current community development director in Jersey City, she noted, once worked for her as a relocation officer. She still coaches him. “I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just in the position,” Gandulla said. “Being the first means you have to teach.”
She pointed to Jersey City’s first-time homebuyer assistance as an example. The program, she said, eventually grew to offer as much as $150,000 in assistance during her tenure. But the important part wasn’t simply increasing the number. They looked at what was actually keeping people from becoming homeowners.
There might be down-payment assistance available, for example, while closing costs remained another significant obstacle. Mortgage costs mattered too. So the city worked with banking partners and looked at the complete transaction instead of assuming one form of assistance solved the problem.
“You have to be a student of your business, whatever you do, in order to give back the way that you should,” Gandulla said. That way of thinking now comes with her to Newark. And she is careful about one thing: Newark is not Jersey City. She may understand urban development. She may understand New Jersey. She may understand Puerto Rican communities. But that doesn’t mean she arrived here assuming that experience automatically gave her an understanding of Newark.
So she started calling people. “I may be new to Newark in a formal work capacity, but the Puerto Rican community isn’t new to me,” she recalled telling local leaders. She wanted to know what was happening here. What were the priorities? Where were the gaps? Why weren’t more Puerto Rican-owned businesses growing and scaling? What happens when a family arrives from Puerto Rico and finds itself navigating housing waiting lists, utilities, benefits and employment? Who is connecting them to resources?
Families here remain connected to families there. People travel back and forth. Money travels back and forth. People relocate. When something happens on the island—a hurricane, an extended power failure, an economic disruption—it doesn’t remain thousands of miles away for Newark families with parents, grandparents, cousins and property there.
A person can be sitting at work in Newark while worrying about whether someone they love thousands of miles away has electricity or clean water. That is part of the community, too. And understanding Newark means understanding some of the places Newarkers remain connected to. Gandulla currently serves as a statewide Puerto Rican commissioner, which gives her another vantage point on those connections across New Jersey. But even within Newark, her thinking extends beyond the Puerto Rican community.
At some point after arriving at Invest Newark, she started asking another fairly basic question: What languages are Newarkers speaking Spanish, certainly. But also Portuguese, French, Creole and others. Then came the next question. How much of the information businesses and residents need is available to them in those languages?
Gandulla has encouraged Invest Newark to begin producing more content in Spanish and has talked about expanding communication into other languages as well. It sounds like a communications issue. It is also an economic-development issue. If there is financing available for a business owner, but they don’t know about it or cannot easily understand how to access it, the existence of the program only goes so far.
The same is true of housing programs, technical assistance and other resources. Which brought our conversation back to the same place where it began – access. Not simply whether a city is growing. Not simply whether money is coming in. But whether the people who have already invested their lives in these places have an opportunity to participate in what comes next.
There are similarities between Trenton, Jersey City and Newark. Gandulla has spent enough time in each to recognize them. But she also knows that every city has its own history, people and rhythm.
“I can tell you today what Jersey City’s priorities are based on living there,” she said. “I can tell you today what Trenton is because I’m born and raised there. I can tell you professionally what I see from Newark as an outsider, but I need to hear the impact.”
